New Company to Lease Techs: Replaces MicroSolutions

Another Northwest Arkansas technology firm was sold last month, when Custom Micro LLC of Little Rock purchased MicroSolutions Inc. of Fayetteville.

MicroSolutions is one of a handful of Microsoft-authorized technical educational centers in the state, which attracted Custom Micro owners Terry and Jeff Johnson to the business.

“I’d been seeing ads for an ATEC in Fayetteville, and there are only three of them in the state,” says Terry Johnson. “They were teaching classes to certify people as Microsoft engineers, and I got the idea that, if we bought the company, we could not only train other people for profit but train our own people and then get them to stay with us for three years or so.”

The new company will be named Custom MicroSystems and will be in the business of providing trained technicians to Northwest Arkansas companies, often on a full-time basis.

“We sell technical skills, not people,” says Jeff Johnson, who emphasized that his company is not a head-hunting firm. “After a period of time at our client’s site, usually six months, they will return to our training center for additional instruction.” At that time, the company will get a replacement technician.

With the high demand for skilled computer technicians, Terry Johnson says, the purchase was a matter of survival for his company.

“We go out and recruit people because it is too hard to steal them anymore,” says Terry Johnson, co-owner of Custom Micro. “Everybody’s robbing from one another because there are so few [Microsoft engineers], but now we can grow our own.”

Efforts to recruit trainable employees are already at full scale, Terry Johnson adds. They also plan to retain all 15 members of MicroSolutions Northwest Arkansas staff, including former owners Jason Long and Victoria Heinrich.

“The types of people they had employed there are very hard to find, because they are certified trainers, and we are going to need good teachers to start this program,” says Jeff Johnson.

Custom Micro also manufactures custom IBM-compatible computers and systems in its Little Rock offices, but the company’s emphasis has switched from manufacturing to services during the past two years, Terry Johnson says. The company’s annual revenue is estimated at more than $12 million.

MicroSolutions opened in February 1997.

Study applauds incubators,

Genesis one of sample projects

A recent study, the largest ever performed on business incubation, shows that incubators have measurable effects on the entrepreneurial companies they serve. This is good news for the University of Arkansas’s Genesis Technology Incubator, which was one of the institutions used in the study.

“While a variety of development strategies are aimed at attracting existing firms to a region, business incubation is geared primarily to creating new firms and new jobs,” says Larry Molner, a member of the research team and director of the EDA University Center for Economic Diversification at the University of Michigan Business School in Ann Arbor. “In an economy where new businesses are creating far more jobs than existing corporations, it’s important for communities to have business creation strategies in place.”

The study examined companies, graduates, managers and stake holders and discovered that, on average, incubator companies experience healthy growth, have high survival rates, remain in the communities where they were created, provide employee benefits, expand community resources and improve community image.

The average return to the community was $4.96 for each $1 of public funds that was invested in the incubator, the study shows. The return by GENESIS is even greater than that, says director Sam Pruett. Its return has been approximately $20 for every $1 investment.