Springdale Company Buys Smaller Competitor

Advanced Information Management (AIM) of Springdale, a locally owned records management firm, has eliminated one of its competitors.

AIM, owned by Don Keller of Fayetteville and George Catsavis of Fort Smith, recently completed a deal to acquire the assets of Ironwood Shredding Co. of Rogers, previously owned by Don Longley.

The two principals declined to disclose the price AIM paid for Ironwood, but Keller, the company’s managing partner, said the acquisition is an important milestone in AIM’s strategic growth plan.

AIM and Ironwood were competitors in the field of document shredding.

“What we get from this [acquisition] is adding approximately 150 new customers that we can sell our other products to,” Keller explained. “For Ironwood customers, this is good for them because now there are more things we can help them with.”

To go with the growing customer base, Keller said AIM is in hiring mode. The company currently has about 15 employees, but plans to hire between 5 and 10 new workers by the end of the year, concentrating primarily on sales and operations.

“We’re going to hire sales people and pursue other markets,” Keller said, noting that most of AIM’s 300-plus customers are based in Northwest Arkansas. “We would love to buy other companies if they became available.”

Additionally, Keller said AIM is exploring a significant real estate acquisition to accommodate expansion. The company is currently headquartered at a 34,000-SF office and warehouse facility at 1720 E. Highway 264 in Springdale.

“We are currently looking at an 80,000-SF facility that’s also in Springdale,” he said. “We will be expanding in the next year or year-and-a-half.”

Full-Service Records Management

AIM is a full-service records management firm specializing in the secure offsite storage, management and shredding of documents. AIM also offers document scanning as well as electronic document storage and retrieval.

AIM also has a state-of-the-art, environmentally controlled vault for the storage of sensitive data including network backup media.

While the cost for document shredding is tailored to each business, Keller said 100 file storage boxes worth of documents can be stored at the Springdale facility for $30 a month, or 30 cents per box. The pricing is based on boxes with dimensions of 15-by-12-by-10 inches, or one cubic foot.

For security reasons, AIM does not disclose the names of the corporate and government clients who use its services. Companies in the financial services, medical, accounting, legal, communications, transportation and state and local government sectors are targets for records management services.

Keller said AIM houses “hundreds of thousands” of boxes at its warehouse, and between 3,000 to 5,000 documents are scanned every month for its customers.

“If you can think of [the companies], they’re here,” Keller said. “Our largest customer has tens of thousands of boxes, and our smallest has maybe 40 to 50. There is no hard market. It appeals to everybody. Large companies need the space, smaller companies think it’s cost-effective compared to a mini-storage facility.”

History Lesson

With AIM, Keller has come full circle.

The company’s roots in Springdale date back nearly 30 years. It began to evolve as a records management company under the ownership of Mike Spillers, who bought the business in 1995 when the firm was in leased space at 2863 Lowell Road, and the only service offered was microfilming.

Little Rock-based Central Records Service Inc. soon became a part owner of the firm, and dispatched one of its executives (Keller) to Northwest Arkansas to help Spillers grow the business, which was rebranded to Advanced Information Management.

But in 1998, Central Records sold its Little Rock operations to a company headquartered in Memphis. Spillers retained sole ownership of AIM when he bought out Central’s stake, but Keller moved to North Carolina, where he bought an ownership share in a similar company called Southeast Records Services.

Before selling SRS in December 2005, Keller helped grow the company from a three-person staff into one of the largest privately held companies in its industry in the Carolinas, with annual growth of more than 20 percent.

Keller, one of only 14 CRMs (Certified Records Manager) in the state of Arkansas, was working for a records management firm in Dallas in 2010, when Spillers died. His widow called Keller to ask if he would return to Northwest Arkansas and buy AIM. He approached Catsavis — who had bought the Fort Smith division of Central Records in 1999 — about joining him, and the two have been co-owners of the company since November 2013.

Catsavis declined to say how much he and Keller paid for the business, and he was also tight-lipped about annual revenue. But he did say that AIM has realized revenue growth of about 10 percent in each of the last two years.

“AIM has always had a great name,” he said. “We’re trying to take that name to a [higher] level, with our processes, business development and customer service.”