Twenty-one years
The same company, the same family, and quite a lot of the same people.
Midwest IT opened in Twin Lakes in 2005 and moved a few miles to Pell Lake in 2017. Here is roughly how it went, in the pictures people happened to take at the time.
Twin Lakes
The company is started in Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, by Bill Weigel, who had been consulting on networks since the nineties and likes to frighten younger engineers with stories about troubleshooting before search engines existed.
A family business
Pete Weigel joins his brother Bill as a systems engineer and account manager. Twenty years later he still takes the calls.
The shop
Two people at a bench, bare walls, and a workshop that doubled as everything else. Eric Grimes joins the same year and the business starts growing steadily rather than occasionally.
Saying it out loud
A trade show booth with the pitch on it: systems consulting, managed services, backup and recovery. Twelve years later the words have changed and the argument has not.
Pell Lake
The company outgrows Twin Lakes and moves a few miles up the road to Pell Lake, taking over an old bank building on Park Street. The sign goes up. By this point the helpdesk is a department rather than a person, and most of the people running it today are already here.
Closing a door early
The team pushes secure remote access out across the client base and closes the open ports behind it. Nobody asks for it. A year later, when every client has to send staff home at once, it turns out to have been the most valuable project of the decade.
Everyone goes home
Clients have to send their staff home at once. Within a few weeks, thousands of users are working from home seamlessly and securely, as each business needs them to, on the remote access that went in the year before.
Building it out
The office gets rebuilt from the studs while everybody keeps working. Same address, more room, and a proper space for gear to be built and tested before it ships. The same year Bill, the founder, retires. He stays on as an emeritus partner and is still consulted on strategic decisions.
More hands
The company hires more engineers and technicians, drawing on decades of personal relationships among the existing staff to bring in experienced people rather than strangers.
The oldest server
The oldest server under a Midwest IT support contract is retired: an IBM AS/400. Anyone who has worked in IT long enough will appreciate that one.
AI advisory
Recognising both the security and the growth implications of AI, the company forms an AI Advisory Program to help clients use the technology productively.
Seventeen people
Still family-owned, still on Park Street. Eight of the team have been here long enough between them to add up to well over a century, and the partners still take calls.
The part that is not a photograph
Why it matters to you that we are boring about this
IT companies get bought, rebranded, rolled into a private equity portfolio and quietly turned into a call centre. It happens constantly, and it happens to your provider without anybody asking you first.
The technician who learned how your business works is the single most valuable thing your IT company owns, and it is the first thing lost in that process. We have stayed within a few miles of the same lake, under the same family, for twenty-one years. That is not a strategy. It is just what we did, and it turns out to be worth something.
The stolen computers came back online, and we were watching.
Someone broke into an office and took the machines. Our software was still on them, so when one was plugged in, it reported home.
Read the story
The building burned down. The server was still running.
A spark in an outlet took the building. Smoke, then the fire department's water, then the ceiling came down on the server. It was still live.
Read the story
Out of business for two weeks. Insured again when it was over.
A threat actor sat inside the network for weeks, then deleted every backup and encrypted everything at once. We got involved in week three.
Read the storyTalk to a partner, not a sales script.
Tell us what is going on. A partner will call you back the same business day, look at what you have, and tell you honestly whether we are the right fit. No pricing pressure, no pitch deck.