Today we’d like to introduce you to Greg Brainerd.
Greg, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
In 2001, I got married to my wife of 16 years in Tucson, Arizona. I was working for a small computer company that was very similar to Braintek. Unfortunately for me, at the time, I was laid off. I started looking for work in Tucson, Phoenix, and in California. A friend that I had worked with had moved to the Houston area and encouraged me to come here to look for work. I started applying for work and found a job with Pennzoil working graveyards as a network administrator at the data center downtown. About a year into my position, Pennzoil was purchased by Shell.
At that moment, I felt that my job may be in jeopardy as in mergers there are some overlapping positions. Soon after that we started Braintek. My wife, Tracy, started attending networking events trying to generate some interest and since I was working graveyards I was in a position to help people with their computers during part of the day. I was exhausted working Shell at night and Braintek during the day. The day came and Shell asked me to work the evening shift which helped me adjust my schedule better. Then a few months after that they decided to lay me off. I was so excited! Braintek had grown to support both my wife and I and now we could concentrate full time on it.
In 2006/2007, we had grown to the point that we needed our first full time employee. Tracy asked that I move the business out of the living room and into its own place, so we did. We moved into a small office/warehouse complex off of Blueberry Hill in Oakridge North, across from the Woodlands. Shortly after that we hired one of our first employees, Russell Ferry, and he has been with us for the past 10 years. From that point we expanded and moved into a second suite on Blueberry Hill. Throughout the years we’ve grown our client base and have grown the staff to 13 people, including Tracy and myself. This year we busted at the seams at the Blueberry Hill location and purchased our own building. It was a 2000 sq. ft. house that we converted to be our business headquarters.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
There were several obstacles. I was trained to be a computer network field engineer. As we started Braintek I had to learn to be a manager, sales person. My wife had to learn how to handle our books and HR responsibilities. With sales I had to learn how to find clients. I had to learn to be confident in myself and what Braintek can do for clients. I attended Toastmasters to help me overcome public speaking and joined the leadership team at the Woodlands Chamber of Commerce Breakfast team to help me practice that public speaking. I joined BNI and those helped me overcome my fears and improved my sales skills.
As a manager I had to learn to be a bit more hands off with my staff. As they grew I had to give them more freedom to operate and I had to stop micro-managing them. Giving them more and more responsibility was difficult for me. However doing that has helped Braintek grow because I can’t do everything myself.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Braintek – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
Braintek is a computer network outsourced IT department. Clients of ours hire us to be that IT department that they don’t have. We schedule regular onsite visits regardless if there are issues or not. When we are not onsite the client can call and speak with the helpdesk anytime they need us. We specialize in taking care of the technology the clients have, that generally includes laptops, desktops, servers, networking equipment (routers/firewalls, switches, wireless access points), cloud services, email systems. We also offer web design and SEO. We don’t physically work on broken printers/copiers but will connect them to the network for printing and scanning. We don’t do cabling. We don’t sell or work on VoIP phone systems but do provide back end services for VoIP providers since they operate on the network.
I feel that Braintek has a good record of communicating with our clients. Often I hear that other IT people are difficult to communicate with and don’t let them know what’s going on. We work hard to ensure our technicians keep the clients in the loop on whatever we are doing/needing.
Braintek offers a true flat monthly rate for our services based on the number of people we are supporting at the business. That rate doesn’t change from month to month. There are no hidden surprises from a labor point of view. We take care of the scheduled visits, remote support, helpdesk, cloud backup and anti-virus for a single price. If we install a new server, it’s included. If we transition from an old on premise email system to Microsoft’s cloud based Office 365 it’s included.
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
I would like to expand further into Houston to grow our business base in our backyard. I’d also like to open a location in Austin, Dallas or San Antonio.
We have also developed internally a ticking/work order system called Workorders.com. We’ve been using it for the past several years and this year we’ve invested in upgrading that technology and will hopefully be opening it up to the public for use in 2018.
Contact Info:
- Address: 25326 Oakhurst Drive
Spring, TX 77386 - Website: www.braintek.com
- Phone: 281-367-8253
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/braintek
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/braintek
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