Twenty-nine years in IT. Twenty-four building Xerillion.

I started as an internal IT manager for a consulting company, then spent two years as an IT consultant at a small accounting firm. That's where I learned the business side of IT: meeting prospects, writing proposals, tracking time, and invoicing. I always wanted to own a business, but at the time, as crazy as it sounds, I didn't believe you could build one out of IT. That job showed me you could.

I saved up enough cash to last about a year while I worked on getting my own clients. Then I started Xerillion. In the beginning, that meant buying marketing lists, printing postcards myself, and sending them out in lots and lots of cold outreach.

Little by little, I might send out 1,500 postcards and get one or two calls. Some months I'd get a client, some months two, some months none. Within about a year, I had enough business to hire my first employee. In that same year, my wife joined as my business partner and ran operations while I was in the field with clients. After that, we added about one employee every year or two.

Up until the early 2010s, we operated within about 30 miles of our office. We put servers on site, fixed servers, helped clients, made routine on-site visits, and did lots of on-site work.

In the early 2010s, Microsoft moved aggressively into the cloud, and people began to wonder, "Why do I need servers on site?" I was concerned about what that meant for our business, but I didn't see another choice but to follow what Microsoft was doing. We took our Microsoft cloud partnership very seriously from that point on.

Microsoft was this huge, gigantic company and Xerillion was super tiny, but I came to realize that Microsoft gives you back as much attention as you put into the relationship. It took years and years of work, but we learned to build managed services entirely around Microsoft 365: email, files, phones, security, and device management in one place. Most of the headaches of owning an IT system go away, especially when there's little or no equipment on site to set up, manage, maintain, and replace.

It was better for our clients, and it's more sustainable for us as a company. It's why we're still here nearly a quarter of a century later. Many of the Chicago-area companies we started out beside and competed with 20-plus years ago have since sold out and no longer operate as independent companies.

Today, that Microsoft 365 cloud foundation is what makes AI work for a company. Your people get answers instead of search results, securely, within your own guardrails. Having everything inside Microsoft 365 is good for business continuity and for not maintaining back-end systems anymore. It also lets your users chat with your IT system and get answers, instead of sifting through search results.

The next phase for Xerillion is to keep growing and help our clients bring AI to the data that's already inside Microsoft 365 and their business applications. It's also to take out the drudgery that causes delays and errors and is repetitive, tedious, and boring, so employees can run with that and do amazing things with their own companies, all through technology built inside Microsoft 365.