Around 2011 I turned down an account I badly wanted.

It was a good-sized company, easy work, an hour up the road. We were small enough that the revenue would have mattered. I said no because taking it would have meant hiring a tech who split his week between their office and a surgery center in Jackson, MS, and I already knew which one would get the short end on a bad Tuesday.

That decision looked stupid for about two years.

Earlier this week Inc. named us No. 112 in IT Services on its 2026 Inc. 5000. No. 4 in Mississippi, across all industries. No. 2 in the Jackson metro area, across all industries. First time we have ever applied. People have been asking me what we did. The honest answer is that we mostly stopped doing things.

The Problem With Being Good At Everything

Most managed IT providers are generalists, and there’s a sound business reason for it. A dental practice, a manufacturer and a law firm all need patched servers, working email and someone to call. On paper the work is the same, so you take whoever calls, and you grow.

It works until it doesn’t. What generalists can’t do is know things.

When a practice management system pushes an update that breaks imaging integration, a generalist finds out the same way the practice does, at 7:15 in the morning with a full schedule. Somebody starts Googling. Meanwhile a firm that has seen that exact software fail on eleven other practices already knows what broke and has the fix ready before the first patient is in the chair.

That gap is not talent. It’s repetition. And you only get repetition by narrowing.

Specialty Practices Are A Hard Customer, Which Is The Point

We work with oral and maxillofacial surgeons, ENTs, orthopedic groups, dermatologists, OBGYNs, and plastic surgeons. These are demanding accounts. They’re regulated. The software is old and strange in specific ways. And the tolerance for downtime is close to zero, because a surgery center that can’t run at 7 a.m. isn’t inconvenienced. It’s got a waiting room full of people and a schedule that will not reschedule itself.

A lot of IT firms will take a specialty practice and then service it like everything else on the list. We decided we’d rather be the company that already knows what’s running in the building before we walk in. Not the software category. The specific software, the specific version, the specific way it fails.

The trade was real. We said no to a lot of revenue in the first few years, and there were quarters where that hurt. What we got back was compounding: every practice we onboarded made the next one faster, because we’d already seen the problem.

Flat Fee Changes What Your IT Company Wants

The other thing we did early was stop billing by the hour.

Hourly billing puts a managed IT provider and its client on opposite sides of the same event. Something breaks, and one of you has a bad day while the other one has a good month. Nobody says that out loud, but everybody feels it, which is why practice administrators get quietly suspicious of IT invoices.

We charge a flat monthly fee. If your network runs clean all month, we get paid. If it falls over four times, we get paid the same and we’re the ones eating the hours. That structure decides what we spend our time on without anyone having to be noble about it. Prevention becomes the profitable choice.

It also means an administrator can put a real number in next year’s budget instead of a range.

There are two words on our logo: seamless and relentless. Seamless is what the flat fee buys. The goal is that you stop thinking about IT at all, which is a strange thing to sell because the better we do it the less you notice us. Relentless is what happens the day seamless fails anyway, because it will. Both halves have to be true or neither one is.

What The Ranking Actually Measures

The Inc. 5000 ranks companies on one thing: revenue growth over three years. It doesn’t measure whether we’re good. It measures whether people kept paying us.

We came in at No. 2,243 overall out of 5,000 companies. That number is the one everybody quotes and it’s the one I find least useful, because the list runs from staffing agencies to hot sauce companies and comparing us to them tells you nothing.

The numbers I’d point to are the ones that actually mean something. No. 112 in IT Services nationally. No. 4 in Mississippi. No. 2 in the Jackson metro area. Those compare us to firms doing roughly what we do, or operating where we operate, and there are a lot of very good IT companies in this country.

None of it came from a sales push or an acquisition. It came from practices renewing and then telling other practices, and specialty medicine is a small world where reputations travel fast in both directions.

We’re in 43 states now, out of an office in Flowood, Mississippi. Fourth-fastest-growing company in Mississippi, second-fastest in the Jackson metro area, on our first try at the list. I did not have that in mind in 2011 when I turned down the easy account.

If You’re Choosing An IT Provider

Two questions worth asking, whoever you end up hiring.

First: how many practices like mine do you support? Not how many clients. How many that run what I run. The number tells you whether you’re buying experience or funding someone’s education.

Second: how do you make money when my systems run perfectly? If the answer is uncomfortable, you’ve learned something.

Ask us both of them. That’s an offer, not a figure of speech. Book an appointment and put them to us directly.

We aren’t the biggest IT company in the country and we don’t want to be. We’re the 112th fastest-growing one, and we got there by being unreasonably specific about who we work with, and by having a team that treats a practice manager’s 6 a.m. call like it matters, because it does.

The relentless part was never a slogan. It’s just what the job turned out to require, and I got lucky in who showed up to do it.