Every great company has an origin story and as LME celebrates 30 years in the IT and cybersecurity industry, we sat down with CEO Joe Engelking and founder Leon Engelking to share the inspiration and milestones that have made the company what it is today.
Leon, we’ll start with you. You were at Microsoft when it first started to get into personal computing. How did you end up at Microsoft in the first place?
I worked at IBM. My brother worked at Microsoft and he gave me a reference and got me in.
What were your titles and duties there?
I was a field service tech. I serviced typewriters, dictation equipment, and copiers mostly and got familiar with working at client offices and experienced lots of different cultures that way.
What was the Microsoft culture like back then?
It was very by-the-books corporate. We wore suits. There was no drinking at company events. It was a very rigid culture that is probably at least partially to blame for the modern stereotype of what came to be known as IT people.
What did IT mean back then?
Not a thing until I got to Wang Industries. At Wang, it was supporting word processing equipment and microcomputers. I started as a tech at Wang and then moved up to management.
What did cybersecurity mean?
“Cybersecurity” didn’t exist in my early career but came to life once I started LME. In the early days, cybersecurity was largely just running anti-virus software and making duplicates of files.
Now it is a completely different ballgame.
You left Microsoft to found LME Services back in 1994. What was the inspiration?
I was laid off during the tech crash of late 80’s/early 90’s. I saw an underserved market. Not many people offered IT support for offices using PC’s and/or local area networks (LAN).
Where was the first headquarters?
I had an office in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. For our friends from other states, that’s a suburb of Chicago to the West of O’Hare Airport.
Who were your early clients and how were you helping them?
CJBS and ABPN were some of our early accounting firm clients. We also worked with several law firms in those days as well. Remarkable that a lot of those early services are still needed 30 years later.
We maintain servers, PCs, networks, email, data security and provide other services to accounting firms and law firms as well as other businesses today. The core needs aren’t all that different today, just the technology.
I learned quickly how important it is to provide 5-star service in those days. Our work was just as mission critical then as it is today.
The dotcom bubble burst in 2000. What was that like for you?
Our industry as a whole suffered for sure. My revenue was down but luckily all of our core services that support physical offices and the people that use them were still greatly needed.
You launched right in the middle of America Online’s glory days. What was the internet like back then? What types of things were your clients doing online?
AOL was pretty cool but business internet use overall wasn’t that popular yet in the early AOL days.
Internet adoption for our business clients started with email.
We were also able to provide basic file transfer services but it was very slow. Bandwidth was a big issue, especially using dial-up modems.
A lot has changed since 1994. How did the emergence of cloud services impact your clients and the services you provide?
The cloud is just paying to have your data and programs stored on other peoples’ servers. Data storage in the cloud has gotten cheaper over time and that has been nice.
Those servers are managed by the hosting companies so it has made it easier to support and it’s easier to get more horsepower when you need it, as there is less backend to manage, but also hectic because of the multiple channels you have to go through in order to troubleshoot when there are issues.
Joe, let’s get your perspective. You started working with dad before undergrad back in 1999. What were you doing in IT back then?
I really got interested in IT by playing with the internal hardware in computers, taking them apart and putting them back together.
I also learned early operating systems including DOS and early versions of Windows.
As a business service,I would provide on-site software installation for clients and that’s really how I learned what clients want and need from an IT service provider interaction.
What was the college student’s perspective on technology when you were at Northern Illinois studying journalism?
I definitely had an eye on the future. Networking and Servers seemed to be where the next wave of hiring would be focused.
I spent time working at a helpdesk at the campus lab and got familiar with securing and reloading workstations.
What were your post-undergrad jobs?
Immediately post-undergrad,I spent about 6 months working at LME doing odd IT support jobs.
Then got a job a Helpdesk job at Children’s Home and Aid and enjoyed that work.
I then went to a Managed Service Provider named AZBS, starting at Tier 1 and I had worked my way up to Tier 3 by the time I left.
But at the end of the day, I really missed LME and decided my next step would be to join the family business and really take it to the next level.
What brought you back to LME in 2014?
After my MSP work, I could really see the potential to help significantly more people in our area if we were to become an MSP ourselves.
I was ready to take on a leadership role and turn my father’s IT consulting company into an MSP. I knew which direction the industry was heading and wanted to take his company into the future.
How has the industry changed?
It has changed in a number of ways.
Networks used to be server-centric and are now cloud-centric.
We used to also have big business networks but the model has shifted quite a bit especially during the Covid pandemic to more a hybrid, work-from-home type arrangement.
Cybersecurity has become a much more complex problem. We’ve seen all these foreign hackers trying to infiltrate systems in the United States using Ransomware and wanting to get paid in Cryptocurrency. None of that existed even when I took the leadership reins at LME.
We also used to perform break/fix work where we would get paid by the hour. There wasn’t really an expectation that business systems were online and accessible by employees and staff 24/7. Now that’s the norm.
So our industry has shifted to providing 24×7 eyes and ears on a business to ensure that systems are up and bad guys aren’t up to no good. Our MSP work is via monthly support contracts.
What types of IT challenges are clients coming to you to solve?
Too many to name!
Some common ones include:
- Migrations to the cloud.
- Network setup and monitoring.
- Cybersecurity for email and data.
- Disaster recovery and backups.
- A helpdesk service for their employees.
- Various types of compliance and reporting to prove it such as SOC, ISO, and HIPAA documentation.
We get other request as well. Custom software development. Making various systems play well together.
There’s always new technology coming to market and we have to understand it and how our clients can use it safely.
What happens to businesses if they delay or choose not to solve the types of problems you work on?
We hate it, but we see companies in our local community lose a lot of money. Using out-of-date systems slows down productivity for everyone. The really newsworthy stuff is the hacks that end up with multi-million dollar ransoms, shutting down critical infrastructure, etc.
The Colonial Pipeline hack that caused a nationwide fuel shortage is a great example.
For smaller businesses, their issues may not make the news but they can be quite severe. A lighter, more mischievous type of hack might just shut down operations for a few days.
But if a business loses its client’s data, they can be held liable for damages by all of their clients. That can be the end of a business.
From an IT perspective, if things don’t run smoothly, are misconfigured, are breaking down, or are just plain slow, then they see workflow inefficiencies, lost productivity, and morale goes down.
Especially with younger workers, they expect everything technology-wise to just work flawlessly.
What about cybersecurity? What types of challenges are clients seeing?
Many hear stories of hacks.
We start our cybersecurity relationships with a CSRA (cybersecurity risk assessment) to provide them with an honest assessment of how well they are handling their cyber risks.
Most businesses are not doing any cybersecurity and assume their IT people are also doing Cyber.
The reality is many IT people don’t actually know cybersecurity all that well and they aren’t actively working to prevent problems.
Companies often don’t find that out until it’s too late.
Because of all the risk in the market, larger companies are often requiring anyone who has access to any of their data to prove they have preventative measures in place.
We help them actually get compliant and then navigate these questionnaires and provide supporting documentation like SOC, ISO, & HIPAA reporting.
What happens if cybersecurity challenges are not solved?
Most companies don’t have cyber insurance.
If they do get hacked, they’re in really dire straits.
If a business chooses not to get the audits required to prove they are secure, they’re essentially locked out of many business relationships with government entities, banks, hospital systems, etc. It’s a big deal.
LME has carved out a reputation for long term client relationships. What do you attribute that to?
On the one hand, we’re about the most quintessential IT firm in existence. Leon worked at IBM and Microsoft in the 80s.
On the other hand, we’re likable, personable people and that’s not all that common in our industry. A lot of professionals in our space are a bit gruff and don’t like it when someone actually wants their attention.
We’re easy to get a hold of and enjoy solving problems for our clients.
Although we could easily charge a lot more for what we do, we generally underprice our services just a bit because we really enjoy the SMB market and appreciate that many of our clients are playing catch up when they first start a relationship with us.
Since most of our clients are long term and we get a lot of word-of-mouth referrals, we don’t have to cover big marketing budgets and things of that nature either.
How would you describe LME’s culture? How is it different from other IT and cybersecurity firms?
We’re a 30-year-old business that is still, at its heart, a father/son team. We actually live down the street from each other.
The rest of our staff really get what we’re about culturally and how we treat our clients.
“Winning” for us is keeping clients so happy that they work with us for years and we get to see them grow and they give us the opportunity to take care of their friends/professional acquaintances via referral.
From a technology perspective, we have a nice combo of young and old. Leon relates better to the older generation and likes servers, tape backups, firewalls, and is very comfortable with what I consider “legacy” networks and infrastructures while I tend to look forward and like the cloud, cybersecurity, hybrid operations and meeting exceeding expectations from the younger generation.
Who is an ideal client for LME Services’s IT practice?
We’ve helped many companies over 500 employees, but our preference is companies in the 10-50 user range that are ready to modernize if they haven’t already.
They need efficient cloud infrastructure, understand the need for cybersecurity, and they trust us to our job so we can keep them doing theirs.
What about cybersecurity?
We don’t really expect anyone to already know what they need with regards to cybersecurity. We start by educating our clients.
Once we help them understand where they are via a CSRA, we can help them with a plan to get them and keep them safe thereafter. It’s our job to stay abreast of new threats and be sure we prevent them for our clients.
What’s around the corner for LME?
We’ve really got something special and we want to help more people get back to business by having a great IT and cybersecurity partner.
We’re long overdue to overhaul our marketing and make it easy for the 1000s of businesses who really need our specific expertise to find us.
We already provide 5-star service. We just want to be available to a wider audience.
If a business wants to see if LME is the right fit, what steps should they take?
Our relationships start with a simple phone call. You can book a time at your convenience on Joe’s calendar right on our website.
Bring your questions. We’re here to educate you. Then we put together a proposal that will give you what you need to alleviate your concerns and get back to focusing on your core business.
We take great care of our clients so they can take great care of their clients.
