Mickey Maurer Entrepreneur of the Year Award: ‘A great connector of ideas and people’

Justin Christian, 50, founder and CEO of the Indianapolis-based IT consulting and workforce fulfillment firm BCforward, is as famous for his networking skills and charitable works as for his business acumen—an acumen that’s built his company from a two-employee startup in 1998 into an international powerhouse. During its quarter century of existence, BCforward has become one of the nation’s largest Black-owned businesses, employing some 5,000 workers around the world.

“He has built BCforward from a local provider to a nationally competitive, full-service tech firm,” said David Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly and Co. (an early BCforward client). “Justin is relentless and a great networker and deeply focused on client needs—all key to founding and growing an important business.”

He and his wife, Darrianne Christian, have also made it their business to help minority students develop the personal and professional contacts vital to entrepreneurial success—most notably via the Justin and Darrianne Christian Center for Diversity and Inclusion at the couple’s alma mater, DePauw University. Christian also serves on the boards of DePauw, Lumina Foundation and the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership.

For his work not just in building his own business but also in helping others do the same, Christian is the inaugural winner of IBJ’s Mickey Maurer Entrepreneur of the Year Award. IBJ Publisher and IBJ Media CEO Nate Feltman named the award in honor of Maurer, who has launched, owned and invested in several Indiana companies involved in cable television, film production, radio broadcasting, newspaper publishing, real estate and banking.

Maurer and partner Bob Schloss acquired IBJ Media in 1990 and owned it in whole and later in part until March, when Feltman took full ownership of the company. Maurer, an attorney, also served as Indiana secretary of commerce in Gov. Mitch Daniels’ administration and founded a not-for-profit corporate retreat called Mickey’s Camp. He is a board member of The National Bank of Indianapolis, which he founded with his cousin, Morrie Maurer, in 1993.

Though Christian’s professional roots run deep in Indiana, he’s not a native. He grew up in New York City’s Greenwich Village, the son of an African-American jazz club manager and a Jewish mother. He wanted to become a professional trumpet player, so he signed up for the music program at Greencastle’s DePauw University. But fate had other ideas. Worrying that he might not have the chops to make it as a pro, he put the horn aside and pursued a bachelor’s in computer science instead.

“It was the right decision for so many different reasons,” he said.

While working toward his degree, he met a classmate two years his senior who would one day become his wife. Darrianne Christian’s life journey was at least as unconventional as her future husband’s. Born in Gary, she was recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency while still in high school as part of the Stokes Undergraduate Scholarship Program. She remained in the agency’s employ at DePauw, where she also earned a computer science degree.

Once, Justin Christian was accosted on campus by agents from the U.S. Department of Defense who were doing a routine background investigation on Darrianne.

“I’m this dopey 20-year-old walking around Greencastle, Indiana, and I get approached by two men in suits,” he recalled. “I asked, ‘How did you even know about her and me, when we’re not officially in a relationship?’ They just said, ‘Oh, we have our ways of finding out that information.’”

Christian interned at Lilly while at DePauw and got his first job there after graduation.

“That’s where I got my first opportunity to get a sense of who computer consultants were and to try to understand what that business was all about,” he said.

After a couple of years at Lilly, he decided to start his own consulting firm. His wife was all for it but strongly advised him to keep the decision from her family. Especially her brothers.

“They would have lost it,” she said. “They would have told me, ‘You just married this guy, and he quit his job and you’re taking care of him.’ It would not have gone over well.”

Her family likely would have fainted dead away if they’d known that Christian and his lone partner, Tony Bucher, financed the startup with about $1,500 in pocket cash and their personal credit cards.

Christian admits he never imagined his company morphing into what it is today—an IT consulting and workforce management services provider with globe-spanning operations ranging from its Indianapolis headquarters to its development center in India, with more than 1,000 employees.

“It was like, ‘Let’s start a company that will be small, so we can touch everything,’” Christian said. “Just give everybody our cell phone number, and if they have a problem, they can call us, and we’ll fix it. It was high touch, high customer service. One thing led to another, and people got the word that we were fun to work with.”

“We” at the time consisted of Christian, Bucher and, when circumstances warranted, Darrianne. (Bucher left the company in 2009.) Even though Darrianne has never held an official title with the company, Justin said she’s always served as his sounding board, helping to develop strategy and occasionally carrying out high-value assignments.

Once she went to Chicago for an important meeting with one of the company’s first potential clients. Justin wanted the customer to think the company was more than just two people (which at the time it wasn’t), so he asked Darrianne to use her maiden name at the presentation. That same day, the client called the company offices, eager to sign a contract.

Darrianne’s influence over the operation remains to this day. Though she left her job with the CIA years ago and today devotes herself to raising the couple’s four daughters (plus serving as Newfields’ board chair), she’s still an informal BCforward consultant.

“I couldn’t even go through the list of every major challenge and business decision where I’ve been able to bounce ideas off of her,” Justin Christian said. “She’s been there every step of the way.”

Another early client was the late Mays Chemical founder and owner Bill Mays. Businessman John Thompson, owner of four companies, including Thompson Distribution and First Electric Supply, was present at the first Mays/Christian pitch meeting and considers Christian a friend.

“He could have moved his company anywhere because he has people around the world,” Thompson said. “He still could today. But he chooses to be right here in Indiana, raise his family and grow his business.”

Christian spends a great deal of time helping DePauw, where he currently serves as chair of the board’s academic affairs committee. Specifically, he wants to make it a more welcoming place for its large cadre of minority students and to help them develop the sorts of personal contacts that served him so well.

Back in the day, this sort of social capital was typically accrued through membership in the school’s extensive Greek system.

“I would see generations of people come back to DePauw, and students would go to the fraternity houses and meet with older fraternity and sorority members and build connections,” Christian said.

But since most of the Greek institutions at DePauw are predominantly white, those opportunities typically didn’t flow to minority students. Extensive discussions with the school (and a roughly $1 million donation from the Christians) led to the founding of the Center for Diversity & Inclusion—a meeting place where minority students can form connections. Darrianne selected many of the interior furnishings herself and oversaw the inclusion of a full kitchen that’s already been used by a student startup to help create a restaurant business.

There’s even a beauty salon/barbershop specifically for folks of various ethnicities who have trouble finding competent hair care in Greencastle. Indeed, Darrianne remembers during her student days having to carpool with her friends to Indianapolis to get their hair done.

“As we started talking to the school, the scope of the center expanded to include a lot of diverse groups, which I thought was pretty exciting,” Justin Christian said. “How do you create experiences that give people access to information and opportunities?”

“He wants the center to be a place where our students who come from historically marginalized populations can belong,” said Dr. Dionne Jackson, DePauw’s vice president of institutional equity. “He wants them to come into the space, feel as if it’s a place that feels like home to them, and to have the support and resources to help them achieve at very high levels at DePauw.”

“He is a great connector of ideas and people,” said Holbrook Hankinson, the center’s executive director.

When they aren’t working, the Christians both spend much of their free time looking after their four daughters, traveling extensively and putting together Lego sets with the kids, which are then displayed around their home. Justin, with the advice and tutelage of Darrianne, has also recently started seriously collecting art by African-American artists.

But his most valuable collection is likely the business contacts and personal bonds he’s developed over the years.

“A lot of great friends and relationships have come from this entrepreneurial journey,” Christian said. “If central Indiana hadn’t been part of it, I might not have had the opportunity to meet the wonderful people I’ve been able to interface with and collaborate with over the last 30-plus years.”•

Check out more of IBJ’s ranking of Indy’s fastest-growing companies.