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Revenue growth FY 2020 to 2022: 157%
2022 Revenue: $8.88 million
What it does: Secured Tech Solutions partners with school districts that need to sell, protect or support devices such as iPads and Chromebooks. As the company put it: “Whether you need repairs on your existing devices, accessories like cases or carts to protect them, or you are ready to retire your devices and make a new investment, Secured Tech Solutions can help.”
At first: President and CEO Nate Holmes started in the educational technology space seven years ago with a company called AppleCrossing that repaired iPhones and iPads. In November 2018, he and Chief Revenue Officer Chris Hawkins split off and started Secured Tech.
Evolution: Today, iPad repair is the smallest line of business, Holmes said. As the company has grown, it has listened to customers and added the services they wanted, including selling chargers (“As schools sent devices home in the pandemic, the devices came back, but the chargers didn’t,” Hawkins said), providing accidental damage insurance and enabling districts to sell refurbished devices through
a community buyback program.
Expanding base: The company now has 250-300 customers nationwide in 29 states. About half of the customers are in Indiana, including Hamilton Southeastern, Sheridan, Hamilton Heights, Lawrence Township, Decatur Township, Mount Vernon and Warren Township. Typically, Secured Tech will pick up a customer’s devices, bring them to the warehouse, clean them, remove the data, grade them for the secondary market and prep them for resale.
Competing: Early on, Secured Tech’s leadership saw that doing the little things—like returning devices fully charged—could build its reputation. “That’s always been the challenge for us—looking around the corner to see what the next thing is going to be and trying to beat the giants in our space,” Hawkins said. “As you might imagine, competing against Apple is challenging as a small company from Indiana, but what we say is: Apple will always beat us apples to apples, so we try to make a very appealing and captivating orange that our customers can rally behind.”•
Check out more of IBJ’s ranking of Indy’s fastest-growing companies.
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