Entrepreneurship Grant Award
GridSouth Networks was awarded an Entrepreneurship Grant for $100,000 to be matched with a $100,000 investment. The Pensacola-based company provides high-capacity, high-performance Grid Networking, VMware Hosting services, Cloud storage, remote backup, 100 Mbps Internet service and managed web hosting services for Microsoft Windows platforms. All of GridSouth's product and service offerings are designed and built around the philosophy of "over-engineering™" which includes fully-redundant data centers, active standby equipment and technical expertise to deliver cost-effective service plans with uncompromising results.
“Service and consistency are the keystones to our business,” says Jim Nitterauer, GridSouth’s President and CEO.
“Exceptional customer service is vital in this industry. Our employees must all wear multiple hats and be efficient.”
That efficiency is important considering GridSouth maintains between 300 and 400 clients at any given time in almost every state and Canada. “As a new company, we want to stay lean and mean,” Nitterauer explains, “but we still need to be responsive.” The four-person company is focused on slow but steady growth and has increased revenues every year since its founding.
GridSouth’s success can be largely attributed to its ability to stay nimble. “In IT, there is a need to change service offerings fairly often, but your categories of products stay the same,” states Nitterauer. “We have adapted to fit the needs of our clients and the marketplace.”
Nitterauer also recognizes the impact the WIRED funding had on the start-up. “The grant helped us bring on more employees than we would have otherwise,” Nitterauer says. “Funding can be hard to come by, and we want to do all we can to create jobs.”
GridSouth has plans to continue growing. “You have to know going in that you’ll stick with it for four to five years,” explains Nitterauer. “And you have to be willing to adapt the plan.”
GridSouth has adapted to a changing marketplace and has become profitable inside that five-year timeline.