The co-founders of Lincoln-based informational technology company Five Nines are still getting used to the idea of its success.
James Bowen and Nick Bock founded Five Nines in a Lincoln coffee shop in October 2006. Soon afterward, they signed a three-year lease for office space. They balked at a five-year lease because Five Nines hadn't even been around for three years, Bock said.
Now, they're starting to think more long term.
"We've just recently kind of gotten accustomed to the whole five-year projections," Bowen said.
Five Nines specializes in helping out so-called 9-to-5s. The company has offices in Lincoln and Omaha, with plans for a third to open May 1Â in Kearney. Five Nines provides managed information technology services to small- to mid-size businesses that don't have IT departments of their own. The services include monitoring and hosting office network systems, backing up data, setting up office technology and offering support for technology issues.
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"We really become a functional part of their business," Bowen said.
"One of the things that we're good at is not just solving the day-to-day issues," Bock said, "but meeting with them on a quarterly or even just a yearly basis to help them figure out what's their budget, what are they doing strategically next year, how can we have the right technology solutions to help them be successful as a business."
The business' name comes from the ideal level of perfection in information technology, with systems working 99.999 percent of the time. Bowen and Bock each had their own technology support businesses before joining forces to start the award-winning Five Nines.
Five Nines earned the Lincoln Chamber of Commerce's Small Business of the Year award in 2007, a year after opening. It was named one of the five best mid-size places to work in Lincoln in 2014. It has made the Inc. 5000's list of fastest growing private businesses for six years straight. Bock expects the business will make the list for a seventh time in 2015.
The company, which started with three employees, has grown to 90, he said. Five Nines retains more than 95 percent of its customers each year.
Bock said the relationships the company has developed with its customers are the key to growth and maintaining its customer base.
"We assign a primary engineer to them to give them the feel of having their own IT guy sitting in the office," Bock said.
These engineers get so involved, he said, that they get invites to Christmas parties.
"It happens every year," Bock said.
Five Nines looks for companies that want to outsource their IT work. Most of its business comes through word-of-mouth, Bock said.
Bowen, a Lincoln native, graduated from Nebraska Wesleyan University with a computer science degree in 2000 and got his MBA from the University of Nebraska at Omaha in 2013. Bock moved to Nebraska when he was 10 and graduated from Union College with a history education degree.
Even with its success, Five Nines will remain a Nebraska-based entity, they said.
"At its very core, we're a Nebraska company," Bock said.
While he acknowledged there are attractive opportunities to expand outside of the Cornhusker State, he said there's still plenty of room to grow in Lincoln, Omaha and central Nebraska.
"Yeah, there's opportunities outside of Nebraska," Bock said, "but Nebraska's home, and we want to be able to grow in the communities we're in."