Chalupas and the Cloud: Happy 15th Birthday, LiftOff!
Starting a small business is scary. Statistics show that most fail within only a few years. Somehow my boss, Ron Braatz, President of LiftOff, has defied the odds.
This month, Ron’s Microsoft cloud technology group is celebrating its 15th birthday. Woo hoo!
Back in 2008, Ron was a CRM Solution Specialist for Microsoft and noticed how heavily the company was investing in cloud infrastructure. Microsoft had just released BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) and Office 365 would soon follow.
Ron decided to take a chance in 2010 by launching LiftOff, a Microsoft partner that would help organizations reach the new cloud employing an educational approach. “For years, I saw companies deploying IT projects with just too much failure because they needed guidance,” Ron says. “I knew that LiftOff could help successfully coach organizations through this complex process.”
Business was slow at first as Ron started to build what would become our cloud deployment coaching model. He kept busy working his old Microsoft network and re-connecting with small businesses he collaborated with over the years.
As the Microsoft cloud began to be viewed as a viable IT solution for organizations and LiftOff started to grow, he hired me (Brian) in 2011. I wasn’t really a tech guy back then – my background was in corporate PR and business development – and I worked in a high stress job that kept me away from my young family for long stretches. I joke with Ron that he literally saved me because I was not in a good place back then! He taught me everything about Office 365 and his vision for how LiftOff could help organizations reach the Microsoft cloud.
Colin, Tom, Nicole, Kristina, Allison, and Amy would later join the company and they likely have their own “Ron saved me” stories that would best be told by them. We all contribute to an amazing company culture that was created and fostered by Ron.
The early days of LiftOff were very busy as we grew alongside the young Microsoft cloud. We spent a ton of time trying to convince clients to move to the cloud where they couldn’t open the server closet and manage their own stuff. Reliability, cost, and security were huge concerns (and still are!)
It was just Ron and me at first, and we both wore many hats. Concurrently, we made sales calls, organized business development outings for our clients, populated our social media channels with content, performed migrations to Office 365 and so much more.
One day early on, I remember we drove three hours to visit a client, spent the entire morning with them, and then hustled out to drive an additional hour to see yet another client in the afternoon. On the way, we were hungry, so we stopped at Taco Bell for a quick lunch. While we prepared to dig in, Ron got a call from a prospect that we’d been talking to for a few weeks. I watched in awe as Ron closed a deal while munching a Chalupa. Small business owners need to be flexible!
Fifteen years later, LiftOff is now one of the top Microsoft partners in the country. Over a thousand small businesses, state and local governments and federal government contractors have trusted LiftOff with their Microsoft 365 licensing, deployment and training needs.
Contact us with questions on your organizations move to Microsoft 365. We can help with the Microsoft Commercial cloud, the Government Community Cloud (GCC), and the GCC High.
Happy birthday, LiftOff!