"OK", she said, "I’ll do it."
The question was, “Would you like to start a business with me?”
And that was pretty much it. No investors. No strategic plan. No twenty-year roadmap. No clue where any of it would lead. Just Arleene and me, a spare bedroom in our small eastside home, a couple of computers, and the feeling that maybe we could build something useful.
And on October 1st, 2006 it began, and now I’m sitting here on the eve of our 20th anniversary trying to make sense of the distance between then and now. It doesn’t feel like twenty years. Not really.
I can still remember those early days clearly. The little things. The nerves. The excitement. The constant feeling that everything mattered because, frankly, everything did.
And the hard parts weren’t choosing a name, designing a logo, building a website or figuring out what colors we should use.
The hard part was much simpler.
I was on a mission, and people had a need that wasn’t being served in a way I felt mattered.
A vendor can help you with your business. A partner is different.
Especially in a culture like ours, where relationships matter, becoming a trusted partner is something you earn. It takes time. It takes showing up. It takes doing what you said you were going to do.
That was what we wanted to build.
We wanted to help businesses get better through technology, but we also wanted to build the kind of relationship where we could do that together.
Trust was always at the center of it.
That was it.
It wasn’t about money then. It still isn’t, although these days there are a lot more bills and considerably more people to pay.
The mission hasn’t changed much.
We help people. We solve problems. We take responsibility, even for things we didn’t necessarily cause or own.
At the end of the day, we do our very best to leave things better than we found them.
Somehow, that simple idea carried us twenty years.
Then one day you realize twenty years actually passed
Yesterday I was on a call with a client we have worked with for a long time.
Dad is retired now. His son has taken over.
And at the end of that conversation, it hit me.
We have been doing this long enough to work through generations of families.
That took me a minute.
When you start a company, twenty years sounds like forever.
Then one day, it’s behind you.
The people who gave you a chance when you were young are retiring now. Their kids are running the company.
Employees have grown up with you.
Clients have bought businesses, sold businesses, expanded, downsized, moved and started over.
My own kids have, in some shape or form, been parented by many of the people who have worked here over the years.
And they aren’t babies anymore either.
Some people who were part of this journey are no longer with us.
And somehow, Makios has been there through a little piece of all of it.
That is the part that humbles me.
Because twenty years isn’t just a business milestone.
It is a chunk of a life.
A big one.
The technology certainly reminds you how much time has passed.
We look back through the memories and see Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 10 and 11. We watched servers leave closets, move into virtual environments and eventually disappear into the cloud. Email became mission critical. Phones became software. Cybersecurity went from something technical people worried about to something CEOs lose sleep over.
And now we are at the dawn of AI showing up in everything at a pace unlike anything I have seen before.
For those of us in this industry, it can honestly be a lot sometimes.
The gravity of what we are responsible for today is very different from even five years ago.
But honestly, none of that is the story.
The story is the people we went through it with.
And some of them are really great people.
I keep coming back to trust
If there is one thing I am most proud of, it is probably that people trusted us.
And still do.
They trust us with their businesses, their data, their systems, their employees, their communications, their money and sometimes, quite literally, the keys to the kingdom.
It is easy to normalize that when you do this every day.
I try not to.
Sometimes I remind our people of it because I’m not sure everyone always realizes how extraordinary that trust really is.
A business owner gives you access to almost everything they depend on and says, in one way or another:
Take care of this.
That has always meant something to me.
A lot.
Maybe more than it should.
Or maybe because I simply believe that is what we are supposed to do.
Take care of it.
Arleene, Ivan and I have always shared some version of that same instinct. Push. Don’t quit. Get it done. Get it across the finish line.
Own your part of the story and make it something you can be proud of.
Maybe that is part of why we made it this far.
I’m not sure.
We definitely didn’t get everything right
Twenty years also gives you enough time to be honest with yourself.
We made mistakes.
Plenty.
I made mistakes.
Also plenty.
There were clients we probably should have said no to. People we should have hired much sooner. People we probably held onto too long.
Ideas we chased that went nowhere.
Ideas we ignored that turned out to be pretty good.
And yes, I was probably too stubborn at times.
Too impatient.
Too abrasive.
Too sharp-tongued.
Maybe I have softened a little.
Arleene may disagree.
But I don’t think the drive ever changed.
That little voice that says, “We can make this better” is still there.
Very much so.
And somewhere along the way, Makios stopped being something Arleene and I did and became something a lot of people built together.
And they are still building it.
Even more interesting is that people we once may have looked at as competitors have become partners, collaborators and, in some cases, fans of what we are trying to build.
The circle got bigger.
That may be one of the strangest parts of the whole thing.
People have answered phones, crawled under desks, worked weekends, nights and holidays, driven across town because something broke, sat with clients until problems were fixed, built systems nobody sees, caught mistakes, challenged me and made us better.
Some stayed a long time.
Some were only here for a chapter.
But they all left fingerprints on this place.
The same is true of the clients.
Some have been with us for an astonishing amount of time.
They gave two people working out of a spare bedroom a shot.
Then someone else did.
Then someone else.
And little by little, those chances turned into a company.
That is humbling.
Because nobody owes you twenty years.
And believe it or not, some of those clients are still with us today.
If it all ended tomorrow
I have thought about this more as we got closer to year twenty.
If we closed the doors tomorrow, I would be sad.
Very sad.
Not because I think we are finished.
Quite the opposite.
It feels like we are right in the middle of another chapter.
There are things we still want to build.
Things we want to change.
Things we want and need to get better at.
And honestly, some things I think we are only now becoming capable of doing.
But if somebody told me this was it, twenty years, done...
I’d be pretty damn proud.
Proud of what we built.
Proud of the people who built it with us.
Proud of the businesses we helped.
Proud that we survived some things that probably could have taken us out.
And mostly, incredibly grateful for what we have been allowed to manage.
Because that is what it feels like now.
We were trusted with something.
A company. A team. Clients. Families. Livelihoods. Relationships.
And for twenty years, we have been fortunate enough to be responsible for all of it.
So I don’t really think of that as ownership anymore.
I think of it as stewardship.
And somehow, I’m still excited
The funny thing is, after twenty years, I am not sitting here feeling like we made it.
I don’t think you ever really do.
I’m sitting here wondering what comes next.
AI is changing everything. Technology is moving faster than ever. Clients need more from us. The risks are bigger. The opportunities are bigger too.
And I have absolutely no idea what Makios, or the world, looks like twenty years from now.
I kind of like that.
Because twenty years ago, Arleene and I couldn’t have imagined most of what we do today either.
What I do know is that we are still curious.
Still building.
Still trying to get better.
Still extremely passionate about the work we have been entrusted with.
Maybe a little wiser.
Maybe a little less abrasive.
Maybe.
All that said, I am genuinely excited about what comes next.
The bottom line
To everyone who trusted us, worked with us, worked for us, supported us, challenged us, stayed with us, or was part of the journey for however long...
Thank you.
And especially to Arleene.
Because twenty years ago, I asked you a fairly ridiculous question.
“Would you like to start a business with me?”
You said yes.
And I’m still amazed at what came from that answer.
Humbled by it.
Grateful for it.
And twenty years later, somehow, still excited to see where this goes.
