Reprinted with permission of the Rochester Business Journal.

VOLUME 30, NUMBER 26 WWW.RBJDAILY.COM SEPTEMBER 26, 2014

Mike and Sitima Fowleraim to manage 10,000computers in this area

Serving companies in Rochester, West-ern New York and beyond, Capstone Information Technologies Inc. offers businesses outsourced computer and net-work support services.

“Our clients hire us to proactively man-age their network so they can focus on their core business and not worry about com-puter issues,” co-CEO Mike Fowler said.

“We are the outsourced IT department for small businesses,” added his wife, co-CEO Sitima Fowler. “We understand their budgets, processes and growth goals. As their virtual CIO, we guide our clients to help them meet their business goals using technology.”

Sitima Fowler’s focus is new business development; her husband focuses on oper-ations. Capstone currently has 21 staffers, more than half of whom work in techni-cal support. Advanced technology allows the support team to monitor and manage clients’ networks remotely. Capstone’s in-house help desk is always available to take client calls.

Mike Fowler has more than 20 years’ experience in IT. He started Capstone in 2003.

“We learned early on how important marketing was to our business,” he said. “No one knows how good we are until we tell them. We took that one step further and said, ‘No one believes how good we are until our clients tell them.’”

Sitima Fowler joined Capstone seven years ago.

“IT services is a growing industry,” she said. “Everyone uses computers to get their

job done. As such, the hardware, software and all the applications they use in their business have to play together nicely. A lot of knowledge and work is needed behind the scenes to make sure it all works and that our clients are not facing any down time.

“We have experts on virtualization,

cloud computing, email, Microsoft prod-ucts and security,” she added. “You really need a group of IT engineers to manage even a small business environment.”

Capstone manages more than 3,000 com-puters in the area. There is plenty of op-portunity in Rochester and Western New

A pair of co-CEOs who believe in setting big goals2014 BUSINESS PERSON OF THE YEAR

Photo by Kimberly McKinzie

“We are the outsourced IT department for small businesses,” says Sitima Fowler, with Mike Fowler, her husband and co-CEO at Capstone Information Technologies.

Reprinted with permission of the Rochester Business Journal.

York, Mike Fowler said.“When we decided to grow, we imple-

mented a marketing and sales department. We have a BHAG, a ‘Big Hairy Audacious Goal,’ to manage 10,000 computers and have 10,000 satisfied, happy customers. It’s a big goal, and when we hit that, we’ll set a new goal.”

Leadership is about setting direction, he said. “We do strategic planning every year, followed by quarterly planning. We also look at our five-year, three-year, one-year and quarterly goals.”

His job is to align the organization with those goals and make sure that the vision is communicated clearly.

Leadership also is about finding the right people to hire.

“We look high and low to find the people who have the right technical skills, but more importantly, that they match our core values, that they have the right personality profiles for our company, because we know that by hiring the right people we will be able to support the growth,” he said.

The co-CEOs say they feel very fortunate that everything they have set in motion over the last 10 years is gaining momentum.

Last year, Capstone earned a place on the Rochester Top 100 list for the first time, and the firm is on it again this year. In ad-dition, 2014 is the second year when Cap-stone has been listed on the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing companies.

“We recognize that we are a local busi-ness and we owe our success to the busi-nesses and the friends and family we have in this area, so we really try to give back,” Sitima Fowler said. Community outreach is very important to the couple. “You have to be passionate about whatever you par-ticipate in; otherwise you are not going to stick with it.”

Fowler founded RochesterRockstars.com several years ago. She contacts lo-cal CEOs and conducts short video inter-views on how a success-minded business owner thinks.

“The site has become so popular that the D&C has picked it up and invited me to blog about it.,” she said. “It is also shown at RIT classrooms and (the) Finger Lakes Economic Development Center. I am pas-sionate about entrepreneurship. Sharing advice, mentoring and giving people in-spiration that Rochester is a great place to

do business is what I like to do.”Last year, to celebrate Capstone’s 10th an-

niversary, the Fowlers conducted a 10-month campaign of giving back. A different charity was selected each month, and the staff found a way to make giving back fun.

“We are in Corn Hill and there is a local public school here, and all our employees collected items the teachers needed and we then went and delivered it to the class-room,” Fowler said. “Then we invited the classroom back here and we did a whole day of show-and-tell where the kids dis-sected a computer with our engineers. One of our core values is having fun. Our em-ployees came up with the idea that chari-table giving can be fun too.

“We love supporting our non-profit cli-ents,” she added. “The Center for Youth Fashion Week is coming up. We are doing baskets and having a competition among our teams. We will donate the baskets and have a party for the winning team.”

Meanwhile, the Fowlers continue to anticipate the future needs of their cli-ents. You can’t sit back and wait for the phone to ring for business to come to you, they say.