by Michele Newbern Gillis
Staff Writer
Starting and building a well-rounded company is a lot like being a conductor. You have to orchestrate your talent, hire good people and oversee them to make beautiful music.
Donny Lamey, 32 and owner and president of DiscoverTec, started the technology solution company out of his apartment in 1993 in Pensacola and has grown it to a multi-million dollar operation.
He says that he doesn’t rule his company with an iron fist; he orchestrates many different talents to make the company a success.
“It’s a matter of respect,” he said. “I don’t run the company with the mindset of here’s what you need to do, now go do it. I run the company with the mindset of hiring very intelligent people who are very good at what they do and I expect them to do a great job.
“I respect their area and their level of expertise. I want to hire people who know more than I do. I have great people who love what they do. They are excited about it. It’s not work for them, it’s their lifestyle. It’s part of their hobby.”
Lamey said it takes a lot of flexibility to run such a company.
“You have to be flexible and be able to recognize the changes in the industry because it changes quickly,” he said. “It’s not a stable industry in the fact that what I am doing today, I will not be in three years. That is just the nature of the industry. We just have to update, change and modify.”
He decided to start his own company to fulfill a need he saw in the marketplace.
“In 1993, I was working for several companies and one of the things that I noticed was that there was not a single solution for people who had a technology need,” said Lamey. “In other words, there were people who did graphics, there were people who did programming and there were people who did wiring.
“But a company didn’t exist that would coordinate for a new business or facility and to have all of the pieces that a company would need to have a single point of contact.”
So, at the ripe old age of 21, Lamey decided to start his own company to service all of a company’s technology needs in one place.
“So, what I decided to do was to come in and be jack-of-all trades,” he said. “I’ll do it all and I would actually go in and do all the different pieces, put them together and make it work in a unified solution. I just worked out of my apartment, added clients and worked hard to do a good job.”
He moved the company to Jacksonville in 1995 and now has 50 employees and currently deals with several thousand customers in the Southeast.
“Pensacola just didn’t have the marketplace to do some of the things we wanted to do,” he said. “So, I spent six months looking at Tier One and Tier Two type cities all over the Southeast to pick the market. We just fell in love with Jacksonville. It was just a perfect fit for us. When I moved here, I had to start over. I had to leave all the clients and start over here.”
Lamey didn’t start out as a computer geek. He was a finance major in college and whenever he would give presentations, he always did his in a multi-media format and he caught the technology bug.
“I was actually three classes away from receiving my finance degree and decided I didn’t want to do finance for the rest of my life,” he said. “I stopped, went back and started all over again to get my information systems degree.”
He has a bachelor’s degree in information systems from University of West Florida.
His company is divided into four divisions: Website/Application Development, Information Technology Support, Home Automation and Virtual Office Facility.
When you visit DiscoverTec, you will not notice a sign for the company anywhere.
“This facility is actually a virtual office facility,” said Lamey. “We have conference rooms, training rooms and board rooms that people come and use like it’s their own office.”
Lamey said his company bought Class A space in a building in Southside and put in all the latest technology and let businesses come and use it as an extension of their own offices.
“We have hundreds of businesses that use this facility as their own office,” he said.
Lamey brought the company to Jacksonville in 1995 and has grown the company significantly since then.
“This year we are tooling ourselves to be a major player in the marketplace of offering technology solutions in all of the divisions we offer,” he said. “Our facility is now full, so we are looking to possibly expand that. As far as working with new homes, this year we will put technology integration into about 2,000 new homes.”
Some of the company’s clients include builders, Realtors and companies in the Northeast Florida area.
“In addition, we work with architects, engineering firms, attorneys, doctors offices and manufacturing companies,” said Lamey. “It’s really a diversified list.”
In relation to builders and Realtors, DiscoverTec offers several services to help them in their business life.
“We could be their technology partners for their office by doing all of their computers and networking,” he said. “We also do websites and multi-media presentations and graphics for both Realtors and builders.”
Lamey said a Realtor could use their virtual office if they don’t have an office. Users are charged a monthly fee and can come in and use the facility as much as they want.
“The use of technology helps companies be more efficient, which reduces their costs,” he said. “Technology is an investment in an organization that allows a company to be more efficient and operate at a higher level so it can be competitive. Without technology, they have to exhaust manpower to accomplish the same task.”
Though technology has advanced in leaps and bounds since Lamey started his company, he says this is only the beginning.
“People think that we have reached a point where the market is saturated, but that is not true,” he said. “Technology integration still has not gone to a point to where it is integrated into the lifestyle as much as it could be.
“For example, people are still battling with getting data transferred from the office to home, how they balance their schedule and all the different tools dealing with how they communicate. As people become more and more used to this, it will be nice when people understand how to use this technology so that it is part of their lifestyle. It’s still work for people, not a part of their lifestyle.
“Once it gets fully adopted, it’s just going to explode. It’s still in its infancy.”
In order to keep up with the ever-changing technology market, Lamey’s company has a research and development department to recognize some of the needs in the marketplace.
“They find a solution and introduce those needs to the market so we can stay head of the curve,” he said. “You have to stay ahead, find out the problems and offer solutions.”