Secured Tech didn’t start with a plan to become a national K-12 technology company.
When longtime friends Nate Holmes and Chris Hawkins founded the Fortville-based company in 2018, they focused on a specific challenge: repairing damaged iPads for school districts.
Before long, those early customers raised a different question. Repairs solved the immediate problem, but could device damage be prevented in the first place?
“They said, ‘We love what you’re doing, but how can we use you less?’” Hawkins says.
The question led Holmes and Hawkins to begin evaluating protective cases that could help schools reduce damage and keep more devices in students’ hands.
That exchange captures much of how the company has grown. Rather than beginning with a plan to offer nearly everything a school technology department might need, Secured Tech expanded as recurring challenges revealed opportunities for new solutions.
Schools needed repairs. Then they wanted to prevent those repairs. Then they wanted more predictable repair costs.
Then 2020 arrived.
“We always joke that in 2020, we became a charger company,” Hawkins says. “Most of the devices came back, but none of the chargers did.”
Later, districts began asking Secured Tech for help selling retired devices after disappointing experiences with buyback companies. Secured Tech responded with a simplified pass-or-fail grading system designed to make payouts easier to understand before devices ever leave the district.
More recently, tighter school budgets have created demand for affordable refurbished devices.
The common thread, Hawkins says, has been sticking to problems the company understands and adding solutions when schools consistently ask for them.
Sometimes the Best Sale Is No Sale
That approach occasionally means telling a school not to spend money with Secured Tech at all.
Hawkins recalls working with a local district that was spending six figures on Chromebook repairs. The district was preparing to sell Secured Tech, a group of older devices.
Secured Tech told them to keep them.
The Chromebooks already had Google licenses and could be used as loaners when student devices broke. Keeping them would also allow the district to reduce the number of repairs it was sending to Secured Tech.
“You’re sitting on a much more valuable resource to you than it is to our company,” Hawkins recalls telling them.
That same thinking extends to hardware recommendations. Secured Tech works across manufacturers rather than pushing one particular brand, using what it sees across school districts to help technology leaders understand what is working elsewhere.
Conversations often begin with what a district already likes about its technology program and where it is running into problems. If something is working well, there may be no reason to change it.
Today, Secured Tech helps K-12 districts with devices, repairs, protection, software, buyback and other technology needs. The company has also grown its team while trying to preserve the personal, problem-solving approach Holmes and Hawkins relied on in the beginning.
Eight years after its founding, Secured Tech has grown well beyond Fortville and now serves over 500 districts in 37 states. The problems schools bring to the company have gotten bigger and more complex, but the way it approaches them has remained relatively simple: understand what is working, find what is not, and help the district make the decision that makes the most sense.
