Meet Steve Fry
Co-founder of a number of businesses, including two that have made the Inc. 500 and Inc. 5000 Lists. Today, Steve spends his time matchmaking organizations that genuinely want to grow or increase collaboration with a team of experts in E-Commerce, M365/SharePoint and Digital Marketing. Steve serves on a number of boards where he gets to see up close how non-profits work. Having been to about 70 countries, Steve loves to travel with his wife, Jan. They have two grown daughters and live in suburban Des Moines.
Tell us a little bit about your company and what exactly it is that you do and introduce the company in general?
We have a couple of companies, but they're all under the banner of spindustry. And we're based in the suburbs of Des Moines, Iowa. And we do really two major things. The first would be large scale web application development. And as a part of that would be replacement parts e-commerce. We do a lot of that. And then the other side of our business is Microsoft Office 365. And as a part of that platform, we do a lot of work with SharePoint, Teams, Power BI, and some of the tools within that suite to move businesses to the cloud. As people are working more and more remotely, that is a platform that is very busy for us and serves our clients well.
How did you get into this space and tell us a little bit about your background?
It started about 35 years ago, when I first got out of school, I went to work for an insurance company and then I moved to Iowa back in 1990. I was involved for a number of years with an exporting business. We sold old firefighting and safety equipment that was manufactured in United States, but all of our clients were international. And I, for a number of years, covered Asia Pacific. So, from Japan down to Australia, and then back west to India, and got to do a lot of traveling. And that was back in the day when we didn't have email. And we didn't have the ability to communicate like we do today. And then in in 1996, we started a new company. I met a guy when I was working in a product fulfillment business, Michael Bird, he's my business partner. And he helped us in the exporting business to automate everything that we were doing. And he just did a wonderful job and he was entrepreneurial. And my business partner and I and other businesses decided to, you know, let's start a new business.
Where do you see the future of business going today?
So I in my business career, I have seen incredible change. I remember When I was early in my career, the fax machine became a prominent feature in most offices. And that was a revolutionary tool that you could actually send something, a piece of paper for from one office to another. And we do so many things that I couldn't have thought of 30 years ago, even 10 years ago, we do things today, we wouldn't have thought of. And I think looking forward there's more change. I think there'll be careers that people do 10 years from now that don't exist today. I know a lot of people are involved in social media work today. Well, if you go back maybe 10 or 12 years ago, that's really when that all started and there was nobody working in social media today. That's a big, big business.
Can you share with our listeners your most successful or one of your favorite networking stories that you had?
I have belonged to a breakfast club for several years now. It meets twice a month, and this is going back about 10 years. One morning after we had our bimonthly breakfast, one of the members that I had just met but didn't really know him very well came up to me and we were chatting and he said he thinks he may have a client for me. It was a hog farmer in northwestern Iowa. And I looked at him and I said, Jim, do you know what I do? And he laughed. And he said I think you'd be surprised, and I thought, I don't know how we're going to help a hog farmer in northwestern...
