Bill Ramsey, the former Bill Guy, has started another IT company

Bill Ramsey swears he didn’t want to start another technology company, but that’s what he’s doing.

“I got talked into it.”

Ramsey is best known as the Bill Guy of the former Bill Guy Technology Solutions , which he sold to Cybertron in 2012. He became a partner in that company and then left in 2015.

His noncompete expired in February 2019, but Ramsey says he was focused on his uBreakiFix franchises, and he and his wife also bought Sweetly Scrumptious and renamed it River City Sweet Shop.

Then former client Steve Austin approached him about starting another IT company.

“Hey, look,” Ramsey says Austin told him, “I’m sick of the way I’m treated by companies.”

Austin, who owns All Angles Collision Repair and is a partner in Oxford Senior Living among other things, says he liked how Ramsey treated him when he had the Bill Guy.

“If it’s not you,” Austin said of starting a business, “it’s going to be somebody else, because I’m just tired of it.”

He, Ramsey and City Council member Bryan Frye are now all partners in Soteria Technology Solutions.

“I kind of had some demands,” Ramsey says. “A lot of lessons that I learned from the last company.”

That included being partner focused and “taking service to another level.”

“A lot of the things that we saw that frustrated companies about their IT, we said, ‘Hey, we’re going to fix those.’ ”

One big thing is giving clients proper help from the moment they call, which Ramsey says means not having to go through layers of help and then getting an expert only when the others haven’t helped.

Ramsey says a lot of his other former clients had requested that he start a new company, too.

Soteria is the Greek goddess of protection.

“We help protect your business,” Ramsey says.

He says the managed IT services company basically is an outsourced IT department. He says their goal is to work with companies that value their IT assets.

“You would be amazed. There’s a lot of people who don’t.”

Ramsey says a lot of business owners have aging equipment and say, “Just make it work.”

Soteria, which has an office at 1815 E. Central, has already acquired Backbone Technology Group.

Ramsey says he’s hiring employees now.

While he’s good at the technical work, Ramsey says, “I really like the business side.”

That includes expanding the business out of state sooner rather than later.

“We have some pretty aggressive goals.”

Part of Ramsey’s reluctance to start another IT company is because he says it is a high-stress job.

“It’s sort of a thankless job, but I still love it.”

This story was originally published January 23, 2020 at 5:03 AM.