a Rite-Solutions' truck simulator.
Rite-Solutions
- Owner: Employee-owned
- Location: Middletown
- Type of Business: Information technology
- Year Founded: 2000
- Employees: 85
- Annual Sales: $7.6 million in 2003
- Web site: www.rite-solutions.com
Depending on what office you step into, the hallways of Rite-Solutions lead to a unique mix of engineers, fine-tuning digitized slot machines to simulators for everything from a tractor-truck driving school to the U.S. Navy.
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An employee-owned IT company hoping to see revenues of $12 million in 2004, Rite-Solutions has developed expertise within the gaming and entertainment community, where it has the ability to simulate entire casinos as well as provide real-time information about how the house is faring throughout the day. Such information systems are highly customized and can require more than a million lines of code, as well as the ability to perform upgrades and maintenance while the system is running.
The company has also found a secure line of work performing about half of its business as part of government contracts, where the company’s top officers all have their roots. The company does several local projects for the Newport Naval Station, Raytheon and the Naval Underwater Warfare Center, although the work spans the coast from Maine to New Jersey, many times dealing in building regular and secure network routers.
Rite-Solutions CEO Jim Lavoie calls the work keeping an office’s technology “thinking and blinking,” adding that the company is often called on for industrial-strength solutions. “We can’t build a system that has to be baby-sat,” he said.
“The two industries are a lot more alike than they look on the surface,” said President Joe Marino. “Helping a businessman with that up-to-the-minute information leaves less of a margin for error. That’s the same advantage, information dominance, that the war-fighter is looking for.”
Lavoie and Marino already had more than 20 years experience in the technology field when the small company they spent most of their careers working for was sold in 1999. They decided to start Rite-Solutions the following year, hiring CFO Linda Edwards and COO Ned Hole to oversee the company’s day-to-day operations while Lavoie and Marino drummed up business.
After growing out of a small, 150-square-foot space at 1272 West Main Road in Middletown (the business now takes up most of two floors in the same building), renovations are already under way for a new space in the Aquidneck Corporate Park that should be completed by June.
Rite-Solutions, which employs 85 full-time workers, also has a 10-person administrative staff working at the company’s corporate headquarters, just over Westerly’s border in Pawcatuck, Conn. The company is happy to have made a name in Rhode Island, where officials are willing to make the time to meet with small businessman and where there are organizations in place that can help a small business in a small state, said Marino.
Lavoie and Marino both tout the experience of their workers. The average Rite-Solutions employee (a mix of professionals holding degrees mostly in engineering, computer science, mathematics and physics) has 15 years of experience, in addition to holding a stake in the company. The men talk about the importance of finding the right people to work with and to work for.
“If you’re going to start, start with seasoned professionals,” Marino said.
With the implosion of the dot-com industry on the heels of the startup of their business in January 2000, Lavoie and Marino said they were lucky to be able to pull from a good pool of talent around Boston. Now, Lavoie said Rite-Solutions regularly sees “people coming to us with their most pressing problems,” looking to tap into a pool of talent that’s willing to take ownership of a problem.
“Our mantra is sound growth,” said Marino, who added the company is currently hiring. “We’re not in a sprint to a three-year IPO and hitting the beach. … We want to be here to support the growth for a while, our aim is to reach 1,500 employees in the not-too-distant future.”
Lavoie and Marino take obvious pride in their business and are serious about the roles they play as watchdogs over the company’s lighthearted culture, often poking fun at themselves and the geek-stereotypes of their industry.
They talk about the little things, from running funny caption contests for staff pictures in the employee newsletter to sending flowers or a fruit basket to welcome the family of new hires. And every third Thursday, Rite-Solutions holds a company-wide meeting to discuss the good and the bad of the last four weeks, in the spirit of allowing all stakeholders access to whatever information they desire. Lavoie remembered his former company’s early days, before being bought out by IT giant Anteon Corp.
“It started out focusing on people,” Lavoie said.
“But when it became a public company, a lot of those ‘people goals’ changed and were weighed against shareholder goals. Here, we’re killing two birds with one stone. Our shareholders’ goals are our goals,” he added.
