CCS Technologies founder and President Greg Slater is committed to downtown Coopersville.

Longevity Does Matter
Daniel Schoonmaker

COOPERSVILLE — The shelves of office supplies filling the downtown Coopersville storefront of CCS Technologies are a bit misleading as to the nature of the 30-year-old technology firm.

“When we moved downtown, they said, ‘Please put in office supplies; we don’t want to have to go to Alpine (Avenue),” explained CCS Technologies founder and President Greg Slater.

Although the stretch of Randall Street that leads from downtown Coopersville to the I-96 expressway is rapidly expanding with strip malls and shopping plazas, the nearest office supply store is still 14 miles away on the Alpine Avenue commercial corridor in Walker.

Slater, the current president of the Coopersville Chamber of Commerce and an active member of the Downtown Development Authority, felt obligated to fill those requests, and was astonished by the amount of business he has seen in the retail venture. CCS has seen the same walk-in boom from locals in need of computer repair, which was another surprise.

“I never thought it would be as busy as it is,” Slater admitted.

Neither of the ventures had ever played a large role in the firm’s business model before, but as Slater explained, its willingness to change is what has made CCS one of the region’s oldest companies of its kind.

In 1974, Slater was the junior associate in charge of computer operations for the Coopersville accounting firm today known as Spoelman, Hovingh & Feldt Inc. Paul Spoelman and Ron Hovingh concentrated their work on tax issues, while Slater managed a smaller load and anything requiring the use of a computer. It wasn’t long before the trio recognized an opportunity to provide information technology services to both its clients and competitors, and spun off Coopersville Computer Services with Slater at the helm.

“A lot of the other companies that were around back then had problems adapting to change,” Slater said. “And they didn’t survive.”

When he first came to Spoelman Hovingh, the industry was still using paper tape machines, an upgrade from punch cards. Then came the Burroughs mini-system and removable discs roughly a square foot in size.

“They were about yea high, yea wide and yea tall,” said Slater, displaying the shape of the oversized disc with his hands. “We could get a whopping 4.8 megabytes on this mini-computer. For Christmas, I’m giving away this key fob that holds a gigabyte.”

The company originally launched to provide technology consulting for small and medium-sized businesses, primarily related to accounting functions. That changed during the next wave of technology adoption, when clients large and small began purchasing first-generation personal computers such as Apple II, Commodore PET and RadioShack’s Tandy TRS-80.

“The salesmen would tell people they could do whatever they wanted them to, but wouldn’t bother to mention how complicated the software was and how much training would go into that,” said Slater. “I remember specifically going to one office, and they had a Tandy in the corner that they were just using to play the (University of) Michigan fight song.”

The Wolverines were his inspiration for an expansion of consulting services aimed at automating additional client business functions and training operators in their use. This picked up speed through the advent of PCs in the 1980s, network systems in the 1990s and the Internet in more recent years. It adopted the more concise CCS Technologies brand at this time, believing it better characterized the company’s services.

CCS today has 175 business clients, most of those in a triangle stretching from Muskegon to Holland and back to Grand Rapids, but with some as far away Lansing, Kalamazoo and Traverse City. It serves small municipalities, retail firms, manufacturers and a diverse group of service professionals.

Oftentimes, clients have outgrown CCS’s services, opting to acquire IT assets of their own. Slater cited such a situation that occurred recently with a long-term client. When it first contracted CCS, it had two locations. Today it has eight. In these cases, clients have typically retained CCS for special projects and to support its IT department.

“When we get a business that is really doing well, we feel like we’re a part of it.”

Turnover at the six-technician firm is practically nonexistent — a selling point to clients, as accounts are consistently serviced by the same faces for many years.

In 1978, CCS moved from Main Street to a Randall Street office building raised by the accounting group. Five years ago, it renovated the former Lemmen Chevrolet showroom on Main Street, and has since played a key role in the revitalization of the historic downtown corridor. Nearly half the storefronts were vacant at that time, and CCS was followed by a surge of relocations, expansions and startups that all but filled the structures adjacent the Coopersville & Marne Railway Station, visible from CCS’s back door.     BJX