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| Reece opens doors on Main Street By Marc Longpre--[ marc@hmbreview.com ] Published/Last Modified on Wednesday, August 9, 2006 3:16 PM PDT Sitting in his new Main Street office, surrounded by complicated charts and diagrams, Randy Reece is a long way from a kitchen. Trained as a professional chef in New York, Reece spent years traveling the world cooking in some of the best restaurants on the planet. It was during a stint at one of these restaurants in Montreal in the early 1980s that Reece found computers. On a whim, he signed up for a class at McGill University. He was hoping to learn about these new personal computers that were making so much noise at the time. That one class turned into an undergraduate degree, a graduate degree, and then a career, eventually leading him to the center of the technology universe - Silicon Valley. Six years ago Reece sold the business he had helped found and started helping Coastside businesses with IT as a way to occupy his time. "It was more as a hobby than anything else," he says. That hobby soon turned into something more. With business booming and Reece realizing he could no longer handle the operation on his own, he hired four employees and moved into a Main Street office above Indo. Reece Computer Systems now has about 130 customers, 95 percent of them Coastside businesses. "We're their IT department," Reece says of the small companies he serves. "Big companies have their own IT departments, and we're bringing those benefits to smaller companies." Examples of how companies use Reece are never far away. Mike Laffen, president of the Half Moon Bay Brewing Company, said the restaurant has used Reece as a one-stop shop for all computer needs, including point-of-sale system integration and implementation to emergency repair and support. Reece said the idea to open shop on the coast came partly from living here and partly from the realization that no one was providing an all-in-one solution for Coastside businesses. "We're focusing on Half Moon Bay and this area," he said. "It's a beautiful place and we want to make it work here." Among the projects he's working on is a help desk, or Smart Help, that will be included within a company's system allowing users the same solutions you might get at a major corporation. "It's one thing to fix a machine that's broken, it's another to figure out how to give people complete support," Reece said. "We don't just fix boxes." Reece said that with the enlightened, tech-friendly environment on the Coastside there's plenty of room for expansion still. In fact, he's currently looking to bring on a sixth member of his team. To contact Reece Computer Systems call 726-7155 or visit www.reececomputers.com. |