Who We Are

Advocates. Experts. Entrepreneurs.

We are Technology Group Solutions. And we do more than provide a wide variety of IT services and solutions to clients of all shapes and sizes. We put people before profits and value relationships more than returns. Our mission has always been to meet the needs of everyone around us—from ourselves to our customers and the wider community. We aren’t tech-savvy for the sake of being tech-savvy. We focus on creating an individualized IT plan based on the needs of each customer through our consultative approach.

Those guiding principles are the foundations upon which we do business across four offices, with over 80 employees. We were founded over 15 years ago and have grown to service most of the Midwest. And we’re not stopping anytime soon.

Leadership Team

Lenora Payne

Lenora Payne established Technology Group Solutions, LLC (TGS) in 2005, based on her belief in providing a full spectrum of information technology infrastructure solutions with integrity, honesty, dependability, and a customer-centric philosophy.

Lenora began her career in IT over 30 years ago in the word processing data equipment field. Her background includes operations management, employee training, sales support, and human resources. Prior to her founding TGS, Lenora held positions at GE Capital Information Technology Solutions, MicroAge Computer Center, and other IT resellers, in various senior positions.

TGS provides superior customer service and unmatched value due in part to their strong vendor relationships and strategic partnerships. Under Lenora’s leadership, TGS has been recognized and has received many consecutive awards, including Top Women Owned Business, 50 Fastest-Growing Women-Owned/Led Companies World-Wide, Top Area Minority-Owned Business, Fastest-Growing Area Business, Top Small Business, Entrepreneur of the Year (2013 Central Midwest Finalist), Women Executives—Kansas City, Diverse Small Business of the Year, Supplier of Year, MBE Supplier of the Year, Kansas Woman-Owned Business, 25 Under 25, and others. Lenora is a member of the KCBJ Women Who Mean Business, class of 2021.

Lenora attended the Kellogg School of Management, Kauffman FastTrac Growth Venture. She has received multiple sales and technical certifications in the field of information technology.

Lenora and her team at TGS infuse their work with a sense of respect—for themselves, their clients, and the community around them.

Lenora Payne

Chief Executive Officer

Doug Floersch

Doug Floersch has over 26 years’ experience in the IT industry, with an extensive background in data center, network, and solution sales. Doug currently serves as CTO of Technology Group Solutions. As a founding member of TGS, he has a reputation for relentlessly pursuing superior service and execution for customers.

Over the past 10 years with TGS, he has been able to successfully lead the organization to an astounding $140 million in revenue. Doug has been influential in the growth of TGS, developing a highly qualified team, driving a single vision to be the best service-focused IT organization in the Midwest. Under Doug‘s direction, TGS has been recognized by the Kansas City Business Journal as one of the fastest-growing businesses in Kansas City.

In the past, Doug served as an enterprise architect for Unix systems. Doug has a passion for traveling, camping, and fine foods. As a born and raised Kansas City native, Doug is an avid KC Royals and Chiefs fan.

Doug Floersch

Chief Technology Officer

Richard Long

Richard has 35 years of technical, sales, and business development experience in the technology sector. A graduate of DeVry Institute of Technology, Richard has an electronic engineering background. He spent 13 years with Sprint Corporation helping launch their first CDMA Cellular network, Sprint PCS. He went on to lead Sprint’s Network Operations Support Center and Support Systems Engineering team. Before he departed ways with Sprint, Richard was a technical instructor at Sprint’s University of Excellence. He moved into sales in 1999 with Fore Systems (acquired by London-based Marconi Communications) and subsequently held senior sales roles with Cisco Systems, Fortinet, A10 Networks, VMware, and Sacramento-based start-up Gluware.

Richard has a history of establishing and driving new business relationships and alliance partnerships with major mobile and wireline carriers, managed services and cloud providers, large enterprise customers, channel partners, and technology OEMs. In addition to a very successful sales career, Richard has years of experience developing strategic partnerships and go-to-market alliance relationships between multiple partners having similar market and business objectives. In his current role with TGS, he’s recently established strategic partnerships with the Kansas City Chiefs and Sporting KC.

Richard is a native of Kansas City and a U.S. Army veteran. He’s married with four children, all of whom are huge KC Chiefs fans. Richard and his family are active in the KC community as long-time volunteers of Operation Breakthrough, Harvesters, Habitat for Humanity, Supporting Kids Foundation, and many others.

Richard Long

Senior VP of Sales and Business Development

Don Newsom

Don Newsom has 25 years of management experience, and over 18 years in various IT roles with emphasis in ITIL functions supporting change, incident, and problem management. During his time at TGS, he has also served as the Director of Account Management and VP of Managed Services.

Don is a graduate of Baker University’s School of Professional & Graduate Studies. He has participated in three different leadership programs and is a student of strategic leadership and occupational psychology. From 2015 to 2016, Don served as the Chairman of the Sprint Next Leaders Program after participating in several roles in the program for the previous four years. He is also certified in Lean Six Sigma and has managed an Operational Excellence program that saved more than $15 million in revenue during a three-year span.

Born in Kansas City, Don is an avid Chiefs, Royals, and Sporting KC fan. His hobbies include sports, fitness, travel, and drinking beer. Don is currently an active supporter of the Multiple Sclerosis Mid America Chapter in Kansas City. He also currently serves on the board for Supporting Kids Foundation and on the Career Track Advisory Board for Centriq.

Don Newsom

VP of Operations

Bert Soto

Bert Soto brings 30 years of experience in the telecom, networking, and data center spaces to TGS. Since 2014, Bert has been leading sales and strategy at some of the most innovative companies in the SDN, NFV, and orchestration spaces—Gluware, 6WIND, and Ciena (Cyan). Before this, Bert led sales and strategy engagements for Cisco into one of the largest mobile service providers in the world. Prior to Cisco, Bert planned, designed, and deployed networks at AT&T before transitioning to the supplier side of the industry at Alcatel and Cerent (acquired by Cisco).

Bert Soto

Chief Diversity Officer and VP of Sales

Vivica Ballew

Vivica brings over 25 years of experience in both accounting and human resources to her role at TGS. Prior to joining the company, she managed the operations of a successful fire and water damage catastrophe company. Working in several diversified organizations has given her the skills necessary to succeed in today’s environment and staying current with the proper procedures in compensation benefits is her top priority, so that she can ensure a fair benefits package to each employee. The world houses so many different types of people, and Vivica enjoys not only meeting them, but working with them, too.

She enjoys gardening, family camping trips and working in the community with her women’s church group.

Vivica Ballew

VP of Human Resources

David Schooley

David has been in the accounting profession for over 30 years. A graduate of Pittsburg State University with a bachelor’s degree in accounting, he’s been a CPA since 1992. David has a background in several industries from public accounting, manufacturing, construction, land development, auditing, and pharmaceuticals.

David oversees the financial decisions by monitoring and enforcing policies and procedures. He’s also responsible for the company’s financial statements, accounting, sales tax, A/P, A/R, job costing, payroll, budget planning, tax compliances, and in-house audits.

David has been in the Kansas City metro area for the past 30 years. He’s married with two children, and they are enormous Sporting KC and Royals fans.

David Schooley

Controller

Uriah McHaffie

Uriah McHaffie has over 25 years in the IT industry in various technical and leadership roles. Prior to taking on the role of VP of Information Security, Uriah joined TGS as a Principal Security Solutions Architect. He held systems engineering positions at Arista Networks, Cisco, Dell SonicWALL, and others before TGS.

Certifications: CCIE #44666, CISSP, CMMC-Registered Practitioner, Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), MCSE, Arista ACE, Nokia and Checkpoint

Uriah McHaffie

Chief Information Security Officer

Robert Binckley

Robert’s professional career began in the banking industry in commercial loans, but he quickly broadened out into the IT Industry. Over the past 25 years he has managed a variety of IT Operations functions including Data Center Site Operations, Solution Architecture, Help Desk, Project & Program Management, Vendor & Contract Management, Executive Staff Operations, and Network Engineering. Prior to joining TGS, Robert was Director of Technology Assurance for a regional bank headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, leading Service Architecture and Automation; Incident, Problem, Service Request, Knowledge & Change Management; Managed File Transfer services; Business Continuity Planning; and IT Audit & Compliance.

Robert leads TGS’s Consulting and Service Delivery team, working to ensure that customers’ projects are delivered on time and on budget. In this role, collaboration is critical to understanding customers’ needs, intentions and desired outcomes. By beginning with the end in mind for each engagement, the Consulting & Service Delivery team helps ensure positive customer experiences.

Robert enjoys time spent with his family more than anything else. Over the years, his hobbies have included on-stage performances in plays and musicals, on-camera and voiceover work, modifying cars, drone videography, and video editing.

Robert Binckley

VP of Consulting & Service Delivery

Strategic Partners

  • CISCO
  • Dell Technologies Business Partner
  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise
  • VMware Solution Premier Provider

Complete List of Partners

  • A10 Affinity
  • Altigen
  • APC by Schneider Electric
  • Arctic Wolf
  • Arista
  • Armis
  • Aruba (HP Networking)
  • AWS
  • Azure
  • Brocade
  • Cambridge Systems
  • Cisco
  • Citrix
  • Cohesity
  • Crayon
  • Dell Technologies
  • Elastic Search
  • EMC
  • Ergotron
  • ESET
  • Extreme Networks
  • F5
  • Fortinet
  • Glue Networks
  • Hitachi
  • Hitachi
  • HP Inc.
  • HP Enterprise
  • IBM
  • Infinidat
  • Infoblox
  • Juniper
  • Kentik
  • KS Fiber Net
  • Lenovo
  • LightEdge
  • Meraki (Cisco)
  • Microsoft
  • Motorola
  • NetApp
  • NetDocuments
  • Nimble
  • nVidia
  • On Controls
  • Oracle
  • Palo Alto Networks
  • Panasonic
  • Polycom
  • Pulse Secure
  • Pure Storage
  • Qumulo
  • Red Hat
  • RingCentral
  • Riverbed
  • RSA
  • Rubrik
  • Ruckus
  • Silver Peak
  • Sophos
  • Spectra Logic
  • Symantec
  • Tintri
  • Toshiba
  • TrendMicro
  • Unite Private Networks
  • Varonis
  • VCE
  • Veeam
  • Verkada
  • Veritas
  • VMware
  • Western Digital
  • Zerto

Success Stories

Major Transportation Corporation

TGS worked with a large enterprise customer on a firewall conversion project, from Palo Alto Networks Firewall to a Cisco Firepower NGFW. We converted the firewall rules, removed unused policies, and implemented new policies according to best practices, in order to better secure and optimize their infrastructure. Previously, our customer struggled for many months to come up with an acceptable migration and conversion strategy at a reasonably affordable price. They found their efforts leading to cost-prohibitive consulting engagements or unreliable and inefficient OEM tools. Our security engineering team purpose-built a migration solution and completed the project in less than 60 days.

Engineering, Procurement, Consulting, and Construction Company

What started originally as a project to accelerate the deployment of next-generation technology led into a health check and consulting services for the sunsetting of a long-term outsourcing data center agreement, and finally the data center migration from Oklahoma to Illinois. We installed, configured, and deployed the new HW newly hosted DC in Illinois and migrated hundreds of mission-critical and business-critical workloads from Oklahoma DC to Illinois DC. TGS performs quarterly health checks to assure the health and safety of the environment, and that ongoing peak performance is achieved.

Major Sporting Franchise

TGS led a DC redesign and overhauled digital capabilities as well as helped our client migrate from legacy-tiered to hyper-converged infrastructure using VMware VSAN.

Major US Wireless Carrier

TGS specialized its retail store system integration, kitting, delivery, and implementation. We provided the delivery and installation of printers, phones systems, access points, point of sale terminals, wireless LAN controller, and routers.

All products were delivered to the TGS system integration facility, configured, asset tagged, recorded, and fully integrated. Each store then received the technology in a single package with full installation instructions for easy, on-site deployment.

Not-for-Profit Research Center

TGS upgraded the data center storage and refreshed overall technology capabilities.

Commercial Real Estate Management Company

We engineered, deployed, and managed wired, wireless, voice, and E911 networks—as well as providing surveillance and security measures and implementing data center protocols.

Awards


List of Our Awards

Ingram's
100 Fastest Growing Area Business
Year(s) Received: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

250 The Most Powerful Business Leaders
Year(s) Received: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021

Corporate Report 100
Year(s) Received: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021

Top 25 Woman-Owned Business
Year(s) Received: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021

Top Minority Owned Business
Year(s) Received: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022

WeKC at 25
Year(s) 2017

Kansas City Chamber
Top Small Business
Year(s) Received: 2015, 2016, 2017

KCBJ

Top Area Black-Owned Business
Year(s) Received: 2022

Fastest Growing Area Business
Year(s) Received: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019

Top Area Minority-Owned Business
Year(s) Received: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022

Top Area Women-Owned Businesses
Year(s) Received: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021

Women Presidents’ Organization
50 Fastest-Growing Women Owned/Led Companies Worldwide
Year(s) Received: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

Enterprising Women
Over $25 Million in Annual Revenues
Year(s) Received: 2017, 2018

"TGS embraces a true customer-centric philosophy that enables us to take on a trusted advisor role to provide an all-encompassing solution to achieve the business objectives set forth by our customers. Rather than performing one-off tactical projects and piecing them together, we take a strategic approach. Together with our customers, TGS will critically analyze the customers' business objectives and potential obstacles, and formulate valid designs and implementation plans that meet their needs today and well into the future."

Lenora Payne, CEO