Who We Are

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bert Soto

Bert Soto is director of sales and 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).

Mike Parks

Mike Parks achieved the Cisco Certified Networking Expert Certification in 1997 (CCIE #2694) and has sustained active status by recertifying bi-annually since then. Over the last 25 years, he has architected, designed, implemented, and supported designs (some at global scale) while employed at Mobil Oil, NAIC, Sprint, Paranet, as an independent consultant, Sanofi-Aventis, Cisco Systems, for 2 years as the Director of Solutions Architecture at TGS, and now as VP of Solution Architecture and Service Delivery. Mike served as a systems engineer and consulting systems engineer at Cisco Systems for almost 13 years across service provider, public sector, healthcare, and mid to large accounts.

Mike’s philosophy to solutions architecture is to identify the business objectives and map technology to the best solutions to successfully meet and exceed those objectives.

Mike has been married for 25+ years and is active in the community as a foster parent. He is the coordinator of Financial Peace University and is often walking or biking on the great trails in the Kansas City area.

Heath Schwartz

Heath Schwartz has just started his 23rd year in the information technology industry. Heath spent the first 10 years of his career as a network and systems engineer, managing environments for large enterprises leveraging Novell, Microsoft, Cisco, Citrix, and eventually virtualization technologies. As Heath transitioned into a consulting role, he fulfilled full-time leadership roles for large organizations, acting in direct IT leadership capacities to provide direction, process, and operations, assisting these companies in embracing emerging technologies and aligning business goals with IT strategy.

With a background in engineering, business operations, service delivery and scheduling and, for the past 10 years, solution selling that has a focus on goals and outcomes of the business, Heath has been a proven leader with a focus on growing and expanding the TGS South territory.

Heath and his wife Katrina have a very active large family of seven children and one granddaughter. Some of their children are grown and have started their careers, while others attend university with one still in middle school. Between sports activities, theater, acting, improv, and the stress of the OU football season, Heath makes sure to enjoy every Sunday as a time to make family dinners a priority, bringing everyone together for a home-cooked meal.

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.

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.