Custom Tailored

While on maternity leave in 2001, Lora Stevenson received a 3 a.m. phone call that would change her life. The owner of a custom yacht manufacturing business in Kentucky had a problem—the company's IT director had suddenly died, and no one knew his passwords. A mutual friend suggested Stevenson, who promptly helped get the factory up and running. (Ultimately, Stevenson would reconfigure the company's entire network.)

That project led to another frantic phone call and another and another, and before Stevenson knew it, she had enough business to start a business.

"I was getting to the point where I wanted to get some sleep myself," she says, laughing. "I didn't have all the hours in a day to learn everything I needed to learn, and I saw an opportunity to do IT differently."

So, TLW, a custom information technology company, was born. Today, Stevenson, 35, has about 37 employees ("but ask me again on Monday") and more than 200 clients. The company is growing exponentially—she estimates that since last year, TLW has experienced 300% growth.

TLW works with a wide variety of clients around the country, many of whom are in the insurance, financial, legal and health care industries. And Stevenson's company does almost everything—IT maintenance, education and consulting—and if they don't, they'll find someone who does. The company's mission is to "provide professional and technical expertise that ensures companies receive the maximum value in planning and controlling their technology assets."

"We are very customized to the businesses that we serve," Stevenson says. "I've heard our engineers say that, 'We're the glue. We do things that nobody else will do.'"

Stevenson also prides herself on matching the appropriate staff with clients. TLW's biggest employee need is for people who have project management and customer relations experience. But Stevenson and her staff always keep an eye out for folks who have specific skills, such as MySQL, which are currently in demand, and may also have interesting, overlapping work experience—"maybe they worked in the music industry or they love golf." "That's where the excitement is for us," Stevenson says. "We want to take someone who has great tech skills and is passionate about a business driver and connect him with a business that feels as strongly about its market."

And as a female business owner in the tech sector, Stevenson says she'd like to see more women in her field. She also believes that Nashville is the place to be right now, not only because there are "exciting things happening in music and art every day," but also because of its status as the epicenter of the health care industry and the business opportunities that status represents.

"As I did research on forming a business, I realized that this really is the health care capital of the world. With HIPAA and the move toward electronic medical records, what a place to be," says the Kentucky native who moved to Nashville from Wisconsin in 2000. "It's just perfect."