Looney and Associates: Providing a level of service others couldn’t

The Challenge: Jenna Higginbotham says don’t let the fact that interior design focuses on things like pillows and paint confuse you. Companies like hers, Looney and Associates, require real computing power. 

“People think about interior design as picking fabrics and colors and things like that, but really there's a hugely technical side to our business because we work with architects and engineers and mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, developers, contractors,” Higginbotham said. 

“We do produce construction drawings which require pretty hefty software. We were early adopters for our market, not for architecture in general but for interior design, of building information modeling software. … It requires heavy-lifting computers. Then we can render, which requires a lot of beefy rendering software. We have to think about how our technology can support those efforts while not breaking the bank.”

And that technology that supports Looney’s business needs a lot of support itself. To get that support, Looney had a longtime relationship with a managed services provider. But, after decades of working together, what started strong started to deteriorate after that partner struggled to keep up with Looney’s evolving needs. Tickets were going unanswered for days at a time. Employees were kept from doing work. And for a business that runs on deadlines, many were put at risk of being missed.

It got to the point that Higginbotham—a designer and member of the firm’s leadership team—was spending most of her time not doing client work but troubleshooting IT problems and trying to manage a vendor relationship that had gone south. 

She knew, despite the long history with the other provider, it was time for a change.

The Solution: Higginbotham employs roughly 50 people across three offices, its Dallas headquarters as well as locations in Chicago and Honolulu. IT issues could keep those employees from working for days at a time, something exacerbated even more if those employees weren’t in Dallas. 

Higginbotham knew her new IT provider needed to provide better efficiency, better time management, and more personalized attention. 

“For me, I needed them to feel like someone in our organization. I wanted people to have a face to a name. I wanted people to know who they're talking to, know they have someone they can go to, because that was one of the challenges with our previous provider. We were never talking to the same person. There was never someone onsite coming in and really being that presence, so we wanted to find someone that was willing to be. ... The company didn't have to be based locally, but I wanted someone local so there's a human that's helping us.”

Additionally, she needed a provider that was budget friendly. 

She found all of those things in Sagiss.

“I had a good gut feel after meeting Travis. I like that he's stepping into his family business. I was just like, ‘I like the way this feels. I can tell that he's a solid guy, a good person.’ That's how we operate our relationships. ‘Are these good people? Do we want to work with them?’ … We kept coming back to Sagiss and thinking this really feels more like us, and, frankly, they felt a lot like our current IT company. It just sounded like they actually did the work.”

The Result: Higginbotham says her team saw Sagiss’ impact right away.

“They've been attentive, they've been thoughtful, which is huge,” she said. “They have helped the people who've been stuck for a long time with different problems. I think one of the things that I really appreciated them doing was coming in person and meeting with our team. That way, our people could see them.”

And for Higginbotham, having Sagiss onboard has allowed her to focus on bringing more value to the company and her team. 

“One of my executive roles is to be project managing the project managers or helping manage the project managers. I really wasn't able to get into that [before]. With Sagiss coming on board, I've been really able to focus more on that, more on the business of the business, keeping our project managers going, educated, informed, meeting with them regularly, having the time to meet with them regularly and do the few projects that I am on. That's been huge.”