Erica Martinez-Rose feels your pain.
As someone who owns up to being “technologically challenged,” she understands how devices can sometimes send us into a rage.
So, when she and her husband Matt Rose started an IT support and services company, she decided to own it.
“We have some fun with it,” said Erica, who named the couple’s company “Tech Rage IT.” “We’ll ask, ‘Are you seeing red? Do you get raging headaches?’ People chuckle and they get it.”
Tech Rage IT might have a playful message but it’s serious business.
This summer, the company completed a three-month training program led by a group that has helped prepare companies like Starbucks and Nordstrom.
The program has pushed Tech Rage IT, a company named a Florida Company to Watch last year, into a new sphere.
That’s a far cry from where the company was about a decade ago, when it lost a client that had made up about 75 percent of its business, an ordeal Matt Rose called “a gift and a curse.”
How did they push through? They found Orlando’s tech community through UCF’s Business Incubation Program.
“You get complacent sometimes,” Martinez-Rose said. “We needed to start building those relationships (here) and that’s how we got connected to the incubator.”
Tech Rage IT grew out of an employee-tech support relationship in upstate New York.
Erica worked in the corporate world, constantly getting infuriated when the tech she had didn’t work; Matt “was the IT guy.”
They had no entrepreneurial experience.
But that didn’t stop them from creating Tech Rage IT about 15 years ago.
The company formally moved to Oviedo around 2010.
“The community has been really welcoming but it has been a lot of learning where to go, especially as a B2B business,” he said.
The couple started to really dive into the Orlando ecosystem in about 2017.
That’s about the time they connected with the incubator.
Since then, the incubator has helped them build relationships and have a de facto board of advisers on call when needed.
The push has been instrumental in Tech Rage IT becoming an outlier in a crowded IT services market.
“Our competitors have been in business for 30 years so we needed to stand out,” she said. “Someone telling us that from the outside was the biggest turning point.”
Ever since moving to Florida, Erica and Matt have had two boys.
They have built a business.
They continue to expand and seek opportunities to build it out further.
“We would have avoided the mistakes we made along the way had we had this resource sooner,” Erica said. “Mistakes happen, of course. But if you can avoid catastrophes at the start, it’s great. We owe our growth to them and would not be where we are without a hand up from them.”