Jeff Geisler and the company that began in the middle

When Jeff Geisler helped create Velosio, the new business arrived with something most newborn companies would find rather useful: thousands of customers. Announced in December 2017 and operating as one business in 2018, the combination of Socius and SBS Group brought together more than 300 employees and about 150 affiliates. Geisler, previously the CEO of Socius, became its founding chief executive. The interesting part was what he wanted that size to accomplish.

He spoke about serving businesses that resembled his own. Mid-market customers needed help choosing and deploying technology; their provider was itself navigating growth, changing products and the move to cloud computing. There was a certain symmetry to the proposition. Before advising a client on how to change, Velosio's leaders had agreed to change the shape of their own companies.

Geisler's public career offers a view of entrepreneurship conducted through combinations, consulting teams and long customer relationships. It has fewer theatrical props than the familiar garage story. The essential question is just as demanding: how do you make a business bigger while preserving the reasons people trusted it when it was smaller?

A company already in motion

Long before the Velosio name appeared, Geisler was building within the business software partner community. In 2011, he was interviewed as the owner of Socius, a firm growing through the recession by acquiring smaller businesses. That detail gives the later merger a useful backstory. Bringing companies together was already part of his working vocabulary.

Socius occupied a practical corner of technology. It helped organizations put business management software to work, across accounting, enterprise resource planning, customer relationships and analytics. The work sat close to the machinery of a customer's daily operations. A successful implementation had to make sense to the people responsible for using it after the consultants had gone.

Geisler's educational connection was to Miami University in Ohio. By 2015, while he was CEO, Socius was participating in a state-supported internship initiative involving Miami students. The firm hired one Miami intern the previous summer and three that summer. Its human resources manager, Colleen Dorr, described a repeatable program intended to bring new talent into consulting and fresh ideas into support departments.

Four interns are modest company in a story that eventually includes thousands of clients. They belong here because a consulting business grows one person at a time, even when its announcements count people by the hundred. A transaction can add capacity overnight. Developing the next consultant takes a little longer than signing the paperwork.

Growth with room for the neighbors

There was another route to size: help other firms remain useful to their own customers. Socius participated in Microsoft's Dynamics Master VAR program, introduced in 2011. Smaller partners could work through a larger organization and gain access to support and resources. By September 2016, Socius had accepted more than 25 affiliate organizations since the program's creation.

That month it welcomed Vancouver-based 2B Diverse Workplace Integration Solutions into its network. Affiliates continued selling to and serving their existing customers while Socius supplied business development, marketing, brand and readiness support. The arrangement offered a way to widen the firm's reach without treating every relationship as an acquisition waiting to happen.

The same year, Socius expanded its Aspire conference beyond Ohio, with events in Columbus, Charlotte and Atlanta. Attendees could choose introductory sessions or more advanced training in Dynamics GP and CRM. Geisler tied the expansion to the response from earlier events. It was a straightforward expression of a service business: put knowledgeable people in a room with customers who have questions.

Socius also refreshed its logo and website in 2016. Underneath the new look was an established range of deployment choices, including software on a client's premises, private hosting, Azure and hybrid arrangements. Customers could approach change from different starting points. In this business, the future still had to accommodate whatever the client was running on Monday.

Two firms, one set of responsibilities

The December 2017 combination gave these ideas a larger home. Socius brought its organization and experience; SBS Group brought its own team, customer relationships and partner network. Their executives described a single business operating with the resources of both. The Microsoft offering spanned Dynamics products, Office 365 and Azure, while relationships with other software vendors would continue.

The leadership arrangement placed Geisler at the head of the new organization. Jim Bowman, SBS Group's president and CEO, became chairman and chief revenue officer. Joe Longo, SBS Group's chief operating officer, became COO. It was a company with several experienced builders at the table, each arriving with a business history rather than a blank notebook.

Geisler's explanation of the opportunity included a revealing phrase: businesses that are no different than ours. He was talking about the customers Velosio intended to help. The comparison brought the company's own experience into the sales proposition. Growth, technology decisions and operational change were matters its leaders could discuss as participants.

Scale supplied the other half of the argument. Combining the firms gave customers access to a broader pool of expertise and brought their affiliate programs together. For Geisler, the attraction was the ability to expand faster than either firm could alone. The challenge implicit in that ambition was coordination: a bigger organization still had to deliver a coherent experience.

A first birthday with a long memory

Velosio celebrated its first anniversary in January 2019 with a pleasing chronological oddity: a one-year-old business drawing on more than 30 years of predecessor experience. The calendar had been reset; the accumulated work had not. It was an origin story particularly suited to a consulting company, where experience is part of what the customer buys.

During that first official year, Velosio launched Progressus, a cloud solution for professional services businesses. It reported growth of more than 100 percent in its dealer management solution business and expanded its agribusiness offering from horticulture into fresh food production. These were distinct operating problems and customer groups, gathered under the new name.

The anniversary also brought recognition, including Microsoft Inner Circle 2018/2019 and Bob Scott's 2018 VAR Stars. Geisler connected the firm's results to how it positioned itself to help clients. His comments kept returning to the relationship between the provider's success and the customer's ability to use the technology productively.

In 2019, Velosio was also named among the Best Employers in Ohio. Employee experience carried roughly three quarters of that assessment. Discussing the recognition, Geisler described client appreciation feeding employees' sense of value and their ability to serve clients. He compressed the idea into four words: This is an ecosystem.

“This is an ecosystem.”

Jeff Geisler, on employees and clients, 2019

Choosing the next partners

March 2019 brought a new financial partner. Harren Equity Partners completed a recapitalization of Velosio alongside its founders, Geisler, Bowman and Longo. The announcement said all three would remain in leadership and continue as the company's three largest individual shareholders. For that moment, ownership continuity and outside capital were being presented together.

Geisler's account of choosing Harren emphasized responsiveness, creativity and the way its team worked with the organization. These are unusually human criteria to place beside a financing transaction, but they fit the rest of his public comments. A business assembled from professional relationships has reason to consider how its next partner behaves before the documents are signed.

That summer, Velosio acquired Synergy Business Solutions, a West Coast Microsoft partner specializing in services businesses and project-based billing. The deal added more than 20 technical and delivery professionals. It also expanded Velosio's presence in the northwestern United States and deepened its work with customers whose revenue depends on managing projects.

Geisler described becoming a preferred acquirer of other Microsoft partners as an intention established when Velosio was formed. His explanation included professional development and training opportunities for the incoming employees. The arithmetic of the deal included both additional expertise for Velosio and a larger organization in which Synergy's people could work.

The company after its founding chapter

The story has continued beyond Geisler's founding tenure. In May 2024, Robbie Morrison became CEO, succeeding Bob Knott on his retirement. Morrison had helped lead SBS Group through the original combination. The succession connected a later chapter of the business to people who had participated in its beginning.

In 2025, Velosio opened a new Atlanta headquarters and held a grand opening in July. The company described operations across the United States, Canada and India. Co-founder Joe Longo and Morrison appeared together at the event, a photograph of a business carrying its origins into a different city and a later leadership era.

For Geisler, the distinctive achievement remains the founding combination itself. He helped bring two established organizations into a new company built to advise growing businesses on change. His recurring concerns were specific: customer outcomes, access to expertise, employees' opportunities and partners who could work together. The glamorous part, if there is one, is that such unglamorous concerns can add up to a company.

At Velosio's beginning, he reached for a comparison with the customer. Businesses like ours. It is a useful place to end a founding story, too: with a chief executive who presented the organization he was building as a fellow traveler in the work he was selling.