The people who had already employed Mike Leonidas became customers when he opened his own company. In 2002, he founded NIC and retained his former employers as clients. It is a small detail with a large consequence. His first business relationships carried a history of work into a new arrangement. Before there was a founder’s pitch to consider, there was a person whose work they knew.
Many founding stories begin with a discovery. This one begins with a continuation. Leonidas had experience inside other organizations; NIC gave him a business of his own through which to serve them. The interesting change was in the contract. Someone who had worked within a company could now be hired by it. An old professional relationship became the starting point for a new enterprise.
There is something pleasantly unsentimental about that beginning. An employer becoming a customer does not need a lecture about the founder’s potential. It can make a decision based on experience. For an IT service business, that is a useful inheritance: people who know what happens when they ask for help. The company still has to deliver after the relationship changes.
The customers came with him
Leonidas, who also uses the name Michael professionally, trained in information technology at the Computer Education Institute in Woodland Hills, California. His work has included Windows servers, networks, storage systems and enterprise hardware. These are the parts of a business that make themselves especially noticeable when something stops working. Their usual contribution is allowing everyone else to get on with the job.
His technical background helps explain the range of responsibilities he later took on at NIC. Strategic decisions sit alongside the onboarding of major accounts, planning complex projects and advising clients. A founder in that position moves between two kinds of conversation: what a system can do, and what the organization needs it to do. Translating between them is part of the work.
The client becoming a client again is the recurring event here. Each engagement asks an existing relationship to accommodate a new requirement. A business might need different infrastructure, more capacity or a different way of working. The service provider must understand both the equipment and the accumulated expectations around it. Familiarity can help; it also gives the customer a clear basis for judging the next job.
A working day is the unit of measurement
A client account published under Carolwood Estates describes a relationship with Leonidas and NIC that began in 2009 and continued across companies the writer founded or joined. It recalls the completion of three offices, with another forthcoming, and work ranging from planning and purchasing to equipment and software. The account’s subject is a business ready to operate when it needs to.
That is an unusually practical description of loyalty. The relationship follows a person’s changing professional circumstances. NIC has to remain useful through new projects, rather than merely familiar from an old one. The testimonial praises deadlines and execution. Those may sound like modest virtues until an office has a date on which it must open. A deadline has very little interest in your intentions.
Daniele Beasley, president of Cove Street Capital, describes another kind of continuity: working with NIC from an early on-site technician arrangement through the move to a cloud-based environment. The means of delivering the service changed while the relationship continued. Her account emphasizes confidence in the company’s leadership and its execution. Technology evolves; the customer still needs someone to take responsibility for making it useful.
These are customers’ accounts, and their emphasis is revealing. They describe working arrangements and completed jobs. The computer matters because a business needs to do something with it. A founder may talk about strategy in the meeting room, but a client eventually encounters the result in a working day. The distance between those two places is where a service company earns its next engagement.
Three questions before the cloud
Leonidas’s published cloud-security advice offers a compact view of his professional priorities. He identifies detection technology, ease of management, and service and support as three considerations in selecting a platform. Taken together, they give the decision a life beyond the purchase. The system has to recognize threats, remain manageable and have people available to help when its complexity produces a problem.
On detection, he points to capabilities such as examining encrypted traffic, handling unfamiliar threats and keeping false positives low. On management, he emphasizes central control and reporting. Support supplies the continuing assistance needed when security and legitimate applications interact badly. His checklist moves from capability to operation to the human help that keeps the arrangement workable.
“The ability manage the solution from a single pane of glass is essential.”
Michael Leonidas, on cloud security
The phrasing is technical. The concern is easy to recognize. A business needs to see what is going on without turning the task into a tour of disconnected controls. Reporting helps people assess effectiveness and make adjustments. Support matters because software sits inside a working organization, where a blocked action can be someone’s unfinished task. A convincing demonstration is only the opening act.
His public writing has addressed everyday business technology as well as security. In 2016, his LinkedIn article list included cloud computing, internet speeds, phone systems and relocating IT infrastructure. That last topic has a particular charm. The office move, with all its very physical inconveniences, belongs comfortably beside discussions of the cloud. A business can change its address without wanting an adventure in connectivity.
That same February, Leonidas spoke about cybersecurity awareness as NIC launched a redesigned website. He argued that businesses needed to understand protection, rather than treating security as a fashionable discussion. The website was intended to make information easier to find. It was an early public expression of a concern that also runs through his writing: business leaders need usable explanations of technical decisions.
Utah, with the existing promises attached
On July 11, 2024, NIC announced the acquisition of Applied Integration, an IT service provider in Salt Lake City. The purchase marked its entry into Utah and added a local team. For Leonidas’s company, the geographical story had widened beyond its Los Angeles beginnings. The acquisition also brought existing customers with expectations formed before NIC entered the picture.
NIC’s announcement said those customers would retain their pricing and existing service plans while gaining access to broader resources. That detail deserves room beside the expansion news. It describes growth through the customer’s experience: a change in the provider’s organization accompanied by continuity in an established arrangement. The company was adding a market and making a promise about how the transition would feel.
Existing service plans.
NIC’s acquisition announcement put continuity alongside expanded resources.
Acquisitions have two clocks. The announcement happens on a date. The practical transition takes place across the work that follows. Existing clients still have ordinary questions about service, projects and support. Their schedules continue while organizations combine. In this chapter of NIC’s story, the commitment to keep established arrangements makes the business decision legible to the people who depend on it.
The challenge resembles the one at the beginning of Leonidas’s career as a founder. A relationship continues through a change in structure. In 2002, former employers hired his new company. In Utah, an acquired provider’s clients encountered a larger organization. The situations differ, but both ask the business to make continuity real through subsequent work. A new name on an arrangement must earn its place there.
A coach still has to show up
Outside work, Leonidas’s published biographies mention golf, travel and snowboarding. His industry speaker biography also describes coaching his children’s basketball teams. It is a welcome detail in a career concerned with infrastructure and security. The founder has another setting in which a group of people needs attention, explanation and a plan. The court supplies its own fairly direct feedback.
There is no need to turn a family interest into a management doctrine. Coaching children is interesting enough on its own. It gives the profile a scale smaller than an acquisition or an enterprise network: a parent spending time with his children and their teammates. Business biographies often hurry past that sort of activity. It is part of a life, even when it has no quarterly metric.
His current public work includes a NAWLA on-demand webinar on cybersecurity in manufacturing and distribution, alongside Helen Leonidas and technical operations manager Kalem Ison. Its focus is the lumber and building materials industry. That setting keeps the technology discussion close to operations: production, shipments and customer relationships. It is another example of bringing the technical conversation into a particular business context.
Across these chapters, the question grows more specific. Which organization needs help? What must keep working? What changes when the company expands? Leonidas’s career begins with people who had already chosen to work with him and continues through clients choosing the business again. There is a satisfying rhythm to that story. The technology keeps moving. The next engagement still has to be earned.