ESCANABA — Under a red awning at 712 Ludington Street in Escanaba is a business that has been providing phone services to business customers in the Upper Peninsula and northeast Wisconsin for decades. Thanks to a recent merger, however, the operation that has been operating under the name “Solutions Telecommunications” has been absorbed by Guide Star, which began as a division of CCI Systems from Iron Mountain and has been growing to incorporate telecommunications and other companies with related skillsets. This allows the business that had been Solutions (a name that is disappearing to be replaced by Guide Star) to now offer a broader range of services — cybersecurity and information technology (IT) — to its clientele.

Nick Sigan and Neil Clapp, who have been running Solutions since taking it over from founders Richard and Margaret Stichman, believe it made sense to join forces so that multiple parties — but especially customers — could benefit from the partnership of experts in various fields.

“In the old days of telephones, you provided a telephone and that was it ,” said Sigan. “Computers then came up… There was a fine line where computers began to provide some of the phone system communications as well. Phone people still knew the infrastructure more than the IT people did, but the IT people knew more about the network and the computers … so there was a kind of a melding together, so to speak.”

He compared the Guide Star merger to an alternative: If Solutions had wanted to begin offering IT services, they would have had to build a new department from the ground up — a daunting challenge with lots of overhead and difficult to do properly.

“And from our side, we gain access to a really robust, happy customer base to market those additional services into, but we also get the most experienced telephone solution providers in the U.P.,” said Guide Star Senior Vice President Evan Rice.

Rice said this is the second strategic merger Guide Star has made in the last eight months. The first was Teck Solutions, a managed service provider in Kingsford.

Sigan relayed that the team at Solutions had viewed it as a good sign when they heard Teck Solutions had partnered with Guide Star; they held the Kingsford company in high regard and respected their judgement.

“The funny thing is, we partnered with Teck Solutions because we needed IT people to work with, so for the last decade we worked side-by-side with them,” said Sigan. “And then it turns out they merged into Guide Star, and now we have.”

Rice said that while a good amount of work has been involved in the merger, the transition has been smooth because the business models blend well, the employees get along, and Guide Star is prepared to do the most for their customers.

Existing customers of Solutions had been notified once the merger was confirmed. More recently, Sigan and Rice said they have been making the rounds, sitting down with key customers to discuss the situation. Both reported receiving a warm welcome after explaining that all that would change for customers was the name on the bill and access to a wider array of services.

“It was really, really a good feeling to see how receptive they were to that,” said Sigan. “It turned out to be a win-win right across the board. So now we’re going to be able to handle our customers the way we did, and all of our customers are still going to get the same service, but at same time our product set is immensely expanded. And now we’re able to be a one-stop shop for all of the different components that we weren’t able to supply before.”

Rice said that the biggest concern presented by businesses that had been customers of Solutions was whether they would still be able to get in touch with the pair of small business owners they’d grown close with.

“Yes, you can still call Neil; he’s still around, still working on phone systems,” Rice chuckled. Clapp has joined Guide Star’s engineering team doing technical solutions, which Rice said provides him more time in a role he enjoys and excels at while other people handle the administrative side.

“We’re excited,” said Sigan. “We talked for years about trying to be able to offer this type of stuff to our customers; they keep asking for the IT expertise. And we just didn’t have an easy answer. We still wouldn’t have if we didn’t have the opportunity to merge with Guide Star.”

Rice said, “Finding IT resources that are good at what they do and can kind of be that one-stop shop is hard. So we’re just really excited to be able to expand that and bring that further into the markets up here.”