JONESBORO — After earning an electrical engineering degree from the University of Arkansas, Bob Shipman found that jobs in that field were scarce in Arkansas.
So he and wife Laura moved to Alabama. While they enjoyed the lifestyle, it wasn’t home.
They moved back here and created their own jobs.
After their beginning in a spare bedroom outside of town in 2004, the Shipmans’ company became Tech Friends Inc., the new owner of the former Coca-Cola plant at the corner of Highland Drive and Caraway Road. The company bought the building from Hays Clothing.
With about 50 employees now, Shipman said the building will allow the company to bring all the employees under one roof and put two other buildings on the market. The Highland Drive location will allow expansion to about 200 workers in the next few years.
“Those jobs will draw revenue from outside the state to fund exceptional salaries and benefits for high tech workers here in our area,” Shipman said. The company has grown by more than 30 percent per year since it started.
Shipman called the purchase a “risk reduction strategy.” The floor plan calls for maintaining the 70,000-square-feet of open space now used by Hays.
“We don’t really need the visibility of Highland,” Shipman said. “But we need to be able to move out of that building to a larger building in the future if needed.”
If the company outgrows it, the building can easily be converted back to retail use, Shipman said.
Haag-Brown Commercial Real Estate coordinated the sale of the property, looking for a site providing key technology infrastructure like fiber optic internet and electrical specifications for industrial 3D printers.
Tech Friends creates software and hardware solutions to make correctional facilities more efficient and require fewer taxpayer dollars to operate. Using local software developers, the company built an industry-leading accounting system used at more than 500 jails and prisons in more than 30 states.
“One of the issues that I saw in that particular industry was that you have a lot of different regional commissary companies, and none of them could devote the money that was needed to build a technology solution,” Shipman explained. That made it difficult for the smaller companies to compute with mega-firms. “That’s where I started this company, was to actually get a lot of the small players together and contribute to one technology pot.”
Shipman discovered he wasn’t alone in seeking to return to his roots.
“And I’ve got another guy that works with us, he’s got a Ph.D. in engineering,” Shipman said. “He had the same exact story. He moved off and worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (in Ohio) for years. But he wanted to move back home. I’ve got another guy that worked at IBM for years, and guess what? He wanted to move back home.”
Tech Friends owns multiple patents and seeks to multiply its team in key technologies such as video streaming, artificial intelligence and web development. The company wants to hire as many local residents as possible.
“We believe Northeast Arkansas produces people just as smart, as talented, and as motivated as anyone found in Silicon Valley,” Shipman said. “Tech Friends provides an opportunity for our best and brightest to stay right here in Jonesboro.”
By Keith Inman, Sun Staff Writer, inman@jonesborosun.com
