It was a pleasant surprise for Team Support Services to find out it had been anonymously nominated as one of Michigan’s 50 Companies to Watch and even better to learn it had been selected for the award.
Coming on the heels of its 2011 Catalyst Award for its work as a job creator and recent recognition for its giving to the United Way, Team Support Services is going to have to stop calling itself one of Kalamazoo’s best kept secrets.
The nearly 12-year-old records and information management company of 120 employees is coming off a solid year of growth that translated to 20 people being added to its staff between the last quarter of 2011 and the end of the first quarter of 2012.
As the state’s economic downturn left many talented workers without jobs, Team Support Services has been able to hire some of them in key positions as it continues to build its highly qualified staff, says Charles Fierke, one of three members of the company’s executive staff.
He attributes the growth the company’s core values: philanthropy, ongoing education of staff, and working with customers in setting policy that helps them work with their documents efficiently and to use their records to obtain information that helps them with business decisions.
Team Support Services has created a niche for itself working primarily with companies that are required to meet certain regulatory standards with regard to their record keeping, such as life sciences businesses, health care providers and governmental agencies.
Scanning, coding and indexing records are a few of the services the company offers. They work with both paper and electronic records.
Fierke says that beyond the storage of records, the company offers ways to help companies understand the information their records contain. Team Support Services also helps companies that are merging as they try to make sense of what records are needed and how two different record keeping systems can be combined.
While the company's focus is local, many of its customers have locations across the country. A growth area for the company has been its mobile records division that sends a team to wherever records are being kept to provide consultation as companies develop policies regarding how best to keep their records. Fierke says helping companies implement such policies is another service that sets Team Support Services apart from other document storage providers.
Often, the company has been able to discern services like those of the mobile records division that its customers needed before the customers became aware of them, another factor that has kept the company growing.
"We have our roots in the community," Fierke says, "and we're dedicated and motivated to keep jobs here."
Writer: Kathy Jennings, Second Wave
Source: Charles Fierke, Team Support Services
Enjoy this story?
Sign up for free solutions-based reporting in your inbox each week.