The Tabor Consulting Group was founded in late 1989. I was thirteen years old and was paid $10 to fix a friend’s mother’s computer, it needed to be rebooted. It’s been a long a strange journey ever since.
The organization’s first official hardware was an Apple IIc and an IBM PS1 Desktop. We (I) quickly discovered that you could take them apart and put them back together… and they would still work. I started work full time in IT during my late teens. A local computer shop took pity on me, hired me, and I went to work in the “real world” of computer repair, adding ram, upgrading printers, and installing DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1. (Thanks Terry!)
I was tapped in 1994 to work on something called “the internet”, together Mike, Daniel, Andy, and I went to work building the first Dial-up provider in the Middle Tennessee area. We dubbed our creation “CrISP”, Crossville Internet Service Provider (Thanks for the name Robin). Back then we could not even get ISDN lines for our Out-route, so we wound up using a two-way Satellite link from Hughes, 512K Down and 128k Up! It served a bank of 16 Modems running at 28.8Kbps (later 33.6Kbps). Still to this day, late at night, I can still hear the ghostly call of those modems.
After we did the Web 1.0 thing and sold our ISP up the chain, I was picked up by the travel industry to inside IT management. I spent the next few years working for a couple of large nationwide travel agencies doing IT management. After 9/11 and the travel industry tanked, I became a consultant to several high profile travel company’s such as Lufthansa, Royal Caribbean, Sabre, and Amadeus.
Somewhere along the way I got married and my wife and I had a little girl, and we she was old enough to start school, my family moved back to Tennessee where it all started.
..and this is where the Tabor Consulting Group has its proper start…
My last consulting gig left me with a fair amount of capital, and with the low-low cost of living in Crossville Tennessee, I figured I could just be “semi-retired” for a while. However, after three weeks I came to the realization that it was 11:00am on a Tuesday, and I was still in my bath robe, watching Day-time TV. This had to stop. So I got me some office space, a desk, a laptop, a phone, and I hit the pavement looking for some consulting love. I figured the demand for Travel Industry IT managers was pretty low in Tennessee, and after putting up with various bosses “BS” for the first 30 years of my life, it was time to make my own “BS”. I did business under the name “McKinley H. Tabor, Procurer of Information” because titles are meaningless anyway.
As time passed, business grew. “I” became “we”, and “Procurer of Information” became “Tabor Consulting Group”. I found out that while a one man show is fun, a real comedy act takes two or more to do.
TCG stared out, and still is today, an “Out sourced IT Firm”. We fill a niche in that we provide full scale IT management to companies that are large enough to need an IT manager, but not large enough to afford one full time.
We found success in expanding our services to include other “out-source” jobs such as bookkeeping, accounting, graphic design, and large volume printing. Our goal is to free up time for a small to medium size business owner so that he or she can focus on doing what makes them money.
Today TCG is a vibrant and dynamic organization proving jobs for many people in the Middle Tennessee Area. We service clients from all over the South Eastern United States. Our people come from a wide and diverse background, allowing us to bring to bear both skill and excellence in searching for a solution to our clients problems.
When you do business with us here is what you can expect:
We live or die by the sharpness of our minds and the keenness of our wits.
We carry forward with our internal mantra “Get it done and move on”, because there is nothing worse than an unfinished project.
We work for the love of the project, not the love of the paycheck.
We tell it like it is, good or bad.
We don’t “bid low” just to get a job, when we do it, we do it right.
We don’t waste money on Proprietry Software and Hardware if there is Free or Open Source software available.
Each of us here has a genuine love of technology, creativity, and organization.
We are a group of philosopher kings.
We believe in idealism.
We are consummate professionals, but we are not corporate, and we never-ever-ever take ourselves too seriously.
No matter what we do, it’s pointless unless our clients understand what we’re doing. After all, do you really need another arrogant computer geek telling you what to do, in a language you can’t understand?