Different perspectives will interpret 25 years in different ways. To a young person, it may be a lifetime. To an older person, 25 years ago may feel like yesterday. In geological time it is but a blink of an eye. In terms of technology evolution, 25 years can seem like a very long time.

Here is one perspective: When Handel was incorporated in the summer of 1997, less than 2% of the world’s population was on the Internet. File sharing still happened via floppy disks. CD ROMs were just becoming mainstream. Google did not yet exist. Facebook and other social media companies were still years away. Fax machines were still in regular use for sharing documents. Digital cameras were very much in their infancy. Digital music meant you were playing a CD. Video and audio streaming was but a distant dream. I could go on and on about technologies we take for granted today that did not exist in 1997.

Handel started out as a general database consultant. You had a database need; we built a solution. One of our first solutions was a unified county management system used by Wyoming counties to manage a variety of services from property assessments and property taxes to vehicle titles, vehicle registrations, marriage certificates and much more. Naivety is a common commodity in young people and something we had in abundance back then. In fact, I firmly believe if we knew then what we know now, there would not have been a Handel. Nobody in their right mind would have attempted some of the projects we took on with the very limited resources we had in those early days. Imagine a three-person company building an entire county government solution in Microsoft Access! That was Handel circa 1997. Failure was not an option. An agreement was an agreement. It may have almost killed us, but we soldiered on and delivered. Another common trait in entrepreneurs is the inability to assess their own value. They tend to underestimate how to price their products and services. Handel was no exception to this. County governments today spend millions of dollars on solutions similar to what Handel valued in the low five figures in the late 1990s. Somehow, we survived and what didn’t kill us made us stronger.

One of the custom projects we did in those early days was a case management system for a Juvenile Assessment Center in Colorado. What was supposed to be a one-off solution led to a stream of phone calls from other Colorado counties with similar programs. A key aspect of these programs was the need for rapid intervention. The sooner you intervene, the better the outcome for the youth. After selling this custom database to a few more counties we decided to give it a name: RiteTrack. RITE was short for Rapid Intervention TEchnology. One day we received a call from Miami-Dade County and that was a pivotal moment for us. Why would one of the biggest counties in the country call a three-person database shop in Laramie, Wyoming for a software solution? After that day, we figured we had something. We pivoted from being a custom database shop to selling RiteTrack – a case management solution for juvenile justice.

Finding our footing there in the early 2000s, we have made it our focus and the result speaks for itself. We have customers today that go all the way back to the very early days. Some customers have been with us for over 20 years of our 25-year journey.

Over the years RiteTrack has evolved both as a platform and as a solution. What started out as a desktop solution for juvenile diversion programs has evolved through many generations to a world-class web-based solution serving several different human services programs for counties, tribes, and states. What has not changed at Handel in these 25 years is our deep commitment to our customers and our “failure is not an option” attitude. In 25 years we have not had a single project fail due to something we did. In an industry where an estimated 50% of all IT projects never work or live up to their promise, that is a statistic we are very proud of.

The other thing that has not changed is that we have not sold the company to an investment firm. Handel is still employee-owned. We do not have investors who put revenue growth and profits before the interest of customers and employees. Our values and beliefs are the same today as they were back in 1997. We are thrilled to celebrate this milestone of reaching 25 years in 2022. According to the Small Business Administration, less than 10% of the companies founded in 1997 still exist today. We are excited as we embark on the next 25 years of our journey and look forward to where it will take us. We are very thankful for the customers who helped define the first 25 years of our journey and who will travel into the future with us. We are equally excited for the customers who will join us in the coming years and who will reap the benefits of all the experience we have gained.

For the customers, employees, vendors, board members, and other stakeholders who have been with us on this journey, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. It could not and would not have happened without everyone!