On the wall of Kip Lynch’s office is a handwritten note that reminds him of his goal: Help someone today.
The simple phrase has directed Lynch his entire career, from when he started as a research scientist developing tests for the AIDS virus to today, as president of the IT firm CMIT Solutions in Doylestown.
“It all goes back to this little note I have here,” Lynch said.
Lynch’s career in helping people began at Sloan-Kettering, the New York City cancer center. Lynch, who has a doctorate in immunology and microbiology from Ohio State University, spent two years there before joining DuPont as a research scientist working on tests for the AIDS virus. When the tests were completed, Lynch began marketing them to blood banks and other users.
“I really enjoyed that,” he said. “The more I got into (sales), the more I realized, this is my calling. It’s not being at the bench and developing things. It’s about going out there and telling people how (the products) can help.”
Lynch, who lives in Lambertville, N.J., spent more than two decades in the medical device and diagnostics field, helping companies like Johnson & Johnson
and Novartis market their products. But that came to an end in 2010, when he was laid off from his position as marketing director for a Central Jersey medical device firm.
Lynch spent the next year looking “for the next best job.” While he considered going back into the medical field, he ultimately decided to put the entrepreneurial skills he learned in sales — developing and growing new markets — into his own business.
CMIT Solutions, founded in Austin, Texas, in 1996 as a small computer support company, now has more than 135 locally owned offices nationwide.
The company specializes in providing technical support to small- and medium- size businesses that don’t have their own in-house IT people, or that have tasks their own techs can’t perform.
“We’re strictly focused on businesses,” said Lynch, who has four technicians and an office in Doylestown’s Grain House complex. “We don’t have a storefront, or a place somebody can walk in to get some help. But we’ll try to help anybody who comes to us.”
CMIT has two core products — a 24/7 monitoring service called Marathon and a data backup program called Guardian — but provides any type of technology service required, Lynch said, from email to video conferencing.
Last year, the company helped Renew Theaters with the installation of digital projectors at the County Theater in Doylestown.
“We realized in advance we needed to do this IT work, and we wanted to have this work done within the Doylestown community,” associate director Chris Collier said. “We reached out to a couple firms for proposal bids. We were really impressed with CMIT and with Kip’s proposal. CMIT helped sketch out the whole network diagram, provided us with firewall protection, and did a lot of cleanup in terms of organization and installation to make everything as smooth and easy as possible.”
