How Troy Ventures created an IT behemoth

Jack Berberian and Drew Laroche were waiting for the right time.
Ten years ago, the two entrepreneurs founded Troy Ventures, a holding company from which they would launch various startups. Back then, the focus was on incorporations and trademarks — until they started dabbling in health IT services.
In 2009, when the federal government announced incentives of up to $44,000 for hospitals and providers for switching to electronic health records, Berberian and Laroche saw a golden opportunity in diving deeper into health IT. Thus was born SecureNetMD, a full-fledged IT service for healthcare providers and the cornerstone niche for Troy Ventures.
“That really became the mechanism for almost everything that you see today in our company,” said Berberian. “From there spawned our consulting services, our voiceover IP services married with data analytics services, post-implementation support, IT security, server builds, IT staffing for medical institutions — we really niched ourselves in that space.”
You get the idea. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Troy Ventures also provides web design services for businesses and device repair services for consumers.
Now, the Lewes-based company has additional offices in Dover, Monrovia, Calif., and Hatfield, Pa., where it just acquired an infrastructure cabling and access control company. They have 35 full-time employees and a militia of part-timers and contractors.
But what Berberian and Laroche really pride themselves on is their data analytics services. By owning everything from the phone lines to the hardware and software, the range of data their companies can collect and report on is varied and thorough, to say the least.
“We can tell how many calls come in, how many were made outbound, how long patients are on hold, how many calls are transferred out,” said Berberian. “From a marketing standpoint we’ll provide vanity numbers to track the incoming call volume from billboards and advertisements.”
Berberian attributes the success of SecureNetMD to the creation of Troy Ventures’ subsequent 800-pound gorilla: DelmarvaVOIP. Essentially, Berberian and Laroche took the same platforms they were using to service hospitals and applied them to businesses.
“We had a lot of business leaders in the community who had either a friend or knew somebody in the hospitals and knew what we were doing with cost savings and data analytics,” he said. “We were actually approached by businesses to see if we could apply [those services] to their businesses.”
So they did.
According to Berberian, many of the companies people might call on a day-to-day basis that advertise on TV or radio are using their system. “The consumer would never know it,” he said.
For the past year, Troy Ventures has been working on coupling its existing services in a package designed specifically for startups, including incorporation and registration services, called LLC Startup. They’re looking to roll out that company in the second quarter of next year.