Our Story
We didn’t start this company to fix computers. We started it to fix a broken industry.
20+ years, several hard lessons, and one conviction that never changed: your IT provider should act in YOUR best interest, every time, even when you’d never know the difference
The Accidental Beginning
Matthew Harvey never planned to own an IT company. He was the IT guy inside a growing business, buried in overtime and sleepless nights, putting out the same fires week after week. Instead of accepting that as normal, he started asking a different question: what would make these problems stop coming back?
He found root causes. He automated the repetitive work. He chose solutions that eliminated entire categories of issues instead of patching symptoms. Over time, a job that consumed his life quieted down to a fraction of the hours. The problems weren’t being handled faster. They were disappearing.
Then he went to work for an IT provider, expecting to bring that approach to more businesses. What he found instead felt like working for a dishonest car mechanic. Clients didn’t know enough about technology to know when they were being taken advantage of, and the company knew it.
Matt realized he couldn’t fix that problem working for someone else. In 2006, he founded Stepping Forward Technology on a simple promise: do what’s right for the client, especially when they’d never know the difference.
The Lesson: Prevention beats reaction, and ethics beat everything.
Most IT problems don’t need to be solved faster. They need to stop happening. And the only provider who can deliver that is one whose interests are genuinely aligned with yours.
The Hardest Lesson
The early years were exciting. The company grew, clients were happy, and Matt hired people he trusted to build it with him.
Then came the moment that nearly ended everything. A trusted team member, someone Matt considered a close friend, quietly started a competing business and left with a significant portion of the client base. Another employee, watching it unfold, left too, convinced the company wouldn’t survive.
He wasn’t wrong to wonder. Matt was left nearly alone, with contractual obligations to clients and a knowledge gap that had just walked out the door. What followed was a year of seventeen-hour days.
Matt could have spent that year blaming someone else. Instead, he came to a harder conclusion: a better leader would have seen it coming. He had built jobs around people instead of building a company around principles. That was on him.
The Lesson: When things go wrong, look inward first.
Ownership is part of culture. To this day, when something goes wrong at Stepping Forward, the first question is never “whose fault is this?” It’s “what do we need to change so this can’t happen again?”.
Rebuilding on Honesty
Here’s the part of the story we’re most proud of, and it’s not a victory.
With the company struggling, Matt sat down with clients and told them the truth: this is not the company I set out to build. I’m going to learn, grow, and fix it. I’m asking for your patience.
He didn’t spin it. He didn’t hide it. And something remarkable happened: most of those clients stayed. Many of them are still clients today, nearly two decades later.
Meanwhile, Matt went to work on the real problem: himself. He devoured more than a hundred books on leadership, culture, finance, and building businesses that run on process instead of heroics. He joined a national community of top-performing IT providers to benchmark against the best in the industry, a peer group he now leads.
The Lesson: Trust isn't built by being perfect. It's built by being honest when you're not.
That’s still how we operate. If a backup fails, you hear it from us. If a cheaper option would serve you just as well, we tell you. Transparency isn’t a marketing word here. It’s the reason our oldest clients are still our clients.
Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast
By 2020, Stepping Forward had frameworks, processes, and steady growth. Then the pandemic sent everyone home, and something became impossible to ignore: parts of the team didn’t share the values the company was founded on.
Matt made the hardest calls of his career, starting at the top of his own org chart. And in place of who left, he rebuilt the team around three non-negotiable traits: hungry, humble, and smart. People who take pride in their work. People who own their mistakes and learn from them. People who genuinely care how their work affects others.
>Nearly the entire team turned over. What emerged was rare in this industry: a team where every person actually wants to be here, actually cares about your outcome, and actually acts like an owner.
The results followed. The company nearly tripled in size over the next three years. Clients stopped seeing us as a vendor and started treating us as a strategic partner.
The Lesson: You can't process your way around the wrong people.
Every tool, framework, and system we run is operated by people hired for character and values first. Tech can be taught. Character is learned through good mentors and life experiance. That’s why the person answering your call sounds like they care. They do.
Built to Outlast Any One Person
The final chapter, so far, came from an unexpected teacher: growth itself.
By 2025, Matt was still the person solving every hard problem, and the company had outgrown that model. When his daughter was born and he stepped back to be with his family, the cracks showed. Service quality dipped. Direction blurred. The company was still too dependent on one person.
So Matt built what most companies our size never do: a real leadership team, with defined roles, clear accountability, and a weekly operating rhythm for solving problems before clients ever feel them. Today the company runs on a proven operating system, not on any single individual, including the founder.
(And yes, three of the leaders are named Matt. We’ve heard all the jokes. We hired for hungry, humble, and smart. The name was a coincidence.)
The Lesson: A company you can depend on can't depend on one person.
Your business deserves a partner with documented processes, named accountability, and leadership depth; not a provider that falls apart when one key person is out. We built that depth over 20+ years of intentional design.
What This Story Means for You
Every lesson above was expensive. We paid for them in sleepless nights, lost clients, and hard rebuilds, so that the company serving you today would be:
Proactive by design
We staff more people preventing problems than reacting to them, because the founder lived what reactive IT costs.
Honest to a fault
Verified backups, tested failovers, documentation you own, and a clean exit if you ever want one. We consider exit-readiness a feature of a trustworthy provider, not a threat.
Built on the right people
Hungry, humble, smart. Hired for character, developed relentlessly.
Led by strategy and intention
Founder-led business reviews, a real technology roadmap, and advice measured by your outcomes, not our project sales
We started this company because businesses deserve an IT partner that acts in THEIR best interest. Twenty years later, that’s still the whole story. Learn more about our company values on our About Page.
Matt Harvey’s Real Why
Great leadership is rare. When great leaders exist, people benefit, problems get solved, and the world improves. Growing Stepping Forward is not about revenue. It is about expanding the impact I can have on my staff, my clients, and our community.
Key Books that influenced me most
- The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber (working on vs. in the business)
- The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni (hungry, humble, smart)
- EOS / Traction (visionary, integrator, rocks, accountability)
