St. Louis County Firm is Building Ultra-Secure Data Facility
Date Posted: July 29, 2021
Posted In: News, Projects,
From St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Mike Steinmann doesn’t even have a contract with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, but the agency’s commitment to St. Louis helped convince him to make a $10 million investment.
Steinmann, 38, is chief executive of HITS, a data management company that just announced it is building a new facility in Hazelwood. It will be the only private facility in the region that meets National Archives & Records Administration standards for storing records.
HITS is spending the extra money to meet those standards because it sees the federal government as a big potential customer. After all, Steinmann said, government agencies lag behind the private sector in the transition from paper to electronic records, a process in which HITS specializes.
Still, the project is a big bet for a 50-employee company with annual revenue of less than $5 million. Only after NGA committed to build a $2 billion western headquarters north of downtown did HITS decide the risk was worth taking.
“It’s ‘Field-of-Dreams’-ish — build it and hope the business will come,” Steinmann said. “If the NGA weren’t going to build here, would we be able to do this? I think the answer is no.”
The super-secure facility, scheduled to open next May, is the latest step in the evolution of HITS, which started 27 years ago as a microfilm company. By the time Steinmann joined in 2001 as a student working his way through St. Louis Community College and then Lindenwood University, its main business was scanning paper documents.
Steinmann’s first job was removing staples and paper clips to prepare documents for scanning. He was promoted to warehouse manager and then moved into sales, where he led a push into the health care industry at a time when hospitals were being required to adopt electronic records systems.