It started at a mom-and-pop computer store.
Twenty years ago I was the tech behind the counter of a small family-run PC shop. The work was whatever came through the door that day: virus cleanups, dead power supplies, a hard drive making the click every technician learns to dread, with somebody’s entire photo collection trapped on it. Some days I built machines from parts. Other days I drove to a house because the internet was “down,” and the culprit turned out to be a cable the dog had chewed.
That counter taught me the thing I still believe about this business: nobody wakes up wanting IT help. People want their photos back and their workday un-ruined, and the technology is just what stands in the way. If I can’t explain what went wrong in plain English, the job isn’t finished.
In 2010, my name went over the door.
The first Walker Computers was a one-person consulting shop that grew into a small managed-services firm. At its peak I was responsible for more than 300 systems across Windows, Linux, and Mac, plus the email, phones, and backups that kept a few dozen small businesses running. I hosted the mail servers. I built the phone systems. I answered the late-night calls, because there was nobody else to forward them to.
Running your own shop is a particular kind of education. Every promise is yours to keep and every mistake is yours to fix, usually the same night. I’d recommend it to anyone in this field, once.
Then the enterprise years.
In 2015 I went to see how the big environments run. For the next few years I worked deep in infrastructure: keeping fleets of servers healthy in data centers, building the virtualization clusters whole companies ran on, moving an entire office onto Office 365 without losing a mailbox, and designing disaster-recovery replication for more than a hundred servers. At that scale you stop trusting luck and start trusting design, because on any given day something, somewhere, is failing.
By 2019 I was technical lead at an established managed-services provider, the kind of company other businesses hire to be their IT department. I ran the engineering behind seventy-plus client companies, built the team up from five technicians to twelve, and kept nearly all of them, which in this industry is the statistic I’m proudest of. Together we handled the escalations nobody else could crack: the cloud migration with no downtime window, the phone cutover that had to happen on a Friday night, the office network that failed only on Tuesdays.
And the director’s chair.
Since 2023 I’ve directed IT for a company of more than 300 people. The altitude is different, but underneath it’s the same job I had twenty years ago: keep people working. I’ve set the budget, built the security program from zero-trust architecture down to the password policy, planned the roadmap three years out, and sat in the meetings where executives decide which technology is actually worth buying.
That seat taught me something the bench never could: how all of this looks from the side that signs the checks. So when a vendor quotes a small business five figures for a problem an afternoon of honest work would solve, I recognize the move. I’ve heard the same pitch from the buyer’s chair.
Why Walker Computers is back.
Because somewhere between the dashboards and the budget spreadsheets, I noticed that the stories I actually told people were never about the big projects. They were about the recovered wedding photos. The five-person office that could finally print. Twenty years in, I know exactly which part of this field I like best, and it’s the part where the person I’m helping is in the room.
So the name is back over the door, this time in Greater Houston. Everything above comes with it: the shop-counter patience, the MSP discipline, the enterprise security habits, and a director’s sense of what’s actually worth your money. When you call Walker Computers, I’m the one who shows up.
If that sounds like the help you’ve been looking for, the consultation is free and the first hour is too. Worst case, you get a straight answer about what’s wrong and what fixing it should cost.