Ben Farmer

Ben Farmer is the kind of person who seems to measure success not by the technology he delivers, but by how much easier life becomes for the people who count on it.

Passionate, focused, and determined, BJ has carried those qualities through more than three decades of running CITOC, and it is why the people around him tend to describe him less by the company he built than by how well he looked after them. Spend a little time with him and you see what they mean. He speaks plainly; a longtime friend from one of his CEO groups loved that about him, the way he could cut past the noise to the thing that actually needed attention. He reads and studies constantly, staying ahead of where technology is going, because his clients count on him to see around the corner for them. People who have worked with him for years keep reaching for the same words: tenacious advocate, trusted advisor, good friend. It is telling that one Houston businessman first heard of BJ not from BJ at all, but from a client who pulled out his business card in the middle of a meeting just to talk about the work his team was doing. When the two finally met, he found the client had it exactly right.

The work itself is simple to explain, at least the way BJ explains it: technology makes business life easier. What he really offers is peace of mind. He wants a business owner to be able to budget their technology with confidence, to know that anyone on staff can pick up the phone and someone good will answer, and to keep their attention on the business they love while the systems hum along behind it. BJ has built his entire career in Houston, a city known for its entrepreneurial energy and its openness to anyone willing to work hard, where companies in everything from energy to healthcare began as somebody's leap of faith. Spending three decades among people like that has kept him close to what a business really means to the person who built it, and it shows in how he treats every client: like someone guarding another person's dream.

Through it all he never stopped being a student. He has served on national boards in the Microsoft partner community and spent years in rooms full of fellow CEOs trading hard lessons, giving as much as he took. Ask about his education, though, and BJ will point you to the line he wrote on his own resume: a PhD in Business from the School of Hard Knocks. He means it as a joke, but like most of his jokes, there is truth tucked inside. Everything he knows, he learned by building, and the people he built it for have been vouching for him ever since.