Boyle Welcomes CSG to Schilling Farms

By Jane Aldinger
– Memphis Business Journal –

Nashville based Converged Solutions Group LLC is relocating its Memphis office to Boyle Investment Co.’s Schilling Farms development, leasing about 6,000 square feet of space in Helena Chemical Co.’s headquarters facility.

CSG’s offices are currently located at 3915 Mendenhall, and the move will be a welcome change for the company’s staff, says president and CEO Brian Jones.

CSG is a single source provider of integrated voice, data and contact center solutions and is singularly focused on providing Siemens communication products to its clients.

Jones says CSG has about 700 clients in its total geography, which includes Tennessee, Mississippi and north Alabama.

The company employs a total of about 58 people, but its largest office is in Memphis where it has about 20 employees. While the company’s headquarters are in Nashville, the meat of its operation, including accounting, IT and purchasing infrastructure, is in Memphis.

The company is about a year old but has a long history in Memphis. CSG was originally founded in 1979 as ATS Telephone Data Systems. In 1996, Expanets purchased ATS and owned it until 2003 when Avaya, Inc., a provider of business communications software, systems and services, purchased all of Expanets’ assets.

Jones purchased ATS’ assets and clients from Avaya in January 2004. Some of its local clients include MLGW, Cry-Leike, Nike, Thomas & Betts, Baptist, LeBonheur and FedEx Freight.

Jones worked for ATS and Expanets, and he says the company’s Siemens focus brings a different value to the customer.

“What we’ve done is peeled back all of those other products and intensely focused in on Siemens,” he says. “All of our technical folks and engineers are geared toward helping our clients realize the value of their system that’s deployed.”

Jones says he sees the company’s future growth, solidified in the Voice over IP and WiFi markets and hopes Schilling Farms will provide the company with a fresh start.

“We really believe Schilling Farms is going to put us in the central area of the growth in Memphis,” he says.

CSG will move into it new office in early March, and Jones says they have plans to expand to about 8,000 square feet after the first year.

The company spent about $90,000 in training and certification for its employees last year, and he says that investment in his workforce is paying off for the clients.

The 104,000 square foot Helena Chemical building is more than 80% occupied by Helena Chemical, but the CSG deal will boost the building’s occupancy to about 95%, says Mark Halperin, Boyle executive vice president.

Helena committed to a 15 year lease when Boyle announced the building in June 2000 as a piece of Boyle’s 443-acre Schilling Farms development. Hampering says the building now has two available spaces, one about 3,000 square feet and another of about 1,500 square feet.

National Safety Associates is building a 60,000 square foot headquarters building at Schilling Farms. Weston Cos. is developing that property on about 6.5 acres, but NSA purchased an additional six acres for future expansion opportunities.

Boyle has been negotiating with some companies about kicking off another corporate office building at Schilling Farms, but Halperin says the timing on another project is still undecided.

“Hopefully that will be coming down the pipe pretty soon,” he says.