Skyward Inc., the Stevens Point-based company that is now one of the world’s leading providers of administrative software for school districts, didn’t even have an office when it opened 30 years ago this September.

Company founders Jim and Jean King started out working in the offices of their customers, recalls Cliff King, Jim’s younger brother and now the CEO of this $50 million firm.

“What started out as a local family business has steadily grown into a business supporting customers in six countries,” says Cliff King. More than 1,400 school districts in 17 states, including 80 percent of the districts in Wisconsin, now use Skyward software to manage student records and school business accounts. The company has grown at an annual 19-percent clip through the first decade of this century.

In addition to the main office in the Stevens Point business park it now has a second office in that city as well as branches in Madison; St. Cloud, Minn.; Lansing, Mich.; Bloomington, Ill.; Pittsburgh, Pa.; Dallas/Fort Worth; Indianapolis and Austin, Texas.
But even with its growth to more than 325 employees, Skyward is still a lot about family. Cliff King took over as CEO when his brother retired in 2007, and several family members still hold top positions in the company.

Even the company name came from a family member, who won a companywide naming contest in 1994. Andy Lind, the nephew of Jim and Cliff King and now the company’s vice president of customer service, remembered that while in the military Jim King had been nicknamed “Sky King” after a 1960s television adventure series, Lind played around with versions of that name and came up with Skyward. He pocketed the $1,000 contest prize, and the company saved on any costs it might have incurred for a marketing firm to find a name. 

Skyward also hires and promotes many people from the Stevens Point area. Fully 40 percent of its workers come from the University of Wisconsin—Stevens Point or Mid-State Technical College in Stevens Point. Typical is Scott Glinski who was born and raised in the Stevens Point area and has worked for the company for 23 years. He moved up from vice president to company president when Cliff King became CEO in 2007. Glinski is a Mid-State graduate.

What’s made Skyward so successful?

“By practicing controlled growth and holding true to our golden rule of business, which is treating others the way you’d like to be treated yourself, we’ve been able to truly understand and fulfill the needs of our customers and industry,” says Cliff King. “In this business it’s important to listen to our customers to meet their needs.” 

Speaking about controlled growth, he says, “We want to make sure we have enough resources to provide our customers with the level of service that they have come to expect from us.” 

A measure of the success of this approach is that Skyward has a 98.5 percent retention rate among customers—a standard seldom matched among software producers. 

“The thing that sets us apart from the competition is that we offer both a student management suite and a school business suite (of programs),” adds Glinski. “Most companies offer one or the other. With us you get both, and they’re based on the same database.”

All of the software is tailored to the state in which the school district is located and the programs allow clients to generate state reports at the touch of a button. The Skyward Student Management Suite contains programs that cover census/demographics, report cards, grades and transcripts, student activities, academic eligibility, bus scheduling, data warehousing, lesson plans and many other topics.

The Skyward School Business Suite includes programs for accounts management, budget management, data mining, payroll processing, contracts, e-commerce, purchasing, employee review, substitute teaching and building management.  Additional services that Skyward provides include on-site and online training, program customization and many more.
Skyward, in fact, offers 33 sets of software programs.

An important key to Skyward’s growth has been contacts with potential customers at training sessions, statewide user meetings and other meetings. Skyward’s administrators attend user meetings and other conferences, which give them important one-on-one contact with school officials, Glinski says. The Wisconsin user meetings have grown to a point where more than 1,000 people attend.

“It’s tough finding a place to hold them,” he says of their size, noting that the sessions are now held at the Kalahari Resort in Wisconsin Dells.

“We often find that word-of-mouth recommendations are the best kind of marketing,” King says. The company Web site contains more than 900 testimonials from satisfied customers, including about one-third of them from Wisconsin officials.

Here’ a sampling:

“I have never worked with a more dedicated team of technicians than when I worked with Skyward to virtualize our six servers into two. Their efforts were well above 100 percent of the norm, and that’s what makes Skyward consulting service above the competition.”
— Tony Jaworski, district technology coordinator Weyauwega-Fremont School District

“Skyward customer service was very helpful for me when I started working on the vendor 1099 process. I had kept a list of questions since the day I started and we addressed all of them.
—Lisa Skoyen, finance manager Osseo-Fairchild School District

“We were blown away with the information available that was presented to us at the Wisconsin Skyward User Group Conference. We are very excited about the way Skyward will change our routines with regard to scheduling, reporting and communicating with parents. The staff and presenters at the conference were extremely informative and supportive.”
—Susan Bast, counselor, Germantown School District

Major milestones

Significant dates in Skyward’s growth include opening its first branch office in St. Cloud, Minn., in 1988 and a second one in Bloomington, Ill., in 1992. Skyward acquired  Matrix Computers, an education software company in 1994. After adding two other state offices in the ‘90s, Skyward anticipated the problems of Y2K compliance at the turn of the century and as a result was ready to help school districts comply.

In 2001, Skyward partnered with the Washington State Information Processing Cooperative to solve the problems of 297 school districts in that state. It now serves 97 percent of that state’s school districts. The following year, it acquired SchoolAssysts, a Texas software company, and opened a branch office in Austin, Texas. In 2005, it began supplying software for the 41st largest district in the country, the Jordan District of Utah. Skyward released its latest version of the Skyward Student Management System in 2009. This web-based suite has both the student management and business management components and allows districts to operate in a true HTML environment.

Skyward’s international business started with its installation of a system at the U.S. Embassy School in New Delhi, India, in 2006. The company’s software now also serves schools in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Greece.

King jokes that unlike some companies that outsource and offshore their technical support to call centers in India, Skyward gets calls from India. In fact, he says one group of  Indian visitors to a user session in this country came to learn about the technology, but also had an agenda of sightseeing. They wanted to see four things: Niagara Falls, the Mall of America in Minneapolis, a Walmart and snow. They were able to see all four during an October visit.

Skyward’s growing international business offers employees the chance to visit other countries, King says, and they’re encouraged to keep their passports current in case they’re called on to work at foreign venues. Katmandu, Nepal is on the 2010 travel itinerary for Skyward employees.

Asked about some of the biggest business challenges, Glinski ’s response is expected for the industry the firm is in.

“The toughest is keeping up with the technology,” he says.  He adds that Skyward’s research and development specialists are constantly working to produce software that meets changing technological needs.

As for the future, King foresees a continuation of the company’s policy of controlled growth. But he also notes with a smile that Skyward currently works in only 17 states — leaving plenty of room for expansion.

By John Hill

You can contact John Hill by e-mail at jhoythill@sbcglobal.net.