Why we built an IT team that treats you like a neighbor, not a number.
The problem wasn’t that these organizations needed less support. It was that they needed a different kind. When you have an IT department down the hall, you know exactly who to call. You don’t wonder whether someone will get back to you, or explain your setup from scratch to whoever picks up. You stop by their desk. You ask your question over coffee. You get an answer from someone who already knows your name, your systems, and what matters to you.
That’s what Thomas set out to build when he founded Rural Solutions in 2005—and it’s still what we’re here for. When something goes wrong, you’ve got a dedicated team that already knows your organization. When something’s on your mind, you call us. No hold music. No strangers. Just your IT department “down the hall”—without the cost of hiring one in-house.
Thomas Dukeshire got his first taste of technology in the early 1990s, watching his grandfather figure out his first computer. Something clicked—not just an interest in the technology itself, but in the moment of someone understanding it for the first time.
That stayed with him. Over the years, he built a career around it: hands-on IT support, consulting, training teams, and teaching at the Community College of Vermont. And across all of it, he kept seeing the same thing. Small organizations doing important work, being handed slow responses and generic fixes by providers who clearly had bigger clients to get back to.
