Provalus To Celebrate Crockett Center With Tuesday Ribbon-Cutting

By Greg Ritchie

Messenger Reporter

CROCKETT — Provalus will celebrate its growing Crockett operation with a ribbon-cutting ceremony Tuesday, Sept. 15, at 11:30 a.m. at 1505 S. Fourth St.

The ceremony will be followed by refreshments and tours of the company’s Center of Excellence. The event will be held with the Crockett Area Chamber of Commerce, City of Crockett and the Crockett community.

Will Ruzik, vice president of facilities and operations for Optomi Professional Services, the parent company of Provalus, said the event will give local residents an opportunity to see the facility, meet employees and better understand the work being done there.

“We want to show our production facility. We want people in there working,” Ruzik said. “We want folks to be able to walk through there, see our people, see them working, understand what it is that our vision was and what we were trying to build here.”

The company has already created dozens of local jobs and is approaching 100 employees in Crockett. Ruzik said Provalus may reach or pass that mark by the time the ribbon is cut.

Provalus’ broader goal in the rural communities where it operates is to create between 150 and 200 jobs, generally over a five-year period. Ruzik said the company has often reached those numbers sooner, typically during its second or third year in a community.

“The whole idea is to be able to create a sustainable career, to keep folks in our community,” Ruzik said. “In rural America, that’s how we’re going to win. Now people have opportunities to stay home.”

Although many people may initially describe Provalus as a tech-support or call-center operation, Ruzik said those descriptions do not fully explain the company’s work.

“IT support, tech support — all those are such broad terms,” he said. “It’s really hard to truly understand what it is we do.”

Ruzik emphasized that Provalus is not a data center and does not consider itself a traditional call center. Some entry-level technology support work is part of the business, but he described that as a smaller component and a way for employees to enter the information-technology field.

“That’s not to say we don’t do some level of true tech support or what you would consider call center,” Ruzik said. “But that is a very small, minor piece of our business, and something we use as an entry level into the IT space.”

From there, the company invests in training and helps employees move toward higher-tech roles, he said.

“We’ll continue to invest and train and upskill and move into more of the high-tech roles, which is where we really want to focus as a company,” Ruzik said.

At the center of Provalus’ business model is what Ruzik called a rural-focused mission: bringing technology careers to communities where those opportunities may not otherwise exist.

“We understand the work ethic, the work aptitude, the desire to get into the IT space, and folks who may live in rural communities just don’t have that opportunity,” Ruzik said. “That’s where we want to meet them in their careers and bring that opportunity to these communities.”

Ruzik said Provalus hopes its presence will create more than jobs. The company also wants to encourage additional investment, support local businesses and become a partner in the community.

“If we’re going to put 150, 200 people to work in your community, what other services must come and support that?” he said. “Can we bring some of those mom-and-pops back? Can we create some level of revitalization in these rural communities?”

“We are much more than just a job provider,” Ruzik said. “We want to be a true community partner, partner with education, bring additional resources, be able to introduce folks into IT at a much earlier age and then just be able to generate that true economic engine inside the community.”

The company also works with schools and educators in the communities where it operates. Ruzik said Provalus can help schools develop technology programs, identify equipment and find instructors while giving students a chance to learn skills that can be used in many different careers.

“When I was in school, our technical training revolved around more of the blue-collar — the welding, the bricks,” Ruzik said. “Career technical training now has started to develop into IT, and we want to make sure we take that step further.”

He said Provalus wants to help schools build career and technical education programs rather than simply ask educators to meet the company’s needs.

“We want to partner with you and help you build out your IT programs and your career technical training,” Ruzik said. “IT is so broad that you’re giving them a skill set they’re going to be able to take out into the real world, regardless. Anywhere in the world — it’s a universal language.”

Crockett was always on Provalus’ short list when the company began exploring Texas. Ruzik said he helped recruit the company’s first location in Brewton, Alabama, in 2018 before joining the organization and beginning to help identify additional rural communities.

The company later opened a facility in Jasper, where it now employs approximately 250 people. But Crockett remained under consideration.

Ruzik said Provalus used a combination of research, demographic information, education data, quality-of-life considerations and conversations with local leaders to identify potential communities.

The company studied approximately 30 communities in East Texas before narrowing the field and conducting site visits. The final decision came down to Crockett and Jasper, with Jasper becoming the company’s second location in 2019.

“Crockett was continually on our mind,” Ruzik said. “We loved Crockett, loved everything about it. It just, for a couple different reasons, Jasper ended up winning that bid, so to speak, but we always loved Crockett and knew there was something there.”

As Provalus continued to grow, the company returned to the Texas communities it had previously considered.

“Crockett’s been on our minds since 2019,” Ruzik said. “We’re so glad to finally be at the point we are, and so happy that the leadership continued to watch our progress, believed in us and wanted to partner with us.”

The Crockett facility itself also required significant work before the company could host a public event. The building had previously served as a community college, and Provalus needed to update the technology, modify the layout and create larger production areas instead of individual classrooms.

Ruzik said the company typically waits to hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony until a facility is operating because it wants community leaders and other supporters to see the finished product in use.

“Our ribbon cuttings or grand openings are a chance for us to bring those leadership folks back in, even at the state level, that supported us and were part of this project, and say, ‘Come see what you supported and what your work has done here,’” he said.

The event will include a portion of the ceremony outside, followed by tours inside the Center of Excellence.

“We want them to meet our employees, hear their stories and hear why they were so excited for these opportunities and what the future may hold here,” Ruzik said.

Community members are invited to attend the ribbon-cutting Tuesday and tour the facility after the ceremony.

Greg Ritchie can be reached at [email protected]