Patrick Clements

Patrick graduated from the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business with a marketing degree in 1997. A year later he joined Micajah ITS, the Atlanta network consultancy founded by his future partner Jon, and ran business development for its network projects with government organizations and with schools getting online through E-rate funding.

In 1999 Patrick and Jon co-founded bigWebApps in a basement in Atlanta. Its first help desk, BigWebDesk, was built for IT consultants serving K-12 schools and colleges, to cut response times, onsite visits and ticket escalations. It grew into SherpaDesk, which Patrick has run as CEO since January 2013.

In 2007 the company lost most of its development contracts in the recession. Patrick cut staff and gave up a new office lease in downtown Atlanta to keep the business alive. He still runs SherpaDesk on the same rule: take risks, but never bet the company.

Outside SherpaDesk, Patrick is a member of the Technology Executive Roundtable and serves on the boards of several non-profit organizations.

On this blog he writes about the parts of IT service work that rarely make a product page: hiring the first tier 1 technician, saying no to an executive who wants a security exception, building a support team, and billing for managed services. His writing on entrepreneurship has also appeared in AllBusiness.