A decade ago, husband-and-wife team Beth Holmes-Bozung and Kevin Bozung had an idea, courage and determination when they launched Safety Net, a Northern Michigan IT company based in Traverse City.

“It literally started out of our spare bedroom in our house in Holiday Hills,” Holmes-Bozung says. “And Kevin went door to door to businesses, starting with Cherry Tree Inn at the end of the road near our house.”

From those beginnings, Safety Net has become one of the region’s most trusted names in IT solutions for small and mid-size businesses. The company offers network administration and design, IT security, point of sale, and other behind-the-scenes services that help businesses keep their day-to-day operations running smoothly—whether that business is a chocolatier or a manufacturing company. “IT is IT, but we understand that the needs are unique for each business,” Holmes-Bozung says. Safety Net created a niche for itself in the banking industry, but its other clients range from hotels to real estate companies to area grocers.

Safety Net’s headquarters are in a Traverse City facility that the company gutted and rebuilt into state-of-the-art operations center, where technicians watch wall-mounted monitors that allow them to swiftly respond to client needs in real time. The company also maintains a second, smaller office downstate in Brighton, which they plan on growing in the coming years.

“Even when we were still quite small, our mentality was, ‘Don’t act like a mom and pop; take it a step above,” Holmes-Bozung says. The company considers itself the market leader for information security, taking measures such as requiring keyed entry for all employees. Details like that, Holmes-Bozung says, set Safety Net apart and is critical in building trust with clients.

Safety Net’s growth has been entirely organic, drawing largely on the complementary skills of the couple at its helm. Kevin Bozung, who oversees the technical side of the company, had extensive experience as a network engineer prior to launching Safety Net; Beth Holmes-Bozung brought her background in sales and marketing. Though their roles have evolved as their company has grown, the two are still each other’s sounding board.

Over the years, Safety Net’s staff has blossomed to its current 24-member team, consisting of technical support, project engineering, administration and sales. The company takes pride in recruiting exceptional, passionate staffers and having very little turnover, which Holmes-Bozung credits to Safety Net’s family-like atmosphere as well as the resources and lifestyle available in

Northern Michigan. After all, it was those resources and that lifestyle that drew the couple to the region in the first place, a decade ago. “We were young and unencumbered and could go anywhere, and we liked it here,” she says. “And we knew it was a growing region.” Even with the company’s additional presence downstate in Brighton, Holmes-Bozung is firm about Safety

Net’s commitment to Northern Michigan: “We have no plans to be headquartered anywhere but Traverse City,” she says.

As the region grows, so too will the demand for dependable, secure IT solutions increases for businesses of all sizes. Safety Net plans on growing right along with them, continuing to offer top-notch, forward-thinking services—even if those services are always happening quietly, behind the scenes. “It’s not glamorous or sexy, but our work allows these companies to focus on what they do and not have to worry about IT,” Holmes-Bozung says. “We’re the back-end support you don’t hear about. We help keep them humming along, which in turn allows them to do even better work.”

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