Andromeda – Rebranding and Helping Clients through their AI Journey to Become More Efficient and Profitable
Jeff Borello
CEO & Co-
Andromeda
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Jeff Borello
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-
Interview conducted by:
Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor
CEOCFO Magazine
Published – September 14, 2026
CEOCFO: Mr. Borello, Andromeda has a 30-
Mr. Borello: Thanks for having me back. It is a transformational time. AI is obviously having a huge impact. We have been at this 32 years now, so we have been through some of these transitions such as the internet, cloud computing and cybersecurity, but nothing like this. This one is a whole different animal.
Our goal now is to build out a new practice or business unit inside the company where we can help our clients and new clients figure out their AI journey and how to use AI to become more efficient and profitable.
CEOCFO: What are some of the challenges in developing something that is going to work for your clients, especially when AI is becoming more and more controversial?
Mr. Borello: I think the biggest challenge is the speed at which it is developing and changing. It is really mostly an impossible task to try to keep up with. It used to be that things changed year over year, maybe they were fast and they changed quarterly, but this is every day. New models are coming out, new companies are coming out, it is just the level of advancement that is happening and the development is just astronomically fast. It makes it hard to keep up. I literally just hung up with a peer group call, and the topic was how we would keep all these things straight.
It is like AI is supposed to make less work and for us it is making more work. You can literally be working on ten different things at once and trying to keep them all straight. It is just a big challenge. It is brand-
CEOCFO: Andromeda has many clients in the industrial and manufacturing arena. Are they less involved in AI, and is it possibly a bit easier because it is an industry that is not always as up to date with technology, or is it more challenging?
Mr. Borello: I think it is less about the industry. We have a very big focus on the manufacturing space but we do have clients in other industries. It seems more like there are people that are going to embrace AI, there are people that are against it, and then there are people that just don’t have the time to figure it out.
For us, our manufacturers are a mixed bag. I just had a call this week with a fairly small manufacturer, they are probably 20 employees, and I would have expected them to not be embracing at all, but no, their president and operations director are both well versed and deep into it. They are building out things and trying to identify some of the marketing that they could automate. I was surprised that they were as deep into it as they were. I think it is more about the makeup of the leader of the group, or if they have someone who is more cutting-
CEOCFO: One of the things on the Andromeda difference page is, “When it comes to manufacturing your IT, we believe in simplicity, accountability and delivering consistent value.” Would you address that for us and tell us how it plays out day to day in interactions with your clients?
Mr. Borello: I am sure someone might think this will sound cliché, but we really have worked hard over the last 32 years. We were founded on some of those same concepts of trying to make sure that IT is there to help, and when it isn’t helping, that we can get issues resolved quickly. One of the things we pride ourselves on is our communication, so when things aren’t going well, you are having a struggle or your system is down, you can call us and we will get someone on it. In today’s businesses there is often less staff, there is more urgency around everything, and being there to help is a big deal to us.
We spend a lot of hours talking about and building an organization that can help our manufacturing clients and can make sure that IT is more of a help and less of a hindrance. There are a lot of pieces that go into that such as responding to people quickly, resolving issues, and one of our big things is making sure that we are trying to eliminate issues from coming back in the future. That is something we do well.
When a customer signs on with us, usually they have a couple months of ramp-
CEOCFO: Would you give us an example of what you might recognize when you are working with a client, which would lead you to make a change for them?
Mr. Borello: The lowest-
Sometimes nobody told them because, with a lot of IT companies, you call into the help desk, tell them the problem, they fix the problem and move on. It takes a different level of analysis and a concerted effort to find the patterns and root causes, and then fix the root cause, whatever it happens to be.
CEOCFO: Do potential new clients understand the depth of your service, and how do you project that?
Mr. Borello: I think they do. I think the buyers are much more sophisticated than they used to be. There is a lot more information and research available. I think the big struggle that I see for prospects is that they may be looking at five MSPs, and sometimes nowadays people are looking at ten MSPs all at once, which boggles my mind because I can’t believe they want to talk to that many people. But we tend to look like a commodity. If you look at ten MSP websites and talk to them, they all say the same things: customer service and fast response time. So I feel for prospects trying to differentiate between everybody. I think that is our struggle.
We really do feel like we have built a company that is different from a lot of others. There are some great MSPs out there, but there are also a lot of mediocre and terrible ones. Trying to deliver the message so that prospects understand the difference is hard sometimes. At some point it all sounds the same. It is a challenge to get that messaging right so that at the end of the conversation with our sales team, they say, “Wow, these guys really are different.” Then we need to be able to back it up with some numbers. I just talked about how, when we bring new customers on, we drive their issues out of the system. To be able to show them at the nine-
CEOCFO: Do you do much outreach these days for new customers?
Mr. Borello: Yes, we have a dedicated marketing effort. We are doing things with SEO and now AI GEO. We have a full-
It used to be when we started that you would put an ad in the Yellow Pages and that was all you had to do. Now there is so much messaging. There is social media, and you really have to be doing it all because you never know where people are looking or how they are finding you. It is a challenge for sure in general and specifically in our industry.
CEOCFO: What is your geographic reach, and has it changed over time?
Mr. Borello: We are still headquartered in a suburb of Chicago. A lot of our clients are in the Chicagoland area. We are now targeting Illinois and the seven surrounding states, which have a very heavy manufacturing presence: Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Iowa and Missouri. We can serve clients anywhere in the country.
We have ways to get somebody onsite if we need to, but about 90% of what we do is done remotely from our service desk here in Lockport, Illinois. We can get hands onsite if needed. We can service clients around the country, but our focus is the Midwest and manufacturers in the Midwest.
CEOCFO: You have two tiers, Pluto and Jupiter; would you tell us about the options for your clients?
Mr. Borello: Pluto is meant to be the smaller package. It is a very good package for about 60% of customers. We try not to call Jupiter a higher-
CEOCFO: Tell us about your rebrand and new site.
Mr. Borello: When we originally started 32 years ago, we were Andromeda Computing Systems Inc. Then we were Andromeda Technology Solutions for about 20 years, and we thought it was time for a refresh. We had the same logo for 20 years. We rebranded to just Andromeda, shortened our website to Andromeda.tech, introduced a new logo and new color scheme, and did the whole thing. It has been exciting.
What we think is an advantage is that our employee tenure is way higher than what most MSPs have. There is a pretty good chunk of the crew that has been here for a long time. However, when we decided to do something new, we didn’t tell anybody. Our leadership team knew, but we didn’t even tell our marketing team. We did this completely in stealth. We announced at an all-
It is challenging when you have had Andromeda Technology Solutions around for 20 years to find all the places where that shows up and get them updated with the new logo. It has been quite the feat. Somebody said today they found another case where it has the old logo. It was fun. I don’t think I would do it again, but it has been fun.
CEOCFO: What is the Andromeda Secret Sauce?
Mr. Borello: That was the brainchild of one of our marketing team members. Ironically enough, he is pretty creative, but he is an electrical engineer by trade, so he has an engineer’s mind and is also very creative. We had all these marketing pieces describing the various features of the things we offer. We have something called M*AR*S (Managed ARchitecture Solution), which describes the solution we provide in our services, and it is a package that we update every 18 months. We needed to combine these things into something, and he came up with Secret Sauce.
He showed up in a marketing meeting one day and said, “Hey, I got this thing and we are going to call it Secret Sauce.” I am not sure everyone was completely sold on it, but we are in an industry that is not exactly known for fun. IT people are not known to be the fun ones in the bunch. Anything we can do to lighten it up and make it a little tongue-
CEOCFO: What do you look for in your people, over and above their skills?
Mr. Borello: They have to be someone we like and want to work with. We are a people organization. We are an organization built on relationships, so you have to be likeable. If you are the smartest person there ever was and I don’t like you, we just don’t want you on the team. There is so much camaraderie on a team. No one here works in a silo; everybody is part of a team, and the teams are very interactive with each other. If you get someone whose personality doesn’t click, it stands out like a sore thumb. It’s like the old joke: “How do you tell an outgoing engineer?” They look at your shoes instead of theirs. You have to have personality and bring some excitement to the team.
We are very open about who we hire. What matters to us is whether someone fits the culture, works well with the team, has a good personality and doesn’t bring unnecessary drama. We just do not have the time or patience for drama.
CEOCFO: How do you spend your day as CEO?
Mr. Borello: I still lead marketing, although I spend less time on it now. Over the last year I have spent a lot of time on the finance side. We have spent the last two years improving our financial processes so our monthly reporting is more consistent and we close the books faster. Strategy takes up a lot of time too: thinking about what comes next, what we should be doing differently and where we should be looking next. In the last six months, and especially the last month, a lot of that has been around AI. We are building out an AI practice, so we have to figure out what that looks like.
I have final interviews this week and next to hire an AI solutions engineer for our team. That has been a big focus. We know that as our clients look to do more with AI, the first place they are going to look for help is us because AI is technical and we are their technical team. We need to be in a position to help them with that. It will continue to take up a lot of my time as we figure out what the package looks like, what the solution looks like and how to integrate it with clients. I would like to say it has become part of my eight-
CEOCFO: What are you surprised we can do with technology today, and what are you surprised we cannot do yet?
Mr. Borello: I am a technology guy and I have been a geek my entire life, but there are still some things I am amazed by. For example, driving somewhere with GPS and Google Maps. We are in the suburbs of Chicago, and I remember when you would drive downtown Chicago and not only did you have to make sure you did not run someone over, you also had to try to read the street signs to figure out where you were going. That is just completely taken off your plate. You can drive anywhere you want, even if you have never been there before. You put the destination in and just drive. That to me is just flat-
What hasn’t been done? I think this will change soon. Medicine has made tremendous advances, but I still think there is a lot of untapped opportunity in the data. Ten or fifteen years ago, there was a big push toward electronic medical records, and one of the goals was to get all this patient data into digital systems so we could analyze it and start finding patterns. I think we will see another push toward that with AI because it gives us new ways to analyze enormous amounts of medical data and potentially uncover patterns that would have been very difficult to find before.
I think one of the keys will be figuring out how to use all of that medical-
CEOCFO: Is there anything that our readers should know about Andromeda, which we haven’t talked about yet?
Mr. Borello: Yes, we call it our mission purpose for the company. It is helping people succeed. We really are doing that here, whether it is our internal team, our vendors, our partners, our customers. We really do want to help people. We are deep into the manufacturing and industrial space. We are putting together offerings that are specific for that space.
Our goal over the next five years is that when a manufacturer starts looking to replace their IT service provider, everybody says, “Andromeda is the group.” One thing that happens is people just come to accept that their IT service is not great, but it is good enough. They think there is nothing better out there, that they are all the same, and that the devil you know is better than trying to change. That is not true. There are better providers out there, whether it is us or somebody else.
If you are struggling with IT and you think it is not delivering what it should or providing value to you, call us and let’s have a conversation. I can almost guarantee we can improve your life in that regard.
Andromeda | Jeff Borello | Managed IT Services for Manufacturing | Managed IT Services for Industrial | Proactive Network Infrastructure Management (NIM) for the industrial sector | Co-