IT firm's headquarters adds to flourishing Buffalo Grove industrial district
While Buffalo Grove's center of town tends to attract the focus - and often the ire - of its residents, its industrial district to the north is quietly making its mark.
A recent addition to that area, Business IT Source (BITS), held an open house at its new headquarters in Buffalo Grove last week, featuring appearances by sports celebrities Bill Wennington and Kyle Long.
BITS' products include computer systems, software, networking equipment and storage components. It also performs hardware configuration and software imaging.
The company's new headquarters at 850 Asbury Drive, located in a new 39,000-square-foot facility, replaces its former offices in Vernon Hills.
Founded in 2009 by brothers Bob and Dan Frauenheim, along with Jack Mellor, Pat Farragher and Matt Walsh, the company serves commercial clients nationwide.
"We sell strictly to businesses, and we tend to concentrate on large enterprises that have professional IT and professional purchasing," said Mellor, the company's chief financial officer.
Buffalo Grove helped sway the company's decision to relocate in 2017, when the village entered into a six-year agreement to share 75 percent of its home rule sales tax with BITS for the first $40 million in annual taxable sales it receives. For annual taxable sales greater than $40 million, the village would share 100 percent. The village would retain 100 percent of retailer's occupation taxes.
"It means a great deal to the Buffalo Grove residents," said Buffalo Grove Trustee Joanne Johnson, who attended Thursday's event. "The revenue that it brings into our tax base relieves every taxpayer of the additional burden of taxes."
"Our industrial district is thriving and generating a lot of revenue. And this is just one example," she added.
Visitors to Thursday's open house could tour the 27,000-square-foot warehouse, 7,000 square feet of office space and 5,000-square-foot configuration lab. The latter is the building's nerve center, where systems, servers, storage and networking equipment are customized and prepared for shipping.
"In our business, the central part of our value add is our integration facility, where we can do lots of custom configurations to computers," Mellor said.