Spinning a message of success for young people

March 7, 2007
BY SANDRA GUY Sun-Times Columnist

Robert Blackwell Jr. sees broader missions than boasting a client list of industry giants, being a guiding force in international table-tennis tournaments, and leading one of a handful of African-American-owned Information Technology companies in Chicago.
Blackwell, 46, whose father Robert Blackwell Sr. runs Blackwell Consulting, wants to transform young people's lives by showing them a future in technology. He is doing so by giving young people a fresh start at his Web application-development company, Electronic Knowledge Interchange (EKI). Blackwell runs EKI with his best friend, Co-CEO Diego Ferrer, who is a native of Venezuela.

The company designs, builds, implements, and manages Web applications and application infrastructures, and develops and manages business-process improvements and architectural work.

EKI has hired three young ex-felons who have served their time and who show promise and dedication to new ways of living.

"We have a culture that's welcoming to everyone from all backgrounds," Blackwell said of the 100-employee company with about $20 million in yearly revenues and headquarters at 33 W. Monroe.

Jonathan Villa, a 27-year-old infrastructure architect at EKI, got a chance at his dream job when he was offered an internship in August 2002. Villa, a Milwaukee native, served time in prison from age 17 to 19 after he started running with the wrong crowd.

"I looked around in prison and saw men in their 40s and 50s. I didn't want to be that old [in prison.] I wanted a life," Villa said.

Villa was working as a carpenter when, at friends' urging, he enrolled in a computer-skills program called HomeBoyz Interactive, run by the Rev. Jim Holub, a priest in Milwaukee. Holub noticed Villa's rapid progress and told Villa about the EKI internship.

Blackwell is determined to show young African Americans and Latinos that information technology can be a welcoming and lucrative field.

"I care about giving African-American and Latino young people opportunities to show how successful they can be if they're given opportunities," Blackwell said.

Blackwell's venture into real estate development in the mid-1990s was ahead of its time in recognizing the value of property in the North Kenwood neighborhood between 43rd and 47th streets on the lakefront. He bought a house there and started a company in 1994 that built high-end houses in the area to try to jump-start mixed-income development.

Blackwell, who still lives in North Kenwood, also is a Ping-Pong enthusiast, and founded Killerspin LLC, a table-tennis company whose mission is to make table tennis a major sport.

Blackwell loves being part of such missions, especially in tight-knit environments. He believes smaller companies have an advantage because they cannot afford to fail. He knows from experience, having started his own consulting firm in the early 1980s out of his apartment in Humboldt Park, and after taking over a small IT company, Bytewise International, in the late 1980s. Bytewise specialized in developing financial planning systems, including the world's largest spreadsheet-based applications for Sears Roebuck, as well as options pricing, trading and portfolio management systems for the OEX, S&P 500 and foreign currency markets.

"We have productivity paranoia," he said of EKI. "If we don't excel, we'll be out of a job. We tend to out-perform very large companies with whom we compete. I like that."

David Weinstein, president of the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center, said he is impressed that Blackwell has diversified his revenue sources by working with both public-sector groups and private companies. "That's a recipe for success," Weinstein said.

©2007 by Chicago Sun-Times.

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