Hank Haines
Founder & CEO
Sets SEQTEK’s direction and holds the company to the standard it was founded on: technology in service of the business, never the other way around.
About
Hank Haines has spent his career on a single conviction: software should bend to how a business actually works, not force the business to bend to the software. He has been building it since 1980, when he traded a Winchester 30-30 rifle for his first computer, a TRS-80, and taught himself to code by typing programs out of magazines line by line.
That conviction became a company. Before founding SEQTEK, Hank led a 13-person division at CIMCASE International, a Tulsa consulting firm that installed and integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for manufacturers. He kept seeing the same problem. Successful companies, often in the $1 to $3 billion range, had built their edge on the 10 to 20 percent of their operation that did not fit a standard ERP. The software told them to change. Most of them knew better.
Hank founded SEQTEK on August 29, 1999 to close that gap. The company wrote software that integrated with a client's ERP and delivered the part that made them unique, over the browser, without asking them to give up what set them apart. Within a year SEQTEK had grown past 20 people with work in Houston, Salt Lake City, and Austin.
The dot-com bust tested that. SEQTEK lost several contracts in a single month and had to lay people off. Hank came through it with a changed view of what he was building. He gave the business to God and runs it as a steward rather than an owner. That decision still shapes the company: a culture of grace and trust, high expectations held in a supportive environment, and one question asked on every engagement, are we actually solving the business problem.
Hank holds an associate's degree in computer science from Murray State College and a bachelor's in mathematics from Oklahoma Wesleyan University. Outside SEQTEK he has never stopped building, co-founding the industrial-monitoring companies Well Checked Systems and EdgeStack and earning patents in machine-learning predictive maintenance. He and his wife Susie have three children.
Areas of expertise
- ERP integration and custom software
- Multi-tenant SaaS web platforms
- Business process and automation
- Technology strategy for mid-market companies
- Founding and leading a consulting practice
Education
Associate of Science, Computer Science, Murray State College
Bachelor's, Mathematics, Oklahoma Wesleyan University
Good to know
- 1.Traded a Winchester 30-30 rifle for his first computer in 1980 and taught himself to code from magazine listings
- 2.Wanted to be a forest ranger before he found software
- 3.Played college baseball and basketball
In their words
Are we doing this just because we like code, or are we doing this to actually solve the business problem?