TRS Technology Solutions

It all started back in October of 1983… Wait… actually it started even before that… hmmm, this could be a long story and I’m not sure either of us want to go into all of that here… let me just give you the Semi-Short version:

The Genesis Of The TRS Story

Mike Baumann, Sr. was working for the local Telco since the mid 1970’s and survived a couple of mergers and ownership changes. However, when Sprint took over Centel, he was told that if he wanted to keep his job he was going to have to move, either to Las Vegas or Kansas City.

Mike was born and raised right here in Killeen, TX and made the decision to leave Sprint and stay here in his beloved Central Texas.

While Mike toyed with various options of employment and entrepreneurship, the one thing that always made Mike mad, was ever since Sprint took over Centel, they started charging $60 Service Charges to local customers… and it didn’t matter whether you were a Business Customer or a Residential Customer, you were getting charged $60 (minimum) for Onsite Service.

Nowadays, you’re thinking “$60… that’s a great price!” But back in the early 1980’s that $60 felt like today’s $500. Very few Businesses could truly afford that rate, not too mention the complete budget-changing impact that amount was doing to (normal) Residential customers.

So Mike made the decision that he was going to make sure Residential customers could get an affordable rate for onsite services, like phone line and cable TV wire installations.

In October 1983, Texas Residential Services was created, and Mike Baumann, Sr. started installing phone lines and cable TV wires for $18.50 per hour.

The Transition to TRS Telephone Systems

In February of 1984, Mike sold his first phone system to Aycock Construction. He quickly realized he enjoyed the system installations a lot more than crawling under houses and through residential attic spaces. Plus the money was better.

Not long after that he had some business cards and vehicle magnets made that said TRS Telephone Systems… and we were off and running.

You have to be pretty old to remember all of the technological changes that were happening back in the 80’s and early 90’s… but that’s when everything technology-related was transitioning from enormous to a somewhat manageable size. The only thing getting bigger was TV screens.

Phone systems were coming down from the size of refrigerators to about the size of today’s large microwave. Then eventually to the size of a normal briefcase.

In the late 80’s or very early 1990, TRS sold it’s first Panasonic system and fell in love with the ease-of-install, ease-of-use and all of the really cool features it offered that none of it’s counter parts offered. Plus it was priced very competitively.

We’ve pretty much always provided Paging Systems.

In 1996, TRS sold and installed it’s first CCTV camera system…

In 1997, we added our first Data and Networking Technician (as Ethernet and Microsoft became commonplace).

In 2003, we sold our first IP-based Networking Camera system…

In February 2004 – 20 Years to the Month – Aycock Construction purchased their second phone system from us.