Meet your new IT consultant

Hello! My name is Michael Romp and I started Sky Birch Consulting to overcome the binding limitations of typical consulting firms and focus on my passion of helping customers achieve their technology goals quickly, correctly, and without bureaucratic inefficiencies.

My tenets of exceptional IT consulting

Passion for technology

My genuine love for working with IT, even in my free time, allows me to experiment and understand how technology works at a fundamental level, and to stay up-to-date on the latest developments.

Open & honest approach

No one knows everything and misrepresenting what you do know can lead to disaster. Saying "I don't know" when you don't have an immediate answer leads to better decision making and is key to build long-term trust with your customers.

Future-focused

Exceptional consulting is more than just implementing solutions and walking away. Knowledge and communication around how to support the technology further down the road is critical, as is designing it with future-proofing in mind.

Enterprise experience

Every company has a different culture when it comes to technological processes, usage, and adaptation. One size does not fit all, and an experienced consultant has learned the myriad ways businesses operate and is capable of tailoring a solution customized to a specific organization.

About Me

The Early Years

I have always loved working with computers, starting around the time I could read. Growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, I got my first computer experience in preschool, helping the teachers load software from cassette tapes into TRS-80 computers so we could play games. They came to rely on my brothers and me whenever any of the other children wanted to use the computers.

In second grade, I got my first taste of programming in BASIC on the school’s Apple II computer by copying code from the Basic Training section of the latest 3-2-1 CONTACT magazine. It thrilled me to meticulously enter each line, one-by-one, and then finally see the results of a working program when I was done. Eventually, I would learn to write my own small programs — at first by changing various lines in working programs, then eventually learning to write my own subroutines.

Discovery

A few years later, near the end of elementary school, my family got our first household computer. It had a modest 33-megahertz CPU with just one megabyte of memory. The microwave in your kitchen today probably has more horsepower, but that computer lasted us through my school-age years, providing my brothers and me with endless hours of entertainment.

Soon after we got our first home computer, we got a CD-ROM drive for Christmas. It might not seem like a big deal now, but to my brothers and me it unlocked a whole new potential of what computers could do. We spent hours exploring the Microsoft Encarta digital encyclopedia and watching all the included videos. For the first time, there was a near-limitless world we could explore, which was unparalleled — until we discovered local dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSes) and, eventually, the Internet.

During this era is when I really started learning how computers work and became the go-to troubleshooter for my friends and family. I became adept at not only diagnosing and solving problems, but also really understanding how computers, programs, and operating systems worked under the hood.

Career

My IT career started at the University of Iowa when I worked at the university’s help desk. This incredible experience gave me the opportunity to assist countless people with varied computer backgrounds and experience levels. I learned just how differently everyone works with computers and how every approach needs to be tailored to the individual. And nothing in my career has been more rewarding than the look in someone’s eyes when you recover their almost-complete thesis from a badly damaged floppy disk.

After graduation, I moved back to Des Moines to work in consulting for a smaller firm focused on small and mid-sized businesses. Those important years gave me the foundational knowledge and experience with IT infrastructure and networking upon which my career is built.

In 2009, I moved to Illinois to work for a technology consulting firm based in the Chicago suburbs. The company grew quickly, and almost immediately, I rose among the ranks to become one of its top-billing consultants. In 2018, the company was acquired by one of the nation’s largest consulting firms, and I remained in Manager and Senior Manager roles before leaving in 2021 to start Sky Birch Consulting.

Personal Life

I currently live in Chicago with my amazing wife Emily and our adorable one-eyed Shih Tzu Gatsby. We love traveling (when there isn’t a global pandemic), running the occasional 5K, going to local concerts, and exploring all of the wonderful restaurants the city has to offer.

When I’m not tinkering with our home network or adding automation routines, I love skiing anywhere I can find snow, and still indulge in video games from time to time.