This draws on three things I wrote as they happened — in February 2011 when I sold my first company, in May 2012 a year later, and in April 2013 when I finally said out loud what I had learned. The quotes are from those posts. The rest is 2026 me, telling it straight.
1999: a living room full of servers
I started eMonarch in 1999 as an application service provider — the idea that a small business should not have to buy servers and software, it should rent them from someone who ran them well. I still remember sitting in my living room with a stack of HP servers and my little brother, trying to make it work. The market wasn’t ready. Neither, honestly, was I. So eMonarch became a managed IT company — flat fee, we-are-your-IT-department, monitoring and prevention instead of hourly repairs — and grew into a good business that made a good living and provided good jobs. Ten years later, in 2009, we finally signed the first client for the hosted infrastructure I had written the vision document for a decade earlier. Not crazy; just early.
2011: why I sold it
At the end of 2010 I asked myself how far I could take the company and what it would cost. I saw three doors. One: run it at a steady pace, add a client or two now and then, and be what I called a “lifestyle entrepreneur.” I wrote that there was “absolutely NOTHING wrong with being a lifestyle entrepreneur unless your name is Sean Fullerton.” Two: hire aggressively, especially salespeople, and push — except I was not a sales manager, I did not understand salespeople, and the hours it would take were hours my three small children would pay for. I had once made a room of business owners write an “I AM” statement that could not mention their business, then asked whether they would trade their family for guaranteed success. Nobody would. Neither would I. Three: sell to a larger firm with leadership I could learn from and take managed services to a bigger market.
I chose door three, and I believed I was being led to it. I wrote a list of reasons — a stable future for my family, to grow as a leader, to take managed services further, to give our customers more, to learn — and I meant every one of them.
2012: fourteen months later
I lasted about fourteen months. Big ships move really slowly, and my dreams were no longer the thing steering the ship. A year and a quarter after the sale I wrote the first honest post: the thing I had dismissed for myself — a business that exists to provide a good life for the owner’s family, their team, and their community — was right all along. “The business exists to serve the stakeholders.” And “if you’re not growing you’re dying,” which I had repeated like scripture, was wrong too. There is a great deal to be said for a stable business that keeps innovating for its customers and stays a win for both sides.
Two years after the sale I stopped hedging. I had read a piece that used the word acqui-hire, and it landed like a slap. “I had sold my company for a job. I had spent the last fifteen years of my life making sure I never had a job, and I sold out for some quick cash and a job.” Selling eMonarch was a mistake. I called it a glorious disaster and an epic fail, and I still would. There was plenty of blame to go around, but I was the one who signed the paperwork. What I got for it was worth having, though: “I am an entrepreneur, period. I am not a manager — just ask anyone who has ever worked with me.”
2012: NSN Management
So in 2012 I got the dust broom out and started NSN Management in Tulsa — the same craft, done the way I had always wanted to do it, for owner-run companies of ten to a hundred people — the businesses eMonarch had always served, and the kind of business I had just relearned the point of: technology that works so the owner can build the life the business was started for. That is not marketing copy; it is the lesson, priced in.
Everything about how NSN runs comes out of those years:
- One flat monthly fee, because I learned in 2009 that in break-fix the only one who wins is the IT provider, and in flat-fee the provider is paid to keep things running.
- An in-house help desk in Tulsa, because you don’t outsource your core.
- A planning cadence and a monthly report, because accountability has to scale past the founder’s cell phone.
- The WOW standard — every ticket, project, and meeting is a chance to make someone’s day better than they expected — because “transform lives through excellence and innovation” was the purpose in 2009 and it never stopped being the purpose.
- Built to stay. Tulsa-owned, owner-led, and not measured by whether it becomes the next big thing. I have already learned what selling costs.
What happened next
Staying turned out to be the growth strategy. NSN Management was named Kaseya/Datto MSP of the Year 2025 and made the Inc. 5000 2026 list (No. 3,329 nationally · #18 in Oklahoma · #9 in Tulsa) — outcomes that came from serving the same kind of businesses well for a long time, not from a bigger ship. I am 57 now. I have been doing this since the nineties, long enough to have co-written Special Edition Using Microsoft Active Directory (Que, 2001) when Active Directory was new, and to have been named to the Tulsa Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 back when I qualified. I do not solve tickets anymore; I steer. And I still believe there was a purpose in all of it, the mistake included.
Why this matters to you
When you sit across the table from NSN Management, the person who built the company has been the owner in your chair — has made payroll, has picked a technology partner and regretted it, has learned the hard way what a business is for. That is the perspective behind every plan we put in front of you. If you would like to talk to a company that was built to stay, book a Discovery Call.
Questions Tulsa businesses ask about this
Who founded NSN Management and when?
Sean Fullerton founded NSN Management in Tulsa in 2012. He had started his first managed IT company, eMonarch, in 1999 and sold it in 2011.
What was eMonarch?
A Tulsa managed IT company Sean Fullerton started in 1999 as an application service provider — the idea that small businesses should rent servers and software rather than own them — which grew into a flat-fee managed services provider and, in 2009, a hosted-infrastructure provider. It was sold in 2011.
Why did Sean sell eMonarch, and why does he call it a mistake?
He sold to take managed services to a bigger market under leadership he could learn from. Within about fourteen months he found that a large organization moved slowly, his vision no longer steered it, and he had, in his words, traded a business for a job. The lesson — that he is an entrepreneur, not a manager, and that a business exists to serve its stakeholders — is what NSN Management was built on.
Is NSN Management going to be sold?
NSN Management was built to stay Tulsa-owned and owner-led; Sean has already learned firsthand what selling costs. It has grown by serving the same kind of businesses well for a long time — Kaseya/Datto MSP of the Year 2025 and an Inc. 5000 2026 honoree — rather than by becoming part of a bigger ship.
What does the founder do at NSN Management day to day?
He steers: strategy, the planning reviews with clients, and the systems that hold the team accountable. He does not solve tickets; the in-house help desk in Tulsa does, under a written response standard with automatic escalation.