Back in the Internet Stone Age (circa 1997), East Lansing was one of only two cities in the United States with high-speed cable Internet access, and Ryan Vartoogian was a sophomore at Michigan State University with an idea: start a company—which would become Spartan Internet Consulting—offering consulting services for companies that didn’t understand the technology behind, or the potential of, high-speed Internet service.

A scant 11 years later, Vartoogian, on behalf of his 29 employees, accepted the Entrepreneurial Award for Internet Services, saying that Spartan Internet Consulting’s success is due in large part to “those individuals on staff that really make a difference every day helping our clients all over the country [and represent ] Lansing as a great place to live and work.”

Vartoogian grew up in the Detroit area, but fell in love with MSU and the Lansing area when he came here for college. He said he’s been able to leverage a lot of the expertise of the people in the community to help him develop and grow his business, and is delighted that so many people in our area support entrepreneurship, something he said he feels is unique to Lansing. He said that although “what we do could be done from anywhere, I think the culture of the community is very important. There are a lot of attributes that are really hard to replicate in a small market like Lansing. I think that’s what gives it its advantage. It is a small, tight-knit community with these great resources, and we’ve really tried to integrate ourselves within those.”

The idea behind his company “was a combination of two things: one, always really wanting to start a business,” he explained. “My father and his [father] were entrepreneurs.” When the Internet (the second thing) came along, “It was one of those opportunities that just looked so enticing and interesting that you have to get involved with it. I took the leap, and being as young as I was at the time, you don’t know what you don’t know.”

What Vartoogian did know was that, like in the early days of railroads, the Internet offered a unique way for getting things from point A to B. And, like with the railroads, “great fortunes are waiting to be made, and a lot of great opportunities.” For his company, staying at the leading edge of a leading edge industry is of paramount importance to make the most of the opportunities. He said Spartan is “trying to continue to always innovate and be able to deliver new, fresh ideas, and at the same time, ground that innovation in realistic business strategy.”

An example of the company’s cutting edge work is the Spartan Internet Political Performance (SIPP) Index, something he called “the first quantitative measure of Internet-wide performance of each presidential candidate for the 2008 election.” He got the idea for it while watching political coverage on CNN. He said, “With the evolution of social networks and the Internet as a vehicle for the average constituent to really voice an opinion and get involved in the political process… came the question of how you gauge the impact of this Internet channel on the political process.” The SIPP Index accomplishes this by tracking over 650 quantitative factors that measure the levels of support to show how well each candidate does in connecting with individuals over the Internet.

Don’t you wish you’d have thought of that?

Vartoogian believes the keys to his success are “the ability to take that entrepreneurial spirit and to instill it within everybody in the organization so that they’re not constrained by tradition and they’re able to be innovative and to find their own way and make an impact. The second would be the passion for what you do. If you don’t have that, I don’t think you’ll succeed as an entrepreneur; because if you aren’t passionate about what you’re involved with and what you’re trying to do, then you’re not an entrepreneur.”