Meet Justin
Although Justin has spent the last 23 years working in the corporate software and telecommunications industry, prior to that, he developed a soft spot in his heart for working with special needs individuals during his early years of college while attending Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas and working for Developmental Services of Northwest Kansas (DNSWK). During this time he worked in 2 different group behavior homes for developmentally disabled men where the overall goal was to provide support for these individuals with a wide range of abilities and disabilities and assist them in learning as many basic living skills as each individual was capable of learning ranging anywhere from self care, meal preparation, performing house chores, interacting in leisure activities, and overall behavior management. Although it’s been many years since he worked there, Justin learned as much from them in terms of how simple it is to be a decent and contributing human being as he hopes they learned from him in terms of the living skills he was trying to teach. Justin looks forward to finally being in a position to utilize the knowledge he obtained in the pursuit of an MBA within an organization that is capable of growing and providing as many services as possible to serve a usually underrated population that many times only needs a little bit of added support to live fulfilling and successful lives.
Justin Dale Lemman
A transplant to Texas originating from sparsely populated Western Kansas, Justin has been happily married to Shelly since 2002. In the early years of their marriage while Shelly was holding down the fort as a stay at home wife and mom, Justin was busy supporting voicemail technicians and working to obtain his MBA from The University of Texas - Arlington which he completed in 2008. Then, while Shelly was transitioning from a stay at home mom to preschool teacher and then extending her own education to earn her MS in Special Education, Justin expanded his knowledge in IT and computer software and transitioned from Technical Support Engineer to DQA and finally to Software Developer where he worked his way up to Senior Developer and worked with everything from Microsoft SQL, JAVA, MySQL, C#, JavaScript, etc, etc. While Shelly was stepping away from simply contracting her services to forming her own business, Justin gave advice, shared ideas, and assisted from the sidelines as much as time allowed while he constantly attempted to keep abreast of emerging technologies and software changes. Once it was obvious that the company Shelly started had reached the point where additional growth was going to require the hiring of full time employees and opportunities for expansion were just within reach, discussions began on whether it was feasible for Justin to step away from the software world and take a permanent position applying his previously obtained MBA skills to help run Innovative Ways. This didn’t happen, however, until over a year later after already hiring the first full time employee at Innovative Ways and Justin’s Software Developer position was eliminated along with many others from the company that he had worked at for the last 23 years. Instead of seeking continued employment in the corporate world, Justin and Shelly decided it was time to fully invest his efforts into the company Shelly started and he moved into the role of CEO to run the business aspects of Innovative Ways, freeing Shelly up to do what she does best for the company, facilitating relationships to benefit people faced with disabilities.