Cultivated Technology Group was founded in September 2020. Facebook image

As a fourth-generation farmer, John Paul envisioned himself following his family’s footsteps in the agriculture industry. 

John, 29, is the great-grandson of Paul Paul, Armenian immigrant and founder of Pipco Farms in 1930, which operated until the late 1990s. Paul Paul was a longtime member of the Fresno Fair board of directors and is the namesake of the Paul Paul Theatre at the fairgrounds.

Agriculture was not the only industry the Paul family — or John — would come to hang their hat on.

 

Cultivated Technology Group, Inc. carries the legacy of the Paul family’s other business venture that sough to capture the potential of the internet in the early ‘90s and built the foundation for the company John would one day found.

“Our family has been in the community for several generations,” said John, founder of Cultivated Technology Group Inc. “My parents had a gift basket company called ‘Bouquet of Fruits’ that, I would say, is definitely the most notable aside from the fact that we had a very large farming operation in Southeast Fresno.”

With Bouquet of Fruits, the Paul family took advantage of the proliferation of the internet, purchasing domains (some of which are still active to this day) to assist in delivery services for the business.

Eventually, Bouquet of Fruits would come to fulfill orders for national companies including 1-800-Flowers, Costco and other major national retailers.

By the early 2000s, the company had about half a dozen programmers and graphic designers on staff.

“Looking back now, that was a little bit insane,” Paul said.

After the family farm shut down in 1996, Paul, who grew up envisioning himself taking over the family farming business, eventually found himself at the helm of a budding IT company with a team that included longtime employees of Bouquet of Fruits.

“We actually have members of that original team that have seen me grow up my whole life that are here on this staff,” he said.

Founded in September 2020, Cultivated Technology Group works to ensure IT solutions are never a challenge to find. Building custom made software, as well as providing IT assistance, consulting, web design, maintenance and more, the company models itself on the basic principle of finding the most direct answers to IT problems.

Cultivated, in fact, creates much of its services in house, allowing it to have more thorough knowledge of their operating systems for maintenance and development.

“My philosophy behind software was never ‘let’s find off the shelf; let’s always build around the company and build the direct solution,’” Paul said. “I think for a time, being custom software was a little bit intimidating. But I think, now more than ever, with the modern tools there’s a lot more openness.”

Cultivated’s original service — enabling counselors to communicate with students with direct parent involvement — is a prime example of the company’s “build it for them” mindset.

“You have a school district that may have less than 20,000 students; they don’t have their own IT and programming teams on staff like some of the bigger districts,” Paul said. “So we kind of fit that little niche where we can provide them with tools or help build them tools based on their budget.”

Despite having a primary background in agriculture, Paul’s team at Cultivated has backgrounds in the education sector,  automotive industry and other areas, providing expertise to assist in the company’s wide reach of available IT services.

“We work on everything from websites all the way through to custom programs to then assuming projects, finishing and delivering them, and then managing them,” Paul said. “We’ve kind of got a different plethora of opportunities that we engage in with these clients.”

Paul said that Cultivated Technology likes to use the term “CTO [chief technology officer] on demand,” adding that a lot of companies are geared toward the concept of mobile services that can be aimed directly at the customer.

“We’re taking that same approach to say ‘we’re here however you want us to be here with you, and we can customize our engagement at just about any level that you need us to,” Paul said, adding that Cultivated can provide weekly checkups and services, or more infrequent health checks on IT systems.

Cultivated currently has more than 40 clients across the state and clear to the East Coast.

Paul estimates that roughly 80% of clients are in the Central Valley, but through searches and word of mouth, the company has found clientele out of state due to their work in the field.

Paul says that Cultivated takes a lot of pride in where they are founded.

“They [clients] know how prideful we are to be working here in our Valley,” Paul said. “We’re never going to turn down people that can recognize what we do here and what we’ve done with our past lives and how we’ve brought it all together. The advisory that we have from the outside coming in — it’s something special. And we can share that with people.”

Cultivated Technology Group Inc. can be reached at cultivatedtg.com, or by phone at (559) 680-0511. The company office is located at 11178 CA-41 BUS, Suite 104 in Madera.