About Kohlisys

A small shop that's been quietly keeping the internet on for thirteen years.

Founded 2013

Team 7 humans

Based Maryland

Clients today 38 active

01 — Story

Why we started, and why we never grew past nine people.

Kohlisys started in 2013 with one client, one server, and a strong opinion about what was wrong with the IT services industry. Thirteen years later, we still have strong opinions — but now we have receipts.

We've watched our peers raise money, hire aggressively, and become exactly the kind of shop their founders started out trying to avoid: slow, expensive, full of account managers, light on engineers. We didn't want that. So we capped ourselves at nine humans, kept rates fair, kept the founder in code, and grew by referral only.

Today we serve about 38 active clients — a mix of small businesses, nonprofits, and primes who subcontract us into government-adjacent work. Some clients have been with us all 13 years. Several started as "just a quick fix" engagements and never left.

If you're a small or mid-sized business that's been burned by an agency, ghosted by a freelancer, or watched a six-figure project quietly die — we've probably heard your story before. We'd like to hear it again.

02 — Team

Seven people
who answer the phone.

No account managers. No project coordinators. The person who scopes your work is the person who writes the code is the person who emails you when the build is done.

Jaswinder Singh

FOUNDER & PRINCIPAL ENGINEER

Custom software, Drupal, AWS. Thirteen years running Kohlisys, twenty in the trade.

DRUPAL AWS ARCHITECTURE

Asha Rao

SENIOR WORDPRESS ENGINEER

WordPress core contributor, ten years building marketing sites and headless WP apps.

WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE HEADLESS

Diego Marín

DEVOPS & HOSTING LEAD

On-call rotation, monitoring, incident response. Sleeps so you can.

AWS LINUX OBSERVABILITY

Priya Shah

ENGAGEMENT & CLIENT LEAD

Runs discovery, manages timelines, and writes the status notes you actually read.

DISCOVERY PM STRATEGY

03 — Principles

Six rules
we don't break.

After 13 years and several mistakes, we've boiled how we work down to a small list. We write it on the wall. We tell clients in the first meeting. We mean it.

/ 01

Boring tech, on purpose

We pick stacks we can still hire for in five years. New is not better.

/ 02

Status notes in plain English

You should never need a translator to understand where your project stands.

/ 03

Senior people on the keyboard

The person you meet in discovery writes the code. No bait-and-switch.

/ 04

We host what we build

If we built it, we keep it running. No throwing it over the fence.

/ 05

Show your working

Demo on Fridays. Weekly status notes. Code in your repo, not ours.

/ 06

Stay small enough to mean it

We cap our headcount on purpose so the same senior team can stay close to every client.

04 — Timeline

Thirteen years, told in eight bullets.

2013

Founded in Northern Virginia

One developer, one client, one stubborn idea: that IT services could be honest.

2015

First hosting contract

Our first long-term managed-hosting client — still with us a decade later.

2018

Hit 50 active engagements

Crossed 50 simultaneous builds + retainers. Hired our second engineer.

2021

Drupal practice formalised

Stood up a dedicated Drupal-support practice after one too many D7 rescue jobs.

2024

SOC 2 controls package

Rolled out a SOC 2 controls package for regulated-industry clients.

2026

Same phone number. Different decade.

Thirteen years in. Still the same number printed on the original business card.

05 — In their words

We've been with three agencies in eight years. Kohlisys is the only one where I haven't had to ask twice. They built our portal, they host it, they fixed the thing the last guys broke — and they explain things like a person.

COO, field-services client (anonymised at the client's request)