Julie Lott Taking up the entire 18th floor of the Wilbur Smith Building at the corner of Gervais Street and Sumter Street, VC3 is a high–tech firm on a highangle growth pattern. Begun in 1994, VC3 has grown since 2005 from 51 full–time employees to 78 today. For the same time, revenue has jumped 187 percent. Julie Lott, who works on the web development team, has been with VC3 more than seven years.

Lott was born in Greenville, where her father worked for Exxon, making Lott something of an Exxon brat. The family moved to Macon, then to Atlanta, and eventually to Columbia by way of Charlotte, all before Lott entered Dent Middle School. From Dent she grew into Spring Valley High School, where she skipped a grade to go to Clemson.

Lott has an older sister Kathy, who has retired to Beaufort. Her older brother Joe works in sales in Wilmington, North Carlina. Her parents have retired, and they live in both Lake Wylie and their beach house at Edisto.

Lott’s intentions in horticulture at Clemson didn’t hold, and she transferred to the business program at USC after one semester. She focused on marketing. While still a student Lott interned with Columbia’s Stan Smith, the head of Standard Savings & Loan at the corner of Washington Street and Main Street.

Almost immediately after college graduation, Lott married and took off for Del Rio, Texas, her husband’s Air Force assignment. Her husband shifted his career direction and left the Air Force. Both Lotts connected with NCR at the company headquarters in Dayton, Ohio, and transferred back to Columbia.

Beginning in 2000, Lott went to work for Steeleye Technology, which bought pieces of NCR. After three years with Steeleye Technology, Lott went out on her own as a free–lance consultant, mostly in technical documentation development. In almost no time, she took an offer from VC3 to work in project management.

Lott and her husband Claude have two daughters. The older, Emily, is a freshman who plans to major in business at USC’s Columbia campus. Katie, a junior at Richland Northeast, is thinking about theater when she gets to college, wherever that may be.

Lott’s position at VC3 put her pushing a new product, TestView, among Midlands schools. The product is integrated into a student information system, so school teachers and administrators can see everything about each student in one place. What’s been called TestView is now Excent, which is already in every school district in the state for the purposes of special education. Each special education student must have an individualized education plan. For the rest of the students in the state, Excent is in 53 school districts out of the 89 total.

For moving Excent across the country, VC3 has partnered with a company in Atlanta.

The Lotts are members at Rockbridge out North Trenholm Road, near where they live. A 3.5 tennis league competitor, Lott plays across the Midlands, depending on competition schedules and court sites.

And she has to say, “Where do the USC kids play tennis? There’s nothing approaching tennis court adequacy, certainly when we look around other major universities in the region. USC doesn’t have anything near the number of courts we had when we were in school. And the Columbia Tennis Center on Wheeler Hill? What’s that? A dried river bed?”