Courtesy of StoredTech
By Paul Post
If he ever feels the need for a career change, David Andrade would make a great big league general manager.
“Building a company is almost like building a baseball team,” said the new president of Queensbury-based StoredTech. “We’re definitely looking for veterans out there who have done it before. But we also want the new person who is hungry, willing to put in the time and effort, and wants to learn and grow with an organization.”
Andrade succeeds Mark Shaw, who founded StoredTech 14 years ago and continues as its chief executive officer.
“I really looked in the mirror and said, ‘Obviously we want to continue to grow StoredTech in a massive way’,” Shaw said. “We’ve doubled and tripled growth almost every year. But as a business owner it’s easy to make mistakes. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to shortcut some of the mistakes we might make.’ The best way to do that and continue accelerated growth is to bring in somebody who’s done this before at a bigger scale, a bigger level, somebody who is aligned with our goals and company mantra of ‘customer delight’.”
StoredTech is a leading, full managed service provider that supports hundreds of clients with all aspects of IT so they can focus on their core business. StoredTech not only implements clients’ technology, but monitors it as well.
“We insure that the client is getting all they can out of the technology they’re utilizing,” Andrade said. “A lot of managed service providers sell technology. StoredTech is selling not only solutions, but the use of technology and how to become a better, much more competitive business with the use of technology. That’s much different than what I’ve seen in the industry over the years.”
Courtesy of StoredTech
Andrade comes to StoredTech, located near Floyd Bennett Memorial Airport, following a 16-year career at Boston-based Eze Castle Integration, a $100 million-plus company, where he rose through the ranks to become chief executive officer.
StoredTech, with about 70 employees, is expected to have gross revenue of nearly $20 million this year. “We work with companies from Hudson Headwaters to West Point,” Shaw said. “We have a very large regional and global presence from the U.S. to Ireland, the United Kingdom, Italy and Japan. We have hundreds of clients on a global scale, but continue to focus on our communities.”
He founded the firm with just two employees in a Glens Falls home-based office in April 2010. It has grown exponentially to includes offices and facilities in Albany, Raleigh, N.C. and The Philippines.
StoredTech ranks among the Capital Region’s fastest growing companies and made the Times Union’s “Top Work Places” list in 2022 and 2023. It also has consistently appeared in Inc. Magazine’s 5000 fastest-growing companies list.
In March 2022, StoredTech successfully completed the Service Organization Control 2 Type 2 audit, which ensures compliance with leading industry standards for managing enterprise data. SOC2 is a technical auditing process used to validate the systems and controls designed by an organization to secure its customer data.
Two months later, StoredTech announced the acquisition of Raleigh-based NOAH IT, LLC.
“Today we kind of own the market north of Albany,” Andrade said. “I definitely feel we can make our way all the way down to New York City with potential expansion deeper into Carolinas and the entire Eastern Seaboard to Florida as well.”
Handing off day-to-day operations to someone else was no easy decision, or process, for Shaw.
“StoredTech is my baby. To say, ‘I trust you to take care of this’ is a big step, a big risk,” he said. “Am I picking the right person? Will they carry on the legacy? Will they do the things I would do? There’s a lot of things you ask yourself. The answer is that it was a process that took more than a year to implement.”
Andrade emerged as the right choice after a review of more than 400 resumes and 70 interviews.
“It took a long time to vet this person,” Shaw said. “It’s not something I considered lightly. Our senior leadership engaged with him, we spoke to his references and also used a recruiter. I believe David has fully embraced the StoredTech concept of customer delight, putting clients and employees first; promoting from within. Everything I would be doing, I see him doing on an accelerated pace. He’s acting and thinking as an owner and putting all the right priorities I had in place.”
Andrade came on board six months ago, but didn’t officially become company president until June 1. Shaw said this was a deliberate step to let Andrade get immersed in the company culture, and let clients and employees get to know him before making an otherwise surprise, perhaps even shocking, announcement.
Andrade expects continued strong revenue growth while increasing staff to diversify the services StoredTech provides.
“The next goal is how do we become a 100-person organization?” he said. “We continue to recruit and hire local talent. For me personally, a track record of starting and finishing something is always important. The most important characteristics for anybody are aptitude and a desire to learn. If you can get those components with any kind of experience, especially around the tech side, it’s a huge plus although technology can be trained.”
New advanced technology departments around networking and security have built a career path and growth opportunity for employees.
Previously, people went to a traditional office and everyone worked at a computer in the same building. There was one network, one set of servers.
But COVID sent everybody home.
Now with some companies there’s a hybrid workplace in which people mostly work from home and come to the office once or twice per week. Or the firm has a fully remote modern workforce where everything is in the cloud and employees need a phone and laptop with them at all times.
“In an office with one network connection you just need to make sure that network is secure,” Shaw said. “In today’s world, where people are working at home and coffee shops there are a million different endpoints where people can be connected so your security needs change. Today everybody is everywhere. The office is wherever you want to be. As the world changed, we had to change and adapt so that’s what we’re doing. We build service around the kind of company you are . old-school in-house, hybrid or fully remote. That’s kind of where we’re evolving to as companies have evolved.”