Mark Shaw is on a hot streak.
He knows the pandemic has been tough on people and on companies, but for a computer firm, a Managed Service Provider such as Stored Technology Solutions, Inc., the pandemic has been, he admitted sheepishly, good for his company’s bottom line.
The company’s local home is a nondescript warehouse-style building near the Warren County airport. The open design, with space to sit on a couch and watch TV or stretch on a yoga mat, feels a bit more like the Google campus than a warehouse in Queensbury. The company--Shaw is founder and president--also has offices in Plattsburgh, Albany and Raleigh, N.C., interconnected with large video screens.
When the pandemic hit, many companies, including other MSPs, were caught flat-footed. Since 2017, StoredTech had been helping growing companies by providing full-service tech support and moving operations into the cloud.
It paid off during a pandemic when everything moved into the cloud, which is more complex than people may realize.
“Work-from-home creates chaos,” he said. “Everything is a [potential] security breach."
For companies such as a doctor’s or dentist’s office, the move is not simply helping the staff use an online version of a word processor, but having secure access to patient files, billing and other sensitive information. If a company has 50 people working from home, that’s 50 networks that the MSP has to secure, he said.
The forced shift to the cloud is driving some of the $2 million to $3 million in growth this year, he said, but he credits a solid client base and great customer service. He is looking for clients to be “delighted,” he said. "Our referrals have been through the roof.”
Shaw said the company has picked up clients from California to Italy, and has added 2.5 new clients a week so far this year. Part of managing that growth will be to assure smaller clients that StoredTech is still agile enough to help them.
With that comes the need for people who can do the job. StoredTech has hired 11 people since December and plans for another eight in the coming months.
"Five new [people] just started today," he said in an interview on Monday April 5.
To onboard all the new hires, he turns to the Archetypes, to “culture talk.”
This was something born when they had reached 15 or 20 employees and their website was getting upgraded. The marketing firm handling it asked about the culture of the company, about the Culture Talk system.
In his own experience working in large companies, Shaw knew of Myers-Briggs, 6 Sigma and Culture Talk, systems that help organizations communicate better through understanding, in this case, of their fundamental personality types, their archetypes.
Corporate America "can do some really dumb stuff, but they can do good things, too,” he said. "I was all jazzed when I heard about [Culture Talk] for the website.”
Now, everyone has listed on their cubicle name plates--and included in their office directory information--which archetypes, of the 12 options, they fill. Yearly, they talk about the archetypes and how to communicate with one another through them. They talk about how to converse with clients, how to converse with each other. Those people the company is hiring have already taken their tests and been given a archetypal profile.
"We had a great debate on it today," he said yesterday. They hired a person with a brand new archetypical profile. "I'm a little flustered,” Shaw, a Hero, Caregiver, Jester, Revolutionary, Ruler, admitted. "Maybe this will be kind of cool experiment.”
On April 2, the company celebrated 11 years in business.