Stoneworks has experienced a growth spurt during the pandemic, but will now get a chance to prove its mettle on a bigger stage after being acquired by Toronto-based Fulcrum IT Partners.
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When Jody Burton and David Chow launched their own IT consulting business nearly a quarter-century ago, their long-term career goals did not necessarily include building a $100-million-revenue company.
“Our initial mission statement was to buy golf clubs, to take an all-inclusive trip and maybe (earn) some extra beer money,” Burton, the co-founder and CEO of Stoneworks Technologies, says with a chuckle.
“Here we are 23 years later, doing revenues in excess of 125 million bucks.”
The venture that Burton and Chow launched in the fall of 2000 has indeed grown into an IT powerhouse, even if most people don’t realize it.
Stoneworks, which resells hardware and software from vendors such as Cisco, Dell, Hitachi and VMware and packages it into tailor-made solutions for its clients, has experienced a massive growth spurt during the pandemic.
The company’s revenues have nearly doubled over the past three fiscal years, thanks to a growing base of more than 500 customers that includes federal government departments such as the Canada Revenue Agency and Environment Canada, as well as corporate giants like Ciena and Nokia.
Yet amid all that success, the Stoneworks crew has been perfectly happy to stay under the radar.
“Going out there and waving your hand and telling people that you’re bigger and better and all of that kind of stuff just isn’t really who we are,” Burton says matter-of-factly.
Long a dominant player in the Ottawa market, Stoneworks will now get a chance to prove its mettle on a much bigger stage.
Earlier this month, the 25-employee firm was acquired by Toronto-based Fulcrum IT Partners. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Fulcrum’s growing portfolio of technology companies includes organizations in rapidly expanding fields like artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and cloud services. The Stoneworks deal is the Toronto’s firm’s third acquisition of 2023 as it extends its reach from coast to coast.
“With over a million SMEs in Canada, the opportunity for growth and the increasing demand for digitization and new technologies presents a perfect landscape for Stoneworks and Fulcrum to help Canadian businesses optimize, serve, and scale,” Fulcrum chief strategy officer Kelly Carter said in a statement.
Burton says he and Chow, the firm’s co-founders and co-owners, weren’t itching to make a deal when they were first approached by Fulcrum’s leadership late last year. But the Toronto company’s persistent sales pitch ultimately paid off.
“The more and more that my business partner and I slept on it, we just said, ‘This really does make sense,’” explains Burton, who is staying on as Stoneworks’ chief executive as the firm becomes a standalone entity under the Fulcrum umbrella. “It just seemed like a perfect marriage.”
Fulcrum’s extensive portfolio includes organizations that do business in Canada, the U.S. and the United Kingdom, giving Stoneworks exposure to a much broader range of geographic markets and verticals, Burton explains – especially in fields that are “exploding” like AI and cybersecurity.
“These guys basically said, ‘We want to build a global IT powerhouse,’” he says of Fulcrum. “As much as (AI and cybersecurity) have been part of our foundational toolkit … there are new companies within the Fulcrum IT family that are way further down that path.
“It kind of supercharges our portfolio and what we’ve been able to provide our clients over the years. We continue to have the DNA of a $125-million company, but we’re now part of a billion-dollar consortium. We have a far more robust portfolio than we had before.”
It’s a place Burton and Chow probably never would have dreamed they’d end up when they hatched their IT venture all those years ago.
The veteran sales executives had spent years cultivating a blue-chip client roster for Rebel.com, which specialized in making networking systems for Linux, Unix and Windows operating systems and became one of Ottawa’s best-known technology firms before collapsing during the dot-com bust.
“The whole Rebel thing didn’t quite play out the way we had hoped that it would,” Burton says. “We learned a lot from that.”
Applying lessons from the school of hard knocks and tapping into the connections they’d made, Burton and Chow gradually built a company that has stood the test of time.
And Burton believes the best is yet to come.
“I’ve definitely got a lot of steam left in my tank,” he says. “I’m quite energized. We already had a really well-running machine and our car was really fast, and now we’re throwing some high-test fuel in it. For me, that’s very exciting.”
