Storage Strategies - Springfield, VA
Steve Mackie spent 20 years in the Navy as a Naval Flight Officer. The last seven years of his career he developed a specialty in managing command, control and communications networks. He provisioned squadrons with local area networks throughout the world, managed all shipboard IT and communications on an aircraft carrier supporting 5,000 customers,and served as the deputy resource sponsor for the Department of Navy’s Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) program.
After retiring from the Navy in 2002, Mackie went to work as a consultant for Sanz, where he learned about the data storage market. While he saw it as a niche market and ripe with opportunity, he thought it was always filled with conflicts of interest. Armed with two decades of military training and an MBA from New Hampshire College, Mackie began to lay the foundation for Storage Strategies.
“I watched many large organizations with significant management issues that were either being ignored or mismanaged and determined that I could do better,” Mackie said. “Ever since I got my MBA, I’ve been dying to exercise the knowledge that I’d gained about how businesses operate. I had an entrepreneur in me that had to get out.”
Storage Strategies is an independent data storage management consulting and engineering firm, providing services such as architecture development, service level development, data backup, recovery assessments, disaster recovery and on-site engineering and infrastructure operations and maintenance.
Founded in 2007 as a side project, Mackie spent his lunch hours and weekends building up the infrastructure – contacts, salaries, benefits, cash flow – and determining how to run the company. Based on his personal experience and observations, Mackie decided to avoid the threat of conflicts of interest by focusing solely on customizing service to each customer.
“Of the 70-plus firms in the U.S. that claim to have a data storage services practice, we are one of the four or five that are free from the conflict of interest inherent in the sale of hardware and software,” Mackie said. “We only sell services. We don’t have any conflicts of interests.”
This differentiation strategy has worked for Storage Strategies, having won a $5 million dollar contract with CACI International supporting the Navy’s Enterprise Maintenance Automated Information System (NEMAIS) Data Center in Norfolk, Va. The company also won a prime contract from Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) in Philadelphia, Pa., providing data storage management services to their data center.
Dun and Bradstreet (D&B), the industry-performance-rating firm, scored Storage Strategies as 96 of 100, rating the company as a top government contracting firm. D&B gauges performance based off of reliability, cost, delivery and quality of service, business relationship and personnel.
“I attribute my success to the work and personal ethic that was ingrained in me by my father and my two decades of service in the Navy,” Mackie said. “The responsibility I carried as an officer in the Navy gave me the confidence and ability to make hard decisions that is necessary to be successful in the business world.”
Work ethic, and ethics in general, play an important role in Mackie’s hiring decisions. That’s why he loves to bring veterans on board with him. This is evident in that every member of the Storage Strategies board of directors is a veteran.
“Veterans go to the top of the resume’ stack,” Mackie said. “I love having the chance to interview and hire a veteran. I don’t have to worry what a person is ethical about; I know what I’m getting.”
Success didn’t come to Mackie without learning some hard lessons first. While federal markets require larger businesses to make use of smaller businesses for contracts, those larger businesses seldom appreciate being reminded of that fact.
“I’ve come to realize that large businesses are not in the business of helping small businesses grow,” Mackie said. “Our leading punch line is our niche expertise and status as the independent trusted agent status. Our SDVOB status is the cherry on top as far as our pitch is concerned.”
For now, Mackie plans to focus on continuing to cultivate the company brand as the independent, trusted services provider in the data storage market. The phones are starting to ring at Storage Strategies, and Mackie looks forward to the challenge of shifting his priorities to dealing with growth.
“I’m not expecting to conquer the world, but my goal had been to finish the year with about nine people, and I’m on track to achieve that number and add another 12 people in the next year,” Mackie said.
“We’re on scaffolding on the down river side of a dam tapping on a leaking crack,” he said. “Eventually the crack’s going to open up and it’s going to get very exciting.”
Written by Michael Crawford