Profiles of Innovation
The startup king: Gimmal's David Quackenbush is driven to make risky newcompanies fit
I've met David Quackenbush twice. On both occasions 95 percent of the conversation was about CrossFit and the remaining five percent was reluctantly spent talking business.
"CrossFit has become a new passion of mine from a fitness perspective which I've gotten into over the past year and half, so that's a lot of fun and at times a bit insane," he says.
It's hard to not appreciate a guy who can balance being "Mr. Quackenbush" in his professional capacity as president of Gimmal Group and "Quack" when he's upside down performing handstand pushups in a WOD (Workout Of the Day).
"You've got to have a way to blow off some steam," he says.
It's hard to not appreciate a guy who can balance being "Mr. Quackenbush" in his professional capacity as president of Gimmal Group and "Quack" when he's upside down performing handstand pushups in a WOD.
Born in New Jersey, Quackenbush moved to Houston when he was 4 years old. After graduating from Winchester High School in 1979 and Texas A&M University, with a bachelor of science in economics, in 1984, he spent a few years in the insurance and food industries before getting into the IT business after a holiday party introduction led to a consulting job with Arthur Young.
"That was my introduction to the IT consulting business," he recalls. "I guess as they say, the rest is history as it's what I've done for the last 20 years."
Prior to joining Gimmal he was president of CPSG, a national consulting firm in the areas of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Identity Management, and held positions with Comsys, Lante Corporation and Luminant Worldwide. "I've enjoyed being involved with start-ups. I've done it three times now and timing is particularly important since you can't control it so it's always a risk," he says.
In 2008, Quackenbush was brought in to run the operations side of the Gimmal Group, a technology consulting and software company focused on documents and records management. But, he says, "My enjoyment is not sitting behind a desk operating things, my enjoyment is being out and in front of clients working on and solving problems."
The company, with 100 employees, is headquartered in Houston and maintains offices in Dallas, Austin and Portland where they acquired a software company last year.
With growth comes challenge and Quackenbush acknowledges that what keeps him up at night is finding and keeping the right people. "The success of your business survives on having a really good team, which we have, but when you're growing so fast it's just very challenging to find the right people you need."
