CFO Intelligence Magazine – Fall 2022
Ron Gaboury
Yorktel, Executive Officer
Ron Gaboury joined York Telecom, or Yorktel, in 1995 as the company’s CFO. He wasn’t named CEO until 2011, but Gaboury was given a great deal of latitude by the company’s founder, Dr. York Wang, to make most business decisions starting as far back as 1999, when he was appointed President and Chief Operating Officer. Gaboury and Yorktel — an IT solutions and managed services provider for commercial, education, medical and public sector clients — have had a good run and continue to do so.
The year he joined York Telecom — which is headquartered in Eatontown, N.J. — the company posted about $4 million in revenue. By 2021, annual revenue was about $140 million. Yorktel propelled its growth through a flexible management approach, a series of strategic acquisitions, and a specific mindset of leveraging the company’s know-how and assets to optimize opportunities in the marketplace. One such example is the 2019 launch of a separate company, Caregility — where Gaboury, the Co-Founder and Chairman, also serves as CEO.
Originally started as a healthcare line of business within Yorktel, Caregility’s cloud-based telehealth platform was born out of a recognition that the healthcare industry had an unfulfilled need for telehealth systems that were purpose-built for a mission-critical application within in-hospital ICU settings. There was also a need for continuous and proactive monitoring, and a platform-based solution to eliminated technology silos. By 2019, its successful adoption by several major healthcare systems made it clear that it was time to separate the line of business into a standalone company
A DIVERSE APPROACH TO GROWTH
“Yorktel’s growth until around 2000 had been organic — our customer base was basically federal agencies,” Gaboury says. “We had wanted to break into commercial markets, but the dot-com bubble-burst and subsequent recession put those plans on hold until 2004. At that point, however, we started to acquire other service providers, including the ISDN division of Madge Networks in 2000, and an audio-visual company, Univision Crimson Group, in 2006.” In the pre-broadband days, the Madge ISDN acquisition established Yorktel as a significant digital connectivity player. Successive acquisitions built on that and brought the company into the secure webcasting and video streaming services segments.