Featured in:Th i rd Quarter 2011

FAMILYBUSINESSO f f i c i a l m a g a z i n e o f t h e

Massachusetts

In 1994, David and Catherine Gravel had just had their fourth child, had just finished building their home, and had David’s ag-

ing father move in with them. And David didn’t have a job, having just helped sell SelecTerm, the computer-leasing company for which he’d worked for nine years, to GE Capital.

It seemed like the perfect time to start a business from scratch.

“I thought it would be dif!cult for him to go back to being an employee” after the sale of SelecTerm, because of the autonomy he had enjoyed as a manager there, says Catherine, now GraVoc’s vice president. She was also con-cerned that because of the family’s growth, if David did take another secure job, it would be all the harder for him to leave if he were not happy with the employment arrangement. And that’s how GraVoc Associates Inc. was born.

It turns out that climbing up the possibility tree without getting stuck out on a limb is a company specialty. The business’ main focus?

If it’s an IT problem or challenge, it’s whatever you’ve got.

Growth By OsmosisGraVoc Associates Inc., the information sys-

tems, information-security and information-technology consulting company David and Catherine co-founded with a partner, Susan Vo-catura (who left the company in the 1990s), to-day exceeds $3 million in annual sales and has 20 employees, who service the Northeast, primarily New England. Its proprietary systems include property management, business-process man-agement, health care, and cemetery manage-ment, all designed to help clients manage inven-tory and business processes. It’s headquartered on downtown Peabody’s main drag. And all four of the Gravel children – Brian, Nate, Katrina and Sarah – work there.

David Gravel , who holds an MBA from Bab-son College, also has !rst-hand experience in the evolution of IT over the last 20 years. His ex-perience at SelecTerm gave him a grounding in both accounting and IT, because the company’s clients included large !nancial institutions. The challenge: melding the two disciplines together in a way that a non-tech accountant could love. In the early 1990s, IT was still in the hands (and

CLIMBING THE POSSIBILITY TREE

YOUR TECH PROBLEMS ARE THIS FAMILY’S BUSINESSBy Christina P. O’Neill

brains) of tech specialists. The technology was not user-friendly; command-prompt had yet to give way to drop-down menus and desktop icons. And memory capacity for a typical computer was a fraction of the capacity of today’s average digi-tal camera CF card. As for outside storage, a 3.5 inch "oppy disk held 1.44 megabytes of data.

David Gravel had come to believe that there was a market for automated accounting processes among small to midsized businesses. An example of the need: A construction company that used a refrigerator-sized computer that took all night to

process one iteration of the general ledger.To improve such performance, computers

would have to be networked. This was a do-it-yourself proposition, and customizations were tough. Inter-operability between different pro-grams was relatively rare. If a custom application met 80 percent of a user’s needs, it was consid-ered good.

Gravel’s knowledge base grew by osmosis – a favorite word he uses when describing GraVoc’s evolution. He relied on the Accounting Solutions Library at !rst, to determine how many solutions

POSSIBILITY The Gravel family in their Peabody of!ce. Seated: Company co-founder David Gravel. Standing, left to right: Nate Gravel, Brian Gravel, Catherine Gravel and Katrina Gravel.

PHOTOS: CHRISTINA P. O’NEILL

might be available in the accounting !eld. He soon made connections with experts who advised him on equipment essentials. The network platform he developed used Micro-soft Access on the front-end, where data was input. Then came the hard part – convinc-ing accounting !rms he could make a net-work that worked. Once that milestone was achieved, interest in the process spread out to non-accounting !rms.

The more exposure the company got, the more work came in. The construction company referred a roo!ng company; that company referred him to a Chinese food company, which referred him to a produce marketer, and so on. And once it built sys-tems for its clients, the systems needed support. “Business grew by not saying no,” Gravel says. “We took what was there.”

Creating New MarketsThen came Y2K. As the 1990s neared their

end, GraVoc’s customer base started chang-ing. In addition to colleges and power plants, banks, concerned about the potential for systems failure, created a burgeoning market for disaster-recovery products and increased storage capacity.

Gravel would visit a prospective client for a complementary two-day audit and would !nd several areas that required work. The client’s network, its information system, in-formation security, and custom development were all disparate disciplines. He addressed all these segments, to diversify the company’s !elds of work. If one segment wasn’t going well, others would make up for it.

Solving the IT problems of clients has re-sulted in creation of new markets. GraVoc teamed up with !ve cemeteries to develop what is now the GraVoc Cemetery Manage-ment System. Now used by 14 cemeteries, it’s an electronic database of information that once resided only in books and cards, mak-ing it available to management, users, and kin of the deceased. One cemetery, established in 1865, came to GraVoc with records that dated back only to 1989 on an old Unix data-base that only represented a fraction of total interments. A major scanning and data-entry initiative got all the records on a system that mimicked the original Unix database, mak-ing them all accessible for the !rst time.

Basic IT support for !nancial institutions is a staple. Six years ago, Haverhill Bank, the state’s oldest co-op bank, contacted the company seeking help for more timely reso-

lution of network problems than their exist-ing provider could supply. The bank’s audi-tor recommended GraVoc. Within a year of that !rst call, Haverhill decided to give the company all of its IT business, through GraVoc’s Information Security services.

“They’re our !rst call,” says Patrick Dw-yer, executive vice president and treasurer. “They understand our needs.” GraVoc helped the bank pick a vendor for a new phone system, and helped with a software upgrade. After a merger, for which system integration took place over a weekend, Gra-Voc helped the bank reopen the next Mon-day without a glitch, Dwyer says.

Enter The Second GenerationCatherine Gravel, who encouraged her

husband to start his own business rather than seek a secure job, worked in the medi-cal !eld until starting a family. She then started her own home-based seamstress business, and became actively involved in the business when the youngest child, Sar-ah, entered grade school.

As the Gravel children grew up, the !rst contact they had with the family business was cleaning the of!ce on weekends, which they describe as “the proverbial rite of pas-sage.” That chore currently falls to Sarah, who does data entry as well.

Nate Gravel, now director of information security, was the !rst of the second genera-tion to join the company, in 2004, going full time in 2008. He worked in the of!ce on winter and summer breaks. Nate holds a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s in Spanish, and served as a guest lecturer in Latin American studies at Salem State College. He originally thought of GraVoc

work as a temporary engagement until he could !nd a teaching job. But once he did so, he found reality was not what he had expected. The reckoning point, he says, was teaching a course in Latin American history. The course was taught in English, and he realized that many students were taking it because it was seen as an easy credit. “I had passion for the material,” he says, “but no-body else did.”

He’s now fully engaged in an essential part of GraVoc’s business, conducting re-search for information security: risk man-agement and compliance, IT assurance, and audit. He has obtained certi!cations of CISA, CISM, CRISC and MCP.

Brian Gravel, the oldest of the second generation, took a completely different path. He holds a bachelor’s degree in com-munications from Quinnipiac University, and worked in the media industry for nearly a decade. He co-founded DivergingSoul Media Production in 2006 with Matthew Molk. However, it became clear that !lm and music weren’t going to be their bread and butter. One-third of their work was referrals for web and media services from GraVoc clients. “We took on every project we could,” Brian says, developing websites that can be found ef!ciently through search engine optimization. DivergingSoul was acquired by GraVoc in 2010, but kept its name. “It was a good move strategically for us,” Brian says. DivergingSoul has a studio and a green room in the GraVoc building, and Molk is now an associate in media.

Katrina Gravel joined the !rm in 2010 after graduating from Colby College with a bachelor’s degree in English. She’s an as-sociate, and started out doing the !ling and

David Gravel !nds time to engage in community affairs, as well as running the business. He’s currently a sitting City Councilor-At-Large in Peabody.

data entry that Sarah now does. She found that she enjoyed the work and that there was plenty of it. After discussion with her par-ents, they agreed to bring her on board as a full time employee in the fall of last year. She focuses on marketing, social media and community outreach, and is elemental in creating the company’s website and blog – “putting my English degree to good use,” she notes – and learning the HR duties of payroll processing, billing, bene!ts and more. She schedules part-time employees for projects, and this spring, developed a summer internship program for two college students, who will work with staff.

A Business With Community Roots

The town of Peabody can be misleading if one’s only view of it is the tech valley drive-by on Route 128. It’s a blend of old and new. Drive into the heart of town and you’re on a surprisingly busy Main Street full of early 20th century buildings. Revolutionary War history nests cheek by jowl with the North

Shore Mall, one of the country’s !rst outdoor shopping centers, which opened in 1958. (A Revolutionary War-era grave was moved dur-ing its construction, and the mall ownership subsequently created a monument to the dis-placed patriot. Ironically, perhaps, Peabody is not a GraVoc Cemetery Management cus-tomer.)

The Rotary Club is active in Peabody, and Catherine Gravel is an active member and past president. There’s a new YMCA, for which DivergingSoul created a comprehen-sive fundraising video in spring of 2009, and GraVoc is a big supporter of activities of the Peabody Education Council, of which David Gravel is chairman. He also served eight years on the Peabody School Committee and is currently a sitting city councilor-at-large. As an alumnus of Salem State College, he is now a member of the school’s Center for Entre-preneurial Activities Alumni Advisory Board.

He says the company’s three main charita-ble endeavors are !ghting cancer – his mother died of it when he was young; immigrants, drawn from his nine years’ experience at the

Massachusetts Department of Education’s Migrant Program, working with the chil-dren of migrant farmers and !shermen; and improving living conditions in Peabody. He credits Catherine with being the prime mover behind the community efforts, and notes that Katrina has taken over much of the work as-sociated with the Peabody Educational Coun-cil.

It’s clear that David Gravel is proud of the accomplishments of the second generation. “The part that’s amazed me the most is how comfortable they are in front of CEOs and presidents,” he says.

“Business is so ingrained in our family, it’s hard not to become part of it,” says Nate Gravel. He notes that the company’s anything-you’ve-got approach to client solutions has of-fered employees an abundance of opportunities to increase their professional comfort zones. “We use what we know and leverage it against what we don’t know,” he says.

CHRISTINA O’NEILL IS EDITOR OF MASSACHUSETTS FAMILY BUSINESS MAGAZINE.