Imagine you’re a bride whose wedding is only two weeks away when your soon-to-be husband comes home and tells you that he’s quit his job to open his own IT business. For some, this might be a deal breaker, but for David and Aubri Stone, this was an opportunity to forge a new path in the IT industry that took a proactive, rather than reactive, approach to providing robust technology solutions to business owners.
Back in the ’90s, there was no such thing as an MSP IT firm, and David was fed up with how traditional break-fix IT firms were being run at the time. “I was asking myself: Why are we waiting until the service delivery model breaks to address it? Why are we waiting until our clients’ systems get infected with a virus when we should be implementing protective protocols so they don’t get infected in the first place?” David recalls. These were the questions that he grappled with in the weeks leading up to his wedding, which ultimately led him to create Cybertools, an MSP that serves business across the Pacific Northwest.
The Creation of Cybertools
Although Aubri and David now run Cybertools together, David has always been the technology tinkerer—especially as a young boy. He got his first computer, a Commodore 64, in the seventh grade. This computer immediately sparked an interest in breaking down technology to understand how it works, a passion he’s been pursuing ever since. He stuck with his computer courses throughout high school and community college, eventually landing an IT job at the aforementioned break-fix company shortly after graduating in the early ’90s.
On the other hand, Aubri has a background in academia, holding a master’s degree in teaching and a bachelor’s degree in speech and communication disorders; education and the transference of knowledge have always been very important to her. She was on maternity leave in 2008 when the economy crashed, and she came to work at Cybertools for what was supposed to be a limited amount of time. Without any prior training or knowledge, she threw herself into it, learning all that she could and eventually finding a passion for this new industry before joining her husband at the head of Cybertools.
Culture, Community, and Education at Cybertools
What’s unique about Cybertools is that they don’t just provide one type of solution for one type of business. Rather, they serve several different sectors, including the healthcare, financial, construction, nonprofit, manufacturing, and distribution industries, and provide customized solutions based on their clients’ needs. This is also why they’ve resisted niching down further, because if you’re a driven, hardworking business owner or executive and you are looking to prioritize the protection of your business, there’s a good chance Cybertools can help you.
“We’re in the business of helping businesses. For us, it’s all about the people and their values. Our goal is to build trusting relationships and make IT simple so we can protect their daily operations,” says Aubri. And although they mainly work with companies in the SMB space, they have found that larger businesses and even organizations in the public sector like the personalized service and strategy they offer. This means that when large companies have in-house IT but still require additional external support, they come to the team at Cybertools, who identify and fill any gaps in their IT strategy, which usually have to do with their cybersecurity protection or improvement of their productivity.
When it comes to protecting a business against cyberthreats, Cybertools stresses two key things: proactive prevention and education. In other words, it’s important to not only understand the risks that a business faces daily when it comes to cybercrime, but to put systems in place that decrease the likelihood of getting attacked and to prepare the business to respond if it is attacked. As Aubri states, “I’m here instead of in a classroom because this is a classroom for me. We know that cybercriminals are taking advantage of people. They’re even hiring marketing and sales departments to bolster their efforts, and there needs to be education out there about how to combat this.”
She believes that part of her mission is to help executives understand their business needs and potential when it comes to its IT strategy. She reviews their cyber liability policies, helps them understand compliance and best practices for their industry, and assists them in creating an IT strategy that makes sense for their business growth and their budget. Ultimately, whether it’s a plumbing company or a finance firm, no business wants to incur a work stoppage or huge fines due to poor IT planning and a lack of cybersecurity support.
Another important part of the culture at Cybertools is cultivating an educated community of like-minded people. To achieve this goal, they attend multiple business chambers throughout the year to spread their knowledge and are extremely active with local nonprofit organizations, schools, and local business initiatives. Although they have been honored with several awards as a result of this exposure—including the Accountability Group of the Year Award from TMT—they’ll be the first to say that no award compares to the feeling of giving back to their community in ways that really matter. For example, one of their latest achievements in the community was donating technology to both low-income students and women looking to upgrade their education and get back into the workforce, because, when it comes down to it, that’s what their business is all about—putting people before the paycheck.
And looking ahead, this is their ongoing mission at Cybertools. As always, they will continue to be a premier provider of managed IT services across the Pacific Northwest, but they also want to ensure that they’re educating and assisting their community in every way that they can. They hope to further accomplish this goal in the future by opening a nonprofit organization associated with Cybertools that would help provide critical IT services and technology to schools, specialty organizations, and the community as a whole in situations where this may otherwise be unattainable.
Ultimately, Cybertools is the perfect marriage of both David and Aubri’s areas of expertise. Between David’s IT experience and Aubri’s passion for educating the community, they are the living embodiment of their motto: to enrich, empower, and protect.
For more information about Cybertools, click here.
