Connection Point

The stories people tell about John Marshall make him sound like a modern-day Paul Bunyan.

As a youth, they say, he quit the Boy Scouts because he thought the group gave out badges too readily, which chafed his competitive spirit.

As a student at Tech, he worked seven co-ops while managing the six-figure-revenue lawn care company he started as a 10-year-old.

Through his international business travels, he has racked up some 3 million frequent flier miles.

He once took a red-eye flight to London, hopped off the plane and went right to the starting line of the city’s marathon, which he completed in less than four hours.

These stories bounced around the thrumming halls of Atlanta’s Hyatt Regency hotel on the first morning of AirWatch Connect, an event hosted in early September by AirWatch, a mobile management company that Marshall, IE 96, started a decade ago.

AirWatch software allows companies to manage the mobile devices used by their employees: laptops, cell phones, iPads, touch-screen kiosks. From humble beginnings, AirWatch has become a mobile market leader, growing from 150 employees to more than 1,600 around the world in only three years. Earlier this year, it received a record $200 million in Series A venture capital funding. And it counts among its clients many of the world’s largest retailers, oil companies and airlines, as well as government agencies such as the ATF.

At AirWatch Connect, 1,200 of the company’s partners and clients in the mobility industry gathered to show off their latest apps and hardware and to trade ideas. But the event also served as something of a coming-out party for AirWatch and for Marshall—a chance to demonstrate not just what the company has already accomplished, but how much more Marshall still wants to do.

“I’m just competitive,” Marshall says. “If I’m going to do something, I want to be the best.”

That intense drive has been there as far back as he can remember. Marshall was born in Wisconsin and lived there until he was 9, when his father died and the family moved to Charlotte, N.C. His mother ran her own corporate communications business, and while that gave Marshall access to early Mac computers, he used them only casually. His passion, even then, was business.

“We were a middle class family, and if we wanted to do extra stuff, we had to earn money,” he says. “I liked sports, and I wanted to go to summer camps, so then I had to find a way to make extra money.”

At 10, Marshall started mowing one neighbor’s lawn for $5 a pop. Then he added another yard, and another. By the time he was in high school, he had a handful of classmates working for him, hundreds of residential properties to manage and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. The job required hard physical labor as well as accounting skills; he even had to process unemployment claims. “I could have stopped at three yards to get a little bit of spending change,” he says. “But I knew at an early age I just liked building stuff.”

Marshall wanted to go into business, but he viewed a traditional business degree as “so much fluff.” His mom suggested Georgia Tech, and they visited campus during the summer before his senior year of high school. As they walked around, they bumped into John Jarvis, then the chair of the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Jarvis described the area of study to Marshall and explained that the combination of skills it requires would be a great asset to an entrepreneur.

“I was sold,” Marshall says. “There was no question—I wanted to come to Tech. It was that one encounter that changed everything for me.”

At the Institute, Marshall split his time between schoolwork and a steady stream of co-op positions. On the weekends, he would fly home to Charlotte to manage the lawn care business, until he sold it during his junior year. Despite his outside commitments, Marshall enjoyed his classes, “even thermodynamics and calculus.”

During his senior year—on a whim—he dropped his resume off at Tech’s career services office, placing it in a folder bound for Manhattan Associates. Eventually, the fledgling warehouse logistics company convinced Marshall to interview for a position. But rather than a typical sit-down interview, Manhattan required applicants to spend a day shadowing its CEO, Alan Dabbiere. On Marshall’s interview day, Dabbiere was flying to Cincinnati for a project kick- off—so Marshall went with him. They met at the airport at 7 a.m.

“While we were driving [to the client’s office], John asked me why a much larger competitor wasn’t squashing Manhattan like a bug. The question put me on my heels,” Dabbiere says. “But when he listened to our full company vision and saw the customer’s reaction, he basically said, ‘I’m sorry, now I get it.’ I didn’t teach him tenacity, he came in with that.”

Marshall was hired as an implementation consultant. At the time, Manhattan had only 30 employees, and it was fighting to expand and win over new customers one at a time. Within six months, Marshall was leading a team of 10. A year after that, he was managing some 100 employees.

In 1997, when Dabbiere decided to expand Manhattan into Europe, he turned to Marshall. Despite the fact that the company didn’t have a single customer on the continent—let alone an office—Marshall signed up.

Marshall would lug a 40-pound AS/400 computer terminal around London, using it to sell Manhattan’s system to prospective clients. He learned to understand clients’ business needs and to tailor his pitch to each client. He would tour their factories and warehouses and put together a detailed assessment of how to make their operations more efficient.

Leaving a successful position with Manhattan in the U.S. was a risk, but “I have no fear for that kind of stuff,” Marshall says. “I’m not the kind of guy who’ll go jump off a mountain—well, I have been helicopter snowboarding—but in terms of taking chances, understanding my capabilities, I have a lot of confidence.”

Jeff Baum was Marshall’s supervisor at Manhattan’s Europe division. “Whatever he touches, he executes so well,” Baum says. “He’s brilliant in his ability to understand a problem, distill it and solve it. His work ethic is unparalleled.”

It was Baum who related the tale of Marshall running the post-red-eye London marathon. “A couple of us drank a few pints of beer and cheered him on,” Baum says, sitting at a café table at AirWatch Connect. That was in 1998. Baum had so much faith in Marshall that he left Manhattan earlier this year to manage AirWatch’s efforts in Asia.

A year after the marathon, Marshall had the itch to take on a leadership challenge, and he joined the startup Celarix as an executive in 1999. But after the company was sold to a larger corporation in the early 2000s, Marshall decided it was time to get back to his entrepreneurial roots. He was interested in the growing use of RFID technology in logistics, as well as Wi-Fi. Wireless was growing more rapidly, so he jumped into the field.

His new company, Wandering WiFi, focused on setting up hospitality businesses with internet hot spots. “All my friends thought I was crazy, that I’d gone off the deep end,” Marshall says. “I was running Cat-5 cable in a bed and breakfast behind a grease trap.” But slowly, the business grew. Marshall hadn’t created a breakthrough technology—he simply saw a need in the market and moved quickly to fill it. His unflagging work ethic made sale after sale. On his way to hospitality trade shows, he would pick up guides to mid-sized hotel chains and call each location along his route. If a hotel didn’t have Wi-Fi, he would stop by and make a pitch.

“I would drive down the highway and stop along the way, and I would darn near install it myself with hardware out of my trunk,” he says. “It was a hard way to build a business, but it got us our first couple of hundred customers.”

Wandering WiFi’s first big break came when Taco Mac, the Atlanta-based restaurant chain, signed on as a client. After that, Marshall spent a year building a tailored pitch for BMW, which needed software to manage all of the wireless devices used at dealerships; Marshall’s software—complete with tailor-made BMW graphics and design—won out against all of his larger competitors. A few other automotive companies signed on after that, and then several large grocery store chains followed suit.

As Marshall worked with his clients and listened to their needs, he heard one thing over and over again: Employees were doing more and more work on mobile devices—computers, rugged devices, BlackBerrys, kiosks and credit card readers—and companies needed software to connect and manage these devices.

When Marshall and his Wandering WiFi partner didn’t see eye to eye on how to run the business, Marshall sought the advice of Dabbiere, his old boss. Dabbiere had sold Manhattan and stepped away from the business world, but when his advice didn’t resolve the dispute, he bought out Marshall’s business partner and joined in building the new company. Dabbiere joined in 2006, helping re-brand Wandering WiFi as AirWatch and accelerating the push into mobile technology.

Around the same time, Marshall attended a trade show and randomly met an Apple employee with an early-generation iPhone. Many in the tech world had dismissed the device, but Marshall—who didn’t even own a smartphone at the time—saw it as a revolutionary piece of technology that could change the way individuals and companies do business. “I came back to our development team, and I said, ‘Stop everything that you’re doing. We are going to focus on Apple and smartphones,’” Marshall says. “They thought I’d lost it.”

Dabbiere (who isn’t a Tech alum but does sit on the Georgia Tech Advisory Board) hadn’t plan to venture into mobile technology; he simply had faith in Marshall’s ability to build a company. And he saw that Marshall had grown into a skilled CEO. “He’s learned to hire good people and give them direction, but generally leave them alone to do their job,” Dabbiere says. “John has learned to manage a senior team and effectively govern a large organization. What John hasn’t done is let his success go to his head. He still works as hard as ever, if not harder.”

In the years since Dabbiere came on board, AirWatch has grown rapidly, adding clients and employees as it expands around the globe. The company now employs 500 people overseas in nine global offices.

Marshall still spends much of his life on a plane—200 days per year, by his count. In the week before the Connect event, he stopped in Melbourne, Singapore and Bangalore and met with hundreds of customers over the course of five days. “The fact that mobility is growing so quickly means we don’t have a choice. We have to be international,” he says. “It’s just amazing how quickly we’ve had to move to stay in front of the market.”

His aggressiveness has paid off. Earlier this year, the company moved from The Lumberyard, a small office park off of Howell Mill Road, into its new home in an office tower near Atlanta’s Perimeter Mall. Marshall hates cubicles, so his employees sit in a vast, open room, with different departments seated next to each other, constantly sharing ideas and collaborating. When he’s in Atlanta, Marshall works out of a glass-walled office along one edge of the room, his door essentially always open.

“Everything we’ve done, this ecosystem is built with product managers, developers, marketing, solution engineers all within 100 feet of each other,” he says. “I’m either spending time with partners or customers, or I’m in here, showing what I’ve learned.”

The collaborative, customer-centric focus was on full display at the Connect event in early September. During the first day’s opening keynote, a video—complete with swelling movie-trailer music and slick graphics—flashed statistics revealing the company’s growth and the growing size of the mobility market. The company’s software, which offers easy management and security of corporate information, has won over three of the four largest airlines worldwide.

Pilots once lugged around 45-pound printed flight books; every time a flight detail changed, individual pages would have to be reprinted and swapped. Now, every United pilot carries a roughly one-pound iPad equipped with AirWatch software that connects them with a digital flight book. Information updates automatically and the reduction of weight adds up in significant fuel savings over the course of thousands of flights per year.

When Marshall was trying to sell United Airlines on AirWatch, he went to a training center and hopped into a flight simulator to learn how pilots work, says Jon Merritt, the company’s senior manager of flight operations. “John was in the right seat, and we shut down the engine,” Merritt says. “We said: ‘OK, look up what you’re supposed to do [in the flight book].’ He said, ‘I get it. It’s not the same. It has to be immediate, and it has to work.’”

While Marshall’s effort at landing in the simulator was “bouncy,” Merritt says, he won over United with his dedication.

“We bought in on the concept, but what really has kept us around—beyond the fact that they deliver—is the people,” Merritt says. “It’s a testament to Alan and John. They’re probably two of the easiest executives to reach out to, and they set that mentality from the top down.”

AirWatch also has worked with schools that use tablets in the classroom and health providers that use mobile technology to track patient health. In the past six months alone, the company has filed more than 50 patents.

“This is a massive space,” Marshall says of mobility. “Every student from kindergarten on is going to have a mobile device. And every senior citizen is going to have a mobile device that will monitor his or her glucose or heart rate or some element of home health diagnostics. You go from 5 years old to end of life. We have just scratched the surface.”

As he took the stage at the Connect event in a dark suit sans tie, Marshall was comfortable and confident, engaging with his customers and partners. He unveiled new software updates but also solicited feedback.

“We have a long way to go,” he said. “We’re at the start of this journey.”

Next Article Previous Article