Eric Montague and the art of handing over the keys

A founder can spend years getting a company large enough to need someone else at the wheel. Then comes the awkward part: letting that person drive. Eric Montague reached that point at Executech in 2018. The business he had started alone was growing beyond its original boundaries. He handed the CEO role to DJ Dorff and described the change with something more interesting than the customary announcement of a new chapter: an admission that a founder’s talents have a range.

“Every founder needs to be introspective,” he wrote afterward. His argument was practical. Leaders should work out when they have taken an organization as far as their own abilities can carry it, then bring in someone equipped for what comes next. That is an unusually demanding assignment for someone whose name has been attached to a business from the beginning. The company gets a new leader. The founder has to find a new relationship with his own creation.

Montague welcomed Dorff’s arrival and said he was excited about Executech’s future. There was ambition in the handoff, rather than an announcement that ambition had ended. For anyone accustomed to measuring a founder by how long he keeps the title, the episode offers a more useful question: what happens to the business when the title changes hands? His story becomes more interesting at precisely the point where a conventional founder biography might stop.

Two years before a paycheck

Executech began in 1999. Montague wanted to take some of the frustration out of calling for IT help, and he started without outside funding. For the first two years, he took no paycheck. His first outside employee arrived in 2003. Those details give the early business a human scale: before there was a leadership transition to manage, there was a single person trying to make a service model work.

The work addressed small and medium-sized organizations that needed the capabilities of an IT department. A company does not have to be large for its computers to become indispensable. Payroll, invoices and ordinary correspondence can all depend on systems that few employees understand. Someone has to translate the machinery into a service people can use. Montague’s founding idea gave that translation a simple priority: the person asking for help.

By the time he appeared among the 2017 EY Entrepreneur Of The Year regional finalists, Executech had grown to a reported 83 employees. The recognition came with a compact account of the sacrifice at the beginning. Two unpaid years is a striking figure because it measures time, rather than a funding round. There is no need to decorate it with a garage legend or an invented late-night scene. The arithmetic of waiting for a paycheck tells its own story.

A business you could see on the road

Evergreen Services Group announced an investment in Executech in January 2018. The investor’s interest included the company’s culture and its practice of delivering service on site. Jeff Totten, Evergreen’s CEO, recalled seeing Executech-branded cars during the drive from the airport to South Jordan. For a business selling largely invisible work, the cars supplied a wonderfully visible introduction. Networks disappear into walls; technicians still have to arrive somewhere.

Executech had grown from Montague alone to more than 100 people. Reported revenue for 2016 was $13.5 million. Montague said he had spent three years searching for the right investment partner and wanted the company to exceed $100 million in revenue. That figure was a stated goal, rather than an achieved result. It shows the scale of the ambition at the time, and why the business was preparing for a different kind of leadership.

The investment announcement initially kept Montague in the CEO role, with management and staff remaining in place. Dorff’s move into the job came later in 2018. Put those events side by side and the transition looks less like a sudden disappearance than a sequence: find a partner, prepare for expansion, change the person responsible for leading it. The distinction matters. Money can arrive on a particular date. A founder’s changing responsibilities take longer to understand.

The person on the other end of the ticket

Montague’s writing about Executech’s internal life returned to learning and listening. He described weekly staff training, several channels for employees to talk to each other, and opportunities to move into leadership. The details are useful because company culture is otherwise a word that can cover almost anything. A meeting on the calendar, a question answered by a colleague, or a promotion is easier to examine than a slogan printed on a wall.

His promise to staff included choosing the employee when a mistake occurred and treating the incident as something to learn from together. Such a promise asks a business owner to think beyond the immediate discomfort of a dissatisfied client. In a service company, mistakes are part of the working environment. The interesting question is whether people can bring a problem forward early enough for the team to do something useful about it.

Years later, Executech’s service model still carried the outline of that founding approach. Lee Weech described assigned delivery teams of six or seven people, frequent visits to client businesses and a focus on being present. The appeal is easy to understand. When a system fails, familiarity saves some of the preliminary conversation. Someone already knows the office, the people and the work that has stopped. The caller can begin with the problem instead of a lengthy introduction.

Personal service also has a practical limit: a small team cannot know everything. Executech’s later account of its growth emphasized preserving close relationships while adding a larger pool of expertise. That tension runs through the company Montague founded. More people can make more specialist help available; more people can also make a customer feel farther from the person responsible. Maintaining the relationship takes deliberate work as an organization expands.

“Every founder needs to be introspective.”Eric Montague, on the CEO transition

Teaching the next nerd

At a 2018 gathering of technology entrepreneurs, Montague spoke about a familiar constraint on growth: finding enough people to hire. His response included a training program for young people in the year after high school. Participants moved through different stages, and the company hired the top three. He described some of the youngest employees as bright contributors. The program gave the company a way to develop talent before everyone else was competing for the same candidates.

There is a pleasingly concrete quality to that response. A shortage of experienced employees can become an endless conversation about the shortage of experienced employees. Training someone introduces an additional task, with its own costs and uncertainties, but it also gives the employer something to do. Montague’s contribution to the discussion moved from a complaint about hiring to a description of how people could enter the work.

He addressed working technicians, too. In an Executech course about supplemental IT services, he opened by speaking to his fellow nerds. The subject was extra help for internal IT teams that already carried too much work. It offered another view of the same service business: an outside firm could support the person already responsible for technology inside an organization. That person might need additional skills or simply more hands for a demanding assignment.

His teaching could be funny without making the stakes disappear. In a 2017 conversation about online fraud, he invented Bob’s Burger Barn and an urgent request to wire money for fries. The imaginary transaction made impersonation easy to follow. A message appeared to come from the boss, carried familiar details and prompted an employee to act. The expensive potato order was a small comic device doing a serious explanatory job.

In the same conversation, he described an Idaho municipality whose inadequate backup had overwritten earlier versions of its records after an attack. His account focused on the resulting confusion over utility balances. The story brought a technical failure down to ordinary civic arithmetic: who owed money, and how much? He also described Friday training at Executech. Keeping up with change was part of the weekly work, rather than something reserved for an occasional conference.

History books, birds and another classroom

Montague’s interests extend well beyond the office network. He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history, has written three books and practices falconry. He also enjoys the outdoors and places importance on family time. Those are specific pursuits, with demands of their own. History requires attention to what happened before. Falconry involves a living creature with very little interest in a quarterly presentation. Neither fits neatly into the standard list of executive hobbies.

It would be too tidy to claim that a bird explains his management style, or that every business decision began in a history seminar. The interests are appealing because they leave room for a person outside the job title. A founder can have a serious intellectual life and spend time outdoors without either activity becoming a business metaphor. Montague’s biography gives those pursuits space alongside the work, which is where they belong.

In September 2021, he appeared in Utah Valley University’s entrepreneurship lecture series with a session titled Grow Through Life, Don’t Just Go Through Life. The university introduced him as a founder focused on bringing other people along in success. The title sits comfortably beside the teaching he had already done for technicians and business owners. A lecture gives a founder another audience, and the audience gets a chance to consider the choices behind the finished company.

The classroom also changes the kind of story a business can tell. Revenue figures and employee counts describe outcomes. Students have to decide what to try before they have outcomes of their own. An account that includes unpaid beginnings and a later leadership handoff gives them decisions to examine at both ends of the journey. Starting the organization and changing one’s place in it are different problems, each worth a conversation.

A title with room to keep moving

Today, Tech Legion lists Montague as Chief Strategy Officer and Managing Partner, alongside founder and CEO Jeremy Roos. The title puts him back in the technology services world with a different set of responsibilities from the one he held at Executech. His work remains connected to the business he knows, while the organization and the position have changed. The founder’s career has continued beyond the company’s founding chapter.

His public work also crosses other organizations. He is listed as secretary on the board of SVS, where his biography identifies him as Chief Information Security Officer at GPS Capital Markets. His LinkedIn profile records past board service with the Mule Deer Foundation and chairmanship at Early Light Academy. Business, education and community organizations provide separate places to contribute. Taken together, the roles give his career more than a single institutional address.

On LinkedIn, he describes a life lived outside his comfort zone and helping wherever he can. It is a broad aspiration. The more persuasive evidence lies in the smaller, visible choices: teaching young recruits, explaining a threat with an imaginary burger business, returning to a classroom and welcoming a successor. Each involves sharing something he has learned or making space for someone else to act.

The keys in this story belong to a company, but they also represent a habit founders can acquire: keeping every important decision within reach. Montague’s handoff made room for another leader. His subsequent roles made room for more work of his own. Executech could continue without requiring its founder to occupy the same chair forever. For a person who began as the entire company, that is a substantial change in what a working life can look like.