Ron Gaboury and the Art of Getting Out of the Way

Ron Gaboury took sixteen years to travel from Yorktel’s finance office to its chief executive’s chair. Along the way, he acquired a rather inconvenient opinion about leadership: the person at the top should recruit people who are better at their jobs than he is. An ambitious executive might enjoy being indispensable. Gaboury has written about the trouble that comes with becoming the person everyone must wait for. An approval queue is a peculiar monument to build yourself.

His career offers a useful way to examine that idea. In 1995, he joined York Telecom as chief financial officer. In 1999, he became president and chief operating officer. In March 2011, the board elected him CEO. Eight years after that, he helped establish Caregility as a separate company. The sequence spans finance, operations, acquisitions and company formation. It also includes several moments when responsibility moved from one pair of hands to another.

Gaboury studied finance and accounting at Ohio University. Before Yorktel, he worked as a senior consultant at Haag & Company and served as COO of a startup. His professional preparation involved business plans, accounting systems and the mechanics of running growing companies. There is something pleasingly unfashionable about that entrance to a technology career. Someone still has to understand the business after the demonstration ends. In Gaboury’s case, that was where the work began.

A service that survives the sales pitch

Yorktel founder Dr. York Wang gave the new CFO an assignment that extended beyond keeping the accounts: develop the service business. Gaboury worked with the U.S. Army on a different way to buy support. Instead of paying by the hour, the customer could pay a single price for monitoring, live assistance and related services. The work became part of what the industry calls managed services. The enduring question was practical: what happens to expensive equipment after it has been installed?

It is easy to admire a system on the day it arrives. The relationship gets more interesting when someone needs help using it. The Army arrangement put that continuing obligation inside the commercial offer. Gaboury’s early work therefore involved both the technology and the terms on which people could depend on it. A recurring service requires a company to keep showing up. A purchase order, by comparison, can be framed and forgotten.

Yorktel also expanded through acquisitions. Madge Networks’ ISDN division added connectivity capabilities; Univision Crimson Group brought audiovisual expertise. Successive deals extended the company’s reach into video streaming and secure webcasting. These were additions to a working business, with existing customers and existing commitments. Gaboury’s experience accumulated in the joins between those activities: buying a capability, organizing it, and making it useful alongside the capabilities already there.

Yorktel’s annual revenue was about $4 million when Gaboury joined in 1995. A 2022 account put the 2021 figure at about $140 million. Those are widely separated snapshots, rather than a record of uninterrupted growth. Between them came acquisitions, new services and changes in the customer mix. They give the career a sense of scale without turning it into a tidy upward line. The business he eventually led was a different proposition from the one whose accounts he first took on.

The title finally catches up

When Gaboury became CEO in 2011, he had already spent twelve years as president and COO. Wang remained chairman and majority shareholder. David Phillips took over as president and COO, with responsibility for daily operations and executing the strategic plan. The change gave each executive a defined assignment. Gaboury moved into the chief executive role while another operator took charge of the day’s work.

That division matters to the story he later told about delegation. He had experienced the latitude Wang gave him before receiving the top title. He would eventually describe the need to offer latitude to his own colleagues. There is a recognizable continuity between those arrangements, although the titles alone cannot tell us how any particular disagreement was settled. The visible fact is the repeated separation of strategic responsibility from daily execution.

By 2017, Gaboury was describing a strategy involving cloud applications, specialized markets and an expanded consultancy. Yorktel’s Univago service connected different video systems, including older conferencing protocols and Microsoft’s Skype environment. Its professional services team worked on assessment, planning, deployment, training and support. This was a business concerned with making technologies cooperate. Anyone who has watched a meeting disappear into a dispute between devices can appreciate the commercial opportunity.

Twenty people, and a company of their own

On September 19, 2019, Yorktel announced the formation of Caregility. The new company and Yorktel would sit as separate subsidiaries beneath YTC Holdings. Michael Brandofino became Caregility’s president and COO; Ken Scaturro became president and COO of Yorktel. Gaboury remained CEO across the organization at launch. What had been an internal practice received its own structure, leadership and route to investment.

There was a straightforward business reason for the separation. The new operation needed a different mix of skills and dedicated commercial attention. Keeping it inside Yorktel would have meant fitting those requirements into the parent’s existing organization. Giving it a company of its own allowed investment in development, support and a distinct sales effort. Corporate structure can look like administrative housekeeping until a promising business starts pushing against the furniture.

Gaboury later recalled transferring twenty people from Yorktel. By the time of a 2024 interview, he described a workforce of more than 125 employees, alongside fifty contract developers. He also said he had declined an early opportunity to sell Caregility. He believed the business had more room to grow. That decision gave him an additional assignment: build an organization capable of supporting the opportunity he had chosen to keep.

A detour through the NASCAR playoffs

For all the talk of platforms and organizational design, Gaboury’s public career has included a marketing decision with rather more engine noise. In September 2020, Chip Ganassi Racing announced partnerships with Yorktel and Caregility. Their branding would appear on the No. 1 Chevrolet Camaro driven by Kurt Busch during the ten races of the NASCAR playoffs.

Gaboury explained the partnership as a way to widen awareness of both businesses as remote collaboration and work from anywhere became more prominent. The companies sold systems intended to connect people at a distance; the sponsorship put their names on a racing car. It was a change of scenery for a business conversation usually conducted in meeting rooms. The announcement documents a branding decision, rather than a personal racing obsession, and is entertaining enough on those terms.

He had also taken a role in New Jersey’s wider technology community. After joining the New Jersey Tech Council board in 2013, he became its chairman in 2016. That brought him into an organization concerned with business development, education, networking and the regional technology economy. His career was becoming a combination of company operations and connections beyond the company itself.

The boss as a possible obstruction

Gaboury’s own writing on leadership returns to the difficulty of letting capable people act. Recruiting the right team takes patience. Giving those people authority requires confidence. His standard for hiring is unusually direct: “they need to do it better.” The comparison is with the executive doing the hiring, which removes a comfortable escape clause. Competence becomes something the boss must be willing to recognize in someone else.

He describes trusted leaders as a way to avoid becoming a bottleneck. Decisions can move to the people responsible for the work, leaving him time for the company’s broader direction and shareholder value. He also writes about acknowledging his shortcomings and the influence of group ego. These are his stated principles, rather than a claim that every meeting runs according to them. Even so, the admission of limitations is revealing in a profession whose job descriptions seldom advertise any.

The principle gives a different weight to the appointments scattered through his career. Phillips at Yorktel in 2011; Brandofino and Scaturro at the 2019 separation. Each change assigned operating responsibility to another leader. A company can announce growth without specifying who will carry it. Those appointments supplied names. Delegation becomes considerably more concrete when somebody else is accountable for the work on Monday morning.

“they need to do it better.Ron Gaboury, on the people a CEO should hire

The next assignment is substance

The capital requirements have grown along with the organization. In September 2025, Caregility announced an additional $25.1 million through Series A-2 preferred stock and Series C financing. Star Mountain Capital led the round, with participation that included management, Wang and initial founders. The announcement put total outside investment at $92 million. For Gaboury, the next stage involved financing an established operation as well as directing it.

In a 2026 conversation with colleagues, he described the year ahead using the word “substance.” He wanted less emphasis on features and proof-of-concept demonstrations, and more attention to security and resilience. He discussed CUBE, an on-premises offering with disaster recovery and edge-processing capabilities. The vocabulary had moved on from the Army service contract. The concern with what happens when a customer needs a system to keep working was familiar.

Seen together, those episodes give his long career a coherent shape. The CFO took on service delivery. The operator became CEO. An internal business became a separate company. An early sale was declined, and more capital followed. Through it all, Gaboury’s stated hiring rule remained an awkward test for executive pride: bring in someone who can do the work better, then leave enough room for that person to succeed. A boss can be useful without being the next required stop.