1. 26 Cape & Plymouth Business | January/February 2015 | capeplymouthbusiness.com
A complementary relationship:
Father and son each
bring skills to ColoSpace
By Alex Johnson
These days, there is no such thing as a low-
tech business. All companies, large and small,
need to maintain an online presence while
leveraging business applications if they want
to stay competitive, even for the more analog-
oriented companies. But there is also a big gap
in capabilities between large companies, who
can afford their own IT infrastructure, and
smaller businesses who simply don’t have the
same resources. The solution to this problem is
data center firms like ColoSpace, who specialize
in providing these services and can spread those
costs across a range of clients, keeping IT afford-
able for each.
When Aaron Sawchuk started ColoSpace in
2001 with his father, Wayne, it was already his
second venture into the information technol-
ogy industry. “My first foray into the Internet
business was back in 1996 when I started the
Internet service provider DreamCom.” Back
then, the industry was more wide open, and
Sawchuk ran the company remotely while
attending Middlebury College. “It was really the
Wild West of the Internet business, there were
very few options for companies. It was before
the Verizons of the world had gotten into the
business. It was an industry that was mostly
dominated by small, regional providers.” Aaron
saw that the South Shore region was under-
served, as most Internet service providers at that
time were focused on Boston and areas with
higher concentrations of businesses. Broader
service providers, like AOL and CompuServe,
were meanwhile consumer-focused, rather than
providing Internet service to small businesses.
As bigger players later got into the game –
MediaOne (now Comcast), Verizon, etc. –
Sawchuk saw that it was time to move on. “I
saw the writing on the wall there. They did not
care about profitability, they were really focused
on market share.” Sawchuk ran DreamCom
through 2000, and then sold the company.
Wayne’s background was a bit different.
He had run a commercial development com-
pany for 20
years called Olde
Forge Builders, doing a
number of residential and commercial
developments along the South Shore. In the late
1980s, he started National Abatement Services,
an environmental remediation firm. “Through
that, [he] got involved in the technology world,
working in more than 200 Nynex and Bell
Atlantic telephone central offices throughout
the east coast.” During this time, Wayne gained
invaluable experience working with mission
critical facilities. After selling that business, he
semi-retired, but became anxious to get back
into a big project.
In 2001, Aaron had finished college and
was looking towards the future, though job
prospects in the technology field were lacking.
“I think what was taking place in the industry
at that time is there was a lot of uncertainty. A
lot of companies within the data center space
had failed as a result of focusing their customer
base on dot-com startups, so these companies
were going through hyper growth and buying
all these services today, but tomorrow they were
Chapter 11 and
our competitors saw
their customer base evaporate
overnight. However, there was still a very strong
demand for the services that we offer, from a tra-
ditional bricks and mortar company, and those
market opportunities had largely been ignored
by our competitors,” says Aaron. He saw an
opportunity to court the less “sexy” – but more
reliable – firms. Other data center companies
were focused on dot-com firms, but ignored the
local banks, insurance companies, engineering
firms and the like. “[These are] companies that
have huge amounts of data and they need these
reliable infrastructure services,” Aaron says. “So
I had kicked around ideas for different oppor-
tunities in this Internet infrastructure space and
this one seemed to resonate very well.”
The Sawchuks were able to acquire their first
data center at a reasonable cost due to industry
turmoil. This good fortune continued as they
were able to acquire additional facilities from
competitors who had gone bust, expanding the
ColoSpace footprint. Beyond that, however,
Aaron SawchukFEATURESTORY

2. capeplymouthbusiness.com | January/February 2015 | Cape & Plymouth Business 27
Aaron sees another reason for their success.
“Really the secret to our success over the last
13 years has been a strong focus on customer
service. Our competitors in the space today are
companies like Verizon and AT&T and the
level of service that we’re able to give our cus-
tomer is just so much better because we under-
stand their business so much better. We’re able
to respond to their needs much more quickly
than a traditional, bureaucratic, large telecom-
munications provider.”
Now, ColoSpace operates four facilities that
are open and servicing customers, with more
on the way. “We have a Metro West site that’s
under development and then we have our long
term ambition to cover the rest of the New
England space – Portsmouth, New Hampshire,
and Portland, Maine, to the north; Providence,
Rhode Island, and Hartford, Connecticut, to
the south,” Aaron explains. Each data center
ranges in size from about 7,000 square feet to
25,000 square feet and consists of large rooms
full of locked computer cabinets. The facilities
are optimized to keep all of these machines
running in their ideal environment – cool-
ing systems and power redundancies ensure
the machines stay running, even during an
emergency. ColoSpace’s customers, corporate
users mostly located in New England, lever-
age ColoSpace’s services to replace aspects of
their internal IT departments, cutting on costs
and granting access to a system that would
be unaffordable for a firm to maintain on its
own. ColoSpace provides a safe, highly avail-
able environment for companies to keep their
systems, applications and data, where they can
be remotely accessed from the office.
For Aaron, much of what makes ColoSpace
work is his relationship with Wayne. “I think
the reality is that we work extremely well
together because I think we’ve mastered the
ability to separate our personal and business
lives.” Drawing the line between work and
home has been critical. On top of that, their
differences in personality and experience have
been vastly beneficial. “I think we’ve been suc-
cessful because we have complementary skills
and we don’t have the same perspective. So I
know that he has something to bring to the
table, whether or not I agree with him … and
whether he agrees with me or not, he recognizes
my skills and perspective. I think if we were too
similar, we probably would not be as successful,
but we have sufficiently different backgrounds
and perspectives that I think add to the overall
organization’s success."
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Coastal Community Capital awarded Small Business
Assistance Grant
Massachusetts Growth Capital Corporation has awarded
Centerville-based Coastal Community Capital a Small Businesses Assistance Grant to support
its mission of funding small businesses and creating jobs in the Commonwealth. The purpose of
the MGCC’s grant program is to expand economic and entrepreneurial opportunity in the state
of Massachusetts. The program is designed to complement and enhance the traditional public
and private small business assistance network by providing technical assistance or training pro-
grams for underserved and disadvantaged businesses with 20 employees or fewer. A nonprofit
community development lender, Coastal Community Capital provides capital statewide. Coastal
has access to an array of funding sources, including SBA 504 and 7A loans, loan guarantees, and
direct lending.
BIZNOTE