Community IT Innovators Voices: Rob Schamberg, Board Member

In today’s interview, Carolyn talks with Rob Schamberg about his long service on the Community IT Board helping steer the company through the process to become employee-owned through the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) and to his recent retirement from the Board.

Rob describes his career from his days as a college grad who loved technology and the outdoors, through teaching and becoming Principal and Superintendent at various California public schools, to joining the Forum for Youth Investment in Washington DC. It was at the Forum that he met Community IT folks, and was asked to serve on the board where he has been over a decade. After moving back to California near Lake Tahoe, he has now founded his own nonprofit to give students in Reno a chance to explore the wilderness activities all around them, Reno Inspiring Connections Outdoors.

“The relationships that Community IT has with our customers are top-notch. I was just talking to somebody from another company, I didn’t know he was with this company and I didn’t know they were Community IT clients, and he said “we will stick with them because they are our partners in this.”” - Rob Schamberg

Join us for our series featuring interviews with Community IT employees and board members. In this series, we talk about nonprofit technology career paths, career resources, skills, and certifications. We will also touch on mentoring opportunities as you start out on your career and ways to give back if you are further along. If you are wondering what it is like to work at a place like Community IT, you can learn about it here. https://communityit.com/careers/

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Transcript

Carolyn Woodard: Welcome, everyone to Community IT Innovators’ Voices series. My name is Carolyn Woodard. I am the Director of Marketing and Outreach for Community IT, and I’m really excited today to be here with my friend, Rob Schamberg, who is going to tell us a little bit about being on the Community IT Board.

Rob, would you like to introduce yourself?

Rob Schamberg: Sure. I’m Rob Schamberg, and I served on the board for 12 years, I believe. And I’m just happy to be here, Carolyn, it’s great to do this.

Carolyn Woodard: It’s great to have you with us. Thank you so much.

Can you tell me a little bit about your background before you were a board member, and what it was about your background that made you a good fit for Community IT?

Rob Schamberg: Yeah, that’s kind of a long story. And it starts back when I was in college, and I was splitting between all kinds of majors. And then I took a computer class, and it was taught on the very first minicomputer. 

This is back in the 70s. And that was really a cool thing because as I went on, I was doing mainframe work for most of my other computer classes, and I became a computer science major at UC San Diego. And those were just incredible days.

I was thinking; I just heard this wonderful podcast. It’s the podcast Acquired, and they’ve got a four-and-a-half-hour episode on Microsoft. And it brought me back, I just listened to it last week. But it really shows the times that we were in, where computers were mainframes, and these minicomputers had just come out. 

But for most of my classes, I would spend the evening on a card punch machine, typing up cards for the computer. And so really, I loved, loved, loved, loved programming and that.

In the summer before I was to graduate, I got hired by the first computer company, Sperry Univac. And they had a minicomputer division. Minicomputers were like the size of a large refrigerator at that point, as opposed to a whole room. 

The day that I started, they sold the company, which was their minicomputer division, to Varian Associates. I ended up working for them for about a year. I wrote emulators of their next machine.

They’d have their current, the very first minicomputer. There was no software industry back then. When you bought a computer, you got it with the software, with the payroll, with all these different packages.

In order to create the software for the next computer they’d be putting out, the software engineers needed some way to start writing the program and testing it. I’d get the specs of the computer that would come out in a year or two from the engineers, and then I’d write a program that would make the current computer be that new computer coming out in a year. 

It was great technical work, but I’m a social justice person.

Along with doing computer science, I was also deeply involved and taught this class on Wilderness and Human Values, and those were my people. And after a year of doing this, I said, I don’t think I want to spend my time doing this. Much to my father’s chagrin, I said, I’m going to go get my teaching credential.

And so that’s what I did. My career was in education. I spent 30 years in California public schools. I was doing everything from being a high school computer science teacher to being a principal, to running technology for school districts – that was about five years of my life.

At that point, we had a mainframe as well as just getting started with educational technology and Apple IIEs and IBM PCs and all of that.

And then I had a couple of superintendencies after a long assistant superintendency. I did that. This was in California. 

I retired from that, and we decided to move to Washington, DC., where my wife’s parents were, and where I had real connections. And one of those connections was with an organization, which is a client of Community IT to this day, it’s the Forum for Youth Investment, a national youth-serving nonprofit located in DC.

I was the chief administrative officer, which meant that I was in charge of facilities, budgets, the CFO worked under me, and I was in charge. And so I ran the technology services. And I think it was in the midst of my first year, I interviewed Matt Eshleman from Community IT. Well, I didn’t interview him. He came to us with a proposal for services. And so eventually we did go with them, with us. That was before I got on the board. 

And I worked there for three years. And at the tail end, I was approached by Bob Bowen, who had been on the board. He was a friend, and he was a consultant to the forum, and I think he had done some business consulting with Community IT. He was retiring, and he said, hey, I do this thing. I’m on the board of this company that serves nonprofits.

And I said, I know Community IT. And so that’s how that happened. And it was a very different scene than it is today.

That was 12 years ago or so. Dave Deal called me. Bob gave him my phone number, and he said, Would you like to be on the board?

I said, yes. And there we went.

How did you get involved on the board?

Carolyn Woodard: That’s so funny, because that was going to be my next question was, how did it come about that you came onto the board? And I think you were telling me earlier that it was a very small board at that time and that you had served on other boards and were interested in helping it develop. 

Rob Schamberg: Yeah, yeah, it was a small board, probably five people plus David or maybe four people plus David. 

Here was a guy who had started this great little company. And my attraction was, as I mentioned, social justice. My attraction was that here was a company specifically geared to supporting nonprofits. And that really got my juices going. And then also just to be back in technology was just fun. 

But the board was a group of people who were helpful to David. Some were in the software or the computer industry and I think there was probably a lawyer on the board.

And then there was me who was kind of representing nonprofits, but really nonprofit management. Because of my experience as a school district superintendent, I was very experienced with boards. I had served on other boards, but always nonprofits. 

This was my first for-profit board. It came up that, oh, David’s thinking about making it an ESOP, an employee stock ownership program, and the employees would own it. And now that interested me in staying on the board.

But my role at the beginning was really to help professionalize the board.

Carolyn Woodard: You talked a little bit about the ESOP. There was a transition period. David Deal, who we’ve been talking about, was the founder and owner of Community IT when it spun out from Reliacom, where he had been employed. And as you said, he formed this board, but then he wanted to move on. 

Employee Stock Option Plan (ESOP) Transition

He came up with the idea of selling the company to the employees in a way through this ESOP, the Employee Stock Ownership Plan. You were there for that transition. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

Rob Schamberg: That was another piece that I loved about this is David is a social justice person that really believed in helping out his employees, assisting nonprofits. It’s all for that same kind of goal of making life better for as many people as you can. At that point when I entered the board, Dave already had a profit-sharing program. The employees, I believe, were acquiring shares, but I don’t think it was thought out as to what this meant. He had looked into ESOPs – employee stock ownership programs. He had been to a couple of conferences.

And as you said, Carolyn, he was looking to move on. And he really didn’t have an idea, because he was the president and worked full time at Community IT for another three, four years after I joined the board. 

And so the transition was very cool. 

First of all, if there’s people who are in Community IT, employees who want to be on the board, the whole piece of the ESOP, the program itself, it’s basically a section of the IRS code, and it is incredibly technical. 

When I first joined the board, as I said, I wanted to professionalize it, and I was on the Governance Committee, and we did a lot. We created an evaluation system for our CEO, for David. And that’s really the evaluation system we’re still using. 

But then as it became clear that we were going to officially make this an ESOP, we went to a lot of conferences, the board included. There’s an incredible number of consultants and lawyers and all that you need to engage to have an ESOP work. 

We just spent a lot of time on the board, and of course the staff did most of the work, but in setting up the new bylaws for our changed corporation and in developing the structures for that. And then the other piece was that there’s a concept that all ESOPs have, which is that of a trustee that’s taking care of the shares of the employee shareholders. And we worked out what that role was. And it was interesting.

And there was a very complex financial piece where, at the point where David sold the company to the employees, they didn’t pay money out of pocket. There was a loan, which was essentially paid for out of company profits over time. And I think it was something like a 10- or a 20-year loan, and we paid it off in five years or something because the company did so well before and after the structure.

Carolyn Woodard: And I’ll just jump in to say that we have some information on our website about ESOPs and where you can find more information if you’re interested in this part of the tax code that allows the company to be owned by the employees in this particular way. 

Once we had gone through that transition, I think it was over four or five years that some of the shares from David were sold to the employees until the transfer was fully completed. And then he went on and founded a different organization, Build Consulting, which also works with nonprofits.

And we say, we’re the friend of the pod, basically. We do some joint webinars together, and we work with them fairly extensively. 

Board Transitions and Navigating Change

But after he had left, did the board change? What was that like for you and for the other board members to make that transition?

Rob Schamberg: There was a big shift when David recommended to the board that Johan Hammerstrom become the CEO. And we had had over the years maybe one or two presentations from him on various topics to the board and he seemed like a nice guy. And he’s just brilliant, lovely, so concerned about people. 

And an excellent businessman. I think that was my first impression of Johan, that he just cares so deeply about people and is an exceptional manager of the company and the growth of the company is so much due to him. But the board itself, in my role, I stayed for a year or two on the Governance Committee, but I was going to all the ESOP conferences.

And at one point when we got a couple new board members, I don’t remember who left that was kind of in ESOP. I think David was still involved. He said, could you lead the ESOP committee?

And I was on that ever since. I think I was on the ESOP committee for eight, nine years. That involved a lot. 

The biggest piece of that work was that we went through a major shift a year ago where we had always had an internal trustee. At first it was Bill, our CFO. And then Bill and Johan shared that role for many years. But we decided that we were just getting so big and also, it’s work. And here our CEO and CFO are doing this work that’s taking them away from other things. We just decided the best place to go was to hire a professional trustee.

The ESOP board committee spent over, I would say, a year and a half developing the job description and going through the hire. And one thing that’s interesting about a trustee is that the trustee is hired by the board, not by the company, not by the CEO. So that was a lot of extra hours. And we’ve got a great trustee.

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, you found a good one, having been in some of the meetings where he’s made some presentations. Somebody joked that when you go to the ESOP conferences and you talk to anybody who’s involved in ESOPs, they will tell you about it for a long time, all of the intricacies and all of the details. And he is definitely like that.

But he’s just so funny as well. It makes it very interesting for all of us to understand more about how the ESOP works and what the trustee does.

Rob Schamberg: I thought that you were going to say that when you go to an ESOP conference, there’s one name that always comes up and it’s Paul Horn. And that’s the man who is currently our trustee. 

Carolyn Woodard: That’s who we got. You talked a little bit about how the new board members come on. And there have been many changes while you’ve been on the board because you’ve been on for such a long time.

Serving on a Board

I wanted to ask, if someone is listening to this who is interested in serving on a board or maybe interested in the Community IT Board, do you have any advice from the different boards that you’ve served on? 

How do you find out about boards that you could serve on? And what makes you a good candidate to be on a board?

Rob Schamberg: There are some websites if people are interested. I’m still in the nonprofit realm, so most of my work, even though this is a for-profit company, it’s for the employees. I think of it as a nonprofit, and those are also our clients. But there are a number of websites that have board opportunities for people. 

So then the question is, how do you prepare, or what is it? A board really has two main purposes.

• One is representing the shareholders. In our case, it’s the employees. And to make decisions that are in the best interest of the shareholders. 
• The second piece is hiring and supervising, and if you need to, firing. We’ve never had to do that at Community IT. But you hire that CEO. And when you’re in a transition, you in fact are the CEO. You probably hire an interim person to manage the place. But you need to think of yourself on the board as the CEO. 

So those are some things to consider. On boards, you want to have a variety of experiences and opinions and viewpoints, so if you’re interested in being on a board, what are the things that you could offer? Let’s say a business in this circumstance. 

Over the years, when we have somebody leaving the board, we do some analysis at the board level to say, okay, what kind of skills do we want to add to our board? So, for example, Irma, who’s one of our newest members, she’s an attorney. We were looking for an attorney.

In this case, too, we wanted a person of color. We were recruiting a board member to balance out our equity on our board. But at times we’ve looked for people in the managed services space to support that.

We’ve looked at people who have deep business experience, and sometimes board experience. That was another advantage of Irma, because she had served on an ESOP board before. 

If you’re interested in being on a board, you want to make yourself attractive to the board. Now, if you’re part of Community IT, you’re an employee, and you want to be on the board, a great way to get a sense is to come to a board meeting. Talk to Johan and just say, hey, can I come to a board meeting?

Other than some personnel aspects that are not open to everybody, those are open meetings that folks can attend. Learn about the board. 

Then once you’re on the board, I have one bit of advice. It’s one word: listen.

Don’t come in with what you think things should happen, or if you’re an employee, if you have some issue you want to resolve, listen. Listen, listen, listen.

Maybe listen for a year. Speak up certainly when you’ve got an opinion on something but have a sense of what’s going on here. I would also say get engaged. There’s more work to do than there’s time to do it. 

Get yourself a job on that board to help out.

Carolyn Woodard: I’m hearing from you to not think of it as something just for your resume, or that you’re going to be able to be hands-off if you’re on a board. There’s a lot of work, and it’s rewarding work, but you have to be willing to put the work in.

Rob Schamberg: Yes, indeed.

Best Memories of Community IT Board Service

Carolyn Woodard: What is your favorite memory or best experience from being on the board now that you’re retired from the board?

Rob Schamberg: Well, I’m going to break it into two. 

One is the technical aspect of ESOP and being able to provide support to everybody on the board in terms of making decisions. We have to make decisions regarding the ESOP all the time.

But in particular, the employee board members, what we’ve done in the last several years is that we put all the employee board members on the ESOP, because they are the employees, they are the stockholders. I see it as a great opportunity to build that ownership mentality if we have board members who are deeply knowledgeable about ESOP and what it is, and they can help spread that word. I’ve enjoyed that learning.

The other thing is for the past two and a half years, I’ve been serving on the Black Lives Matter Working Group, not as an employee, but really as a consultant. A lot of my background in education has been in working through equity and in making equitable communities, and also facilitation. The Black Lives Matter Working Group was started right after the George Floyd incident and the rising of Black Lives Matter as a social justice issue. 

It was a bunch of employees, including Johan, who said, we should pay attention to this, we should do something. What can we do? How can we educate ourselves? We want to be an equitable organization. And so I was so delighted when I was allowed to join, and the work has been incredible, the people incredible. 

I’ve grown from it tremendously. We’re trying to make an impact there. That was so rewarding, and that was the hardest thing to leave, frankly.

Carolyn Woodard: Really, I was just going to clarify that it is a working group of employees started by the employee owners and that you were very helpful on that group as a liaison to the board and also with your experience helping the group do a lot of learning around creating equity in the workplace and inclusion and belonging. 

It was very, very helpful to have you in that group, which I am also a member of. I just wanted to thank you again for serving on the board.

Inspiring Connections Outdoors – Reno

I wanted to let you have a chance to tell people what you’re leaving to do and your organization that you’ve started up and are very involved in, if you’d like to tell us more about that.

Rob Schamberg: Well, I kind of retired from my other work right at the beginning of COVID. My work at that point was as a national consultant in the area of social and emotional learning, and I worked with dozens of school districts throughout the United States, and I did that work in person.

And then COVID hit, and everything was turning to Zoom and not in person. This is hard work, and it really needs to be in person, at least for me. And I was like, I’m going to move on to other things. And so I continued, and it was really nice because Black Lives Matter came about in that same realm. So that fed a lot of my juices in that. 

When I retired, I wanted to do something related to social justice, to my work, to this wilderness program that I mentioned.

What I’ve started, along with a lot of people in the Washoe County School District, which is in Reno, Nevada, is an organization called Inspiring Connections Outdoors. Reno, Nevada is a 40-minute drive from Lake Tahoe, and the top of the Sierra is one of the most beautiful places in the world. Reno is huge, and their public school system is huge. 

There are about 65,000 students in it, and over half of them have never been to Lake Tahoe, even though it’s 40 minutes away. What we do is we take kids to the outdoors and give them outdoor adventure experiences that they wouldn’t otherwise have if it wasn’t for us. We have this enormous equipment storeroom, and we can take 35 young people and adults backpacking, hiking, camping, snowshoeing, and now river rafting.

We work with local community organizations and school groups. They supply the kids. We supply the certified outdoor leaders to have a safe and impactful trip.

But really, we are a youth development organization. Yes, there are a number of kids who go snowshoeing for the first time in their life, and that’s the only thing they do with us. But we are really developing outdoor leaders among the youth. 

We are about to start our first round of the Reno Inspiring Connections Outdoors Youth Leadership Cadre. Kids under 18 get the same training that an adult leader would have, but liability reasons don’t allow us to do that. But basically, they can run the whole trip. They can organize it beforehand, they can train people, there has to be an adult certified leader with them. And then the moment they turn 18, they can be a certified leader, not just for us, but Outward Bound and other organizations.

It’s a lot of fun. I was chair of Inner City Outings, which is what it used to be called. We kept the same initials back in the early 1980s.

We started this as rafting. A bunch of us had our own groups that we would lead on trips. The big deal was that we would raise money to be able to go on commercial whitewater rafting trips about two hours from San Francisco in the mountains.  Here I was the teacher. We got trained by another nonprofit.

We had a sugar daddy who bought us six rafts and a storage place and supported us. Since I was the teacher, I became the trainer of raft guides. I did that for about four or five years and every April and May, we would train a new set of guides. 

One year, I had a deaf trainee. We had to figure out how to run a boat with deaf participants but a hearing guide. How do you do that? And so to get him trained, we had a sign language interpreter who became my wife. 

If you imagine a boat that’s inflated, three people on either side with paddles and the guide is in the back. Let’s say I’m guiding deaf people, and this is what was happening. The interpreter sits on the front of the boat, faces backwards. They can see the people. If I said forward paddle, she would bang on the boat a couple of times to get their attention and then she’d go like this…

Carolyn Woodard: Right, forward.

Rob Schamberg: Yeah, she would go down this river backwards, and those boats were always out of control because who’s paying attention to what? And people paddling aren’t very good at it anyway. She was very courageous. And not only is she going backwards, but she’s using her hands. She’s not holding on.

Carolyn Woodard: And that attracted you to her.

Rob Schamberg: Definitely a courageous human, yeah.

Carolyn Woodard:  Every time I hear you talk about it, it just sounds like so much fun, but also, you’re clearly so passionate about it and making sure that those young people have access to that wilderness that’s all around them. Here’s the link so people can go check it out themselves. https://www.sierraclub.org/toiyabe/reno-ico

It’s just been wonderful listening to your stories about your career and serving on the board and the things that you’re passionate about. 

Rob Schamberg:  Part of the reason for leaving the board was that I moved from Washington, DC to Truckee, California for this wonderful life here. So, miss y’all and appreciate the great work you’re doing.

Carolyn Woodard: I can ask you the question I often ask staff when I do an interview.

What’s your elevator pitch? If you meet someone at a cocktail party or a conference and they ask you what Community IT does, what do you say? 

Rob Schamberg:  It is an employee-owned company that provides managed services. And I’ll go into what managed services are with that person. But, you know, that and another piece of it that’s so exciting for me is that it used to be just nonprofits in the DMV, the District of Columbia, Maryland and Northern Virginia.

And now it’s countrywide. They’re just the very best. The relationships that Community IT has with our customers are top notch.

I was just talking to somebody from another company. I didn’t know that they were Community IT clients. And he said, yeah, we just stick with them because … they are our partners in this.

Carolyn Woodard: I feel like that was something that David Deal and now Johan so fully embrace, that idea that it’s a long-term partnership and that they both have that servant leadership. 

I think about how the team, the partners, everyone, the whole partnership is better when everyone is better, is contributing. And I just love that about Community IT as well. Really inspiring to work here.

Rob Schamberg: Thank you so much, Carolyn. Thanks for the opportunity. It’s fun to talk about all this stuff.

And I’ll close out with, I just love Community IT. I’m missing it already.