
2016 Entrepreneurial Excellence Awards honorees
Mike Justice, President and Founder of Grid Connect, was recently honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Daily Herald Business Ledger.
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Mike Justice, President and Founder of Grid Connect, was recently honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Daily Herald Business Ledger.
Last night was dedicated to risk taking and overcoming failure as 19 local entrepreneurs were honored during the 17th Annual Entrepreneurial Excellence Awards, hosted by the Business Ledger and its sponsoring partners. Mike Justice, founder, president, and CEO of Grid Connect was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Nineteen local entrepreneurs will be honored in the 17th Annual Entrepreneurial Excellence Awards hosted by the Business Ledger and their sponsoring partners.
Successful startups are driven by experience, knowledge, and an overall understanding of respective industries. This type of wisdom enables older founders to be well-equipped to envision the ideal workplace, with its unique office perks that are often associated with startup cultures. While most people picture a youthful individual as the stereotypical startup found, this does not pertain to a lot of startup companies.
About 12 years ago, Glenn Rodgers and Mike Justice sat in an empty building and Glenn made a little, paper sign that said "Grid Connect" and hung it on the door. Glenn and several other employees worked for the next four months without a salary until the Grid Connect business got going. It's clear that Glenn has been extremely dedicated to working for Grid Connect from day one.
Mike Justice is the Founder and President of Grid Connect. Before the Grid Connect, Mike founded Synergetic Micro Systems, which was later acquired by Lantronix in 2001. After working on the Lantronix team for a couple of years, Mike decided it was time to form another company. Grid Connect was founded in 2003 and has been selling and creating great networking products and technologies since.
John Marchiando joined Grid Connect as our VP of Business Development about 15 months ago. He spearheads the Internet of Things (IoT) developments in our company on sales/partnering level: continually looking for new companies to partner with and traveling with reps to meet potential customers. “I just love the overall culture,” says John about his experience at Grid Connect, “the only pressure in the job is what I put on myself.”
Because Grid Connect is such a tight-knit company, many of the employees of our company end up doing a myriad of jobs. Mary Miller is one of these people. As our customer service representative, she spends her day answering phone calls, handling RMAs, working in shipping with Budd Justice, and periodically working as an auditor for our ISO 9001:2008 certification.
Grid Connect recently moved into what could be considered the ‘consumer’ space through its ConnectSense subsidiary, which provides plug n’ play sensor solutions for a variety of applications through devices such as their recently released Smart Outlet. The parent company still focuses on more traditional embedded connectivity, but according to Mike Justice the industrial networking landscape has started to shift as factory operators become increasingly interested in wireless communications.
Every winter, Grid Connect has a singles ping-pong tournament among some of the best players in our office. This year, we are excited to announce Adam Justice, VP of Grid Connect, as the 2014 champion!
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