At the 26th annual Black Engineer of the Year Awards held recently in Philadelphia, David L. Steward of St. Louis, Chairman of the Board of World Wide Technology Inc., became the first non-engineer to be awarded Black Engineer of the Year Award.
World Wide Technology Inc. (WWT) is an award-winning systems integrator and one of the largest minority-owned businesses in the United States. Steward is an exemplary leader, climbing to the top with sheer tenacity and building his business on the best American values.
One of eight children, hard work was the mainstay of his struggling family, which moved from inner-city Chicago to a small house in his mother’s hometown in Clinton, Mo., after his birth in 1951. All eight Steward children were expected to help with daily chores. Since their house had no indoor bathroom, it was the daily responsibility of all the children to empty chamber pots first thing each morning, as well as milk the family cows, tend to the pigs, hang clothes on the line and spread the ashes out of pot-bellied coal stoves that heated their home, among other chores.
While the low-income family would have easily qualified for charitable assistance and school lunch programs, the pride and work ethic of David’s parents, Harold and Dorothy Steward, kept them from applying for benefits. Harold was young David’s example of an entrepreneur: he worked as a mechanic, ran a local janitorial service, hauled trash and coal with his old truck, and in addition had farm animals to manage. While the Stewards struggled economically, they shared whatever they had with those in need. Young David would carry this spirit of giving and his characteristic agility into the rest of his life.
Steward was the first person of color to attend his newly-integrated elementary school in 1957. And despite the threats from the Ku Klux Klan, his parents faced down adversity and David was integrated into the public schools, where he eventually earned honors and was co-captain of his high school basketball team. After graduating high school in 1969, he went on to Central Missouri State University as a walk-on college basketball player. He later earned a scholarship and worked hard to excel in sports and the classroom, relying on his “stick-to-it-no-matter-what / do-whatever-it-takes” attitude. In 1973, Steward graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Business Management, emphasis on Industrial Organization.
Hitchhiker to St. Louis
At the time of Steward’s college graduation, the United States was in the midst of a recession and there were few jobs for new graduates. He approached a local banker, who lent him $300. With this in hand and all of his possessions in a knapsack, he hitchhiked to St. Louis, moved in with his sister and worked part-time as a substitute teacher until he landed a stable position as an executive with the Boy Scouts of America. He joined Wagner Electric in 1974, but was laid off a year later. In 1976, he got a marketing and sales position with the Missouri Pacific Railroad Company and was the first person of color hired by the company to sell rail services.
Four years later, he joined Federal Express and served as senior account executive. There, he earned recognition as a top salesman and was inducted into the company’s sales hall of fame in 1981. Always striving for bigger and better, Steward decided to acquire his own business in 1984.
So with no money, married and with two young children, in his typical fashion, he negotiated a no-money-down deal to acquire a business and leveraged the assets of the business to give the previous owner a down payment. He again contacted a local banker, Stockyard Bank of St. Joseph, Mo., who lent him $100,000 to continue the cash flow and grow the business, called Transportation Business Specialists, an overcharge audit firm. (In the mid-’80s, they began to use that model, and called it “leveraged buy-outs.”) In the middle of all this, he took on a short-term loan (three weeks) of $2,000 from his father to cover legal expenses for that transaction.
By 1987, Steward had carved a niche and, boosted by his initial success, went on to found a sister company, Transport Administrative Services, which audited and reviewed freight bills for undercharges for the railroad industry, leveraging his railroad experience.
That same year, the new company won a contract to audit three years’ worth of freight bills for undercharges at Union Pacific Railroad, involving $15 billion of rate information for a single client. Steward’s company built a local area network to handle the data and completed the audit 40 times faster than traditional manual methods by using technology to revolutionize the way railroad audits were completed.
He quickly recognized he was not in the business of auditing freight bills … he was in the business of using technology in a new, innovative way and wanted to be part of the technological revolution, changing the way people were doing business.
Enter: WWT
In 1990, Steward co-founded World Wide Technology Inc. with 4,000 square feet of office space, lots of perseverance and a burning desire to win in the competitive field of distributing IT hardware, software and services.
Over the past two decades, Steward and his executive team have built what started as a small logistics/transportation audit company into a leading systems integrator and supply chain solutions provider, employing nearly 2,000 employees in offices throughout the world. Specializing in cloud capabilities, data center and virtualization, security, mobility and networking technologies along with voice, video and collaboration solutions, World Wide Technology provides advanced technology solutions from over 3,000 manufacturers to the commercial, government and telecom sectors. The company’s annual revenue reached $4.1 billion in 2011. As Chairman, Steward plays a key role in WWT’s pursuit of major contracts and has helped build and nurture its culture and core values.
WWT was recently named by FORTUNE magazine as one of the top 100 places to work in America.
Steward has also been an outstanding civic leader in the St. Louis, Mo., area, where he inspired other business and community leaders to set new records in fundraising when he served as Campaign Chairman of the United Way of Greater St. Louis in 2005 and Chairman of their Board of Directors from 2006 to 2008. He also serves as President of Variety the Children’s Charity of St. Louis, President of the Greater St. Louis Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America and is a Curator for the University of Missouri System.
In addition, he serves on the boards of Centene Corporation, First Bank, Civic Progress of St. Louis, the St. Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association, Regional Business Council, Webster University, St. Louis Science Center, the United Way of Greater St. Louis Executive Committee, the HBCU Harris-Stowe State University’s African American Business Leadership Council and Barnes Jewish Hospital.
In 2010, WWT won the St. Louis Minority Business Council Excellence Awards and was named the Minority Business Enterprise of the Year and an HP Partner in Excellence. They also won the AT&T Supplier Award. In 2011, WWT received several more industry awards ranging from National Minority Business Council’s Outstanding Technology Firm of the Year to VMware’s Government Partner of the Year Award for North America to the EMC Velocity Enterprise of the Year Award and the VAR500 Best Partnership Award. The company has also won numerous honors from its key strategic partners like Cisco, HP, NetApp, EMC and VMware.
Reprinted with permission from U.S. Black Engineer & Information Technology magazine.
