GRAND RAPIDS – Former SageStone Solutions President Mark Lardieri on Friday bought a minority stake in CQL, a custom software developer in Grand Rapids. Lardieri was named president of CQL last May.
Lardieri had been president of SageStone until the company was purchased by NuSoft Solutions in November 2004.
“When I negotiated my contract to join CQL, certain threseholds were established for the company’s performance,” Lardieri said Monday. “We achieved all those goals in less than a year.”
While Lardieri said he was scheduled to take an equity stake after hitting his threseholds, that stake increased when one of the company founders decided he wanted out. On Friday, Lardieri signed the paperwork to purchase the shares owned by Mark Carpenter, giving him a significant minority stake along with other co founder Mike Eldred. A majority of the shares are still owned by co founder Kevin Antel, he said.
Lardieri said CQL currently employs 20 full-time staffers with another nine contractors working along side them. By the end of the year, he anticipates at least five of those contractors will be converted to full time employees. One already was a week ago.
The rapidly growing CQL has cracked the $3 million revenue plateau by selling four custom products:
Parental Control Software;
Hosted content Management Software;
Financial Services Software focused on Customer Resource Management;
Financial Portfolio Investment Profiling Software.
CQL also operates a hosted data center.
Lardieri said he’s currently looking for talented technology professionals to join his team. You can email your resume to him at [email protected]
