Server and protect: Dave Jones makes millions for his private-equity investors by safeguarding data.

• Author: Mildenberg, David
• Position: PROFILE

Dave Jones is on his fourth set of owners, having built Charlotte's most successful technology company by keeping management intact and making investors richer. San Francisco-based GI Partners is the latest group controlling Peak 10 Inc., downloading $730 million into the company. "It's very rare to have a guy who takes a business from a startup to nearly $1 billion in value, but that tells you about all you need to know about Dave," says Richard Maclean, president of Charlotte-based Frontier Capital LLC, one of Peak 10's first institutional investors. "And he did that while working for some very hard-to-please investors along the way. Private-equity guys aren't cupcakes." GI is borrowing more than $460 million, almost eight times Peak 10's earnings before interest payments and taxes, according to New York-based Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC. It was among 13 potential buyers Jones met with, sparking bids that culminated in a highly leveraged company with a junk-bond rating from S&P--and pressure on him to deliver.

He can handle it, friends say, noting that Jones--who turns 68 this month and has run 28 marathons and owns bike shops in Athens, Ga., and Chattanooga, Term.--combines the vigor of someone decades younger with a savant's savvy. "He's a man of passions, and he doesn't do anything small," says Micah Morlock, manager of Georgia Cycle Sport in Athens since it opened in 2002. Jones spends most of his workweek in Charlotte and weekends in Athens, often puttering his store on Saturday mornings before riding. "He's about as down to earth as you are ever going to find. I've never known him to take a flashy vacation or drive the flashiest new car," says Jeff Hay, a lawyer with Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice LLP in Charlotte who has worked with him for 15 years. Jones, whose family owned a tobacco farm near Blackstone, Va., drives a pickup truck and an Audi S7.

In building Peak 10, he has relied on other people's money and executives who have been part of the company since its early days. "Dave has a true knack for assembling a team and a way of mentoring people and rallying the troops that is extremely rare," says Nick Kottyan, who co-founded Peak 10 and now runs Winston-Salem-based DataChambers LLC, a data-center services provider owned by North State Communications LLC of High Point. "He could tell his staff, 'We're going to march down 1-77 today, and nobody's going to get hit,' and they will march right behind him and believe...