Maddalone helps inspire next generation of entrepreneurs

Local entrepreneur and 1989 Siena College graduate Guy Maddalone looks over the Maddalone EntrepreneurWall of Fame, which was unveiled April 21 in Siena's Stack Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

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From an early age it was apparent to Guy Maddalone that if he wanted to make money, he had to go out and earn it.

Throughout his childhood, he took initiative by cutting lawns, shoveling and sealing driveways, and took on the paper route — delivering The Daily Gazette within his community.

“Entrepreneurship is your ticket to freedom,” Maddalone said. “What I found back in the late ’80s, people weren’t promoting going up and being an entrepreneur, it was more going up and being a manager of a company and having a successful career; I took a different path and I created my own success.”

Now the 1989 Siena graduate is the founder and CEO of GTM Payroll Services, located at 7 Executive Park Drive in Clifton Park, and he is stimulating other students to do the same.

Maddalone felt that there was a missing ingredient in the business program at Siena — helping kids be entrepreneurs.

The question: How could they inspire students to become future entrepreneurs and make their mark?

The answer: A wall of fame decorated with the logos of companies launched by Siena graduates, imprinting the successful, spunky entrepreneurs who started off at Siena in the minds of subsequent generations of students.

On April 21, Siena’s Stack Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship unveiled the Maddalone Entrepreneur Wall of Success to both recognize the entrepreneurial success of Siena alumni and inspire current students to blossom into tomorrow’s business leaders.

The alumni of Siena College have started businesses in nearly every industry ranging from clean energy, biomedicine, nanotechnology, IT and software to real estate, finance, media and entertainment.

“Siena College has a proud history of educating innovative, ethical and successful entrepreneurs who have made tremendous contributions in helping to grow the economy in the Capital Region and beyond,” said Michael J. Hickey ’83, executive director of the Stack Center and executive-in-residence at Siena. “We are most grateful to Guy Maddalone, who epitomizes the very best qualities of the Siena entrepreneur, for making it possible to establish this wall as a means of saluting our successes and inspiring our students.”

Maddalone and his wife, Diane, met at Siena, and she does accounting and works at GTM in the role of controller. They have three children: Michael, a junior at Shenendehowa High School; Elise, a freshman; and Jeffrey a fifth grader. Maddalone spends his free time coaching his sons in baseball, at the track watching his daughter run, and giving back to the community

Maddalone grew up in Schenectady and graduated from Bishop Gibbons High School.

His experience with being an entrepreneur began during his secondary years in 1985 when he and his mother, Joyce, started a home health care registry, Action Nursing Service.

He went away to Hartwick College, but found himself continuing to be drawn back to the business and running it on the weekends, handling the accounting, books, coordination and marketing. The path led him to transfer to Siena. “I felt a need to sharpen my skills in the marketing and accounting area; fine tune my technical skills,” Maddalone said. “I decided that I would go there to get stronger skills in the business discipline and be closer to the business that we were running at the time.”

His mother worked home health care, private duty, at night. One man in their neighborhood called them and asked if she could take care of him in the evenings so that he could get out of the hospital.

One week later, the phone rang again with a similar request, except this one was for the daytime; his mother couldn’t but had a friend who could. The registry began.

Maddalone ran this business throughout his collegiate years, arranging his courses on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays so that he could run the business on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Seven years later, he sold it and started up another booming enterprise.

After graduating from Siena in 1989 with a degree in accounting, he searched for a way to fill a societal void. “I started thinking about these families that are helping take care of their parents; typically it was somebody who was 40 years of age, 50 years of age and they had a need to take care of mom and dad,” Maddalone said. “I thought perhaps they need help at their house or help with their children, so I started the nanny side of things to expand that thought.”

A New England Nanny was born.

Initially it served those residing within the Loudonville, Niskayuna, Delmar and Clifton Park areas. A related venture soon followed — payroll services.

“Once someone hired nanny from A New England Nanny or a nanny company in Boston or New York City or Los Angeles, we would provide payroll services by the way of cutting checks and filing people’s taxes and I started to grow that piece and became more focused around that,” Maddalone said. “Today we are paying over 30,000 people throughout the U.S.; whereas back in 1991, I started with one client. Today the revenues are going to be close to $10 million.”

Since the inception of GTM Payroll Service, Maddalone has branched out from serving exclusively families to doing payroll for small businesses as well back in 2002. “We are also providing insurance in the form of worker’s compensation, health insurance and we have a human resource consultation service.”

GTM was named to the Inc. 5000 list of the nation’s fastest-growing companies for six consecutive years, 2007 to 2012.

As an entrepreneur, there is a recipe for success. “You have to think big, plan, believe in yourself because many will not believe in you, never give up and be prepared when the opportunity arises, take risks and just go do it,” Maddalone said. “I think the biggest piece of advice is that they have to be creative, they have to think about what need there is in the marketplace that they might be able to satisfy.”

He continued: “My Siena College experience has been an important cornerstone of my life, both personally and professionally, and continues to be through my involvement with the Stack Center. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to ‘pay it forward’ through the establishment of the Maddalone Entrepreneur Wall of Success, which I hope will serve as motivation for Siena’s students on their path to becoming top-level executives and business leaders for the next generation.”