A Little Background

Since 2005, I've moved from 9 years of running a public company to "the give back" part of my life. Not that I'm uninterested in being a CEO again, but this is "a lot more fun."

I teach entrepreneurship to undergraduate college students at Allegheny College. I also work with emerging company executives on how to learn from my mistakes by teaching a year-long certificate program at CMU's Tepper School of Business called the Entrepreneurial Leadership Forum.

An English major at Allegheny and sometime stringer for the Meadville Tribune, writing has always been my passion. I actually wrote the letters to the shareholders in Tollgrade's annual report. I also write a column called "You'll Manage" for Pittsburgh Quarterly magazine.

I want to keep my hands in the game, so I've made recent private equity investments, including the Linux-software portal company Timesys, as well as hospital safety system company Chemdaq. I'm a director of both companies.

So how did I go from being an English major at a small liberal arts college to CEO of a public technology company? The short answer is simple. My Dad, the company founder Craig Allison, Sr., asked me.

For 16 years, we led Tollgrade Communications, Inc. from a start-up funded with $ 6 million in private equity investment to a publicly-traded company with sales that reached $ 114 million and a market capitalization of almost $2 billion in 2000. I had a great team and during my 9-year tenure as chairman and chief executive officer, the company was recognized on multiple occasions as one of the Best Small Companies in America by Forbes, as well as Fortune, Industry Week, Business 2.0, Electronic Business and Bloomberg Personal Finance. In addition, while at Tollgrade, we orchestrated two successful acquisitions for the company that immediately added to its earnings. We also navigated Tollgrade through the post-9/11 telecom downturn by maintaining profitability immediately following the "bubble burst."

Now, I pretty much devote my time to writing and teaching. I teach in the Economics Department at Allegheny College as the school's Entrepreneur-In-Residence. I am also honored to be a member of the College's Board of Trustees. In addition, I write freelance articles, most actively as a columnist for Pittsburgh Quarterly. You can check out some of my past articles on the Pittsburgh Quarterly page.

That's about the whole story. Give me a shout at 412-389-8888 if you want to know more. I'll be sure to let you know if anything else comes up.