AUTHORIZED MONTEL DISTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT: TIM OF H2I GROUP
As Tim McGowan’s career comes to a close and he relaxes into a well-earned retirement, we were fortunate to sit down with him and look back on his time as a storage consultant at H2I Group (formerly Haldeman Homme), an Authorized Montel Distributor.
It all began at a hockey game in 1993, where Tim ran into a friend about to leave his gig in sales at H2I Group. Unsure of whether he could support his family on a teacher’s salary, Tim jumped at the opportunity to get back to his roots. (He previously worked in insurance sales before transitioning to education.)
At H2I Group, Tim dutifully served the clients in his specific sales territory, but he also supported projects across the country, whether they were direct sales or bids. He traveled to where the clients were, weighed in on design work, and leveraged H2I Group’s forty-year history in the storage business to provide solutions-oriented consulting to deliver on the client’s needs.
In his time at H2I Group, Tim watched the storage landscape change dramatically. Back in the 2000s, a lot of his team’s work resembled that of their million-dollar projects with a prominent financial institution that manages document trust custody—essentially, backup mortgage paperwork to the tune of tens of millions of files, all stored in high-security warehouses.
But as the era of digitization cut the corporate paper trail and reshaped how businesses maintained their legacy data, Tim and H2I Group sought new markets for their storage solutions. And while fewer and fewer organizations had the need to store paper files, others were dissatisfied with their traditional static storage and wanted a change. That’s where H2I Group stepped in.
Tim became fascinated with his museum storage clients in particular, as well as Montel’s ModulArt freestanding pull-out art racks and screens, his go-to recommendation for preserving paintings, maps, and more.
“Working with museums offers an opportunity to come up with creative ways to store this history that is so very important to hold on to, that tells our story,” Tim said.
Tim hopes to spend the first years of his retirement cooking dinners for his wife and cheering on his daughter, a high school senior and soccer team hopeful, from the sidelines. Beyond that, he plans to play tennis and golf, travel, and catch up on projects around the house.
Out of everything Tim has done over the years in service of H2I and Montel, we would like to take a moment to thank him specifically for the dedication and care he has shown his clients. It’s no secret that Tim is a gregarious, outgoing storage consultant. He told us himself that he’s going to miss his relationships with his clients and coworkers more than anything else about his career—and we don’t doubt that for a second!
But no matter where life takes him next, he will always be a beloved member of the Montel AMD family, and we wish him a happy, fulfilling retirement.
