Can Wake Forest friends join hearts and minds to create a business, do well and remain friends? Rick Connolly (’94, P ’26) and Steve Dettor (’94) are proving it is possible. For a decade, these fraternity brothers have been building and running a tech-focused, human capital management company, Gravity IT Resources, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
In September, for the sixth year in a row, Gravity IT Resources landed on the “Inc. 5000,” the annual list of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. According to “Inc. 5000,” the 2024 list represents companies that brought in minimum annual revenue of $2 million and “have driven rapid revenue growth while navigating inflationary pressure, the rising costs of capital and seemingly intractable hiring challenges over the past few years.”
Long before they created an acclaimed company that connects businesses with IT workers, Connolly and Dettor were students at Wake Forest. Both grew up in Fort Lauderdale but on different sides of town going to different high schools. They met at Wake Forest in spring 1991 when they pledged Sigma Phi Epsilon. (The fraternity later closed its Wake Forest chapter.)
Connolly remembers an antic Dettor pulled with an empty keg at a fraternity party. “He put it over his head, and he ran across the Quad like it was the Stanley Cup,” he remembers. “I’m like, ‘Who is that guy? I gotta get to know that guy.’”
They reminisce about an entrepreneurship class with the late Horace Kelly, then a business school lecturer, who wanted students to create a business plan. Connolly envisioned a bar in Key West. Dettor imagined proposing that general contractors use new technology — laser-guided grading equipment.

Brian Miner ('94), Steve Dettor ('94), Will Crook ('94) and Rick Connolly ('94) at Commencement
All photos and images courtesy of Connolly and Dettor
A real business created from the bottom up would come much later. After they found each other as pledges, the guys hung out together during the summer in Florida. For two summers, they both worked for the Dettor family’s tennis court business.
After graduation, Dettor continued working for the family business for a few years before moving on to an internet startup, a software company and business school. In 2006, he moved back to Fort Lauderdale and the family business.
Connolly, meanwhile, worked his way up the corporate ladder at talent management firm Allegis Group. He spent three years there as president of one of its operating companies.
Throughout their friendship, Dettor and Connolly kept a daydream going about someday starting a business together.
But Dettor “never thought I was going to leave,” Connolly says. “He’s like, ‘You’re never going to leave your company; this is just conversation over a couple beers between old friends,’ and stuff like that.”
They had separate go-moments during trips to the Florida Keys together. During a drive in Connolly’s convertible, Dettor remembers thinking, “Yep, I think this is meant to be. It’s the right time in our lives to do this.”
At a bar in Key West, Connolly noted his own wife’s previous comments that he wasn’t getting any younger and said, “OK, let’s do it.”
“Rick’s kind of like the consummate leader, people manager, sales guy,” says Dettor. Connolly refers to Dettor as “an ultimate Swiss army knife. … He can do everything.”
Connolly left Allegis at the end of 2011 for other work for a while. The friends launched the business in 2015, driven by a desire to build something from the ground up. Dettor emptied his retirement fund, while Connolly contributed savings.
“It was a high-risk thing,” Connolly says. “We both quit good careers and burned the bridges.”
“I’d never had an opportunity to start something from a blank sheet of paper,” says Dettor, who was especially interested in fostering the early careers of young professionals — a focus that continues at Gravity IT Resources.
For both, the foundation of their friendship was key. “I knew we would be a good team,” Dettor says, and didn’t worry about risking the friendship.
Connolly says, “We trusted each other implicitly,” having known each other for more than 20 years at that point.
The duo can boast of complementary skills. “Rick’s kind of like the consummate leader, people manager, sales guy,” says Dettor. Connolly refers to Dettor as “an ultimate Swiss army knife. … He can do everything.”
Connolly is the CEO, primarily focused on the customer, business development and people side of the business and running the field offices. Dettor is the company’s chief operating officer, running strategy, finance and operations.

Connolly, CEO of Gravity IT Resources
For Gravity IT Resources, the pair wanted to build a staffing company to meet the needs of a growing market, says Dettor. The company helps businesses find IT workers who can do software development, data work, project management and more.
“What we do is we help traditionally larger enterprises, like Fortune 1000 type companies, find IT professionals for contract positions,” says Dettor, explaining that much of the work involves finding tech help for discrete projects where it doesn’t make sense for a business to hire someone full time, although Gravity IT Resources does help also with full-time hires.
Dettor and Connolly focused especially on using referrals to get good candidates, a strategy they think has set them apart. Gravity IT Resources pays people who send in referrals if those referrals get hired permanently or on a contract.

Dettor, COO of Gravity IT Resources
“My philosophy was always like, software engineers know the other best software engineers,” says Connolly, noting that referrals often result in talented hires but in an ad hoc way.
They also tap the Wake Forest network. They have recruited students at Wake Forest career fairs, and Wake Forest alumni, including Connolly’s brother, Brett Connolly (’03), run their offices in Washington, D.C., and Charlotte. Connolly’s son, Jack, is a junior at Wake Forest. Recently, Dettor and Connolly hosted University Vice President and Director of Athletics John Currie (’93) for a leadership lunch for local alumni in Fort Lauderdale.
In 2022, the friends started an additional company, Gravity Data Engineering & Cloud Analytics, a data and generative artificial intelligence consultancy.
They can look back now on how far they have come. They started their first business in Connolly’s house before moving into offices in 2017. Dettor kept running his family business simultaneously for the first few years after the founding of Gravity IT Resources. About a month after the business was established, Connolly’s wife, Jennifer, received a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis.
“It was really, really hard,” says Dettor, who had to quickly learn about the staffing business, while Connolly was supporting his wife and working from doctors’ waiting rooms.
“Having a great partner that kind of stood in the gap when we had to go to medical appointments and stuff like that was a blessing,” says Connolly. Ditto for the supportive spouses.
Dettor and Connolly also have managed to navigate market shocks — the pandemic — followed by a shakier tech market.
If he had known how difficult building the business would be, he isn’t sure he would have pursued it, says Connolly. But when he had his doubts, he looked to Dettor, who Connolly says “was like, ‘We got this.’” Likewise, when Dettor’s spirits flagged, Connolly was on a “crescendo of enthusiasm” and there to offer Dettor reassurance.
“We’ve had the luxury of just being able to focus on growing the business,” says Connolly of their friendship. “We just kind of work well together. We really do.”
— Natalie Alms (’20) is a staff reporter at trade publication Nextgov/FCW, where she covers government technology. She lives in Washington, D.C.