Surviving Market Shifts and Scaling Smart in Tech With Nathan Whittacre

Nathan Whittacre is the Founder and CEO of Stimulus Technologies, a managed IT services provider specializing in internet services, cloud computing, and VoIP solutions across multiple US states. With a bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer science from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nathan has been at the forefront of the tech industry for over 30 years. He is an accomplished author of The CEO’s Digital Survival Guide, host of the Stimulus Tech Talk podcast, and frequent keynote speaker on topics like AI, cybersecurity, and digital transformation.

Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:

[2:08] How Nathan Whittacre turned his home into a kid-run retail business
[5:33] Launching a subscription-based bulletin board system before the Internet era
[10:59] Why Stimulus Technologies never opened a retail storefront
[13:49] How pivoting from products to recurring services reshaped the company’s future
[16:25] The importance of resilience and adaptability during challenging times
[20:39] Why hiring a CEO coach was the most pivotal decision for scaling the business
[21:54] How the COVID-19 boosted demand for remote IT solutions
[24:43] Winning a $140M federal grant to build fiber infrastructure in rural Nevada

In this episode…

Running a tech company for decades isn’t just about having the right product — it requires weathering recessions, embracing evolving technologies, and constantly adapting. How does a family-run business grow from a garage startup to securing $140 million in government funding?

Nathan Whittacre, a lifelong tech enthusiast, shares how he transformed his early passion into Stimulus Technologies, a resilient IT services provider. He recounts surviving multiple economic downturns, adjusting to industry shifts such as the rise of Dell, and responding to global crises like COVID-19 by scaling remote solutions. Nathan also explains how hiring a CEO coach and joining a peer group helped him transition from a tech-focused founder to a strategic business leader. His bold move to pursue public funding allowed Stimulus to expand broadband access to underserved communities, demonstrating the impact of vision and adaptability in the tech sector.

Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Nathan Whittacre, Founder and CEO of Stimulus Technologies, about building a sustainable tech business. Nathan talks about transitioning from building computers to managed services, navigating recessions, and capitalizing on government grants. He also discusses his early ventures, the impact of mentorship, and staying ahead of technology trends.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments:

“I was 11, running a candy store out of my house and doing weekly inventory with a paper ledger.”
“We had to choose: get crushed by the competition or compete for federal infrastructure grants, and we chose to compete.”
“The worse job we do, the more work we have — that’s the reality of a recurring services model.”
“I hired a CEO coach in 2008, and that changed everything and turned our hobby into a scalable business.”
“There’s no industry with faster change than technology. What helps you today can threaten you tomorrow.”

Action Steps:

Adapt your business model to market shifts: Transitioning from product-based to service-based offerings can provide more stability and recurring revenue. Nathan Whittacre’s pivot helped Stimulus weather economic turbulence and grow sustainably.
Leverage government opportunities: Stay ahead of policy and funding trends — Nathan secured major growth through a federal infrastructure grant. Strategic foresight can create transformative growth paths.
Invest in coaching and mentorship: Hiring a CEO coach helped Nathan learn how to scale beyond a lifestyle business. Expert guidance can accelerate business maturity and decision-making.
Diversify client industries: During downturns, shifting focus from struggling sectors (like construction) to more stable ones (like healthcare) can preserve revenue. Diversification cushions against economic shocks.
Innovate with purpose, Not Just Technology: Nathan embraced new tech like VoIP and remote solutions only when it served client needs. Thoughtful innovation ensures relevance and long-term client relationships.

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Episode Transcript

John Corcoran: 00:00

All right. Today we’re talking about how to run a technology company and really endure and be resilient over a long period of time over decades. My guest today is Nathan Whittacre. He’s got one of those companies that is a technology company that has innovated over time. I’ll tell you more about him in a second, so stay tuned.

Intro: 00:19

Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.

John Corcoran: 00:35

All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here, I am the host of the show. And if you listened before, you know that we’ve had interesting and smart CEOs every week from Netflix, Grubhub, Grubhub, Redfin, Gusto, Kinkos, Activision Blizzard, LendingTree, lots of great episodes in the archive. So go check those out.

And before we get into this, this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast and content marketing. We are an easy button for any B2B business to launch and run a podcast.

We do the strategy, accountability, and full execution using our platform, Podcast Copilot. So if you want to learn more about what we do, you can go to our website, Rise25.com or email us at [email protected]. All right. My guest here is Nathan Whittacre.

He’s the President and CEO of Stimulus Technologies. It’s a company that he founded way back in the mid-90s alongside his father. And his brother started from a garage in Henderson, Nevada, and he’s grown it into becoming a leading provider of IT services and cloud computing, voice over Internet Protocol services across multiple states. And so we’re going to hear about his story of enduring and being resilient over time. But I always love to start by getting to know my guests a little bit about what they were like when they were a kid.

And you got this crazy story. You grew up in a rural area, and I guess there wasn’t a candy store anywhere around. And so you decided at the age of 11, I think, it was to basically start a candy store out of your house. So, Nathan, tell us about that.

Nathan Whittacre: 02:08

Thanks, John, for letting me be here. It’s a pleasure of mine to be here with you. You and your guests. Yeah. You know, it’s interesting.

My parents were both business owners. I saw them running businesses, you know, growing up, and kind of wanted to take part of it. In our neighborhood, there wasn’t an option for the kids to go to a local candy store or convenience shop, and saw the opportunity to, you know, sell candy and pop and and different things to my friends. And my mom taught me how to buy it wholesale and sell this candy for a profit to you know, neighbors and friends, and, you know, eventually grew it as an 11-year-old to sell about $200 a week in candy out of my house. It had, you know, 20 or 30 different types of items from, you know, Snickers bars to baseball cards and soda and popsicles.

John Corcoran: 03:04

Is it all, like, in a little corner of your living room by the front door, and people knock on the door and come and buy candy, or that’s it.

Nathan Whittacre: 03:09

Did you stop by? I mean, you saw. That’s exactly what it was. So I had a little closet off the front door. People would knock on the door after school and, you know, buy the candy.

My mom made me run it like a business. I had a paper ledger. I would have to record my sales every day and do inventory every week. And as you know, went to buy the candy or whatever at the local Smart & Final. I’d have to, you know, make sure that I had enough profit from the week to go buy new supplies. And I still have these ledgers. It’s pretty cool to go back and look at, you know, 11 years.

John Corcoran: 03:42

Oh, that’s so cool. You got to, like, frame one of these ledgers and put it on the wall. I think that would be great inspiration. But in the unfortunate case of government overreach, you got shut down.

Nathan Whittacre: 03:54

What happened? Yeah. You know, I think a few of the neighborhood parents were frustrated with their kids spending their lunch money on candy rather than lunch.

John Corcoran: 04:02

And the parents narc’d on you?

Nathan Whittacre: 04:03

They did. They did. And so it took, I guess, about six months. There were some complaints filed to the business licensing division of the city. And then the inspectors sat on it for six months because nobody wanted to shut down a 12-year-old kid selling candy out of his house.

John Corcoran: 04:23

I hope it wasn’t a high priority. Jeez.

Nathan Whittacre: 04:25

Yeah. So eventually they did. I wasn’t home, but they came and knocked on the door, and they said, You know, we need to have a business license to sell out of your house. We need you to collect sales tax on the candy and things that you’re selling. But the problem is, in your area, you can’t have a business operating a retail business out of a house.

So you either need to open up a store somewhere and operate it that way, or shut down. And my parents were like, well, what about a lemonade stand? What about these lemonade stands? They said, well, those are illegal, too. You know, I don’t see them arresting any five year olds selling lemonade, but yeah, they shut me down.

John Corcoran: 05:06

That is brutal, man. Man, that’s unfortunate that they did that. So you, but you actually did you have another thing you did. I think this was in high school. You ran a bulletin board system.

So this is kind of early, early internet days. And I mean, I participated in bulletin boards like in the mid-90s and things. I didn’t really see the business opportunity at the time. So how did it become a business for you?

Nathan Whittacre: 05:33

A little bit of a business. You know, I would charge people a few dollars a month, you know, from a subscription model to be a member and access through the bulletin board. It was a system called FidoNet. This was pre-Internet. So if you wanted to send a message to a user on another bulletin board anywhere in the world, you could type up that message, and then overnight, the modems would call each other and send these messages.

And so the next day you’d log in and have a reply from somebody you know. And wow, I don’t know, it’s Sweden or something like that. Yeah. And so that’s how the system worked. And, you know, charge a small, small fee to be part of the BBS. Also, we’d store, you know, files, shareware-type files that people could download and use. And so, you know.

John Corcoran: 06:18

It’s one part of Reddit. It’s one part Dropbox, it’s one part Google cloud computing. It’s like all this early stuff.

Nathan Whittacre: 06:25

Yeah, it was and it was really interesting. I mean, some of these BBSes made pretty good money. You know, again, before the internet was really a thing for individual users. You know, people were paying, you know, $25, $30 a month to be part of a BBS, be part of these communities. They could play games online.

And then that eventually for companies turned into being a dial-up internet service provider. They just converted over their modems to provide dial-up internet. Obviously that’s changed now, you know, over the years, but that was kind of the precursor to dialing up the internet or and then AOL and Prodigy came along, and CompuServe and some of these very early. Yeah, technically they were BBSes. But the internet took over all of that eventually in the late 90s.

John Corcoran: 07:15

So were you, like, playing around with computers at a young age, figuring.

Nathan Whittacre: 07:18

Four years old.

John Corcoran: 07:19

Four years.

Nathan Whittacre: 07:20

Old? Yeah. My brother and I really, you know, love technology. Thought it was cool. My brother was seven years older than I, so he was more involved with it.

But my parents bought us our first computer when I was four. My brother was 11, and we would just sit there and try to figure out how to make it work. We would get these magazines that had examples of code, and we would just type in the code, and that’s how we would, you know, be able to play video games. That’s what we wanted to do is play video games. And this was pre-Atari 2600.

You know the original video game console at Pre Nintendo. And we just sit there and figure out how to code these games. And that was that I was a nerd. Okay. Let me ask you what I was like when I was a little kid. I was a nerd. Keep it straight.

John Corcoran: 08:06

I mean, in retrospect, the nerds took over the asylum, so to speak. So, you know, Bill Gates just put out his biography I just saw advertised. So one of the biggest nerds of all. And, you know, at one point, I don’t know if he still is, but at one point, the richest man in the world. So you kind of I guess your parents nurtured this interest that you had in technology. And then at what point does it become like an actual business? At what point does it become stimulus technology?

Nathan Whittacre: 08:37

I was working for a small computer store when I was in high school, and the owner of the store was a professor at the local university, so it was a part-time gig for him. We would build computers, help other businesses out with creating small networks. The professor decided that he wanted to focus on his teaching, and then he was a magician, so he wanted to focus on his magic shows. So he decided to shut the store down. And I went home to my dad and my brother after I found this out, you know, made the announcement that they were closing the store, I said, you know, we could do this. Why don’t we start our own computer store?

John Corcoran: 09:15

And you’re in high school. At the time.

Nathan Whittacre: 09:18

I was in high school, I was between my junior and senior year of high school.

John Corcoran: 09:23

Okay. And by the way, your parents, you said your parents had businesses also, were they in retail? Because it seemed like your mom knew stuff about inventory and stuff?

Nathan Whittacre: 09:31

Yeah. So they sold flooring and window coverings. So that was their primary business. And they also owned a ServiceMaster franchise.

John Corcoran: 09:40

Okay. So then you come home at 17 years old and say, let’s open a computer store or reopen or buy this computer store. Probably didn’t seem as crazy. Or did it still seem crazy to them?

Nathan Whittacre: 09:51

It didn’t seem crazy to them. You know, they knew what it took to run a business. And they wanted to be involved, but they wanted it to be a family business. And so we spent a lot of time as a family deciding what this business would look like and how it would be set up. And, you know, especially me, I was 17 years old.

You know, my brother was in college. We didn’t have much experience of actually running a business. Other than, you know, just these hobby businesses that we had started. But my parents had pretty good experiences with the good and the bad. So it wasn’t far-fetched for us to do this, and it was a good opportunity for my brother and I to pay our way through college. As we did this, we worked out of my brother’s garage.

John Corcoran: 10:36

So you ended up buying it from the owner.

Nathan Whittacre: 10:40

Just more or less inventory. So we bought like five of their customers. Their business clients came over to us and then bought their tools and some of their inventory.

John Corcoran: 10:51

Did it remain like a brick-and-mortar store, or did it eventually morph into more of a B2B business?

Nathan Whittacre: 10:59

So we shut down and we didn’t take over the brick and mortar store, so we moved into my brother’s garage and we would do on-site support for our clients. So we would build the computers. It was mostly, you know, building computers and then supporting them on-site. So we’d build the computers in his garage, take them out to clients offices or houses, install them, you know, set them up, connect them on a network. And we didn’t have a brick and mortar store, and actually we never have. Even 30 years later, we don’t have a retail computer location.

John Corcoran: 11:34

Well, probably a good thing because there aren’t a lot of those, right? No. And so you decide To focus kind of on the B2B piece. Oh, and so like in the mid-90s, this was a time period where it wasn’t easy to get computers. Computers weren’t always sold as one complete package.

And I’ve interviewed some people that had similar types of companies. And then, you know, Dell came along, gateway came along and really kind of displaced that business. Did you experience that as well?

Nathan Whittacre: 12:02

I mean, certainly the building of computers, you know, was replaced a lot by these large manufacturers. And, you know, today we’ve joined them. I mean, we’re a Dell reseller, HP reseller. And so we no longer build computers. But that was an evolution over time.

So we’ve switched from a product-based business over to a service-based business just because of the nature of the market. It is kind of funny. My daughter asked me to help her build a gaming machine, and I hadn’t built a computer myself in probably ten years. And so it was, you know, relearning what? That’s what that looks like.

And some people still, you know, from a hobbyist standpoint, you could buy parts on the internet and build your own computer. Yeah. Which is fun to do. But certainly, you know, building or buying a Dell or an HP is, you know, often a better deal today than. Yeah.

Then it was back then. It used to be kind of flopped that you could build your own machines. We could make a profit on building these computers, make them spec’ed right for the clients, and then they become serviceable. A lot of times, you know your Dell or HP, you know, they’re not serviceable by the end user. They control the parts and the supply chain.

And it gave us the option to say, okay, if you want a computer, we can build it, we can service it. We can maintain it for the life of the computer without ever having to, you know, call an 800 number somewhere.

John Corcoran: 13:27

Yeah.

[continue to page 2]

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John Corcoran knows his stuff."
--Michael Port, author of Book Yourself Solid

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