Nathan Whittacre: 13:27
And that was our value prop for that.
John Corcoran: 13:29
It sounds like in the early days, you really had to be flexible in terms of what you’re selling and evolve your offerings. This is the late 90s. Moving to 2000. There’s the whole dotcom meltdown, and there’s nine over 11. What was that experience like for the company?
Nathan Whittacre: 13:49
You know, we certainly saw a little bit of it with, you know, people being scared of investing in technology inside their businesses. But it was actually somewhat of a growth phase for us just because companies were at that point not connected to the internet on a mass scale. You know, maybe 1 or 2 users had a dial-up account. But we saw a big opportunity in the early 2000 to help companies get connected onto the internet. And that’s where we went from just a break fix computer service shop to a combined managed services company that we were offering internet services.
Eventually, voice over IP along with our IT services in one complete package to our business clients. And, you know, a little bit shift away from, as I said before, from a product standpoint to a recurring services model, which is what we’re what we are today. So everything we do today revolves around providing a recurring service to our clients. Being proactive in helping them with their technology needs rather than just a one-off project or, you know, selling a product. So that’s where our model, you know, dramatically changed in the early 2000s when we realized that there was, you know, demand for a complete solution for these clients.
John Corcoran: 15:14
And from a business standpoint, you have a client for a longer period of time. It’s not just one quick sale, and they leave. You make whatever your margin is, you have a longer relationship with them.
Nathan Whittacre: 15:25
We do. And, you know, put some onus on us to make sure that we’re doing a great job. You know, it’s one of those things that the worst job we do, the more, you know, work we have. And that might be good if you’re charging, you know, for time, if you’re just time and materials. But in a recurring services model, the better we are, the more profit we can make.
Because, you know, if we do a great job, we don’t have to provide or, you know, spend as much time and labor on that customer. So it really puts the onus on us to really nail down our service delivery model and have an excellent experience for the customer, because they’ll stay with us for 20 or 30 years. Now some customers.
John Corcoran: 16:07
Now you’re outside of Las Vegas. Las Vegas had a big boom in real estate and growth in the 2000s. And then after the global economic meltdown. So 2008 to 2012 was a real downturn for the region. How did that affect you?
Nathan Whittacre: 16:25
It’s a big problem for us, honestly. We had a lot of clients in the construction industry. And, you know, as those clients either went out of business or really had to scale down their operations. It affected us considerably, and I remember meeting at a family meeting or board meeting or whatever you want to call it. It was one in the same at the time and in 2008, and we had to make some hard decisions on, you know, this small family company of how we were going to continue operating going forward. And, you know, we made some tough decisions as a family.
And, you know, it ended up paying off just fine. And we actually grew through that period by refocusing some of our operations, cutting some costs and, you know, redoubling our efforts in industries that weren’t as affected by the downturn. You know, certainly here in Las Vegas, construction, new home building, gaming was a downturn in tourism. So focusing on other, you know, professional services, things that would last like, you know, legal and CPAs medical. We brought in some products that we started reselling in the medical space.
Which was, you know, always growing. That’s always going to be there. We were able to stave off that downturn for us, but it took some tough decisions that we had to make as a company. Call it an early on company to grow through it.
John Corcoran: 17:52
How did you figure out in those early days, since you started this company with your dad and your brother? How did you figure out the division of labor, and who was going to handle what?
Nathan Whittacre: 18:00
So my dad was mostly an advisor to the company. He only worked in the business for a couple of years. Actually, in that period, 2009 to 2011, he worked in the company full time. My brother and I did most of the work through the initial part of the business. And, you know, we kind of divided labor up by customer.
So we each had our set of customers that we were primarily focused on, knew them well, and did the work for those specific customers. But he actually left the company in 2002. One of our projects for a customer that we had was a software development project. We used to do software also, and we.
John Corcoran: 18:41
Run the gamut of every different type of IT service.
Nathan Whittacre: 18:44
We did, we did. I mean, we were, you know, we were just trying to figure out how to make some money early on and pay for college. And, you know, both my brother and I were going through college at the time, too. So we split that software development company into another business that my brother went to run. So in 2002, my brother left the company, and I was left as the sole operator of stimulus.
John Corcoran: 19:07
And how did that change things for you? Did it still, you know, was it a difficult adjustment?
Nathan Whittacre: 19:15
It was a little bit because I had, you know, two family members as business partners that were no longer operational partners in the business. And, you know, they had their own day to day demands on their time. I’m. Whereas, you know, I was operationally making the decisions and, you know, I was in my young 20s and I certainly hadn’t gone to business school. You know, I have a degree in computer science, a bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer science.
And, you know, they don’t teach this stuff of how to run a business in computer science school. And so I, you know, sometimes I made bad decisions and, you know, floundered along the way. You know, how to get sales, how to, you know, maintain customers, you know, these different business offerings. And one of the best decisions I made is in 2008, I hired a CEO coach, part of a CEO peer group. And really learned from the coach and the peers, the CEO peers in my group of how to operate a business and how to scale a business.
And that’s been probably one of the pivotal decisions I made in the company of going that direction to really learning how to move from, you know, a lifestyle business, you know, a hobby into, you know, a real operational business that can scale. And without that decision, I wouldn’t be where we’re at today.
John Corcoran: 20:39
Yeah. Yeah. And that was at a time when you. 2008, when, you know, businesses were struggling. So was that. Was that a pretty bold or difficult decision to make while your company was struggling?
Nathan Whittacre: 20:53
It was one of those, you know, dramatic changes that we decided to make at that time and, you know, refocus the business. So it is bold. I mean, it’s, you know, I’m often willing to take some risks. You know, probably sometimes more than I should. With the business.
But they tend to pay off because I’m very stubborn. So that’s another part of my personality, if I want to see things through. I’m very resilient to all the pressures. And it’s hard, you know, at times to, you know, have those constant demands from different aspects. You know, the economy is doing this. You know, our customers are struggling, but we’re going to, you know, have this vision of where the company is going to go and come hell or high water, we’re going to get there.
John Corcoran: 21:44
Yeah. You. So COVID hits in 2020. Five years ago now. How did that affect you at that point?
Nathan Whittacre: 21:54
It was actually a boon for our business. As with a lot of technology providers, we were ideally ready. Unbeknownst to ourselves for the remote and the remote work and hybrid work that everything that we needed to do. And so a lot of again, we moved away from servicing tourism and the businesses that were really affected by Covid. Luckily, a lot of our clients were essential services and in healthcare legal these businesses that had to continue operating.
And so luckily we were an essential service provider. And a lot of the areas that we serviced and our clients were also but they needed to continue operations in spite of these remote work requirements or stay at home requirements that the state instilled. And so we quickly had to help our clients move to a 100% remote very quickly. And you know, we met as a leadership team. We came up with some service plans, and within a couple of days, we had a comprehensive service offering to help our clients move from working in a brick-and-mortar location to 100% remote.
And, you know, giving that option to our clients to say, hey, we’ll be an essential provider to you. We’re going to help you continue operations, and we’ll help you do it efficiently through technology and not cost you a lot more. And a lot of our clients including us have stayed in a hybrid or remote model because we found it as or more efficient than having to go into the office every day. Yeah. So it’s I think we were uniquely posed as a society because of technology, as things have moved to the cloud, as telecommunications services like zoom or teams had evolved enough, and as internet connectivity allowed for companies to work wherever or whenever they want.
You know, we were uniquely positioned as a society and then as a business to survive that. Now, brick and mortar stores. I mean, it’s a lot harder if you have to have a retail location to operate and certainly hit a lot harder. And I’m very aware that a lot of businesses weren’t as lucky as we were. So but you know, we were just right, right place at the right time to take advantage of that type of growth.
John Corcoran: 24:19
Now you recently got a $140 million grant to hook up 17,000 homes in Southern Nevada to the internet. I imagine this is kind of a rural area or something like that. It sounds like, I don’t know if you’ve if you had gotten grants previously to this, but that sounds like this was a big leap. How did that come about? And what kind of an impact was that when you got that grant?
Nathan Whittacre: 24:43
It takes some pre-planning to do this. We stay on top of what’s going on in the political realm of the government. The federal government passed in 2022 an infrastructure bill. And part of that infrastructure bill was $42 billion set aside for internet connectivity for rural locations. And we realized, you know, we had subscribers, customers in these rural areas, and we met as a leadership team and said, you know, this is either a huge opportunity for us as a company or a company killer.
You know, one of the two. Because in these areas we serve. As we service through fixed wireless technologies today, we had to now compete potentially against a provider that’s coming in and getting government grants to build out fiber optic networks. And that’s very disruptive. And it’s hard to compete against, you know, $42 billion worth of fiber build-outs.
And so we made a strategic move at the beginning of last year to set up the structure so that we could bid on these grant areas. We hired a consulting firm and put together our first grant application early last year, which was not one of these federal grants. It was a state grant, and we won that one. It was a much smaller one than this, than this larger one. And then through the middle to the end of 2024, we spent time with this, this group and developing our proposal to the state of Nevada for one of these infrastructure grants, and one about 85% of the areas where we bid on for this, this grant project.
So we were overjoyed and also very nervous because this is, you know, a huge project for us, something that we haven’t done before. But we’re very excited about it and it’s created a lot of opportunity for the company, but to a lot of challenges as we have to scale up now to deploy this project successfully. We’ve also continued to build, bid on, and hopefully win other projects and some of the other states that we operate in. We’re in five different states. So we’re, you know, currently working on additional applications and other locations.
So we might end up having more than this, but we realized that we had to protect our existing infrastructure, our existing business, and then provide even better services to our existing clients and future clients by offering fiber optic internet services rather than our fixed wireless. So that’s it was, you know, either a business killer or a business accelerator. And we decided to, you know, focus on the acceleration efforts.
John Corcoran: 27:27
And it’s another example of, you know, if you’re going to be a 30-year-old technology company, you’ve got to innovate, you got to change, you got to evolve with the times. And yeah, you certainly are doing that.
Nathan Whittacre: 27:39
Yeah, I think any business has to evolve and change. But in the technology industry there’s not a day that goes by that there’s not something that we have to do differently. I, you know, the generative AI that’s come out in the last couple of years is certainly changing the type of service that we have to deliver to our clients, too. And so, you know, constantly looking at opportunities, but also the opportunities can be threats to, to, to our business. Yeah. And so we’re always balancing that out. And there’s no other industry other than technology that has that much change happening that fast.
John Corcoran: 28:13
Yeah. Yeah. Especially now. Nathan, this has been really interesting. Thanks so much for your time. Where can people go to learn more about you and learn more about your company?
Nathan Whittacre: 28:22
So Stimulus technologies, you can find us at stimulustech.com. Best way to find me is on LinkedIn so you can search up my name, Nathan Whittacre. I also wrote a book a few years ago on how CEOs can use technology to enhance their businesses. So if you connect with me on LinkedIn and just mention the book, I’d be happy to send you a free hard copy of the book.
John Corcoran: 28:44
And you have a podcast as well.
Nathan Whittacre: 28:46
I do. So if you can find us at Stimulus Tech Talk on any of the major podcast channels, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, all the major ones.
John Corcoran: 28:56
Excellent. Nathan, thanks so much.
Nathan Whittacre: 28:58
My pleasure. Thanks, John.
Outro: 29:02
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.