Building a Company to Last
This year, LINX is celebrating 20 years of design and technical expertise.
By Travis Deatherage
For any company, reaching the 20-year-milestone is significant. While planning for LINX's 20th anniversary, I couldn't help but reflect on the business principles upon which we have built our success. These principles have been our foundation in an ever-changing industry.
There were many business lessons to be learned in the late 1990s. That was especially true for a recent college graduate working for a telecom startup. Despite raising $300 million in venture capital, we, like many other dotcoms, barely survivied. After riding the dotcom wave, I followed my entrepreneurial spirit and, in the middle of the 2002 recession, I started my own company. Great idea, right? I built that company upon the basic principles I learned from my father, uncle and business mentors.
My roadmap was simple: Begin with a set of core values and a desire to create raving fans by installing cutting-edge technology inside their homes. My good friend, Ted McCausland joined me. Together, we expanded our service portfolio while growing our commercial installations to 80% of our business. In 2011, we merged the company into LINX, a structured-cable contractor dabbling in AV and security integration. Today, LINX is the largest Colorado-based national AV integrator; moreover, it’s ranked in the top 50 of national integrators.
Seven Business Principles
LINX continues to grow, and we’ve executed five acquisitions, each of which represented a different size and level of complexity. Through it all and over the years, I've learned many lessons. I’ve concluded that the following seven business principles remain at the core of LINX’s success:
M&A might be easy, but the integrating the companies is challenging. The key to success is culture alignment. Then you can execute systems and process integration to build a lasting partnership.
Business is built on relationships and reputation. Do what you say you are going to do, and always finish the job.
The best interface is no interface. The simpler we can make our systems, the more that users will enjoy them.
Our people matter. Developing a culture to cultivate likeminded and committed team members is the greatest challenge (and advantage) in businesses of all kinds.
Leadership is more about coaching than it is about managing.
Financial discipline matters. Running a business during inflationary times is even more challenging than running a business during recessionary times is.
An agile approach to business planning might be needed at times. Shifts in the economy, supply chain and labor market require an agile approach to working with customers.
Unchanging Pillars
Those business principles are pillars, and they don’t change, — even when the world around us does and even when our clients’ needs quickly evolve. When I started my company in 2002, there were no iPhone; only Palm Pilots and Motorola's push-to-talk flip phones existed. Funny how no one asked how they could get the content from their Palm Pilot to a TV screen. HDTV was new and, primarily, was installed in residential spaces, despite the fact that there were only a few HD cable channels and HD content was scarce. The addition of Crestron Digital Media, circa 2010, was a game changer. Despite the challenges of this first-generation product, the benefits were clear: This was the first time that commercial clients could see that the possibilities of digital video distribution exceed those of analog.
Pandemic Expedites Change
The most dramatic shift of the last 20 years occurred when the pandemic expedited, by at least five years, the adoption curve of meeting technology. Little did the industry know how supply-chain challenges would materialize and unprecedented client demand would sweep the world. Zoom, Microsoft Teams and other platforms developed at rapid speeds. As a result, our business planning at LINX has changed — going from performing installs in a few weeks to planning for installations that take months or years. When the world around us changes, we must hold onto our core values and remember that the principles of business success do not change. Whether your business is a start-up or celebrating a 20th anniversary, my advice is the same: Make time to visualize your company in the future. You might not know how you’ll get there, but the answer isn't behind you. Therefore, don't look back. We’re not going that way.
Travis Deatherage, owner/partner and president of LINX
Travis Deatherage is owner/partner and president of LINX, a Colorado-based technology integrator that provides design and technical expertise in network cabling, multimedia systems, security and in-building wireless systems. LINX Multimedia is also a member of Edge, formerly USAV Group.