Commercial Integrator March 2023 - 62

INTEGRATOR INSIGHTS
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 survived.
After riding the dotcom wave, I followed
my entrepreneurial spirit and, in the middle
of the 2002 recession, 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:
1. M&A might be easy, but 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.
62
Travis Deatherage,
owner/partner and president of LINX
2. Business is built on relationships and
reputation. Do what you say you are
going to do, and always finish the job.
3. The best interface is no interface. The
simpler we can make our systems, the
more that users will enjoy them.
4. Our people matter. Developing a
culture to cultivate likeminded and committed
team members is the greatest
challenge (and advantage) in businesses
of all kinds.
5. Leadership is more about coaching than
it is about managing.
6. Financial discipline matters. Running
a business during inflationary times is
even more challenging than running a
business during recessionary times is.
7. 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 iPhones;
only Palm Pilots and Motorola's push-totalk
flip phones existed. Funny how no
Commercial Integrator MARCH 2023
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 exceeded
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 startup 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 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.
commercialintegrator.com
http://www.commercialintegrator.com
Commercial Integrator March 2023

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