Spotlight on: Goodman Networks: Firm aims to hire several hundred in coming months

Goodman Networks Inc. is a national telecommunications services company founded in 2000 that provides engineering, deployment, integration and maintenance services to wireline and wireless carriers and original equipment manufacturers.
The Plano, Texas-based company this summer recently received $62 million in equity and debt financing from The Stephens Group L.L.C., which it plans to use to grow its business, including adding another couple hundred employees to its base of nearly 1,000. The company needs workers across the nation, depending on the contracts it gets. “It’s pretty spread out based on customer needs,” said John Goodman, chairman and CEO of the Hispanic-owned business.
“We started out in the DSL days and started looking at our customer initiatives in 2002-2003, and in 2003, started to prepare to shift from wireline to the wireless side,” Goodman said. “Cingular was our first major customer.” The company initially worked on a lot of site acquisitions and Enhanced 911 buildouts for the carrier. “We touched close to 15- to 20,000 cell sites,” Goodman noted.
Now with LTE buildouts looming on the horizon, “and working with OEMs, we get the opportunity to stay on the front end of new technology,” he added.
Part of the new investment will allow Goodman to diversify beyond site builds to looking at operating expense and capital expense opportunities with carriers. In other words, as carriers move to deploy new technology, Goodman is hoping those carriers will find it cheaper to outsource some of the maintenance and integration work on their networks to Goodman.
The business is also hoping to find opportunities created from the broadband stimulus plan, said Goodman’s Scott Pickett, chief marketing officer at the firm.
With the investment from The Stephens Group, Goodman was able to finalize a new banking relationship and working capital line of credit with PNC, part of the PNC Financial Services Group Inc. The Stephens Group, based in Little Rock, Ark., has a long history in telecom, having become one of Alltel Corp.’s largest shareholders before it was sold in 2007. “Our investment philosophy is to provide exceptional management teams with the stable capital resources required to achieve their strategic vision and build long-term value. Goodman Networks has a strong history of providing high-quality services to the wireless industry as well as legacy capabilities within the core network. As the ongoing buildout of wireless infrastructure continues due to the heavy data usage of wireless devices, we believe Goodman is well positioned to continue to provide excellent services to its existing customers as well as to attract new customers,” said W. Kent Sorrells, managing director of The Stephens Group. As part of the transaction, Sorrells and Jeff Fox, CEO of The Circumference Group and former COO of Alltel, were named to Goodman’s board of directors.
Goodman was able to maintain its Minority Business Enterprise status with the investment, which was important for the family-owned company.
As part of this transaction, Goodman Networks said it has organized into three primary business divisions: NIS (Network Infrastructure Services), NS&T (Network Services & Technology) and Staff Augmentation, with both wireline and wireless experts in each division.