A Birmingham-based technology company has added 30 employees, and its CEO its planning for more in 2022.
Slappey Communications, a 39-year-old IT company providing cloud, voice, internet and managed IT services, has brought in new employees on the back of several acquisitions the past two years.
CEO Will Slappey said his organization is still growing organically, but the job market is tough to navigate right now, so the company has turned to acquisitions in part because they give access to new employees.
Slappey said that the company has grown three times over already and is anticipating more acquisitions in the next 12 to 24 months.
Its deals so far have also led to a rebranding: the company will now be called IT Voice. IT Voice has secured acquisitions of Presidium Networks, RevTel/VOLstate, ON Technology, Wycomp, Preferred Business Solutions and Data Resolution. Data Resolution, which was one of their most recent acquisitions, is a company based in Orange County, California. The acquisitions span several states in the Southeast, and the company now has a presence in Tuscaloosa; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Taylor, Texas; and Dayton, Tennessee. The company has retained all the employees and maintained all the site locations picked up in the deals.
“The opportunity is in the market, and we wanted to be able to grow the company, and finding really good people is hard to do,” Slappey said. “And so, one of the things that's really great about doing acquisitions is that not only do you get the customers, but you also get the entire team of people that are fulfilling those customers, and so it really just jumpstarts the growth.”
Slappey said the company has been on an acquisitions drive to grow the company and find opportunities in the market. Right now, his goals are to get all the recent acquisitions fully integrated into the company and build more from there.
“Building a great team takes time but we kind of found this secret hack, where we can merge other great teams into ours, bridging decades-old relationships into a fast-growth strategy,” he said. “Every company we acquire excels in providing ‘hometown service,’ and when you couple that with our world-class technology approach, it creates this powerful value for our customers.”
As the industry keeps consolidating, Slappey is looking to be at the forefront of that activity from Birmingham.
“I think it's exciting for the Birmingham community ... because our industry is consolidating, if we weren't doing it somebody else would be doing it,” he said. "So it's exciting that one of the companies that is working on consolidating industries — that their home office is in Birmingham, Alabama.”
