Arkansas' Fastest Growing Companies: Telex of Fayetteville Finds a Niche in Power Infrastructure

This article is part of a series on Arkansas’ fastest-growing private companies based on the 2024 Inc. 5000 list. The list ranks companies based on three years of annual revenue growth. The other Arkansas companies featured in this series are Team Go Ventures, Nuqleous and Servato.

Founded in 2014, Telex of Fayetteville celebrates its 10-year anniversary the same year it makes the Inc. 5000 list for the first time. The company secured the No. 171 spot with a 2,232% growth rate.

A nationwide company that provides testing, commissioning and engineering services for investor-owned electric utilities, Telex is Arkansas’ second fastest-growing private company and No. 11 overall in the Southeast.

Mike McDonald, founder and president of Telex, was working for a power company as a relay technician when he saw the need for a company that could compete cost-wise and quality-wise.

Telex specializes in protective relay testing and calibration, functional commissioning and apparatus and equipment testing, which serves a niche in power infrastructure maintenance and development.

The company extends to both new construction and existing infrastructure, addressing an ongoing need in the sector, McDonald said in an interview with Arkansas Business.

McDonald also said Telex has witnessed and adapted to significant shifts in the utility sector throughout the past decade.

“When we first started, there wasn’t a lot of grid construction going on,” McDonald said. “A lot of utilities were still doing things in-house. Now there’s a lot of outsourcing of that skill set, because of retirement.”

This has allowed contractors like Telex to become the “go-to” for developing young talent, which is something Telex is especially proud of. McDonald said Telex “really tries” to bring young technicians and engineers up successfully, which has allowed the company to fill a role traditionally filled by utility companies.

This is especially important in the trades, McDonald said, as widespread labor shortages are a consistent problem for companies.

“Our field is very unique in the fact it takes a lot of intelligence to do, but also, you’re outside, you have to be willing to not want to work in an office every day,” McDonald said. “So there’s a definite person that fits the bill, and we’ve just gotten really good at finding those people.”

Hiring for the company has grown “tremendously” over the past three years, and McDonald said a lot of the company’s growth can be attributed to strategic partnerships, a “relentless focus” on quality and the bringing on of two business partners to help manage Telex and drive new relationships.

While McDonald focuses on running the business and the infrastructure of the company, his partners focus on getting new clients, new business with existing customers and consistently checking in on existing relationships.

This has allowed Telex to focus on keeping the quality and integrity of its services up, which McDonald said is a priority.

“We drive quality so much. It’s a never-ending struggle,” McDonald said. “We’re very much an Arkansas business. We say what we mean, and we do what we say we’re going to do, and that builds trust on both sides.”

Another reason for the company’s growth was a focus on leveraging existing infrastructure to grow out the business.

“Once we have the organization in place, then it’s easy to start filling out, and that’s what we’ve really been working towards the past couple years, is getting these new relationships, maintaining them and then continuing to add new clients to the mix without sacrificing any existing aspects,” McDonald said.

And while headquartered in Fayetteville, Telex’s reach extends outside of Arkansas. The company operates in nearly every region of the country, with the exception of New England, but Telex is “coming for those guys,” McDonald said.

Looking to the future, Telex is aiming for sustainable growth. McDonald said he doesn’t “chase growth at all costs,” but that he does aim to continue expanding.

And while all the growth from the Inc. 5000 ranking was based on Telex’s field services group, the company recently launched an engineering group as a response to client demands, so McDonald envisions a lot of growth in that sector.

Companies on the Inc. 5000 list must have generated a minimum of $100,000 in revenue in 2020 and a minimum of $2 million in revenue in 2023, though Telex’s exact revenue was not disclosed. With approximately 50 employees, most of whom joined in the past three years, McDonald believes that growth is reflected in the Arkansas business landscape.

“I think we’re really putting Arkansas on the map to be a competitor with Texas and some of these other bigger states that have been the business hubs for so long,” McDonald said.