Young company rides 4G wave
Written by Patrick Timmis | | ptimmis@toledofreepress.comSome days are scary for a young company trying to get on its feet.
For Support Services International (SSI) in Toledo, those days come when the company has only a couple power audits left on the schedule. Scary, but not overwhelming.
“We know one phone call is going to change all that,” said Emily Peters, the company’s manager.
SSI, located at 5461 Southwyck Blvd., Suite 1J, bills itself as an engineering support service with a fluid range of services offered.
“There’s no one else around here that does what we do,” Peters said. Some companies do audits, she said, and others do surveys, but no one else runs the gamut like SSI.
With the upgrade to 4G rapidly approaching, the bulk of SSI’s business has been power audits of cell towers for major phone companies.
“We were going through knee-deep snow and climbing mountains to get to these cell towers in various states,” said Robert Peters, SSI’s founder and principal.
But SSI also offers customized training and certification, technical writing, information gathering and indexing and building surveys. Robert Peters spends most of his time working in Washington, D.C., managing nuclear energy projects through SSI.
“[The services] are actually very unrelated,” Emily Peters said. “We’re not afraid to take on new projects that maybe aren’t something we’ve done in the past, because we’re confident that we’ll be able to fill the void.”
Paul Chambers, director of marketing, said Robert Peters has more than 35 years experience in the nuclear energy field. Peters started the company as a vehicle for his interactions with companies several years ago, but officially founded SSI when he brought his daughter Emily on board in 2010.
“He’s always been an entrepreneur, and we work really well together,” Emily Peters said. “Whenever I get the chance, I’ll jump blindly into his idea and trust that we’re going in the right direction.”
The company saw rapid growth early. Two people in an office turned a week later into 14 employees in the field. The company went from one regular client to three, including SSOE. It is down to seven employees now, but Chambers said more growth is coming. “Our biggest problem right now is cash flow,” he said.
But SSI continues to work and, he said, the vision is in place for an expanding company. Emily Peters said the switch to 4G won’t stop that growth, because the next advance will start developing as soon as it comes. And development is where SSI comes in — after all, the company’s motto is “Our starting point is your blank piece of paper.”
The phone rings, and SSI has a hundred new audit orders.
