SEFNCO bounces from Buckley to Sumner

SEFNCO Communications, a locally-grown telecommunications company, recently consolidated its operations in Sumner, taking residence at its new headquarters building on 4610 Tacoma Ave. in June. The headquarters includes administration, engineering, computer-aided design and the workers who hit the streets in cabling trucks.

Chief Executive Officer Scott Nall cited the advantage of keeping departments in proximity and easier access to roadways, as the primary reasons for the move from Buckley, where the company was founded.

“We have a great history with Buckley,” Nall said. “But Sumner made more sense in terms of accessing the highway and the I-5 corridor.”

Cable companies like Comcast offer customers service, but they don’t lay their own cables. SEFNCO’s business is to build the network infrastructure for those companies, designing cable pathways and laying them underground. It focuses on four points listed by Nall: designing cable networks, building the networks, maintaining them with upgrades and service, and repairing them when they become broken.

SEFNCO was founded more than 10 years ago in Buckley by Nall and five others – Jarod Duncan, Rob Graves, Joe Pederson, Shannon Feller and Erik Whipple, who all remain involved in the company today – working out of a garage and experimenting with cable splicing. Nall describes the group as a bunch of “book-smart” people who saw a need and an opportunity to fulfill it. The company has since grown from an initial 13 neighborhoods to service across Washington state, a field office in Idaho, projects in Montana, 225 company employees and approximately 400 subcontracted partners in the field.

“(Growth) has been our biggest challenge,” Nall said. “We’re pretty aggressive. When we first started we had no idea how long it would last. In fact, we had buildings on wheels, which were a source of jokes around Buckley. In this business you can take the money and run or you can double down, and we’ve always doubled down. Every dollar we’ve made, we’ve put back into the company.

“But not everything we touch turns to gold,” he said. “I’m not Midas, I’ve made mistakes. So we aim for cautious growth. We don’t want to expand just to stretch ourselves thin.”

Nall noted that capital investment is a natural risk of the industry, recalling the decision to purchase a fleet of diesel trucks and finding in subsequent years that the price of diesel rose substantially. Telecommunications technology, too, changes at a rapid pace, leaving companies like SEFNCO to predict which ones will find wide use, and to diversify research across the options.

“I go to cable expos, trade shows,” he said. “I watch a lot of things. The stuff I’m working on right now is three years down the line. 4G phones are the big thing now, but I have to think about 8G so we can be ready when it comes time for that.”