Renodis, Amid M&A Surge, Eyes 5G Opportunities, Partner Convergence

… Renodis’ first client for the service.

“We spent 16-18 months building it, breaking it, rebuilding it again. And when it was ready, the CIO did exactly what he said,” Beason said. “We kind of rode that wave for a while for two to three years with nice organic growth because of that.”

Inorganic Growth

The team eventually set its sights on a new way to scale. An agency approached them in 2018 about an acquisition. The firm had been looking for a way to exit the business while taking care of their customers and employees. Renodis purchased the company, and afterwards Beason’s chief financial officer suggested that the deal might exemplify future opportunities.

“It seems like there’s a lot of partners out there that might be looking for a similar exit. We’ve invested a lot of money in who we are. We’ve overbuilt our management team to grow. We can be a $100 million company, but organic growth gets you there slower,” Beason recalled the CFO saying.

So Renodis put together a plan for M&A, leveraging his own cash and traditional bank financing. The firm narrowed its targets down to a final selection and began putting pen to paper.

Then March 2020 hit.

Beason said he was literally sitting in the conference room of another company getting ready to sign an agreement when he realized he needed to take the pandemic into consideration. The team decided to regroup and make revaluate the health of their business.

As it turned out, the business was even healthier than they thought. Beason said May, June and July of 2020 drove record-setting numbers. The shift to remote work drove higher demand for Renodis’ services. That included setting up cellphones, soft phones and increasing bandwidth size.

“A lot of it was support wrapped around this huge base of home users that used to go into the office and had all the technology sitting there at their fingertips,” Beason said.

RCN, RTech and the 5G opportunity

Renodis in March 2022 announced that it had acquired stakes in RCN Technologies and RTech Solutions. RCN provides 5G and LTE consulting and integration. RTech bundles LTE and 5G solutions, which include cross-carrier pooled data.

Beason said the deals, which represented Renodis’ third and fourth acquisitions, helped position the company as a leading 5G LTE enablement partner.

“I believe that 5G is going to replace coax sooner rather than later,” Beason told Channel Futures. “I think it’s going to be a very sought-after technology. They’ve got nine years of doing nothing but data, so they really understand that world. I think it’s going to be an evolution that happens like everything else that we’ve seen over the last 20 years.”

Moreover, Beason said the consumption model of RCN’s 5G offering closely mirrors that of a traditional telecom agent…