Laura Johns: Here we are, another episode of the Know Grow Scale podcast with one of the very best in the business. There are very few people I interview that are south of me here in Jackson, Mississippi, so I’m really excited to have Shawn Torres Torres on the podcast. Shawn Torres, if you don’t mind introducing yourself, and then I’m going to dig right in and ask some questions so we can learn from how you’ve grown your business at Intelcom.
Shawn Torres: Hey everybody, Shawn Torres Torres here. I’m CEO and co-founder of Intelcom. We’re based out of Slidedale, Louisiana, with offices in Louisiana and Texas, but we have clients in 39 states today—I think we kind of stopped counting at some point.
Laura Johns: That’s awesome. I got to sit beside you and some of your team a couple of weeks ago at the Sapiens crescendo meeting and really enjoyed hearing the backstory because everyone’s is unique, and yours is a bit unconventional. Talk about your origin story and what made you decide to focus on this particular business type as you started in telecom.
Shawn Torres: In 2009, I was working for Verizon Wireless doing wireless sales. They had bought Alltel, and I was one of the top reps. I guess there were numbers on papers, and I got let go—I think I was making too much money. That’ll get you going quick.
I made a decision at that point that I wasn’t going to go back to work for someone. I wanted to control my own destiny. I told my wife I was going to start my own company, though I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had just opened an Anytime Fitness, so I’d owned a business but did it as a side investment with my partner, Jimmy, who’s also my partner in Intelcom.
We decided to start a consulting company to help people save money on their cell phones and landline bills, taking a percentage of the savings. That’s where the name Intelcom came from. We had no idea that we were going to end up being a tech firm—we really just fell into that.
2009 was a terrible year for us. We did $8,400 in sales total top-line revenue. 2010 was still struggling; we only did $64,000 in top-line revenue. So in two years, we didn’t break $100,000.
At the end of 2010, I had a client who wanted to buy a phone system. We were getting quotes as their telecom consultant, and Jimmy asked one day, “What if we sold him the phone system?” I remember looking at Jimmy and saying, “What do we know about phone systems?” He had done some research and figured out that we could get certified in the Avaya IP office. That’s what really started the journey.
I remember installing that first system and actually making money after putting it in. It was a disaster during installation, but we got it done. Mr. Brian is still a client today, and I’m thankful for him every day that he gave us that opportunity. We wouldn’t be sitting here today without it.
Laura Johns: How many team members do you have now?
Shawn Torres: I think we have 138 FTEs. It changes every day—I just got a Teams message from somebody named Madison who was just introducing herself and thanking me for the opportunity to work here. It’s so different now to walk around the building and not know everybody.
At this point, I’m not making those decisions anymore. Some people in the industry come to me asking questions, and I have to tell them I’m not the best person to ask. I can bring in the right person though. This isn’t a lifestyle business for me, but I hire people to do their jobs. They know my vision, they know where I want to go, and I’m here to do it with them.
A lot of the people we have today are smarter than me. You’ve got to get out of their way. As a leader, I can be much more of a hindrance than help. If I could give anybody advice, that would be it: get out of the way. I’ve held this company back several times from trying to get involved in things I shouldn’t be involved in.
# Know Grow Scale Podcast
## Interview with Shawn Torres Torres, CEO and Co-founder of Intelcom
*December 9, 2024*
[Previous sections retained…]
Laura Johns: Let’s talk about when you made key decisions that shaped your growth. You mentioned that first key hire was a big decision. Were there any other major decisions that you feel were turning points for your growth?
Shawn Torres: In 2019, we implemented EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System). We were at about $8 million in revenue with probably 35-40 employees at the time. There was structure, but there wasn’t really structure—it had gotten messy. When COVID hit in 2020, we had already been talking about implementing EOS, and we took time within that quarter to really adopt it into the business.
We started setting quarterly objectives and rocks, really working on things that would get us to our VTO (Vision/Traction Organizer). That’s when we started fine-tuning what an annual plan looks like and what a quarterly plan looks like. You can always tell in the business when you start to get these rumblings and everything’s getting frustrating—that’s when it’s time to have that quarterly meeting, come back together, and talk about the issues.
Growth is hard at any stage. Going from $5 million to $10 million is a hard task, and going from $10 million to $20 million is even harder. A lot of people don’t get there because they plateau. It starts to expose the lack of process in your environment because at that level, you can’t be involved in all the things that go on each day.
EOS helps you build structure and really understand your accountability chart—where do people report to? We still struggle with it today because we’re moving so fast. We did $21 million last year and $31 million this year, so that’s a big jump again. If you didn’t have structure, that’s where things would fall apart.
I’m a big component of “if everything’s under control, you’re probably not going fast enough.” Sometimes you just have to go and roll with it, but you need strong work ethic and you have to work on it every day. The difference today is that I’m more focused on working on the business rather than in the business.
Laura Johns: Let’s talk about metrics. What KPIs are you focusing on?
Shawn Torres: At my size today, I’m more focused on looking at my WIP (Work in Progress) and understanding my speed to cash and conversion rate. I look very deeply at my pipeline from a sales perspective to understand the revenue that’s going to get sold versus the revenue that’s going to get converted.
I’m not so involved in the day-to-day metrics like how many tickets we’re doing a day—I don’t know that number now. Someone else has that on their scorecard. I think the biggest problem I’ve seen in businesses is they try to implement too many KPIs at once, or they implement KPIs that aren’t really moving the business forward.
For example, I used to have cash on hand as one of my KPIs, but I don’t look at that anymore. KPIs need to evolve with departments because sometimes old KPIs may not make sense anymore due to how our processes have changed.
When it comes to managing salespeople, it’s actually one of the easiest things to track. How many calls do they make versus how many conversions come through? In my world, a conversion is setting a meeting that someone accepted. How many of those meetings convert to a quote? How many quotes convert to closed deals? Start there and reverse engineer that.
Not everybody’s going to be the same—one person might have to make 75 calls to get to a conversion where another person makes 30, and that’s okay. Study that data and track it week by week on an Excel spreadsheet. You don’t need to overcomplicate it with an expensive CRM.
The sales person should manage their own KPIs—you’re managing the outcome. If they can’t tell you their number, that’s your fault for not managing them properly. You have to take your heart out of it and put your business hat on to move things forward.
Laura Johns: What opportunities do you see for MSPs in the next two to three years?
Shawn Torres: Compliance is a big focus right now with all the CMMC stuff going on for people with federal contracts. Cyber is still a very immature space and changing quickly. Cloud conversions and migrating companies to the cloud, helping them understand how to implement technology to improve their businesses—these are all major opportunities.
It really boils down to process. When you can help implement processes in organizations, that’s when you’re a true value partner. We’re not just here because your computer’s broken and we’ll fix it. While we do that, it’s not what you’re really paying us for.
People are looking for business continuity to ensure their backups are there and secure. We’re moving into building good roadmaps and technology budgets. We work well with rapid growth companies because we know they’re going to need us as we evolve their processes—they need that flexibility.
Employee onboarding and offboarding is a challenge most companies face. There’s a lot of opportunity to help people improve that process so employees start on the right foot with the right access to the right systems.
Laura Johns: If someone’s looking to get in touch with you or wants to know more about you and your organization, where should they go?
Shawn Torres: I’m heavy on LinkedIn. Shawn Torres—S-H-A-W-N T-O-R-R-E-S. I’m pretty easy to find and access. Like I tell my buddy, just Google me. I’m very responsive when it comes to LinkedIn. If anybody ever has questions or needs help, I’m an open book. I’m not doing anything that’s a secret—just working really hard and happy to help anybody.
Laura Johns: Thank you, Shawn, and thank you for listening to the Know Grow Scale podcast.
