Headquarters: Plymouth
Revenues (FY 2005): $42 million
Founded: 1988
Employees: 265
Ticker: Private
Web Sites: www.spanlink.com
What It Does: Telecommunications applications for businesses


It’s almost been as if we’ve had multiple successive companies within the company,” says Brett Shockley, CEO and cofounder of Golden Valley–based telecommunications provider Spanlink Communications. “And we’ve learned from each one of those phases of our growth, and that helped make us stronger and more successful in the next phase.”

After graduating from college, Shockley got a job with Eden Prairie–based equipment maker ADC Telecommunications, where he worked in product management. He was there during the breakup of the Bell System in the 1980s, which resulted in the explosion of numerous new companies devoted to telecom services. With partners Todd Parentau and Loren Singer, Shockley founded Spanlink in 1988 to exploit what they saw as a big market opportunity: interactive voice-response systems.

“That was really when things were taking off in terms of being able to call up on the phone and find out your bank balance, or get a new newspaper sent out if your newspaper didn’t show up in the morning, or check travel reservations—those kinds of things,” Shockley notes.

Spanlink was a bootstrap operation. “When you start a company that way, it’s a ‘failure is really not an option’ scenario,” Shockley says. “And so you really learn to adapt what you’re doing as a business to both the changing conditions in the market as well as what you’re learning every day as you try to drive the business forward.”

Spanlink won two major customers early on: the Star Tribune and Toro. “In both cases, we were selling them interactive voice response applications that were very leading edge,” he recalls. For the Strib, Shockley says, Spanlink built “the very first application in the newspaper industry” that provided over-the-phone delivery services, such as cancelling the paper during vacation. For Toro, Spanlink created a touch-tone parts-ordering system for its dealers across the country.

Spanlink went public in 1996 to finance staff additions and research and marketing efforts. Four years later, Shockley saw a new opportunity: data and voice convergence on the Internet, or voice over Internet protocol (VOIP). Spanlink did a deal with San Jose–based Cisco Systems that re-privatized the company. Cisco took a large minority share of Spanlink, and Shockley became a Cisco vice president. When the technology market slowed down, Shockley returned as Spanlink’s CEO in 2002.

Spanlink continues to provide a wide variety of services, including VOIP. “A lot of the industry is about how you plug phones together and how you route calls—a lot of the basic infrastructure,” Shockley says. “We’ve always been at a kind of higher level in how communications intersect with the business needs of a company. By staying close to that, that helped us to see opportunities long before they’ve become mainstream.”