Wachter Wires Client Needs

If you’ve ever listened to a CD at Wal-Mart, swiped a debit card at Costco or ordered the Admiral’s Feast at Red Lobster, chances are Wachter Corp. hooked you up.

Wachter Corp., a dba for Wachter Management Co. of Lenexa, Kan., (a Kansas City suburb), is an international commercial computer networking, cabling and electrical contractor with about 450 employees nationwide. It’s probably best known in Northwest Arkansas for its mod new building on Arkansas Highway 264, but in certain sectors, the firm’s following is, well, electric.

Mike Reedy, Wachter’s chief operating officer, said the private company’s niche is making big national rollouts happen fast. It’s the wiring world equivalent of the new “Ocean’s 12” gang — a team of highly trained technicians fanning out across the country to implement one grand plan.

“Outside of retail, banking and transportation, where we have quite a few big customers, we’re not that well known,” Reedy said. “A lot of times people will shake their heads in disbelief at our projects. We pull enormous human, transportation and materials resources together in a matter of hours or days and deploy hundreds of technicians to thousands of sites within a few weeks.

“If there’s a physical infrastructure element to an electrical or cabling project, we’re the feet on the street that gets the job done.”

Wachter, which does not disclose its revenue, has done work for 50 of the Fortune 500 companies. Four years ago it helped Wal-Mart Stores Inc. implement an in-store TV system at about 1,200 locations, and it wired Wal-Mart’s touch-screen wedding registry system.

When FedEx ground picks up or delivers a package and scans the bar code, the scan gun is cradled in a truck computer system wired by Wachter. The firm has done numerous projects with IBM Corp., such as installing point-of-sale solutions for Darden Restaurants Inc. of Orlando, Fla., which owns Red Lobster.

Wachter boasts numerous other clients such as Beverly Enterprises Inc. in Fort Smith, Gateway Inc., Bank One Inc., Sprint Fon Group Inc. and others listed at www.wachter.com.

Major arms of both of Wachter’s subsidiaries — Wachter Network Services Inc. and Wachter Electrical Co. — have offices at the firm’s 26,000-SF Lowell facility. The $1.8 million complex was built in 2003 and houses the companywide network customer service center plus a large training facility and warehouse.

Steve Sloan, Wachter’s regional manager in Lowell, works closely with Chris Sims, the firm’s communications rollout manager, and Tom Allred, the customer service manager.

Sloan joined the company 15 years ago and moved to the Northwest Arkansas office in 2000 to help with Wal-Mart projects. He said the firm will do smaller phone systems for local-sized businesses, “just not anything residential.”

“The reason people might see 100 vans out here at our facility is sometimes we’ll bring in 100 teams from all over the U.S. and deploy them to spider out from here on a job,” Sloan said. “We might have a job where we deal with 3,000 stores at once, but we can handle it.

“There’s a two-letter word that Wachter doesn’t know.”

Led by CEO Brad Botteron, grandson of the company founder, Wachter has done extensive work in Texas on Wal-Mart’s supply chain conversion to RFID tags.

“Where we have a niche is most of the companies we serve don’t have the resources to get a chain-wide technology initiative installed quickly or continue servicing it afterward,” Sloan said. “That’s really where we excel.”