Arkansas’ Fastest-Growing Companies: Servato Charges Ahead With Innovative Battery Management

Servato co-founder and CEO Chris Mangum (Photo provided by Servato)

This article is part of a series on Arkansas’ fastest-growing private companies based on the 2024 Inc. 5000 list. The list ranks companies based on three years of annual revenue growth. The other Arkansas companies featured in this series are Team Go Ventures, Nuqleous and Telex.

Servato Corp. of Little Rock secured the No. 3,680 spot on the 2024 Inc. 5000 list, with a 128% three-year growth rate. 

Servato specializes in power management software and remote power management systems for broadband providers, utilities and other industries. And with an innovative approach to battery management and infrastructure monitoring, the company has seen a lot of growth with recent broadband efforts.

Servato’s growth is tied in with the ups and downs of the telecom industry. The company’s surge in revenue coincided with the easing of supply chain issues that had plagued the sector during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The beginning of that 2021 period was right in the depths of the COVID-related supply chain situation,” co-founder and CEO Chris Mangum said in an interview with Arkansas Business. “Telecom customers were continuing to buy products, but it was very hard for us to make it. We might get a purchase order for a product, but if we couldn’t make it and ship it, we couldn’t recognize revenue for it.”

Mangum said that changed the company’s motivation to “really focus on growth.” And once the supply chain “crisis” passed, Servato saw a rapid ramp-up of revenue in 2022 and 2023.

The supply chain issues also led to telecom companies holding onto purchase orders longer than usual, sometimes for 12 to 15 months. Mangum said typically, if a vendor can’t ship an order by the end of a fiscal year, the telecom companies will cancel the purchase order and the vendor has to resell its product. But with the supply chain issues, telecom companies left purchase orders intact, which allowed “many” telecom vendors to keep going.

So as the supply chain stabilized, Mangum said Servato was ready to capitalize on the pent-up demand. And the industry is poised for even more growth as more broadband is deployed throughout Arkansas and the nation.

Mangum said he is optimistic that Servato is in the right space and that the company is preparing for growth, as well as “hopefully future Inc. 5000 listings.” He also said Servato is looking at potential partnerships, as well as potential buyers for the company.

“We’re continuing to focus on our growth, but with an eye toward strategic opportunities,” Mangum said.

Servato’s path to this achievement wasn’t without its challenges. The company faced a restructuring and management buyout that set the stage for its current growth trajectory. 

“We had restructured the business and done a management buyout at one point,” Mangum said. “That put in place a different set of incentives for the principal owners, the four executive team members, to really knuckle down and get after it.”

Servato is currently in 3,000 sites across 38 states, and serves 84 clients including CenturyLink, Hawaiian Telcom and Frontier Communications. Though specific revenue was not disclosed, companies on the Inc. 5000 list must have generated a minimum of $100,000 in revenue in 2020 and a minimum of $2 million in revenue in 2023. Mangum said in a previous article with Arkansas Business that Servato’s revenue has doubled three years running in 2021, 2022 and 2023, and is working to double again in 2024.

Mangum said the list is a great PR tool, as well as a way to show a business is credible.

“It’s a symbol your business is doing well,” Mangum said. “It really has helped to establish credibility. Servato is a small player in the telecom space; most vendors are huge, multi-billion dollar companies. So for us to have someone recognizing who we are, that’s a great asset for us.”

If a company makes the list, it also gets access to an email signature, marketing and networking opportunities and collectible items to distribute to employees, which Mangum thinks companies can capitalize on to foster business relationships and morale.

Mangum said that Servato and other Arkansas companies making the list aligns with a broader trend of startups finding success in the state, and that Arkansas has the potential to become another Silicon Valley.

“We have all these building blocks for it,” Mangum said. “It just has to have this tying together of those blocks in a rational way so that people see the benefits. Then it has to have some catalyst, whether it’s state funding or something else, that kicks it in the right direction.”

Mangum said Silicon Valley didn’t start overnight  — it took 50 years. And he believes Arkansas is 10 to 15 years along that timeline.

“If you start looking at the progress that’s been made, we have tons of thinking around this coming out of the university system and the economic development organizations at the state level,” Mangum said. “We have incubators, accelerators and folks really trying to generate startup activity. It just needs to get this momentum.”