Stampsco one of OK City's top 50 companies

OKLAHOMA CITY—Since the start of the economic recession, Stampsco, a fire and life safety company based here, has more than doubled its revenues, nearly tripled its office space, and has twice as many employees, according to company president and CEO Rodney Stamps.

Stampsco's rapid growth has led to its recently being selected by the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce as one of the top 50 fastest-growing private companies in the metropolitan area in 2011.

Business has “just exploded” since Stamps and his wife, Paige Stamps, now Stampsco's executive VP, started the company in 2002 with some tools and a truck, working as subcontractors, Rodney Stamps told Security Systems News.

Both are NICET-certified—he's level IV and she's level II—and “we just jumped in the truck and started working for other companies that needed expertise and installation and it just kind of sky-rocketed from there � to being a full-fledged company that sold equipment and offered services.”

The Metro 50 Award that the 17-employee Stampsco recently won goes to companies that demonstrate such factors as positive revenue growth, an increase in the number of employees and business expansion. Stampsco and the other 49 companies chosen don't yet know what their ranking is in the top 50—that will be revealed at the awards dinner on Sept. 22.

Stampsco met all those award qualifications, Rodney Stamps said.

“We pretty much doubled our employees from 2008 to 2010, and we doubled our revenues too, and we doubled our revenues from 2010 to 2011 and we're on track to double them again this year,” he said.

Also, the company recently moved into a new 7,000-square-foot facility that is nearly three times larger than its previous space. “Now we need to probably expand further. We're still growing,” Stamps said.

How has the company been able to do so well in this bad economy? “No such thing around here,” Stamps said. “I talk to colleagues in the industry around here and there's not too many that I talk to that are having too much difficulty staying busy.”

A June 2011 report tracking the economic recession and recovery lists Oklahoma City as one of the county's strongest-performing metro areas. The MetroMonitor report by the Brookings Institution, a public policy organization in Washington, D.C., says Oklahoma's strong gas and oil economy and a large number of government jobs are among reasons Oklahoma City was not hit as hard by the recession.

Still, Stamps said, Stampsco—whose largest vertical is commercial but which also serves a wide variety of other clients, including the military, governmental institutions, hospitals and educational institutions—doesn't take anything for granted.

“We don't make any assumptions and say, 'Let's sit here and let the phone ring,'” he said. Stamps said that the company—which he said is the only Honeywell Gamewell-FCI Platinum Level engineered systems distributor in Oklahoma—uses strategies to get jobs such as� “staying on track with sales quotas, meeting with customers, and getting those necessary referrals.”

He said the first key to business success is “hire the right people.”� The company also pays for staff training. “We don't force NICET on anyone but we encourage it strongly,” he said. “It's free. We pay for it.” Nearly 50 percent of the company's employees currently are NICET certified, he said.

Also, Stamps said, Stampsco got into a “niche market, mass notification, [which] has been a very positive growth department.”

He said the military is in the process of converting all its military bases from standard fire alarms to mass notification systems.

“So mass notification has really taken off on the military bases the last two to three years,” he said. Both the U.S. Amy's Fort Sill and Tinker Air Force Base are located near Oklahoma City, and Stampsco is on the federal General Services Administration (GSA) schedule, making it eligible for government contracts.

One project at the air base that Stampsco has been involved in is an approximately $400,000 job designing and engineering a mass notification system for Tinker 3001, a historic building nearly a mile long, Stamps said. This is just the first phase of the project, which will continue for at least another year, and then Stampsco also hopes to be in on later phases of the project, he said.