December 2016 | Business View Magazine

98 99 Project Group 2000 is a full-service, general con- tractor for wireless infrastructure, installations, and deployment of advanced wireless technologies. The company was created in 1995, soon after the federal government began auctioning off Broadband Per- sonal Communications Service (PCS) licenses to be utilized for mobile and data services, including cell phones, text messaging, and the Internet. “We were all former technical managers within the wireless industry,” says Project Group 2000’s President, Scott Shambaugh, referring to himself the company’s two other founding partners. “We realized there was going to be tremendous growth in the cellular industry and there was a necessity for quality contractors to assist in managing and building all of this wireless infrastructure. So that’s what we did.” Today, Project Group 2000 has about 50 employees who work out of three locations in its three major markets: Nashville, St. Louis, and Kansas City. “We Project Group 2000 Enhancing capacity and reliability prOject grOup 2000 have operating, office, and warehouse facilities in each of those three cities,” Shambaugh says, “and we cover about a 350-mile radius of each of them - which is a pretty large territory, covering a lot of the southeast and Midwest. We’re one of those grassroots tower services companies that goes into the field to all of these thousands of different tower sites, and upgrades the carriers’ equipment to new technologies. We do many other services, as well, but that’s the bulk of what we’re doing, currently – what is known as overlays or upgrades. We have master service agreements with the car- riers and we work directly for them, and then we also do work for what they call ‘turfing vendors’ that they may hire to do big, geographical upgrades, and we’ll work for those turfing vendors on big projects. So, it’s a combination of working directly for the carriers and the turfing vendors.” Shambaugh adds that while the company’s ac- tual clients are the large cell phone networks, the towers on which Project Group 2000 crews work are generally not owned by them, but rather by a handful of large, publicly-traded conglomerates. “It’s basically large, high-tech, vertical real estate,” he quips. “Like an apartment complex or a big business high-rise that rents suites for businesses. They own towers and they lease space on those towers to the carriers.” Even in the specialty contractor niche that Project Group 2000 occupies, Shambaugh reveals that there is a substantial amount of competition in the sector. So, separating itself from the pack is key to obtaining new contracts and maintaining current ones. “We like to differentiate ourself from the competition in a number of different ways,” he avers. “One of them is that we really champion AT A GLANCE project group 2000 WHAT: A full-service tele- communications engineering and construction company WHERE: Madison, Tennessee WEBSITE: www.pg technology.net