dec-2017

62 63 time implementation of technology.Teachers were making the buying decisions, so I decided to go on the road, get in front of all these tech committees, and start selling them refurbished computers.” After about a year,Netka’s friend sold the business and he didn’t see eye-to-eye with its new owner. “So, I left and started my own business. I had found the customers, found the suppliers, and created the business,”he continues.“That was back in 2001. I started out of my garage and for the first eight years, I ran it as a ‘lifestyle’ business. I showed up in shorts and flip flops. Every day, I went home at 3:30 when the schools closed. I had one employee,mymother. I bought and sold things and I had other companies, which I trusted, do the work for me. I grew the busi- ness to about $1.8 million annually, over the course of 8 years. “Then, in 2008,when the economy took a nose- dive and all the public money was shut off, I had a moment of panic and a moment of clarity,which STS EDUCATION was, I hadn’t built a real business, and I had missed out on a large opportunity. There were companies that had started after me, selling the same thing, that had grown to be 20, 25 million dol- lars in sales a year.That’s when I went to work and redesigned my business to become what it is today,which is STS Education. It’s grown to $30 mil- lion in sales and we’ve made the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Privately Held Companies in North America list for six straight years.”Once again,Netka’s adversity had bred creativity. Today, STS Education is a nation- al company with 43 employees.“We describe ourselves as an Ed-Tech com- pany that has a curated set of products, services, and solutions that are pur- pose-built-for-education and revolve around four areas: Operational Sustain- ability, Collaboration and Engagement, STEAM, and Software.” Operational sustainability, according to Netka, includes Chromebooks and “STS Second-Life Hardware”which is used computers, tablets, etc. that it purchases frommulti-national corpora- tions and reconditions them through its seven-step proprietary process before covering themwith a life-time warranty. “We also are the only Ed-Tech reseller with an Asset Value Recovery Program that allows us to buy back old assets from schools for cash or credit,”he explains.“To date,we have given over $4,000,000 to schools through this program to upgrade to newer technolo-