“It was just a job. He wanted a career,” Gregg’s son and current RACOM President/CEO Mike Miller said.

Gregg had two job offers — one to become a sales representative for Motorola, the largest radio communications company in the world, and the other from General Electric (GE) to start his own company, become a manufacturer’s representative and sell two-way radios across a territory spanning central Iowa. Against his wife’s recommendation, he took a risk and picked the latter option, and RACOM was born. Almost 50 years later, it’s safe to conclude that his gamble paid off.

“When you’re 30 years old, that kind of risk — with two young kids — that’s a big deal, but that’s what he chose,” Mike said.

Humble beginnings

RACOM Founder Gregg Miller, pictured here in 1972, started the company out of his Marshalltown home. Today, it employs about 150 people and serves every state west of the Mississippi River.

For the first several years of its existence, Gregg was the only official RACOM employee — with plenty of moral support from his wife Sally — and ran the company out of his house on Iowa Avenue. Mike, a youngster then, can remember the first official sale to Concrete Inc. (CI), a Marshalltown business still in operation today.

By 1977, Gregg had added a partner, and he hired his first official employee, Doris Longnecker, in 1978. After several more years operating out of a different house south of Marshalltown, the company grew to between 15 and 20 employees and moved to its current headquarters at 201 W. State St. in 1984.

The rise of cell phones dramatically changed the trajectory of the business and its client base. In the early days, Gregg mostly sold to farmers who needed to communicate back to the house or the grain elevator from the field and construction and concrete companies like CI until they gradually switched over to the handheld devices that are now among the most ubiquitous in the world.

The change, however, presented RACOM with an opportunity to focus on providing two-way radios to public safety agencies — particularly police departments, fire departments, emergency medical services (EMS) and utility companies.

Gregg, as Mike put it, built relationships with the leaders of those entities “from scratch” and worked to overcome the incredibly successful competitor he had spurned over a decade before.

“Everybody knows the Motorola name. The General Electric name is a well known name, but not as well known,” Mike said. “When you show up and (say) ‘I’m the salesperson for the GE radio,’ not only do you not have any history in the business, you don’t have the same recognition as the Motorola sales rep. And so he had two strikes against him when he started.”

GE has since sold out its two-way radio division to Harris Communications, and today RACOM sells Harris/Tait products.

From one generation to the next

Neither Mike nor his sister, RACOM Human Resources Director Carrie Loney, had much interest in taking over the family business while they were growing up in Marshalltown.

“I was one where, at 18 years old in 1986, no freakin’ way did I want to stay in Marshalltown, Iowa. I wanted to get as far away as possible, and no way would I work for my dad,” Mike said.

After finishing his degree at Iowa State, Mike worked, coincidentally enough, at GE for five years and lived in New York City and Tokyo during his tenure there. But RACOM kept growing, and as he began to think about the future, his hometown kept sounding better and better. Mike met his wife, Jennifer, after coming back, and they’ve since welcomed a daughter, Emily, and a son, Owen, into the world.

When Mike returned in 1996, RACOM had between 50 and 60 employees. Today, the number is closer to 150 across its main locations in Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin and Washington, including about 30 at the corporate headquarters in Marshalltown. Along his journey with the company — which dates back to childhood — Mike jokes he’s held every title from janitor to CEO.

Carrie expressed a similar sentiment: initially, at least, working for RACOM wasn’t something she ever truly considered a real possibility. After graduating from the University of Iowa, she moved to the Twin Cities with her husband Nick, and they were “plugging along” — Carrie as a supervisor of a billing team at a life insurance company and Nick as a certified public accountant (CPA) for one of the big six firms in Minneapolis.

“We just kind of thought that was our future, and we never really thought about moving back to Marshalltown until we had our first child,” Carrie said. “Suddenly, I was like, ‘Do I really want to go back to work, do the rat race of taking her to daycare and commuting into downtown St. Paul?”

Gregg’s longtime Chief Financial Officer (CFO) had retired, and a trip home for the holidays in 2000 ended when the patriarch of the company offered Nick a job due to his skill set as a CPA. He accepted, and once Carrie had spent some time at home with the kids, she helped out with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) licensing before eventually taking on a full-time position.

Mike and Carrie’s other sister, Susan Brennan, was previously with the company but now works for the Iowa City School District. Her husband Terry Brennan, however, serves as vice president of RACOM, so the company has truly become a family affair.

After 10 years of working together with his father, Gregg died suddenly at the age of 64 in 2006, and in the blink of an eye, Mike was promoted from vice president to president and CEO. While he can’t claim that the genius of the second generation is the biggest reason for RACOM’s continued success, he credits a convergence of factors including technological and regulatory changes forcing public safety agencies to buy new radio systems.

“It was scary, but over the years, it’s been rewarding to see that we’ve been able to take what was Dad’s vision and passion and continue it on and make it bigger,” Carrie said.

But if there’s one moment Mike can point to as the sign that the company his father founded was still moving in the right direction, it was in 2009. After Motorola end-of-lifed one of its platforms that Iowa City, the University of Iowa and Johnson County had used for years, they put out requests for proposals (RFPs), and RACOM got the contract.

“That one account — Johnson County and Iowa City — kind of started our resurgence here,” Mike said. “Then Cedar Rapids had to do the same thing Johnson County did so that they can talk up and down (Interstate) 380. Then Black Hawk County had to do the same thing that Linn County did. Then Dubuque County had to do the same thing that Black Hawk did. Then Scott County… Pretty soon, we had all of eastern Iowa.”

He celebrated the news in extravagant fashion: he took his kids out to Dairy Queen for ice cream.

A life-changing storm

Mike was at home on July 19, 2018, but he returned to the State Street building as quickly as he could after he got word of the EF-3 tornado that had bowled over downtown Marshalltown. Although he couldn’t possibly have stopped what happened, he still felt like he’d finally screwed up his father’s company. But despite all of the chaos and wreckage, all of RACOM’s communication systems kept functioning at a moment when they were needed the most.

“You always sell to a public safety agency or a sheriff or a police chief (with) ‘We build the most reliable system. It’s never going to go down,’ and that’s kind of your pitch all the time,” Mike said. “You get really good at talking the talk, but you don’t often have to walk that talk. That day, we did.”

RACOM rebuilt its Marshalltown headquarters, and the company has since set revenue records in each of the three years following the tornado. The storm devastated Marshalltown, but it proved that RACOM equipment and systems worked even in the most adverse situations. Mike can recall Gregg’s claims that the building could withstand a direct hit from a tornado, and it hit on what would’ve been his 76th birthday.

“It’s almost like he’s telling us, ‘I told you so.’ It’s really weird,” Mike said. “You learn a lot about your people and yourself when you have to go through that. Your people look at you and how you respond.”

Employees continued to work out of different areas of the building during the restoration process, and it was finally completed in 2020.

A momentous milestone

Only 10 percent of all companies last 50 years, so Mike and Carrie aren’t taking the anniversary lightly. That fact got Mike thinking about what his father’s ‘secret sauce’ must have been, and while he doesn’t have all the answers, he at least has a few ideas.

“(Gregg) attracted a lot of people who were really passionate about our mission. There’s a million ways in the world to make a buck, but the people he attracted were really passionate about public safety communications,” Mike said. “We’ve attracted people who know what they do is important to the world.”

Although he still encounters plenty of locals who aren’t exactly sure what RACOM does, the simplest way Mike can explain it is that if an individual dials 911, the company sells all of the technology that makes the second half of the call possible. Everything from the phone system, the dispatch console and the radio system the dispatcher gets on to the lights, siren and cage in a police car come from RACOM.

When he’s looking to hire, Mike gets excited when he sees titles like volunteer firefighter, reserve police officer or EMS volunteer on a resume. Those are the kind of people Gregg would’ve wanted — people who, to put it simply, just get it.

——

Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or

rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.

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