Adam Fife, CEO of CenCore Group, a provider of advanced communications technology based in Springville, Utah, was recently named as Entrepreneur of the Year - Mountain West 2024 by EY.
Springville, Utah, October 25, 2024
EY celebrates entrepreneurship through its annual Entrepreneur of the Year award. EY has named Adam Fife, CEO of CenCore Group, as one of three Utah entrepreneurs as an Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2024 Mountain West.
Founded in 2010 in Washington DC and moved to Springville, Utah in 2012, CenCore Group is a privately-held provider of advanced tactical and strategic products and services including intelligence analysis, operational support, planning, and mission support serving US Intelligence and Special Operations communities and commercial enterprises worldwide. It provides products and services that become the central hub for the most secure communications of the most critical applications. Some of CenCore's customers are the US government, Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle.
CenCore is an ultra-low profile company that is relatively unknown in Utah, although Adam Fife is one of the original co-founders and its current Vice Chair, of 47G, the rebrand of Utah’s Defense and Aerospace Association. Yesterday, 47G convened its first major conference, Zero Gravity Summit, that attracted over 700 attendees from the Aerospace and Defense communities across the nation.
CenCore’s products fill a critical but very narrow niche in advanced intelligence. As Fife put it, “we are six inches wide and about 6,000 miles deep,” in a recent interview with TechBuzz while discussing his company’s primary product and mission. “We are a niche within a niche within a niche.”
He continued, “we enable highly secure communications at the very front lines of any potential war, and we do it at the speed of war, at the speed of the warfighter. And we enable our customers to hit their targets in a matter of milliseconds—versus seconds—and at the same time defend their own infrastructure.”
CenCore’s primary product is housed in a 20 foot steel shipping container—the only piece of the system that is not manufactured in either Utah, its headquarters, or in Denver, Colorado, where most of its manufacturing happens in a state-of-the art quarter-million sq ft clean manufacturing facility. “There’s a whole lot of highly secure technology inside that container allowing us to integrate with the SpaceX satellite network, StarLink, that is used by the US Dept of Defense. Our technology allows the soldier and the forward-based special operator to see what's going on on the battlefield. He’s seeing what the F35 pilot is seeing, and they're seeing what the submarine crew are seeing. And then there is an operation center deployed in the back that's looking at all of the targets and determining all of the targets that need to be hit and in which order.”
The steel shipping container allows the CenCore technology to be transportable by “any method the government ships things,” said Fife. “Think of it as a big wifi hub that allows different pieces of military technology to talk,” he explained. “We have designed it with resiliency and redundancy in mind. If one hub is removed—which of course will happen in battle—the whole system is daisy-chained and networked together. This redundancy allows the client to do what they need to do without any communication loss or downtime. If it gets blown up, it can be replaced at a cheap cost point relative to DoD budgets. The point was to make something that isn’t catastrophic from a loss perspective.”
Headquartered in Springville, Utah, the company employs 1,000 employees that design and manufacture products that are “critical, but probably not sexy,” mentioned Fife. The company’s products are driven by a specific, non-negotiable customer need for absolutely secure and fast communication in adverse environments. The need is also often driven by the unpredictable nature of international events and urgency of US foreign policy prerogatives to respond to such events.
“We need to be ready for the signal to begin production on large orders,” said Fife. “Because when they come in, they don't say, ‘give me five units,’ they say ‘give me 5,000…and we need them in six months.’” Fife added, “we call it ‘float and hope,’ because when we receive a demand signal, we have to ramp up to full production very quickly.”
The company has not taken any institutional capital. Fife and his team have bootstrapped it for the past 15 years. “Our industry is not about trying to churn out a product in two to four years trying to maximize valuation. We think in terms of half-decades, decades, or 20-year cycles. That’s the time horizon we work under. For most investors, that’s a difficult profile to get behind.”
The conversation moved to how the company is doing, specifically CenCore’s revenue pipeline. “This year we’ll do between $95 and 98 million in revenue,” estimated Fife. “And that will grow 3X in 2025. And we'll at least 3X again in 2026 based on our current order backlog.” Fife indicated that the order backlog is likely to grow between now and year end, which will influence revenue projections for 2025 and 2026.
The company is looking to raise capital in the next six months or so, with a preference of debt over equity, or possibly neither, but rather a revolving line of credit renewing each month, given the company's customers and the size and predictability of the orders the company is receiving. It is in discussions with several large institutions at the moment. The company also needs to triple its manufacturing capacity to keep up with demand. And it will move into acquisition mode to buy down its supply chain in order to maintain production deadlines. The expansion of its manufacturing will likely take place in Colorado or Texas, or both, but not in Utah. Fife brought the company to Utah in 2012 from Washington DC as the labor and warehouse costs were at that time very favorable in Utah, as compared to DC. Currently, the situation is different. Warehouse space in Utah is at parity with DC. “Utah presents a challenge when it comes to manufacturing space. It is just not what I can get in Texas, or even what I can even get in the suburbs of Denver.”
Fife still hires talent in Utah and is now a net exporter of Utah talent. “Utah talent is amazing. Now I'm a net exporter of Utah talent, not a net importer. I hire them here, and then I ship them off to different job sites."
Founded in 1986, Entrepreneur Of The Year has celebrated more than 11,000 ambitious visionaries who are leading successful, dynamic businesses in the US, and it has since expanded to nearly 60 countries globally. The program honors many different types of business leaders for their ingenuity, courage and entrepreneurial spirit, and celebrates original founders who bootstrapped their business from inception or who raised outside capital to grow their company; transformational CEOs who infused innovation into an existing organization to catapult its trajectory; and multigenerational family business leaders who reimagined a legacy business model to fortify it for the future.
The Entrepreneur Of The Year Mountain West program includes Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. As a 2024 regional award winner, Adam Fife goes on to be considered for the Entrepreneur Of The Year National Awards, set to be presented in November at the annual Strategic Growth Forum®, one of the nation’s most prestigious gatherings of high-growth, market-leading companies. The Entrepreneur Of The Year National Overall Award winner will then represent the US as they compete for the World Entrepreneur Of The Year® Award in June 2025.