A former Waitr executive, Joe Stough describes that company’s most successful era like this: It was a blue ocean.
It’s a business term that describes what amounts to the perfect conditions for a new business: virtually no competition, high demand and nothing keeping it from being successful. Simply put, there’s no ceiling. Waitr, the delivery company now known as ASAP, was highly successful in virtually every market it set up shop from 2015 until 2017 until it encountered what Stough described as “blood in the water” in the form of competition in 2018.
Now Stough is the CEO of Lafayette-based data capture company FlyGuys and says that company could be entering its blue ocean period. Much like how Waitr connected those who wanted meals to nearby restaurants, FlyGuys is connecting those who need drone services to its growing network of pilots around the country.
FlyGuys now has 11,000 pilots nationwide, all done without significant marketing efforts to attract them, he said. In a move to accommodate that anticipated growth, the company, which underwent a shift in leadership in 2022, recently moved into a 13,000-square-foot space at 221 Jefferson St. that had been empty for years.
As indicated in its application for the Quality Jobs program with the office of Louisiana Economic Development, drone technology is anticipated to expand at a rate of 38.6% each year until 2030, and the company needs to prepare for that increased demand. Now with about 70 employees, the company is also building an app that will connect customers to pilots.
“We have this surge right in front of us right now,” said Stough, 30-year enterprise software business entrepreneur. “It looks similar to what it looked like at Waitr back in (20)15 where we’re looking at everything we touched just exploding. And then we put together an 18-month plan and we go, ‘Oh my goodness, if things keep going the way they’re going, then we’re going to see triple-digit growth’ — which at Waitr is what happened.”
In this week’s Talking Business, Stough spoke about the company’s move to its new office on Jefferson Street, what’s going on in the industry and what keeps him in this startup field that’s often dominated by people half his age.
Interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s behind the move downtown?
I personally like downtown Lafayette. As far as being in Lafayette goes, downtown feels more like a place where you can accelerate a startup. We need a place with some growing room, and we need a place that feels like an exciting tech startup environment. We haven’t completely finished making it feel that way, but it already feels more that way than being divided across two offices. The OM (Opportunity Machine, an incubator for startups) was a phenomenal place for a bridge for us, but we needed to get more space.
How is your business growing so quickly?
Right now we have 13 companies going into the year that are going to do hundreds of thousands (of dollars in business) and several that will do over a million. They’re from agriculture to solar to roofs and parking lots, construction projects and a few other use cases. We just created a sales team in the past two months. We hired a senior vice president of sales who is very seasoned and came with a wake of people that followed him in his career. We hired probably the best sales team I’ve ever been a part of.
Read the rest of the article originally published on The Advocate here.