DSC Communications Helps Businesses, Safety Personnel Stay in Touch
Good communication is key to the success of any business. This communication can take many forms – largely, it’s about people being able to interrelate to efficiently solve problems, but oftentimes it’s actually just about the technical aspects of communication. Can people talk when they need to? Do they have the ability to stay in touch and solve problems on the fly, even when they’re physically apart from each other and are sometimes way off the map?
Superior’s DSC Communications has made their name on making sure people can connect when they need to for 30 years. The growing company has made key acquisitions and been honored with high-profile awards in recent months, and they provide telecommunications services for the majority of the region. If someone in need calls 911, DSC is behind the scenes facilitating that call. They handle a lot of responsibility with confidence and care.
DSC President Jeff Manion recalls the early days of his involvement with the company as hopeful ones, but he couldn’t have predicted in which direction things would eventually flow.
“In 2011, we had a group – the Manion Group. We were involved with Mac Sport & Marine – that was a business startup that we did,” Manion said. “We started that company, and I found that to be pretty enjoyable. I come from public accounting. In 2014, the owner of DSC Communications wanted to retire. He had a relationship with my brother, who owns CW Technology. And my brother just approached me and said, ‘Hey, would you be interested in running this company?’”
After doing his due diligence and looking at the financials and the business as a whole, Manion and his group purchased DSC at the top of 2015. One would imagine he had a certain level of confidence after doing his research, but Manion suggests otherwise.
“In my mind,” he laughed, “I had no idea what I was doing, buying a radio company. You know: risk and reward. It was a good move. We’ve grown substantially and I’ve had a lot of fun doing it. We’re on year 11.”
He’s right, though – there are never any guarantees. People change, circumstances change, markets change. Even though DSC had been around for 20 years before he became an owner, there was still no way to know that the company would continue to flourish under his leadership. All Manion could do was try. And sometimes, that’s the most important step.
The company as it stands today is a multifaceted one who refers to itself on its website as a “one-stop shop for Motorola Solutions unified communications, video security data and the best service and support.”
“At DSC, we do a lot of different things,” Manion said. “We’re very big in the RF – radio frequency – arena. We maintain and manage 911 dispatch centers. We have 24-7 on-call technicians that take care of any issues that arise. In addition to that, we take care of a lot of public safety agencies with radio communications and we build squad cars – we do squad outfitting. And then more on the commercial end – and we do this also for public safety, but we do video surveillance. We’ve been seeing a pretty good uptick in video surveillance and access control – that’s the badging in/badging out. And then we do some power maintenance. We have a tower crew that does tower inspections and some tower maintenance work. We maintain and manage tornado sirens. Something that’s been happening more recently is cellular amplifiers – if you have no cellular or 911 communication ability, we’ll put in an amplifier.”
Businesses talk about providing “solutions” quite a bit, but DSC truly offers a number of those for virtually every problem that is a roadblock for their customers.
“I like to say that our clients are our partners,” Manion said, “and we’re trying to do solution-selling to help them navigate an issue.”
DSC is still headquartered in Superior, but they’ve branched out significantly, recently.
“When we acquired the company,” Manion recalled, “we had 12 employees, and it was just the Superior location.”
Now, they’re in St. Cloud and Willmar, as well, meaning the company has tripled its footprint in the last five years. With both of those locations, DSC just bought up a pre-existing company (West Central Communications) with a long track record and rebranded.
Now, DSC boasts 48 employees and they’re not planning on stopping their trajectory any time soon.
“Our goal is to continue to grow,” Manion said. “I have a partner group that I’m accountable to. We’ve made some strategic hires that allow more time for us to continue our growth and general outreach.”
The company’s partnership with Motorola and their ecosystem has been key to its success, Manion said. “Motorola used to own all their service shops locally, and, what they did is, they decided to back out and take all these Motorola employees and ask them if they wanted to be owners of their own service shop, so all of them are kind of at that retirement age, and they’re really looking to find their next chapter, and, for their succession planning, we do outreach,” he explained. “I go to a lot of Motorola events and build my network with our radio community. We’re all pretty friendly. I don’t have any bad blood with any of our competitors.”
DSC’s growth, according to Manion, is based on that key partnership but also on several factors that have helped them to flourish in the current climate. “We’ve had consistent organic growth,” he said. “We’ve also had net new growth with new clients, but we’ve also been able to take on additional revenue through acquisition. We have more people out doing sales. We’ve expanded our outreach. Take Enbridge, for example. We did radios for them. Now we do a lot of things – we travel between five different states, and, if they tell us something needs to get done, if it’s low-voltage, we’ll do it. I have another large client – Hormel Foods – where we’ve done work in Texas, California. These things where we’ve decided to go into the Minneapolis area presented an opportunity for organic growth, and it’s been good.”
DSC was recently named a Motorola Solutions Empower Circle award winner for 2024, distinguishing them among thousands of other partners as uniquely successful.
“We were, like, the 116th partner in 2016,” Manion said, “and now we’re around the top 25 [in the Midwest], which is pretty cool. It’s based on total annual sales, year-over-year growth and some other criteria. To see our growth has been really neat. We’ve got some really, really good people that are here helping us along that journey. I come from a family of entrepreneurs, you know, and if you put your head down and put in the hard work, success usually follows.”
DSC Director of Operations Katy Johnson has been with the company for more than three years after seven years with St. Luke’s (now Aspirus St. Luke’s). “It’s been great,” she said. “I absolutely love it. It’s a perfect fit for me – leading people, holding people accountable, processes and procedures. Keeping the wheels on the wagon, so to speak.”
Johnson focuses on safety as a large part of her duties and helps to ensure the company meets certain requirements to be certified with safety vendors in their field. “It’s everything from having a drug screen to having specific training – ladder safety, first aid, hearing conservation,” she said. “I implemented an employee-safety committee. We’ve got an array of employees that represent our organization as a whole. Safety is a huge part of what we do. We want everybody to go home to their families.”
This dedication extends to their clients, too.
“Often,” Johnson said, “they’re coming to us with some sort of concern or problem regarding safety or security, and there’s all sorts of different solutions that can be out there. We have a solution for everybody to create a safer environment for their employees.”
This of course pertains to radio and video, but DSC also does fleet management, which helps employers know where their vehicles are, which can contribute to overall safety.
In reality, DSC’s dedication to keeping their individual customers safe helps contribute to overall regional safety, as so many of their accounts are with governmental bodies that are wholly concerned with serving the public along those lines.
“I would say probably 70% of our customers are government entities,” Johnson estimated. “So, police departments, fire departments, all of that.”
Add the mining industry and the health care industry to that, and one gets an idea of just how much DSC Communications helps to not just make lives easier, but indeed to save them.
“It’s the stuff you see on law-enforcement officers’ hips,” said 29-year veteran and DSC Systems Integrator Ben Crowson of the company’s products. “It’s what they use to yell for help when they need help. We provide the infrastructure and all the pieces all the way back to the 911 communications center. And we do squad builds. We take a stock car and turn it into a squad car.”
Crowson had originally intended his DSC job to be a summer job while he studied in college, but the problem-solving aspects of the job resonated with him so deeply, he never left.
“I just kind of fell in love with it,” he said. “There’s a thrill that comes with repairing something, even to this day. One phone call can change my day, if there’s a system outage or something like that.”
“The good news,” Crowson said, “is I’m also involved in the design. If it’s a critical system, we generally have redundancies. There are very few things that would take everything down. Usually, you’ll just have an area that’s offline. It’s one of the things that’s always said in the Navy, having to do with redundancy: ‘Two is one, one is none.’ We try to advocate to our customers to consider backups.”
Technology has changed greatly in 30 years, and it continues to do so at a faster pace all the time. Crowson has seen a lot in his time with DSC.
“I’ve probably learned something new every day,” he said. “It’s one of the things I most appreciate about the job, I’d say. In the last, say, ten years, the rise of connectivity done via ethernet has been the biggest challenge and has the biggest implications for security. We try to build networks that are completely in the control of our customers, who entrust us to maintain them.”
Crowson, having been in his role with DSC as long as he has, is able to look at the evolution of the company from a unique perspective.
“The funny thing about the acquisition of those companies [in St. Cloud and Willmar] is that we had all existed in the same basic business space and we all have roots starting back in the ‘60s,” he said. “We all rose out of that primordial ooze and evolved separately, and now we’re becoming one cohesive body. What’s cool is we try to shoot for taking the best of all our evolutions and applying that.”
Incredibly, when one looks at the regional telecommunications market, DSC currently can lay claim to about four-fifths of it. “I would say our share of the land mobile product sectors is probably 80% or higher,” Crowson said. “Eight or nine out of 10 of the radios you see on somebody’s hip, we probably had something to do with it.”
Eric Mack is a senior Communications Coordinator at Enbridge. He said that DSC’s role as a collaborator helps them do their jobs on a daily basis. “DSC did a lot of our truck and two-way radio installs,” he said. “They do GPS installs. They built a voice-over-IP radio system that stretches across northern Minnesota for me. They’ve expanded into maintaining and inspecting our communications towers across North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois and upper Michigan.”
“They’re very customer-focused,” Mack said. “That’s the biggest thing. We had a relationship and we’ve been able to expand on it. I can go to them and bounce my ideas off them and they take it to their team and build off that and come up with a solid end solution. I enjoy working with them. I can throw a random project at them, and they figure out a way to do it. They’ve got a good team.”
At this stage, DSC is a multimillion-dollar company that’s 30 years old and still on its way up. They’ve taken some chances and made some big bets, and it’s paying off not just in awards and revenue, but in plain old job satisfaction.
“It’s been fun,” Jeff Manion said.
Tony Bennett is a Duluth-based freelance writer.
