Specialty Fertilizer Products: Fiber Builds a Strong, Healthy Company

JAKE SANDERS EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, SFP

We knew that SFP had unlimited growth potential— and that’s what fi ber gives us. THE CHALLENGE: How do you educate potential customers about your products when those products are literally unique? That was the situation facing Specialty Fertilizer Products (SFP), developers and manufacturers of products that help improve the effi ciency of fertilizers. Founded in 1998, this research and development fi rm had discovered unique fertilizer-enhancing chemical formulas and begun to manufacture its

own patented products. Today, with 60 employees, SFP remains the world’s only company offering these solutions. But success relies on educating farmers and the agricultural industry itself about how soil interacts with fertilizers.

Several years ago, when SFP started building out new offi ce space in Leawood, Kansas, executive vice president Jake Sanders decided he also wanted to “build out” the company’s sales and marketing capabilities for everything from webinars

Fiber Builds a Strong, Healthy Company How Specialty Fertilizer Products is reaping a bumper crop of business

and fi le-sharing to videos and radio. The company was growing so fast that sales reps had very large territories, which impeded their ability to meet with all customers and prospects.

THE SOLUTION: SFP chose Time Warner Cable Business Class (TWCBC) for fi ber services that could scale to accommodate all its sales and marketing goals. TWCBC provides SFP with an integrated, fi ber-based solution set that includes a 50 Mbps Ethernet Private Line (EPL) point-to-point (PTP) circuit for data backup and a 100 Mbps Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) circuit. These solutions support everything from the company’s in-house digital media studio to webinars conducted by the fi eld reps. The high-bandwidth DIA connectivity also keeps the SFP team connected. “If something needs to be done, we’re all on call 24/7,” says Sanders. “Now we have the ability to share documents and fi les, and videoconference with each other, regardless of what time it is.”

SFP also added a PTP circuit for its own off-site backup. “Being an intellectual property company, we have more than 100 patents worldwide, so our data is rather sensitive in nature,” IT director

Doug Jewell explains. The shift to PTP enabled SFP to use a company-owned offsite location, rather than paying a third party, giving SFP complete control of its data.

THE RESULT: SFP is growing and fl ourishing, unhindered by technology issues. “We have the best of problems: how to grow correctly,” Sanders explains. “The agricultural industry is becoming more technologically sophisticated. We’re moving extraordinarily large fi les back and forth—everything from images to video and all points in between. So if we couldn’t do those things, it would hamper our business entirely. These are the things that really move the needle for us.”

“The reason we chose Time Warner Cable Business Class is that we never wanted a bottleneck,” says Jewell. “We never wanted technology to get in the way of our business. Now, we can grow beyond current speed and bandwidth. I can just call and say we’re adding staff or doing HD video streaming. The infrastructure is in place to support our future. “We knew that SFP had unlimited growth potential—and that’s what fi ber gives us.”

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