Building a Business
In speaking with Glenn, what stands out first isn’t the length of his career—it’s the sheer breadth of it. “Next year will be 30 years,” he says casually, brushing off the number like it’s just another firmware update. But behind that figure lies a kind of deep-cycle resilience: the kind that comes from building, tearing down, rebuilding, and managing networks for some of the most time-pressured, high-demand events in the world.
““Referrals are everything,” Glenn says. “None of us advertise. You do a good job, you get the next job. That’s it.””
In an industry that’s increasingly productized and modular—more buttons, more dashboards, more predictive flags—Glenn’s world remains deeply analog in its relationships. The jobs come from trust, not traffic.
Running a business in this space means living in that tension. It’s technical, but it’s also brutally logistical. “You’re not just solving problems,” he says. “You’re trying to make sure your guys get paid. You’re thinking about what gear travels well. You’re wondering whether a switch with a lifetime warranty is going to save your ass on-site.”
The challenge isn’t just building the network. It’s designing a model where the network company itself can sustain the churn: short timelines, tight margins, high stakes. One day, Glenn’s in New York, building a pop-up infrastructure for a major mobile phone launch. A few weeks later, he’s prepping for a multi-venue e-sports tournament in Singapore. “You’re up all night,” he says, almost fondly. “Four hours of uptime, and then you tear it all down and move on.”
There’s no redundancy in the business model. If the stream doesn’t go live, if the Wi-Fi drops during the keynote, there’s no cushion. As Glenn puts it, “The show opens at 9 a.m. You don’t get to delay. You make it work, or you fail.”
That binary is what makes running a small firm in this space so rare—and so hard. From a marketing perspective, these kinds of companies don’t register. They’re not selling a SaaS product. They’re not raising rounds. There’s no lead funnel or content calendar. What they’re selling is trust, repeatability, and experience measured in cumulative years of keeping the lights on without anyone noticing.
And that’s the other truth Glenn keeps circling back to: If you do the job right, no one knows you were there.
“That’s kind of the curse,” he says. “If we do everything perfectly, we’re invisible. If one thing breaks, we’re the bad guys.”
In many ways, running a business like Glenn’s is an exercise in managing visibility both in terms of the network and the business itself. “If someone tells me something’s broken, I’ve already failed,” Glenn says. “I should’ve seen it before it hit the user.”
That kind of real-time awareness is what lets a lean operation punch above its weight. Glenn isn’t a fan of bloated platforms. He thinks that it’s a bad choice to use network management options like Solarwinds because of the huge number of modules and mandatory certifications to keep track of. “If it takes a whole training course to use, I don’t have time for it,” he says. Instead, he looks for tools that fit his mindset—clean, fast, and focused. “If you’ve got 15 hours to build a network for 30,000 people, you don’t have time to screw around.”
There’s a rugged pragmatism to how Glenn approaches the business. He talks about gear the way farmers talk about tractors—what lasts, what breaks, what gets replaced after ten years of faithful use.
And maybe that’s the defining ethos of a business like his: buy gear that works, build systems that hold, and stay small enough to be fast.
To most outsiders, network engineering looks like a quiet corner of IT. But in the events space, it’s the beating heart of operations—under pressure, under time, and often underpaid. Glenn’s story is a reminder that infrastructure work is not just technical labor. It’s logistical, managerial, and occasionally a little heroic.
Asked if he ever plans to scale up, Glenn shrugs. “More jobs, more stress. We’ve got something that works. I’d rather just keep doing it well.”