A Conversation with Eric Bowman, CEO of SPARC
September 7, 2012
The South Carolina Chamber of Commerce announced in 2011 that SPARC, LLC in Charleston was #1 on its annual list of South Carolina’s Best Places to Work for small-medium sized companies.
Founded in late 2009, SPARC has established itself as both a technology and culture innovator, producing high quality software products and services in support of commercial, federal and defense contracting customers.
We toured SPARC and chatted with CEO Eric Bowman and Chief Evangelist John Smith.
LowcountryBizSC:
What is your core business?
Eric Bowman:
We provide cutting-edge commercial software product development and customer service for the federal government and defense agencies. 85% of our business is in the federal space. Our customers are doing some cool stuff around security and development lifecycle management.
The high level of innovation that we have achieved with our core business has enabled us to roll out commercial products such as mobile apps. That is the other 15% of our business.
LowcountryBizSC:
When was the company formed?
Eric Bowman:
SPARC is just two years old. Our original location in Charleston was at Faber Place off of Leeds Avenue. We outgrew that location and started looking around for a building that would be a fit for our company culture of openness and collaboration. Our new building was initially built for a company called Cambar; we moved in about a year ago in February 2011.
LowcountryBizSC:
Who are the principals in the company?
Eric Bowman:
There are multiple individuals who were involved in the formation of SPARC: myself, Doug Ross , Christina Lock, Elizabeth Buske, and John Smith. Doug Ross was my boss when I moved to Charleston ten years ago to help program simulators for the Air Force and Christina Lock recruited me to work for him. Doug retired a couple of years ago after 20+ years as an army officer.
I met John Smith, our Chief Evangelist at SPARC, when he hired me as a programmer . John had just sold one of his companies to Benefitfocus here in Charleston. I was with John for 3-4 years before taking a job at another company for a year and half. When that company sold, Elizabeth and I started to come up with the idea for SPARC.
Doug excels at business development and handles responding to RFPs from the government, while I focus on execution and product development; this I am extremely grateful for. John helps drive our company culture forward. It’s a good fit between the three of us.
LowcountryBizSC:
This past year SPARC won an award as one of the best places to work in South Carolina. How important is culture to the success of your company?
Eric Bowman:
Culture is very important at any company, but particularly important to software development firms where collaboration is critical to your success. Culture is so important that John Smith’s official title is Chief Evangelist! His job is to run and drive our culture forward and he is a huge reason why we have such a unique atmosphere.
LowcountryBizSC:
Talk about that unique atmosphere. What might people expect to see at SPARC that is different?
Eric Bowman:
We chose this building because it is open (not a lot of walls) and has abundant natural light.
Because we are a technology company, some people are surprised about the lack of servers at SPARC. We run everything on the cloud. Employees at SPARC can take up their laptops and activate Hot Spot on their phone and work from anywhere in the world.
We are very flexible when it comes to when and where our team members work. We encourage our employees to work from home once a month and those who prefer to do so more often than that, have our blessing.
We offer our employees access to iPads which they can borrow any time they want. A lot of team members do mobile app development on the side, so we want to give them the tools to be successful.
Having a workout room and a ping pong table are not unique to SPARC, but help in creating an atmosphere of work and play. While the floor plan is open, if you do need a room for a meeting, you can go into either the Chuck or the Norris room. If you need a slightly larger space, there is an adjustable wall between the two that you can remove – which creates the Chuck Norris room. Our ping pong rackets have a picture of Chuck Norris on one side. We work hard here, but we try not to take ourselves too seriously.
What is unique to SPARC is the lack of enclosed office space. The trend in business is towards mobile work spaces where team members can collaborate. We use a development methodology called Agile Scrum where you will see a lot of people working side by side on various iterations of a product. Most people don’t even sit at desks, because they work so closely with their scrum teams. Testers work side by side with developers; peer programming is key to our success and helps to ensure quality. Often you will see our customers sitting next to us as we are writing code so that we can constantly show them progress.
Many of our employees use lockers rather than desks to store their belongings. In fact, most of us on the senior support team do not have a desk; we have lockers, too.
We strive to bring all of these components of our culture company culture into every project that we undertake.
Below, John Smith, CTO and Chief Evangelist at SPARC speaks about the unique culture at SPARC
LowcountryBizSC:
You don’t have an office?
Eric Bowman:
No, it’s a lot easier to stay engaged in the company and the projects when you are mobile – not sitting in an ivory tower somewhere.
LowcountryBizSC: What role do you see SPARC playing in the local community? Eric Bowman: It is one of our goals to support the Charleston Digital Corridor and its mission to help make Charleston THE technology hub on the East Coast. As a software product development shop, we also like to support our partner companies. We run some of our commercial and mobile apps on Amazon Public Services’ cloud infrastructure, for example.
LowcountryBizSC:
How do you foster creativity and entrepreneurship inside SPARC?
John Smith:
We had a company meeting one day and asked our employees whether they consider themselves entrepreneurs. Half the company raised their hands. It became clear that we needed to find a way to support those employees within SPARC, or run the risk of losing them. We created our own internal program called SPARC Ventures where we fund our employees’ innovative projects inside of SPARC.
Our developers or supporting team members can create their own product, pitch it to SPARC leadership, and receive funding. That way we don’t stifle entrepreneurship.
SPARC ventures is modeled somewhat on Google 20, the program inside Google where employees spend one day a week, 20% of their time, working on whatever they want. Gmail was one of the many ideas or products that came out of Google 20.
LowcountryBizSC:
Talk a little more about the process of SPARC Ventures. How do you set up the ownership of a product if it starts attracting customers?
Eric Bowman:
Most companies are afraid that this type of initiative will take away from their main business and they insist on owning everything that comes up under their roof.
There are several stages to the program. After an initial applications and approval, an employee might receive $5,000 worth of funding and be assigned a mentor to develop the idea further. Then they will create a business plan including spreadsheet, PowerPoint, and pitch deck which they will present to leadership and possibly be offered more dedicated resources. Lastly, their job is to build ten customers for their product and from there, we consider ownership opportunities, possibly a business unit or subsidiary at SPARC. The employee gets 6-10% shares in the new venture.
LowcountryBizSC:
Are there any success stories out of SPARC Ventures?
Eric Bowman:
Yeah, lots. One of the ideas that bubbled up out our SPARC ventures program is a product called Greening as a Service (GRAAS). Based on a team member’s idea, we built a software as a service application that acts as a dashboard to offer real-time transparency of energy usage into a building, hospital, or data center etc. The product is a great way for companies to visualize their energy usage, and therefore come up with a plan for potential cost savings.
Another cool program that we came up with in SPARC Ventures is a product that you will see on all of the conference rooms around our facility: QR codes on the outside of the doors. One of our guys got frustrated with conference rooms getting double booked so he wrote a Google app to fix it. You can scan the QR code outside of any of these offices and see the complete booking schedule for the room. Very cool! We see impediments and we try to fix them.
Eric Bowman:
I am originally from Michigan, but I have lived all over: Maryland, Indiana, Texas, and Illinois. I have a Bachelor in Computer Science and an MBA from Charleston Southern University.
LowcountryBizSC:
What is your education and background?
Eric Bowman:
With Naval Commands such as the SPACE and Naval Warfare Center Atlantic (SPAWAR-LANT), one of the largest employer in Charleston, there was a lot of funding being pumped through Charleston for software development, but the work was being done elsewhere. I felt that we had the level of talent to do the work here in Charleston. The challenge is simply letting the world know about the incredible level of talent that we have here locally.
Similar to other entrepreneurs, I wanted to bring a whole new level of skill sets to the development of software in the federal space and felt that I could better and more efficiently support my customers than the competition. We were fortunate that several great customers were willing to take a risk and engage our services right from the start. We also had some great industry partners who were mentors to us.
LowcountryBizSC:
Outline your growth over these two years.
Eric Bowman:
In each of our first eight quarters, we doubled in revenue and personnel. After we had reached 100 employees, it became difficult to keep doubling in size, but we are proud to have achieved a 40% growth rate in this most recent quarter. We have awesome customers and partners that are fueling this rapid growth.
LowcountryBizSC:
Who are some of the industry partners that you work with?
Eric Bowman:
We have partnered with Facebook, Amazon, Google, Red Hat, and Salesforce.com amongst others. One of our partners, GitHub, is a cool site that acts as an open source repository for developers. Their CIO and founder recently visited us for a lunch and learn.
I also encourage people to check out www.opencompute.org, an open source hardware site that Facebook is spinning off as a separate entity.
LowcountryBizSC:
I have heard of open source software, but not open source hardware.
Eric Bowman:
Yeah, it’s a pretty cool concept where you can go in an open source everything from data centers to HVAC systems.
LowcountryBizSC:
How do you acquire new customers?
Eric Bowman:
Our sales are dependent to a large degree on having great customers who recognize the level of value that we bring to each project. If we can sustain the same level of quality and service that we bring to our customers, I am confident that we can continue to grow.
On the commercial product side, we have one person who handles outside sales for us.
LowcountryBizSC:
How many employees do you have and are most of them programmers?
Eric Bowman:
We currently have 140 employees, most of whom are programmers or testers. We do have a small percentage of people working in other functional areas such as marketing and human resources.
LowcountryBizSC:
Are you able to find talented programmers in South Carolina?
Eric Bowman:
We find talent from all over. Charleston is a great place to live, so it’s not hard to attract people here from elsewhere. Within the state, the College of Charleston has come a long way with their Computer Science department and is producing great talent. They could increase their output of graduates by 300% and all would find jobs here locally. That is how well this region is doing in this area of software development. Clemson and the University of South Carolina are also other great sources of talent.
LowcountryBizSC:
Is SPARC a knowledge economy success story for the State of South Carolina?
Eric Bowman:
Our average pay is probably close to double the South Carolina average, so we like to feel as though we are a knowledge economy success story.
Every city, region, and state wants a rapid growth, high paying jobs economy. Mayor Joe Riley of Charleston has been doing a ton of work over the past ten years promoting the city as a technology hub. There has been an explosion of technology companies here in Charleston since his initiative with the Charleston Digital Corridor began.
LowcountryBizSC:
What role do you see SPARC playing in the local community?
Eric Bowman:
It is one of our goals to support the Charleston Digital Corridor and its mission to help make Charleston THE technology hub on the East Coast.
As a software product development shop, we also like to support our partner companies. We run some of our commercial and mobile apps on Amazon Public Services’ cloud infrastructure, for example.
