Tech firm Sterling blossoms in North Sioux City | Local Business

But the husband-and-wife team who control the tech firm say they’re glad to have Sterling where it is.

“It has its challenges, but there are way more benefits from being located here than there are challenges,” said Brad Moore, CEO of Sterling, who spoke glowingly of Sioux City’s “blue-collar, Midwest work ethic.”

“Cost of living, as well, is another positive for us,” said Tim McCabe, Sterling’s president.

Ten years ago, Brad Moore and his wife, Jean, who serves as Sterling’s executive chairman and the majority owner of the firm, acquired the company, which, at the time, was located in Norfolk, Nebraska.

Sterling was founded in Torrance, California, in 1996 by Brad Moore’s cousin, Troy Jones and his wife, Maggi.

Very early on, the tech company cultivated relationships with what would become its largest group of clients — government entities.

“I think somebody wrote Troy a bad check his first year in business — it was a commercial entity — and he said, ‘No more. I know the federal government will pay me, so I’m going to focus on them,'” said Brad Moore. “He just did it out of necessity, you know, he wanted to get paid for the work he did.”

Government entities, from three-letter federal agencies down to local governments and schools, represent the vast majority of Sterling’s business — the federal government alone being about 75 percent. The firm has worked alongside federal contractors with very high-profile names, including Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman.

“We sell technology to the federal government, is an oversimplification,” Brad Moore said. “If the government wants to re-do their networks or data centers or desktops, they’re going to go out and they’re going to buy it from someone. And a lot of times it’s multi-vendor. They’ll buy from 10 different manufacturers. They’ll try and converge all these systems together to make them work and, a lot of times, they turn to partners like us because we’ve got experience with a wide variety of manufacturers.”

Work with government and schools proved to be quite lucrative; Sterling works on some of the largest federal contracts and on a number of classified projects. Under the Moores’ leadership, Sterling has obtained, and maintained, high-level certifications, clearances and training standards to keep its workforce up to snuff with the rigid requirements of federal tech contractors.

Sterling, at the time still a rather small company, moved from California to Norfolk, Nebraska, in 2002. Brad Moore, a native of Wayne, Nebraska, came aboard two years later.

Upon their acquisition of the company in 2012, Brad and Jean Moore decided to bring on engineers, cultivating a lucrative pool of expertise. The company’s problem-solving skills have been called upon by much larger, much-better-known tech companies to help resolve technical quandaries.

Today Sterling employs 60-plus engineers from coast to coast.

“In 2012, I think we made a conscious decision that we were going to go out and recruit the greatest engineers that we could find. And we hired them from Oracle, Lockheed (Martin), Northrup (Grumman),” Brad Moore said.

A state-of-the-art “lab” at Sterling’s headquarters — a rather noisy spot in the building, due to all the cooling fans — enables staffers to work out IT solutions and demonstrate them for clients.

“We have about 1,500 different partners, whose technology we sell and support. And we take the best of what our customers are looking for, and we install it in our lab, where we create solutions. So if they’re having a scenario where they need help, then we can recreate it in our lab, create real-world solutions, so that we can do a proof of concept so they can see it in action,” Brad Moore said.

In all, Sterling currently employs 278 people, of whom 150 work in North Sioux City. In an industry whose penchant for mergers and acquisitions is notorious, the Moores are proud of Sterling’s status as a locally owned firm with deep ties to the community.

A good portion of what the company does today involves complex problem-solving and major projects — from helping the Department of Defense with layered missile-defense systems to working with the Department of Energy on cybersecurity, to artificially intelligent “digital humans” who “work” in higher education. Sterling is also a supplier of computer hardware and custom imaging services to the most populous county in the United States — Los Angeles County.

Sterling’s leadership prides itself on the firm’s high ethical standards, predictability, honesty, security and transparency — attributes that are “very unusual in our marketplace,” as Brad Moore put it, and a strong suit of Midwesterners.

In 2013, the year after they bought Sterling, Brad and Jean Moore moved it to Dakota Dunes. Five years after that, they paid nearly $4.68 million for the former Pacific building at the old Gateway complex, which was on the cusp of being redeveloped.

The building was in need of rehabilitation, having been more-or-less abandoned for a decade. Some Sterling employees had worked in the building long before Sterling purchased it, and found the derelict offices essentially unchanged from the old days.

“When we came and did a tour (of the building) in 2018, some people who work for us today, their offices were — like they were in a time-warp. Their whiteboards were still there, with their handwriting on it. Their pictures were still on the wall,” Jean Moore said.

Sterling moved into the 83,000-square-foot headquarters in 2019, after it was transformed into a highly modern, Silicon Valley-esque office space, with only the polished concrete floors and the steel structure remaining of the original building.

In addition to having its headquarters on former Gateway property, many of Sterling’s employees are Gateway veterans. McCabe, Sterling’s president, was one of them — he started as an inside sales representative with Gateway in 1991 and stayed with the company 18 years.

“We’re so lucky, because they were people who ended up with ties in this community, and stayed in this community, and here they were, 10, 15, 20 years later,” Jean Moore said of Sterling’s roster of former Gateway staffers.

Sterling has been prosperous in the years since it moved to Union County — its employee head-count and revenues are five times what they were in 2013. Throughout its years in Dakota Dunes and North Sioux City, Sterling has often been ranked among the fastest-growing firms in the nation and has received a number of industry accolades.

The headquarters is flush with employee amenities, from a room designated for golf simulators to a cheery, sunlit, spacious break room, complete with various breakfast-foods on offer. Employees who don’t golf might enjoy the shuffleboard table, ping-pong, checkers or the foosball table. There’s also wellness rooms and a shower for employees (“We do have people that, maybe go on a bike ride over lunch, and then they want to come back and shower,” Jean Moore said.)

Lurking somewhere about the place during work-hours is Daisy, the mellow, 10-year-old office dog who roams the halls seemingly at her leisure, greeting employees and reinforcing with her presence the sense that Sterling’s is not the dismal, drab office of the past, but rather something more alive, more enlightened and, perhaps, even fun.

Conference rooms in Sterling’s headquarters are named after places in South Dakota — Sturgis, Deadwood, Rushmore, Yankton and so forth — and South Dakota-themed artwork and photography is displayed prominently.

These design choices were made for a reason.

“We would always have our partners say, ‘Why in the world are you in South Dakota? You should be in Washington, D.C., you should be where all the action is!'” Jean Moore said. “And, we’re like, ‘We are proud to be from South Dakota.’ So, we wanted the building to look like that.”