One Month Later: Joplin VAR's Recovery Still Faces Challenges

SNC Squared's headquarters did not survive the May 22 tornado in Joplin, Mo., but the business is still alive, despite a mountain of challenges that have emerged since the storm.

Earlier this month, the solution provider moved into a new office , after his previous one was destroyed by the EF5 tornado, but every day is still a challenge, said John Motazedi, president of SNC Squared.

SNC Squared was one of more than 300 businesses impacted by the tornado, so finding a new location was not easy. It took nearly two weeks before Motazedi found a space that fit the VAR's needs, and even then it's only about two-thirds the size of their former office and costs more money.

"A friend referred us to this spot and the guy said there were going to be out of [commercial] places to rent. We just took it," Motazedi said.

Long term, he hopes to buy a lot and build a new office or find a more ideal location next year. "We were tight in our old spot. We've crowbarred six people into basically a 14-by-22-foot section," he said.

Still, finding a spot was easy compared to some of the other challenges that came next. SNC Squared's new office didn't have electricity or water for nearly a week. Motazedi was told that the neighborhood was a low priority for the cable company to resume service compared to other areas, so they signed up for DSL with AT&T.

SNC Squared used the DSL service for about four days when that service was cancelled. Motazedi couldn't get a straight answer from AT&T other than 'you guys are down due to a tropical storm,' he said.

"They said, 'You'll get Internet on [June] 29th. That started a barrage of calls. Then it was [June] 22nd. I said, I need it tomorrow. We didn't have Internet for a week and a half," he said.

Meanwhile, the VAR still had been running the majority of operations -- including numerous customers' servers and other equipment -- from the basement of his house. Among the items salvaged from the destroyed office were cable modems that Motazedi was able to restart from his basement.

For the first few weeks after the tornado, Motazedi had three accounts running from his basement: two for business and his family's residential account. The customers' servers, up to 21 at one point, were load balanced across all three.

Then, around June 14, the cable company abruptly cancelled his two business accounts, leaving many customers without access to their data for the first time since the tornado.

"At 8 p.m., I got a panic call from one of our doctor [clients] saying he couldn't get to his patient data," Motazedi said. "I called the cable company and they said they cancelled all Internet because we were in the disaster zone."

Next: Customers Down Again

The cable modems tied to the two business accounts had static MAC addresses that still were tied to the physical address of SNC Squared's now-destroyed former office, Motazedi said.

"They thought they were doing a good thing because they thought we didn't have service and that way we wouldn't have to pay the monthly bills for nothing," he said.

It took three days to get new accounts linked to his home service. "They said the business is no longer there. I said the business is here. We are using it. I need those accounts back," he said. "We did a bunch of DNS re-routing. Everything was a mess. For John Q. Public, anybody else, that's a perfect solution. All the other utility providers, water, electric, gas, all canceled services [to the former office] because nothing exists there. The MAC address was tied to the street address. Even though I was up, they didn't consider that I was sending data across the network.

"I was probably the only one out of those 8,000 accounts [in the tornado zone] still using the Internet."

In other words, SNC Squared had feverishly worked to get every single customer back online five business hours after the tornado struck after salvaging equipment from SNC Squared's office and customers' offices, and now the VAR was experiencing more problems providing service than in the immediate aftermath of the storm.

Today, many customers' servers are still running from his basement because he only has a 3MB pipe at the new office. He's hopeful to get a thicker cable connection as early as this week.

"Realistically, we can't even have techs here [at the office]. We use to have a NOC, with big 50-inch monitors watching everything. That went away. Now it's just a tech, or me, watching the Kaseya and the LabTech screens. The new office is so small, I wouldn't even know where to put those [bigger] screens. It's really affected us," Motazedi said.

Thankfully, most of SNC Squared's techs have been so busy installing new equipment in customers' new offices that the tight quarters haven't been much of an issue.

"It's time consuming. We are stretched to the limits. They're working 10- or 12-hour days. It's things you can't do remotely. New machine installs, adding software, other hardware, printers. It's all manpower," Motazedi said. "It's taken us [four] weeks to get to the point that these [customers] are functioning, with new machines installed. That's almost done. From here on out, we'll have some onesy-twosy stuff, one doctor is moving to a new place in August, but all that stuff will be done."

Prior to the storm, SNC Squared had 75 managed services customers that provided a steady, monthly stream of revenue. Seven of those customers do not plan to reopen their offices which will cost the VAR about $6,000 in monthly recurring revenue, Motazedi said.

Next: Helping Out

That loss has been offset somewhat by the addition of some new customers after the storm, but the majority of that has been hardware sales and some break-fix work, he said. "We're not pitching managed services to them initially. We wanted to get all the money up front for the break-fix then we'll get back to them on a [managed services] campaign," he said.

It's been 31 days since the lives of 50,000 Joplin residents changed forever. Each day brings new challenges, new obstacles to overcome, new pain. Many, of course, face issues more pressing than waiting for the cable company to come. Thankfully, the spirit and compassion of those "with" are doing everything they can to help those "without."

None of SNC Squared's employees and families were directly affected by the tornado. That has kept everyone focused on helping those that did lose a lot on that Sunday night.

"We've never had this level of company culture before. Even though I'm running them ragged, they are tight, focused. They say dish it out, pile it on. I think they can only take that a little longer. But realistically, at the end of this week we will be done replacing equipment, at least in this initial phase of stuff," Motazedi said. "Then we'll see. Those are some of the challenges."