DOGTOWN PROUD
The distance between Scott Landers’ office at atg headquarters and where he grew up between the city’s Park Hill and Levy neighborhoods are only a short drive from one another, but at first glance, the worlds represented by the two landmarks of his life hardly resemble each other.
As the successful software entrepreneur readily said, however, all he needed to know in life came from his blue-collar childhood enclave, the fifth of five children born to Bill Landers, a railroad worker, and Donna Landers, a teacher at a local parochial grade school. It was there that Landers first mastered the art of building and maintaining relationships; was surrounded by the work ethic by which he would build a side hustle into a nationwide player; and set the roots that would stretch far without ever once pulling out of the firmament of home.
“Being in a big family and having siblings, especially being the youngest of five, helps you figure out how to get along, you know?” he said. “It really does give you some early life lessons on how to get along with people and how to work with folks. When you’re the smallest of five, you don’t pick your fights right off. That’s an older sibling’s job.
“I really credit my dad with instilling a work ethic with us. I always talk about when we were younger, my dad worked during the daytime for the railroad, and he remodeled houses at night. He got off at 3 in the afternoon, and he would come home, and he would get me or one of my brothers, and we would go help him remodel houses in the evenings. I grew up in an environment where work and a sense of accomplishment were all tied together.”
Those early experiences had Landers thinking about a career in construction coming out of North Little Rock “Old Main” High School. In fact, he and his brother formed a homebuilding company right after graduation, ultimately completing several homes together, which, for Landers, meant working on weekends and summers home from his electrical engineering studies at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He never completed the degree, but his intensely curious mind led him down many early rabbit holes to indulge a fascination with electronics and circuitry that began in middle school.
“You could either say it’s a fault or not, but one of the things about me is when I get into wanting to learn about something, I will go all-in until I know everything I can find out about it,” he said. “In junior high, I did a science fair project with what was called TTL circuitry, creating a machine that counted objects as they went by using a photo sensor. I actually won the state science fair that year with it, and I still have that desire to go figure out how things work.”
Landers returned home to central Arkansas, where his engineering background and familiarity with computer-aided design technology landed him a job with The Mehlburger Firm in Little Rock, then one of the oldest engineering outfits in the state. He spent nine transformative years there just as the industry and the business world in general were turning technological corners that would reinvent American commerce and carry his career right along with it.
“When I went to work for the firm, they did not have any computers whatsoever,” he said. “I was hired on for a project with the Hot Springs wastewater treatment plant, and they had a requirement to do it in the CAD systems. I had learned that [technology] in school, and so I was hired to be part of that project. By the time I left the firm, we had completely converted to CAD systems, and I was the geek that got everybody trained and networked their computers together.”
Noticing how other companies were in the same boat with digital technology, Landers launched a side hustle, moonlighting as information technology expertise and fomenting the idea of one day owning his own shop.
“That was really the inspiration,” he said. “I always enjoyed working for myself, and I found that I really enjoyed putting computers together and helping companies convert over to the CAD systems.”
By 1999, Landers had gone through some major life changes, including a divorce, and the time seemed right for a fresh direction. He formed Complete Computer Solutions, which initially focused on hardware and networking until 2004. Looking to expand, the company then took on another product line and began selling Autodesk software. Within six months, sales of software exceeded that of the other lines of business, and the company soon rebranded to Applied Technology Group, more recently to atg.
“There’s always that element of luck, good timing,” he said. “I would love to say that I had the foresight to know that the [software] industry was just going to ramp up at the time I decided to expand into it, but I have to claim good luck on that one. Either way, we found that we had a real knack for selling software.”
In time, Landers would find another gear for the company as atg began writing software that would improve the CAD user experience exponentially.
“In ‘04, when we started selling the Autodesk software and helping the engineering firms and architectural firms, there wasn’t a lot of difference [in programs],” he said. “You were still drawing lines, arcs and circles to represent what you wanted to build. Then we started incorporating other software and adding things on to the workflows and processes that they call parametric design, when a door became a door and a manhole lid was a manhole lid, and it was no longer a couple of circles on a piece of paper. These objects in 3D space became more than just representation by lines, arcs and circles. They started to becoming objects with data attached to them.
“We started writing applications and programs that went on top of that. That allowed us to add up how many doors were in a building, what kind of doors were those and what ordering information needed to go with it. That’s really the jet fuel that made us start rapidly expanding across the U.S., taking the information within the drawings and engineering processes and doing more with it than it just being a series of symbols that represented something on a piece of paper.”
The company’s booming growth and the time period in which it happened might have tempted many entrepreneurs to move to a more techcentric part of the country. Landers would eventually open another office in Arizona, but the atg headquarters were destined to stay in his hometown, he said, for reasons beyond mere nostalgia.
“Staying here kept us grounded in what is real,” he said. “It is really easy in this industry to go raise fantastic amounts of money to go explore and try new things. Often many of them have a very low chance of success, but that funding is just so readily available, you get a lot of startups, a lot of flare-ups and companies that die.
“Being based here, you don’t have that choice. You are running a company in the technology space that has to pay its bills every day. It has to think through the consequences of development paths, be judicious in how it spends its money. I think being here in Arkansas has made us a much more responsible company in our growth trajectory.”
Today, the Argenta Arts District neighborhood is one of the more bustling districts in the region, in large part thanks to Landers and atg. The company is not only located there but is helping make possible the atg Pavilion, to be opened this fall at Argenta Plaza, which will serve as the state’s touchpoint for honoring its musical legends. Just over yonder is Draft + Table, the popular upscale restaurant Landers brought to a vacant pub space on the choicest corner of the neighborhood.
Everywhere Landers looks today, he sees the melding of chapters of his beloved hometown, a place that, not unlike himself, continues to push to the far horizon in new and unexpected ways while still remaining fundamentally solid, still building things from the ground up.
“With the advent of artificial intelligence, the way it’s shifting our industry, whoever controls the data wins,” he said. “That’s a really bold statement, but I’ll say it’s even akin to the turn of the century, when the newspaper magnates were winning because they controlled the flow of information. They had amazing power. Today, businesses can’t make decisions at the speed they need to be made without absolute control of their data and information and how to structure their data.
“As atg transforms into this AI-driven world, the focus of that transformation is around data and helping companies to understand their data because without those steps, AI is not really able to help them. AI is taking the pace of change in this industry to a rate that we have never experienced before. That’s really what we’re into today, turning atg from an engineering and architectural company into a data company. It’s a still-evolving transition.”
SCOTT LANDERS ON THE LESSONS OF SETBACKS
“In 2008 and 2009, I learned some great lessons about contingency planning, being able to not just plan for the next success but be prepared for the next step back. I feel pretty proud about how we came out of that in the end because that period was very impactful to our industry. The other thing is juxtaposed to what I believe about having leaders and really trusting them and counting on them to scale your organization: You also have to be keenly aware of what’s going on in an organization. You don’t have to micromanage it in any shape or form, but you have to be keenly aware of what’s going on in an organization. When you blindly give trust and you’re not staying on top of it, not-good things can happen.”
SCOTT LANDERS ON MANAGING GROWTH, SUCCESS
“There is definitely an entrepreneur spirit to me, but you find as a business gets larger and more complex, sometimes you’ve got to take a step back from your first gut instinct and have a more enterprise thought process to it. Our company was founded in an entrepreneurial spirit, but it’s really grown into learning how to manage a large business and, beyond that, how to grow leaders. If you ask me what my job is today, I’ve got fantastic people in the organization that do most of the nuts-and-bolts operations on a daily basis, and what I’m most proud of is growing them as leaders. There’s no doubt about that.
“Managing our growth comes down to learning to rely and learning to trust each other. There is no way one individual can scale an organization without having folks with them that they can truly trust, truly integrate into the process. Turning an employee into a manager is not effective; turning an employee into a leader is highly effective. Having multiple people in an organization that are leading different elements of it is the key to being able to scale an organization.”
SCOTT LANDERS ON INNOVATION
“When we first started this, software companies were expected on an annual basis to have an updated release or a new release, and about every three years or so, you would have a major update to the software. That has changed; we’re on a path now where things are hosted in the cloud, where there’s a much broader connection between platforms. It’s a continuous process now. Customers aren’t expecting a new release annually anymore; they’re expecting a continuous flow of updates and new features. That’s changed how we operate as a company. It’s made us more nimble because we’re not bundling together a group of features and waiting for some show or event. We’re able to take the customer’s problems and tailor the software to address those issues on a much shorter cycle. It’s really helped us focus on what best serves the customer in our development cycle.”
SCOTT LANDERS ON PERSEVERANCE
“Building a company is like eating an elephant: You do this one bite at a time, and you’re better off doing this a bite at a time than sitting down in one meal and trying to consume the entire elephant. This is a hard way to put this, but don’t chase dreams. Follow them one step at a time, moving methodically, or you’re going to fall on your face. There are no shortcuts. There’s no ‘get rich quick.’ It is about taking the million-step journey, and that doesn’t happen overnight. There’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears in between.”
SCOTT LANDERS ON CREATIVITY
“I look at creativity as the problem-solving process. We have a business issue, we have a problem of any sort, how do we go solve this problem? How do we make it have the least resistance to get from where we are to where we need to be? That’s the creative element. It’s just problem-solving skills. It’s knowing that a contractor needs to tie all of his building information to real numbers and then giving him a set of plans that helps him understand what they need to build without someone physically writing in what every door costs and every doorknob and every hinge. That’s where the creative element comes in for us.
“Before you can do that, though, you have to have curiosity. One of the best business skills there is that people often underestimate is innate curiosity. You should never, ever stop learning and asking why. I’m as bad as a 3-year-old; I won’t stop asking people why until I fully understand it.”
Photo by Jane Colclasure
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