The first useful thing Darren Wercinski put on a screen was not an advertisement. It was an answer. Which locker room? What time is practice? Where does a parent steer a child carrying a bag roughly the size of a studio apartment? An ice arena is full of people who need information immediately, and almost none of them are standing still. Wercinski understood this particular species of confusion because he had spent years inside Minnesota rinks. He grew up in Eveleth, played on Eveleth-Gilbert's 1993 state championship team, and went on to play 103 games at Dartmouth.
Years later, while working at Best Buy, he and colleague Marc Kline began discussing businesses they might start. Their eventual idea was wonderfully literal: put screens in community arenas, fill them with schedules, locker-room assignments and local information, then sell advertising around the useful parts. The screen earned attention because the schedule mattered. The ad borrowed that attention. In 2005, Reach Sports Marketing Group opened for business. The first customer was the Super Rink in Blaine, Minnesota.
There was a hometown method behind the financing, too. Wercinski and Kline raised about $350,000 to get the plan moving. Roughly twenty early investors, many of them friends and family from Eveleth, put in around $10,000 each. These were not anonymous entries on a capitalization table. They were people who knew the hockey kid before they knew the founder. The arrangement carried a particular social pressure: a quarterly update is one thing; a Fourth of July party with your investors is another.
A good first model, with a hard ceiling
The arena network grew because its bargain made sense. In 2005, a 50-inch plasma display could cost about $3,000, an awkward purchase for a community facility. REACH paid for screens and recovered the investment through local advertising. The location received a communication system. Advertisers got a captive local audience. Visitors learned where to go.
The trouble appeared in the geography and the labor. Outside Minnesota, parts of Canada and a few pockets on the East Coast, community ice arenas were not a large enough market. Selling local ads was also persistent, repetitive work. A representative could fill a screen one year and face the same quota again the next. REACH expanded into fitness centers, campuses and other venues, eventually building a local-ad business of about $5 million across a network of roughly 500 screens. The numbers were real. So was the treadmill.
Then the customers began proposing a better business. Some successful locations liked the screens but did not want the ads. Could they simply pay REACH to use the software? At weaker ad locations, REACH presented the inverse choice: the company could remove the screen, or the venue could pay a fee to keep the system. The answer was often yes. Hidden inside the advertising company was a software subscription company waiting for both sides to notice.
The center of gravity shifted
The second startup inside the first
Wercinski has described REACH as a startup twice. The second version kept the screens but changed the economic engine. Subscription fees brought recurring revenue. Falling hardware prices lowered the cost of entry. Software that worked with nearly any display let the company step away from a business it did not particularly want to own. The staff changed with the model. A company once weighted toward advertising representatives eventually had nearly twenty people in development and IT.
The product also carried a souvenir from the rinks: integrations mattered. Locker-room schedules were structured data before the phrase appeared on every sales deck. REACH learned to pull information into a screen and make it useful to the person passing by. It repeated that trick across industries, calendars and dashboards. When one customer asked for a Power BI application, Wercinski and chief technology officer Nate Davis worked through the request and the team built it in roughly four weeks. One client need became a capability available to others.
There was a sales lesson inside that product lesson. REACH did not limit itself to signage conventions, where every competitor had the same badge and booth carpet. The team went to vertical trade shows. It could be the lone digital-signage company at an event for churches or car washes, learn the language, win ten customers, then twenty, then forty. The company became, in Wercinski's phrasing, the car-wash guy or the church guy. Specificity opened markets that a generic pitch could not.
That willingness to build had a cost. Years of pleasing customers produced a capable content-management system with enough one-off additions to feel clunky. Wercinski took the criticism plainly. REACH committed nearly $2 million to a CMS rewrite, adding more attention to user interface and customer feedback. Financial caution did not mean refusing to spend. It meant spending where he believed customers would feel it.
Usability became a measurable part of the pitch. At the end of 2022, REACH reported receiving seventeen G2 awards across categories that included usability, customer service and industry leadership. Wercinski attached the result to a plain product goal: people of different technical backgrounds should be able to use the system. The next year's work, he said, would push the user experience and online tools further so customers could make content more efficiently. The ambition was less about decorating screens than reducing the effort between an idea and its appearance in public.
Scrappy, profitable and willing to be wrong
The public version of Wercinski is funny in a way that makes a balance sheet easier to hear. He has called himself prudent, then invited his colleague not to answer whether the team would call him cheap. He has joked about Vikings odds, losing bracket picks and old company lunches that escaped their scheduled hour. The jokes reveal an operator comfortable admitting error. “I have no problem making mistakes, a lot of mistakes, and learning from them,” he said while discussing a mobile-app experiment.
That temperament matched the financing. After the initial raise, REACH became profitable early and did not pursue traditional venture capital. Wercinski bought out many early investors over time and said he wanted to avoid being beholden to investors or banks. He accepted that the company might grow more slowly because it kept a budget and a profit. Yet by 2023, he was speaking openly about doubling recurring revenue, hiring aggressively and funding the product rewrite. Conservatism and ambition occupied the same office.
Loyalty occupied it, too. Even after SaaS became the center, REACH kept a small part of its old digital-out-of-home business. Wercinski explained the choice with unusually direct affection for the advertising representatives who had built the first company. The same instinct shaped the eventual sale. Previous offers had appeared, but he was wary of buyers who wanted the customers and planned to cut the staff.
A sale, then a new position on the ice
In March 2025, Poppulo acquired REACH Media Network. The financial terms stayed private. The strategic fit was clearer: Poppulo gained an established mid-market digital-signage product, and REACH joined a larger workplace-communications company while keeping its brand. At the time, REACH had more than 9,000 software customers and powered over 25,000 screens. The friends and family who had supplied those early checks received their exit after waiting nearly twenty years.
A month later, REACH announced that Kiersten Gibson would take over day-to-day leadership and strategy as division president. Wercinski shifted toward national advertising partnerships while continuing to support the company. The move has a pleasing circularity. Advertising paid for the first screens. Software became the scalable business. After the acquisition, the founder returned his attention to partnerships around advertising, now from a company with a much larger installed base.
The rink remains the cleanest explanation of the whole enterprise. People rarely stare at a screen because a screen exists. They look because something on it matters now. A schedule earns the glance. A useful integration keeps earning it. Wercinski's two decades with REACH are a study in protecting that useful core while changing almost everything around it: who pays, what the company sells, which industries it enters, how the product is built and, finally, who owns the business.
There is no need to romanticize the plasma display. It was expensive, heavy and destined to become obsolete. The observation behind it aged better: stand where confusion already exists, provide the answer, and notice when the customer offers you a better business model. Sometimes the durable software company is already in the room, hanging above the rink lobby.