Rich Balot’s father needed a job. His son had an idea for one. In 1996, Rich and his brother Dave opened a store selling cellular phones and beepers in Wilson, North Carolina, and put their father to work. It was an unusually direct response to a family problem: create the employer, then make the hire. The business eventually became Victra. The original vacancy remains a useful place to begin.
A national chain can make its beginnings look inevitable. A shop, a few more shops, a transaction, a map with pins in every state. Balot’s story has those ingredients, but the interesting part comes after the exit. He sold control in 2015, returned as chief executive in 2019, and joined partners to regain a majority interest in 2021. He had already built a company worth leaving. He then decided it was worth returning to.
There was an earlier business, with a rather different inventory. As a teenager, Balot ran a mobile DJ service. Getting into that trade took two rounds of telephone calls. First he offered himself as a DJ and got nowhere. Then he offered to carry speakers. That worked. There is a practical sales lesson here: sometimes the customer wants help moving the equipment before he wants to hear your taste in music.
Balot recalls that the operation grew to seven DJs working for him by the time he was 16. Phones helped keep the parties running. Before a handset became the thing everyone carried everywhere, it was a way to direct people to the right place at the right time. A teenager sending DJs to their next booking could see a use for wireless service without commissioning a market study.
A small shop with a useful name
He was born in New Jersey and moved to North Carolina as a teenager. His schooling included the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, followed by North Carolina State University and East Carolina University. At ECU, he earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration. Education and enterprise ran alongside one another; the business was already under way while he was a college student.
The original name was ABC Phones. Its expanded version, Affordable Beepers and Cellular Phones, did a little explaining and a little advertising. Alphabetical placement mattered when people found businesses in a phone book. ABC put the shop near the front. Search placement existed long before anyone could hire a consultant to discuss it over a screen share.
His father brought sales experience to the counter. The early family arrangement was practical in another way, too: Dave became a partner and remained important through the later ownership changes. Rich’s public accounts of the company return repeatedly to relatives, partners and colleagues. Even when the numbers grow, the cast stays recognizably human.
The company began as a partnership in October 1996 and incorporated as ABC Phones of North Carolina in 1999. Its carrier relationships changed as the industry changed, moving from U.S. Cellular to Alltel and eventually into Verizon’s system. Balot had to learn to operate within a much larger company’s orbit while continuing to run an independent retailer. The Verizon sign and the ownership behind the counter tell different parts of the same shop’s story.
Leaving was only the middle
The 2015 sale offered the kind of outcome founders are supposed to want. Outside investors acquired control, and Balot retired as CEO. Selling a business also rearranges the daily habits that built it: who makes decisions, who sets expectations, who gets the uncomfortable telephone call. Ownership can change in a transaction. Those habits take longer to replace.
By April 2019, he was back in the chief executive’s job. He has described the return as one of his favorite memories at Victra, because it gave him a chance to repair the operation and its culture. That is a revealing choice. A founder with decades of milestones could have selected the first opening or the sale. Balot chose the work that followed a difficult stretch.
His account of rebuilding is unsentimental about leadership. He replaced senior managers and paid close attention to the people reporting to them. For a retailer spread across the country, the person between headquarters and the store can shape an employee’s experience more immediately than any company statement. A culture needs someone who can put it into practice on a Tuesday afternoon.
The ownership story caught up with the management story in 2021, when Balot and partners bought back control. His brother was involved again. The return required more than nostalgia for the original business. It meant accepting responsibility for the company as it had become, with its accumulated people, obligations and opportunities. A second turn at the wheel comes with fewer excuses about the route.
The map gets bigger. The job gets narrower.
In April 2022, Victra announced its acquisition of Go Wireless. The deal added more than 600 stores and brought the combined footprint to nearly 1,600 locations across 49 states at the time. Store managers, sales associates and field staff would join Victra, while Las Vegas support staff would help with integration. A transaction that looks like one line on a timeline becomes many separate working relationships.
By his January 2026 interview, Balot described a business operating roughly 1,800 locations across all 50 states for Verizon and Total Wireless, with revenue exceeding $3 billion. Those figures describe a particular point in the company’s development. They also explain why the founder can no longer manage the place as an enlarged version of the original counter in Wilson.
His prescription is to give the chief executive a shorter job description. He identifies five responsibilities: direction, the right team, cash, key relationships and his own continuing education. The list has room for ambition and bookkeeping. It gives profit and cash flow separate attention. It also leaves a seat at the table for the CEO’s ability to learn something.
That last responsibility fits his membership in YPO and his enthusiasm for coaching. On LinkedIn, he has written about investing in leaders even when their cost felt difficult to afford. The emphasis is incremental: keep learning, improve the team, acknowledge mistakes and keep going. A business with a national footprint still depends on decisions small enough to make one at a time.
Footprint described by Balot in January 2026.
A phone call is good. A meal is better.
Balot sells access to a world of remote communication. His own advice about starting a business relationship is to meet in person. In a LinkedIn post, he urged people to begin with a meeting or a meal; calls and video conversations can follow once the relationship exists. The retailer of connected devices has retained an affection for sitting across an actual table.
Another post makes his preference for mutually beneficial deals explicit. He writes about the difficulty of asking others for help and the value of friendships and partnerships when he has to do so. It adds a useful complication to the confident founder in the interviews. Independence is attractive. Running a company eventually requires other people to say yes.
There is humor in his account of learning, too. Asked what advice he would give his younger self, he reached for The Lion King, a favorite film, and the lesson of learning from the past. The reference is more memorable than a polished management slogan. He wants his children to know that he makes mistakes. Success, in this telling, does not confer immunity from needing the next lesson.
The company gives that emphasis on people a public expression through Victra Cares. Its partnerships have included Feeding America, Building Homes for Heroes and the USO. In its 2022 acquisition announcement, Victra said its support during 2020 and 2021 had helped provide 1.5 million meals. The program connects a geographically dispersed business to the communities where its employees live and work.
“Win/Win is the only way I know how to do business!”Rich Balot · LinkedIn
Still a Pirate
In June 2024, EY named Balot one of its Entrepreneur Of The Year Southeast Award winners. The recognition marked a career that had already included founding, selling, returning and buying back. It was a regional award, earned well into a working life that began with equipment to carry and a father to employ. The polished ceremony came rather later than the first sales pitch.
His commitments around Greenville have continued alongside the retail business. In July 2025, East Carolina University welcomed him to its Board of Trustees for a term ending in June 2029. He is also president of John Paul II Catholic High School. Those roles place him in institutions with their own daily demands, rather than leaving support for education as a sentence in an executive biography.
There is a modest, concrete example of the connection. In February 2025, Victra’s contact center in Winterville hosted ECU’s inaugural sales competition, bringing together 40 students from five institutions. Students practiced rapport, objections and asking for an appointment. The setting suited an alumnus whose first business breakthrough involved revising a pitch until somebody found it useful.
Away from work, his university biography lists four children, four dogs, fishing and travel. He enjoys watching his children play sports. His ambitions for Victra include more locations and broader product lines, but his account of the future also makes room for education and giving back. The business began as a way to help one member of the family. Three decades later, Balot is still finding people he wants it to be useful to.