Scott McLaughlin and the customer who kept waving

For years, Ryan Suydam waved at Strategic Connections vans. The people behind the wheel may have wondered who he was. Suydam had an explanation: he remembered working with Scott McLaughlin’s company, and the memory was good enough to earn a passing thumbs-up long after the work itself had ended.

Suydam had managed IT at Phillips Architecture before founding Client Savvy. McLaughlin was a vendor who became a partner, in Suydam’s telling, and someone whose business helped shape his own ambitions. Eventually, a chance encounter at a restaurant gave him the opportunity to say thank you. A delayed thank-you has one advantage over a satisfaction survey: nobody is sending reminder emails.

There are bigger numbers in McLaughlin’s career. There are acquisitions, new divisions, a real-estate investment and a transaction with a private-equity-backed buyer. But the wave supplies something those milestones cannot. It shows how one former customer remembered the founder’s work after he had moved on to a different business.

Another customer, Jim Rappl, described the company in a LinkedIn recommendation through the details of delivery. He praised McLaughlin’s team for identifying areas a project might otherwise overlook and for helping his own organization give its customers a better experience. His emphasis fell on timing, budgets and getting ahead of problems. These are concrete things for a business partner to remember. They also place McLaughlin’s customer relationships inside a chain of responsibility: his team’s work affected how another company could serve the people relying on it.

Read alongside Suydam’s recollection, that recommendation suggests why service occupies so much of the personal story. One customer remembered the practical delivery of projects; another remembered an influence on the business he wanted to create. Each was describing a working relationship from his own side of the table. Neither needed an acquisition announcement to explain why the relationship mattered.

Before the vans became familiar

McLaughlin attended North Carolina State University from 1990 to 1994. His early working life took him into the practical business of installing cabling in commercial buildings around the region. At 25, four years out of college, he encountered an abrupt change: the Cary company where he worked went out of business.

A closed employer is a fairly uncompromising career counselor. Whatever plans an employee has made, the next decision suddenly becomes immediate. That disruption came near the beginning of a much longer period of company building. In October 1998, he founded Strategic Connections, initially a structured cabling contractor.

The starting trade matters. Cabling belongs to the working interior of a building, the infrastructure that makes other people’s equipment useful. McLaughlin began with a specific, physical service. The company that followed would extend into audiovisual systems, fire alarms and sprinklers, bringing several kinds of specialist work under the same business.

Buying experience along with a business

The expansion became particularly visible in August 2009. Strategic Connections acquired OneSource Building Technologies’ Audiovisual, Sound & Lighting Group, a business with roots in Long Communications, founded in 1949. The transaction brought an older technical lineage into McLaughlin’s younger company. It also put four Strategic Connections office locations on the map.

In July 2010 came another acquisition, Communications Support Services Inc. That addition brought further management and installation experience to the structured cabling operation. These were consecutive moves into work the company could place alongside its existing services, rather than excursions into an unrelated business.

There is a useful distinction between buying equipment and bringing in a team that knows how to use it. The acquisitions added people with experience in the work. For McLaughlin, growth involved the capabilities of the organization: the trades it could offer and the people available to deliver them.

By 2012, the company could point to projects involving Duke Energy, Church on the Move, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Raleigh-Durham International Airport. That list put an airport beside a church and corporate clients. The common thread was the technical work inside the buildings, rather than one narrowly defined kind of customer.

The advice that came before the applause

On February 23, 2012, at Brier Creek Country Club in Raleigh, McLaughlin was recognized among Business Leader’s Top 50 Entrepreneurs in the Triangle. The recognition arrived roughly fourteen years into Strategic Connections’ history. His accompanying advice to aspiring entrepreneurs was revealingly practical: maintain fiscal responsibility, take care of the team, believe goals can be achieved and dream big.

“Take good care of those on your team.”

Scott McLaughlin, advice to entrepreneurs, 2012

Ambition received its place in the sentence. So did the bills and the people. That combination gives the advice its usefulness. Dreaming big is easy to applaud at a banquet; fiscal responsibility is more likely to be tested after everyone has gone home. He put both obligations in the same account of entrepreneurship.

The company had also received recognition from Systems Contractor News and the Triangle Business Journal’s Fast 50. Yet McLaughlin’s advice was framed as conduct rather than a recipe for winning awards. It concerned what a founder should look after while trying to build something larger. There was room for aspiration, with responsibilities attached.

More of the building, one specialty at a time

The business kept changing its shape. In July 2011, its security division became a stand-alone company, Strategic Security Solutions, still under Strategic Connections’ ownership. In 2018, that business was spun off separately. Expansion, in this history, included decisions about where a specialty belonged as well as which new specialties to add.

A dedicated fire alarm division followed in February 2013. A fire protection and sprinkler division arrived in 2015. The company now offers four core specialties: structured cabling, audiovisual, fire alarm and fire protection. The chronology traces how McLaughlin’s original cabling business accumulated a broader set of responsibilities inside commercial facilities.

The resulting service range includes design, installation, inspections, maintenance and upgrades. The work can extend from campus cabling to sound and lighting for larger venues, and from a conference-room presentation system to fire-system service. It is a business with a considerable amount of activity behind the ordinary phrase “building systems.”

A campus with room for another life

McLaughlin’s business interests also reached beyond installation contracts. By 2017, he and David Hicks of Zebulon had purchased a former corporate campus in Rocky Mount. They had paid $1.35 million for a property with six buildings, 220,000 square feet of space and 600 parking spaces.

The campus had originally been built by Hardee’s and later occupied by banking operations. McLaughlin’s interest was expressed in terms of what the site could accommodate: a substantial workforce, with space already there. He also described Rocky Mount as undervalued. The property was an investment in an existing place with a previous working life.

That episode adds another dimension to the founder of a systems contractor. A building can be a set of technical installations; it can also be an asset waiting for another occupant. In this instance, McLaughlin and Hicks bought the larger container. The parking count alone suggests that “a little office space” would have been a modest description.

Joining forces, staying involved

In August 2025, Strategic Connections entered a new ownership chapter. SuperHero Fire Protection, a portfolio company of Hidden Harbor Capital Partners, announced its acquisition of the business. The stated plans included a larger presence in the Carolinas, a broader low-voltage offering and more recurring inspection and service work.

McLaughlin would continue as CEO and remain an active owner. His response welcomed joining forces with SuperHero and set out ambitions to grow the business, expand its capabilities and keep serving its customers. After years of buying businesses and adding divisions, he was now bringing his own company into a larger organization.

For a founder, an acquisition can become the point at which a biography switches to the past tense. The announced arrangement kept McLaughlin in the operating story. The business would have a new partner, while the founder retained both a leadership role and an ownership interest.

The wave after the contract

Return to those passing vans. Suydam’s recollection gives this long sequence of corporate decisions a human consequence. The relationship endured in his memory after his day-to-day work had changed. When he saw McLaughlin again, he had something specific to thank him for: an example of how he wanted to build a business himself.

McLaughlin’s career can be marked in dates: 1998, 2009, 2012, 2025. It can also be followed through the people who worked with his company and carried an impression away. One of them kept spotting the name on the road and raising a hand. For a company called Strategic Connections, that is a pleasantly literal result.