Peter Barth talks about expansion plans here and abroad
Nearly five years ago, entrepreneur Peter Barth helped launch an accelerator program to grow and support startups from Greenville. Today, Barth’s separate but related company The Iron Yard has graduated nearly a thousand software engineers, operates 22 campuses and has plans for more.
Upstate Business Journal caught Barth at The Iron Yard headquarters downtown to take a look back and ahead.
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How many locations do you have in the works at any one time?
Oh, very few. … We’re on pace of something like 10 to 12 a year, but we’re probably working on 10 new cities in regulatory [department] right now. We’ve grown up in the last year, so we’ve got a formalized regulatory department that works on approvals, and then we’ve got a formalized real estate team for new market assessments and a data research team that does new market research. There’s lots of things in the works.
Growing up – what does that mean to you?
A year ago, there was very little corporate overhead. Basically, all the employees were at a campus. I did a lot of the functional roles directly, and Eric did the rest of them. At this point, we’ve brought in a CFO and COO. We’ve got a finance team. We’ve got a regulatory team. We’ve got a real estate team, and we’ve got someone dedicated to PR, we’ve got somebody dedicated to social media. So as an organization, we’ve gone from everybody’s wearing 10 hats to – well, everybody’s probably still wearing nine hats, but – there’s a lot more bodies who have dedicated responsible areas.
I don’t think we’re a big-boy company yet, but yes, we’ve definitely gone through that transition from those 10 people that do a little bit of everything to very specific areas.
You made your first international moves last year with London – what’s next?
International is really in the stage of due diligence, so there’s nothing immediately in the works internationally. It’s a much longer lead time in terms of what it looks like in that country, legally, regulatory, business wise. … I’ve had conversations about South America, Africa, Europe and Asia. We’ve looked in Australia.
For the most part, we’ve looked globally. I mean, we’re not looking to go into China or any of those places, but we’ve talked about doing business in most of the big cities in the world.
How has the coding education industry changed since you started?
There’s a lot of code schools, so there’s a lot of noise around the space. I would still say, though, our competition is not really other code schools. The typical student is looking at really doing nothing, or going into traditional education. In cities like New York or Austin where there’s 10 code schools, they might be comparing them, but in most of our cities we’re the only code school, or there might be one or two small ones.
This is one of the reasons we’re in places like Cincinnati and Minneapolis. Obviously there’s a huge number of Fortune 500 companies headquartered in those kinds of cities, but they don’t have the same kind of talent volume hat you’d see in New York or San Francisco.
Demand for developers is still on the rise. What does that mean for your graduates?
I think companies are becoming more receptive. They’re more wiling to go out on a limb and take a risk because there’s more demand. I mean, we’ve talked to employers where they say the average is 93 days to fill an open position for a developer, which is a long time if you need help. That kind of need. You see it more in markets where we are where they’re not necessarily tech hubs. There is a longer process. They’re recruiting them across country to come into the community. As a necessity, they have to look at other options.
Do you have any plans to relocate in the foreseeable future?
No, I’m here long-term. I have five kids in the school system. And we’re a distributed company already, so when you look at us, Greenville is headquarters. I’m here, Eric is here, Mason is here. But human resources is in Raleigh, and our COO is in Kansas City, and our CFO is in Chicago. Stacy’s in D.C.. Our team is very distributed. We’re all over the place in that regard, so it’s not a centralized hub that would ever pick up and move someplace.
