Advantix Raises Channel Trailblazer Natasha Royer Coons to CEO

Serial entrepreneur Natasha Royer Coons, an executive who is no stranger to taking big leaps of faith, is jumping into the CEO seat with plans to unite the company around its transformation into a managed connectivity experience provider, the longtime channel leader tells CRN.

Tech executive and longtime entrepreneur Natasha Royer Coons is tackling her next challenge as the new CEO of telecom expense management and connectivity specialist Advantix.

With Royer Coons, the company’s former chief revenue officer, in the CEO seat, Advantix will benefit from passionate leadership and a vision to take the company’s managed mobility and telecom expense chops to the next level, Frisco, Texas-based Advantix said Wednesday.

“If you look at where I’ve taken the company, what we’ve done with the culture, the brand in the channel, the revenues and the team I have assembled, it just made sense for me to now take the helm, especially because I have a new vision for the company for who we are and what we’re focused on. And I believe that this is a new class of service – a managed connectivity experience provider,” Royer Coons told CRN.

[Related: Solution Providers Unite: Advantix Acquires TeraNova’s Managed Mobility Practice]

Royer Coons in 2007 founded and led TeraNova, a managed mobility and expense management provider, until the solution provider merged with Advantix in 2018. She went on to become a partner and CRO at Advantix, leading channel development, sales, marketing and several strategic initiatives.

“I think we had an inkling of how powerful we could be together and how much more we can do with two channel-centric organizations coming together. But the reality of what happened really blew us away when you bring together like-minded entrepreneurs,” she said. “What transpired is the telecom expense management I brought to the table, [and] the way we leveraged that connectivity part of the business and integrated it into all of our platforms and delivered the carrier experience, that has basically propelled Advantix.”

Royer Coons was instrumental in ushering Advantix into a new era of innovation by overseeing the launch of SmartSIM technology, the company’s universal WAN connectivity with auto-failover that can connect to leading U.S.-based carriers including AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, as well as more than 475 providers globally. She’s been working alongside senior leadership to transform Advantix from a solution provider organization, into what the company calls a managed connectivity experience provider that blends multi-carrier connectivity with proprietary SaaS tools to help partners and customers optimize, manage and report on the entire telecom stack.

The company has quadrupled its revenue since Royer Coons joined as CRO after the two companies came together.

“We have created a unique experience around connectivity and the market is ripe for this solution. Enterprise clients are really clamoring for this [because] they’re used to a world of multiple carriers and a lot of complexity. Because of the way we’ve rebuilt this experience, the market is more than ready,” she said.

Now under her leadership, Royer Coons is re-orienting Advantix around the managed connectivity experience strategy, she said.

“We’re signaling to the market and to the channel, that we feel that we are in a different class in and of itself and we’re able to provide this experience like no other,” she said. “We’re moving away from being a telecom expense management [provider] with heavy managed services to leveraging those SaaS roots with the connectivity experience and services.”

The company had to carefully incubate certain products and services, such as its SmartSIM technology, to get it safely off the ground so that the market – and the company’s internal teams – could understand it’s value. Royer Coons’ mission now is to pull the company’s products and services under one umbrella, she said.

“We’re ready,” she said. “There’s not going to be a product supported by different teams and resources and maybe even a philosophy. It’s going to be one philosophy, one focus, one company and a common platform.”