East Meadow IT execs look to past for future success

Peter Xenakis attended Farmingdale State College and Paul Trapani went to SUNY Geneseo, but their real education came during the tech boom and bust of the 1990s.

Trapani, 38, is chief executive of XT Group, a 5-year-old information technology firm, and Xenakis, 30, is the East Meadow-based firm's chief operating officer.

During the mid-to-late '90s, they got jobs in the tech field, saw a small company they worked for merge with another and jumped ship to work, separately, on their own in Internet technology. The era was painful.

"Everyone was going to make a million dollars," Trapani said. "People walked down the aisles [of companies they worked for] with calculators figuring how out how much money they were going to make."

Instead, many went bust. Xenakis and Trapani said they learned from the boom-and-bust. They run their company very carefully.

"We're very conservative" with cash, Xenakis said. "We're putting in our own money and that's what the banks want to see."

The company just got $100,000 in financing from M&T Bank in Farmingdale. XT's sales are now about $500,000 and the company has six employees. It recently hired a chief financial officer and an outside sales person, and is seeking to hire another technical person.

XT Group is careful to watch that its receivables - money it is owed - do not get out of hand, as they did at some tech companies during the boom years.

So far, XT's strategy seems to be working. The company has won contracts for IT work from the towns of Islip and Babylon. The company's work involves integrating systems and managing data and web portals.

One of the biggest lessons they learned? "The easy money is not there anymore," Trapani said.

AT A GLANCE
What: Tech boom and bust
When: Mid-1990s to early 2000
High point: In January 2000, 17 dot-com companies paid more than $2 million each for 30-second TV commercials during Super Bowl XXXIV. On March 10, 2000, the tech-heavy Nasdaq hit an all-time high of 5,048.62.
Beginning of the end: In early 2000, the economy was starting to lose speed. After the March 10 weekend, investors feared the peak, if not reached, was near, and a massive sell-off of tech stocks followed. By March 15, the Nasdaq had lost 9 percent of its value.
Aftermath: The dot-com crash wiped out $5 trillion in market value of tech companies from March 2000 to October 2002.