Defeating the Digital Divide with Ed Walton, CEO of StepCG

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, we're talking to Ed, the CEO of StepCG. And we discuss how StepCG and Cradlepoint are utilizing private cellular networks to provide internet access to underserved communities, interesting use cases where private cellular networks are improving user experience, and how to encourage your employees to get out of their comfort zones and try new things. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Ed at 00:00:36) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Ed at 00:00:48) I went to University of Wisconsin, grew up in Milwaukee area, and was a journalism major. And this is back in the mid-eighties and so forth, long time ago. When I used to come back from school, my parents relocated to Dayton, Ohio. My dad ran the Allen Berry Company, yellow page advertising. And one of my jobs during the summer was I was a bouncer at a bar called Newcomb's in the downtown Oregon District in Dayton.

(Ed at 00:01:14) And the owners of that bar, Pat Bailey and Jim Murphy, great guys. When I graduated, I moved back to Dayton, I was looking for a job, and they happened to actually have purchased the first Computerland franchise in the Dayton area. And they knew me from Newcomb's, working the door and stuff. And, you know, it's always a logical career progression to go from being a bouncer into technology. So I was like, okay.

(Ed at 00:01:37) Computers. And Computerland was the first reseller for IBM equipment solutions, Apple, and so forth. And I started out right away in technology selling enterprise computing and network to enterprise customers in the Dayton area and then Cincinnati. And it's evolved from there to where I am now as CEO at StepCG.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:00) That's crazy. So you were first introduced to tech through tech sales?

(Ed at 00:02:07) Yeah. Yeah. I handled major accounts for Computerland, and it was enterprise accounts. It was large hospitals. It was quick service restaurants like the old Ponderosa and so forth.

(Ed at 00:02:18) Mead, Mead Data Central, which became LexisNexis, Standard Register. It was really across all vertical segments, which is pretty cool because you get to see how folks in the early days of networking, you know, what they were solving for. And really, you know, from my perspective, it's all about the use cases. It's the applications. It's the services.

(Ed at 00:02:37) And that really drives the requirement for infrastructure underneath it. But, you know, when you see new technology and you see the acceleration of things like 5G and whatnot, that just accelerates innovation and new use cases, new business models. And it's just a really cool business, constantly changing, constantly evolving. It's definitely a dynamic industry, but it's never boring.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:00) Yeah. Absolutely. The only constant is change. But so how did you—oh, sorry. What did you say?

(Ed at 00:03:08) No. I agree entirely. You gotta, you know, the only constant is change. You need to embrace it. And if you can embrace it, you can do very well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:18) For sure. So how did you meet the executive team at StepCG and convince them to have you run the company?

(Ed at 00:03:26) Yeah. So I joined a little over two years ago. They all worked on my teams. I come—I was in Wellfleet Communications. After Computerland, I was with a few integrators.

(Ed at 00:03:37) I ended up at Wellfleet Communications, which was an early rival to Cisco. It was one of the first routing companies. And then Bay Networks and Nortel and Avaya, and Avaya actually acquired Nortel. But the guys at Step started out, you know, in 2014, those were folks that were on my teams at Avaya and Nortel. And we did some pretty special things as far as having success in selling networking solutions and some leading edge technology.

(Ed at 00:04:04) And I actually ran a North American sales organization for Avaya for networking and then ran global strategic accounts. Then I went over to Cradlepoint, you know, six, seven, eight years ago. But I've seen Step evolve from the beginning. They're guys I worked with. I've kind of been a mentor to the team at Step and it's a wonderful success story, total organic growth, you know, starting out with two, three individuals and one of the co-founders was Rob Huff.

(Ed at 00:04:32) Rob and I, you know, we're very close. He worked on my team. He was actually my K through 12 expert when I ran the Avaya networking team. And Rob and I got to be good friends. We actually, in 2012, took a bike trip for charity.

(Ed at 00:04:45) My older sister had Down syndrome. We decided, you know, let's raise some money for Down syndrome during Down syndrome awareness month, which is October. And we went out on the Little Miami Bike Trail in Loveland, Ohio, which is just a wonderful thing to do, and it's expanded and grown. But we actually biked 650 miles to Green Bay, Wisconsin. And we raised money along the way and had a lot of fun, met a lot of interesting people.

(Ed at 00:05:08) And, you know, Rob and I talked about that time, you know, in this industry, there's very few value-added resellers. Value-added, you know, could be considered an oxymoron. And so we're like, why don't we think about what would it be to build a partner that was an actual extension, you know, added value. It was an extension of the field engineering force for a lot of these companies that have great technology. And that's really how Step was born.

(Ed at 00:05:35) And so I had a front row seat to Step through its growth. And then a little over two years ago, they had grown it to a certain level. They were probably when I jumped in, I think we were about twenty folks and maybe about $10 million in revenue. And Rob was looking, you know, he's like, I gotta hire a CEO. We gotta figure out how we scale this, you know.

(Ed at 00:05:55) And I was like, what do you think? He's got, well, I got a short list of candidates. I said, well, who's on your short list? And he's like, you're on the short list. You are the short list.

(Ed at 00:06:02) So I'm like, well, okay. Well, I don't know if that's the right short list. But, you know what? I thought, you know, let's have some fun with this. So I came in and, you know, not that we planned the growth that happened, but we kind of exploded.

(Ed at 00:06:16) And the pandemic was, it was both a scary time, but also as a driver of technology and technology adoption, and right in line with some of the things that Step was providing. And the company has grown now over the last two years. We've gone from that twenty people in about $10 million. We're up to 115 people, and we'll be north of probably $80 million this year. And set to probably go through $100 million mark next year.

(Ed at 00:06:44) So we're really putting in place all the infrastructure from a company standpoint to allow us to grow and scale way beyond that. So it's been—we call it rebuilding the plane in progress. Sometimes the plane's flying upside down. Sometimes it's doing loop the loops. But we still have a lift in trajectory, and we're doing pretty well.

(Ed at 00:07:05) So we're attracting a lot of top talent from an engineering and otherwise to the company and just continuing to grow it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:12) That's awesome. So you said you're a value-added reseller of what kind of stuff?

(Ed at 00:07:20) Yeah. We're an IT solution provider, and we're also a managed services company. Everything we're doing is moving towards recurring services and more of an OpEx model. But if you think of the traditional value-added reseller, you know, he sells a solution to a customer, customer might run it, might have warranty on it, and some type of maintenance to, you know, hey, I've got all this stuff, but I really don't have the IT staff to keep up with the complexity of the network. And what I wanna do, you guys take care of it, just wrap your services around it.

(Ed at 00:07:50) Then we got other customers. And we got about 5,000 customers now across the entire country, I think. Some of them just want us to handle it entirely. They just want to outsource the IT portion of that, run the network, run the connectivity, and then they can focus on, you know, what their core business is. So what we, solution-wise, we sell all the traditional networking technologies, things such as wired networks, wireless networks, security, both cyber and cloud managed, physical security, video security, unified communications, things like RingCentral and Avaya and so forth.

(Ed at 00:08:26) We do all the traditional stuff, next-gen firewall, Palo Alto, Fortinet, we're largest Extreme Networks partner on the globe. Fastest growing for a lot of these vendors. Cradlepoint. We're all in. That's kind of, you know, so you got the traditional networking stuff.

(Ed at 00:08:42) And then on the other side, we built out a very robust practice around cellular technologies. And the bet we made a few years ago was that there would be an intersection where cellular is gonna continue to grow and be adopted more into the enterprise. And certainly with government education, medical customers, which is our core markets, but all enterprises, they use cellular in some aspect. Mostly, traditionally, it's been LTE failover. But what we've seen is as cellular has become more and more available and performance has gone way up, prices have come way down, and we have customers across the spectrum using LTE for traditional IoT, mobile, and branch connectivity, but also 5G, private cellular.

(Ed at 00:09:28) There's just a lot of exciting things happening, and we sit at the intersection of really that LTE revolution and explosion as well as the traditional connectivity that sits behind it. So it's pretty cool to see how this is all evolving. We also have built some managed services around that, some dashboard automation that we do for customers that allows an easy button on the front end to deploy equipment. And then we do some carrier-type control things where we can bring a service provider-type solution where we can give you entire, you know, granular control of what's going on in the environment, understanding traffic, building out, you know, networks that are individualized for clients, for customers, really creating that robust experience on the front end for whoever's in there. It could be a student, it could be a patient, a customer or a partner, whatever on the front end.

(Ed at 00:10:17) But on the back end, allowing kind of service provider control and visibility into the network for whoever's operating that network. That make sense?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:26) Yeah. Yeah. And I'm glad you got into Cradlepoint a little bit because I was just about to ask you about them since you had mentioned you worked there. Because, yeah, I've actually had the opportunity to interview two leaders over at their company, Donna and Manish, and they're both fantastic. And the thing that really interested me about Cradlepoint was the private cellular networks and the ability to deploy a secure network to connect over, like, a—I think it was, like, a two-mile radius. I don't wanna get that wrong. But that's just so cool to me. Kinda blew me away that that's possible, I guess.

(Ed at 00:11:04) It is and actually bigger than that. I mean, I know Cradlepoint, having been there, and I ran channels for them and then started to build out enterprise sales before I came over here. We had a very close relationship with great company. Just an awesome success story. Boise is one of the coolest towns on the planet.

(Ed at 00:11:22) I traveled all over with my previous jobs internationally and United States, and I was always like, how did I miss Boise, Idaho? What a cool town that is. And so I took the role at Cradlepoint, stayed in Cincinnati, but I was pretty much out there on a monthly basis. And my middle son ended up playing lacrosse at Boise State, so I had even another reason to go to Boise. But, you know, Cradlepoint, phenomenal success story from the early days when Ryan Adamson and a couple others founded the company.

(Ed at 00:11:52) Always been a leader in LTE and cellular technologies. And that's what I was talking about is that LTE, 5G, private cellular, these things aren't just for breakfast anymore. They're being used all day. I mean, this is the future. And what's cool about it is, like private cellular, and you mentioned that, is that you can build out your own private dedicated network leveraging the same cellular technologies that you have with the carrier networks we're all familiar with.

(Ed at 00:12:19) So AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, same cellular technology, you can leverage it in a private sense to basically build your own private dedicated network. And we actually—if you go to Cradlepoint's site, they announced yesterday, or at least they've been posting it, we announced it actually last week with them, a Defeat the Digital Divide initiative. And that's kind of a central hub for all these communities, schools, everyone out there trying to figure out, you know, what are the options to really bridge the digital divide? And the digital divide is anywhere from 12 million, you know, families and students to upwards 121 million. No one really knows, but there's a lot of folks out there that fundamentally lack access to reliable and secure broadband.

(Ed at 00:13:07) And we've been working with Cradlepoint and some other vendors to build out private cellular networks to solve the digital divide in communities like Collinsville, Illinois, where we actually, over a year ago, lit up a five-square-mile radius for about five, six hundred families. We're basically extending the classroom and all its security policies into those students' homes. And this is the poorest of the poor areas, what they call the underserved areas, where the district was, okay, pandemic happened. There's no dry run for the pandemic. Everybody had to react and basically, hey, we have to enable virtual learning.

(Ed at 00:13:49) Well, in those poorest areas, there's not a lot of internet options, and networks haven't been built out, and folks haven't invested there. So one of the options were, hey, we could put these MiFi pucks out there from the carrier and, you know, they're gonna charge us $60 a month, but at least we can get the kids online. Now the problem with that is, you know, it gets pretty costly when you start talking about five, six hundred, 2,000 students or even more than that in these poor areas. And it's not really secure, and it's not really great performance either. And if you got multiple students in the house, plus you get other family members on the net, well, you can start to envision that, you know, it's probably not an ideal environment.

(Ed at 00:14:31) So we worked with Collinsville, Illinois, and Derek Turner there and Doctor Skertich, you know, great folks, but they were pushing the envelope. They wanted to innovate. They're like, you know, we heard about private cellular. We heard there's spectrum available. Can we build out a network?

(Ed at 00:14:46) And not just, you know, Band-Aid the solution with these MiFi pucks or putting Cradlepoint routers on vehicles and then folks have to drive to get on the Wi-Fi in those neighborhoods. We do that all day long. We actually went a step further with them and said, what if we could leverage some of the cellular technology and spectrum that's available and build out a private cellular network, and then you're leveraging an internet pipe into one of your schools, and we're actually putting radios on infrastructure that they had, like water towers. They added a tower, we built another tower, we used some of their buildings.

(Ed at 00:15:21) And we really—that's what we did. We built out a five-square-mile radius where they're providing secure internet, extending the classroom into five, six hundred poorest of the poor families' homes. And I'll tell you, we underestimated the impact of that. And if you go to our site, stepcg.com or you go to defeatthedigitaldivide.com, you'll see the video where we interviewed the faculty and the teachers as well as some of the family members. It's a heartwarming story because folks don't realize, you know, we take internet for granted.

(Ed at 00:15:54) And these families that don't have access to broadband, and not just for student instruction, but for managing chronic diseases like diabetes, some other things that are prevalent in poor communities, or checking job applications, they really were cut off. I mean, they were cut off from the rest of society, not just the school. So by delivering this solution, working with school district, kind of pushing the envelope from an innovation standpoint and doing that with Cradlepoint, doing that with some other vendors that we work with, Nokia, we're doing some things with Celona, we've got a lot of different flavors of private cellular. It's pretty cool what we were able to pull off. And what's neat about it is we not only did Collinsville, we also did Brush, Colorado.

(Ed at 00:16:41) So we just deployed that a few weeks back. That's being turned on. And then the communities in the surrounding areas are kind of recognizing that, hey, maybe there is a better way. Maybe it's not just band-aiding the solution. There are technologies available like private cellular that we might be able to take advantage of.

(Ed at 00:16:58) And that's what defeatthedigitaldivide.com is all about. It's educating, hey, here are your options, here's what other folks are doing, here's how you can go get funding. And there is an absolute avalanche of funding available that E-Rate has made available, federal government E-Rate program for school districts. They're basically saying, go solve your digital divide, digital connect issues that you have. We're gonna take the reins off.

(Ed at 00:17:25) There are technologies you can leverage today. And what we saw as a company from the StepCG standpoint was the pandemic actually fueled the requirement to innovate. Right? Folks like Collinsville, who built one of the first private cellular networks in the country to solve an issue that they had, they didn't just settle for same old, same old. They said, what's possible?

(Ed at 00:17:48) And we went down that journey with them to discover what's possible and actually make it work. Sorry, kinda rambled there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:55) No, dude. That's amazing. I mean, you hear about the news likes to cover all these crazy solutions that, oh, a billionaire is launching a million satellites, and that's gonna give everyone internet. You know? Where is that now?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:11) And then also you hear about balloons going up to give internet to underserved areas. And I know it can work because there's a lot of smart people working on both of those solutions. But what you're talking about just sounds incredibly practical and useful to implement quickly today where we were just thrust into this pandemic. Now everyone has to go online. You can't wait for the billionaire to give you satellite internet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:37) You gotta get connected now to not have your child fall behind in their education.

(Ed at 00:18:44) Yeah. Yeah. And actually, what we're seeing is, and we expect in 2022, there was just actually last week announcement of more funding for districts. Hey, you can go build out and the government through E-Rate and other programs, ECF, they'll pick up the tab for connectivity, bridging that digital divide. And it's not just private cellular, it's also things like Cradlepoint routers on buses, turning that bus into a mobile classroom. And then enabling things like video security and other applications for tracking and so forth to make sure it's safe and secure. Because anything in a school environment has to be CIPA compliant, Child Internet Protection Act. So you wanna make sure that you're providing ample bandwidth, but you're also securing that bandwidth and controlling it, so you're keeping the students safe.

(Ed at 00:19:34) But you're really increasing instructional time, so they could do their homework on the bus, they're always connected, they go into their home, they've got connectivity. So, and what we're seeing is not only is it now for in-home student instruction, that's kind of the driving corner use case, but then the community takes notice of it. And the community says, well, you know, we've always talked about building this smart city, we've kind of been lagging in what our connectivity options are, and we've been using a lot of outdoor WiFi and these other things. What about private cellular? Because a community can use private cellular then to build out, similar to the school district, a private dedicated network that can connect a lot of different things.

(Ed at 00:20:18) There's an IoT explosion: smart garbage cans, new lighting, police cars, ambulatory, first responder. Most of those vehicles today do have Cradlepoint routers in them, and they're riding either AT&T, FirstNet or Verizon. They can still do that. You can have dual SIMs, dual modems, but now you can put in a private cellular SIM and you vastly reduce your cellular cost on a monthly basis. The ROI is immense. So what we're seeing is the school district really is kind of the corner case, but the adoption is happening across all vertical segments.

(Ed at 00:20:55) We're working with a large airport here locally. I'm in Whitefish, Montana right now, but I'm actually based out of, company's based out of Covington, Kentucky, right across from Cincinnati. There's an airport near us that is really a leader from a technology standpoint. It's a living laboratory. And they're pushing the envelope on innovation, and they've got a monstrous Amazon facility right behind it.

(Ed at 00:21:18) Biggest building I've ever seen. It's just gargantuan. So all things that, from a logistics standpoint, from what they're doing inside the airport, it is just pushing the envelope of innovation. It's super cool stuff. So automated, you got automated robots.

(Ed at 00:21:37) You got things that are serving sandwiches and drinks. The passengers are waiting at a particular gate. They got sensors. They're building in all sorts of intelligence that tell them, hey, you know what? The fuel truck is 30 minutes late, and we know that that's gonna delay the flight time. Let's send an automatic message to the passengers there that they can go down to Starbucks and get a coffee and so forth. So capturing everything that's going on in the environment and leveraging private LTE, they're actually doing it on the outside of the airport to connect video security cameras, ambulatory first responder vehicles, new LED lighting that they're putting in, charging stations for electric. All of that requires connectivity. So they need it outside the airport, but they also are bringing it inside the airport.

(Ed at 00:22:25) So it's kind of indoor and outdoor, and we're seeing that happen in hospitals, warehouses, manufacturing. It's really gonna take off. And the beauty of it is, it's not really an either-or for WiFi and private cellular. It's more in a complimentary fashion. And it's how do you integrate those two and leverage the best of both because WiFi continues to evolve and it continues to get faster and faster with more added benefits.

(Ed at 00:22:53) But WiFi is limited when you get to a larger area or expanse. If you combine the two, now you can offload the WiFi, and you can solve your connectivity needs in a combined fashion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:06) Yes. So I guess I'm not really super clear on the differences between running on a WiFi connection and a private cellular connection. Because once you're connected to it, from the user, it feels about the same. Right?

(Ed at 00:23:21) Yeah. Actually, as you start to get it, what we see is an explosion of devices. WiFi is an unlicensed spectrum. Right? And a lot of private cellular is unlicensed as well. But if you get into an outdoor environment, say you got a college campus or you got an airport or you got a community where you're trying to provide, it would take a lot of different WiFi radios in that environment, about 10 to one of what you could put out there from a cellular standpoint.

(Ed at 00:23:49) So you're gonna get broader expanse, certainly from an outdoor standpoint, and then even internal leveraging cellular. With cellular, you get a more secure because if you think of it, you've got a SIM card in your cell phone, right? To get on a private cellular network, similarly, you need a SIM card. So inherently, it's more secure and it's encrypted all the way through. And it actually allows you more connection density for an explosion of devices.

(Ed at 00:24:15) If you're in a manufacturing facility, you're going to have a lot of different sensors, you're going to have automation, you're going to have robotics, you're going to have cameras. Everything's attached to the network. And with WiFi, that can begin to become saturated, and it's also not necessarily as secure. Or from a handoff standpoint, if you have a large facility or if you're going from one WiFi area to another WiFi area, it's not always a seamless handoff. With cellular, you don't have those issues. So it gives you that connection density, it gives you better security, and allows you to get a better coverage area at a lower cost.

(Ed at 00:24:56) And what we're seeing really is customers wanna blend the two, right? They wanna use WiFi, but at the same time, they wanna offload the WiFi as much as they can and put on a private cellular infrastructure, like in a stadium. You know, you may wanna put the concessions, the ticketing, the video security, put all that on a private cellular network and leave back that bandwidth so you can get a better fan experience on the WiFi network. And then what we do too is with the service provider stuff that we do, it's something called RAN Next, mind-blowing technologies, what AT&T, Verizon carriers use. If you go into Dallas Cowboys Stadium, you go to the Atlanta Airport, you go to Fort Worth, it's basically carrier technology and control that really allows you to create a granular and personalized experience for any user in that environment, but also for any device in that environment.

(Ed at 00:25:47) And you can fine-tune it. And then not only that, you can also drive alternative streams of revenue for the venue, be it an airport, be it a stadium, any large. So there's a lot of things you can do with it, but at the end of the day, it kind of gives you visibility to the entire environment because everything's talking to everything, and it gives you granular control. So that's what we do is really kind of understand, you know, what is someone trying to do? What are they trying to connect? What are all the elements of the environment? What do they have today? And put together a robust solution for them that not only solves the issues of today, but three, four, five, and even 10 years out, embrace some of the newer technologies that are available. And that's what private cellular, I mean, that's all about innovation. We just think it's gonna explode across all vertical segments and pull through all the other technologies that you think of.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:40) So I'm curious to ask you because you mentioned how a lot of people are leaning on LTE today, and obviously, 5G is the big talk of the town in terms of cellular networks. What are some use cases that are enabled by 5G that aren't necessarily possible on today's LTE networks?

(Ed at 00:27:01) You know, 5G, when we think of 5G, so you have 4G LTE. Now today, with 4G, if you ever notice that you go to the 3G environment, you're doing as fast as, you're turning it off and on to try and get back to the 4G environment as quick as possible, right? You notice the difference. The beauty of 5G as it evolves is that it's multiple layers. And so there's a low band layer, and that's kind of the coverage layer that you can get a signal.

(Ed at 00:27:35) It's not necessarily the highest in band, but it's higher bandwidth than what we have today with 4G, and it goes a long way. And then you have mid-band, and mid-band really is what we talked about with private LTE and CBRS, and that's in that 3.5 to 3.7 gigahertz. That's mid-band stuff that's happening today. And then you get 5G, the high-band stuff, which is very high throughput and involves really small towers and antennas and so forth. That's what you hear when you see the small cell towers being everywhere, and definitely it's being turned on in urban environments today.

(Ed at 00:28:10) Eventually, we'll get to where that's available and more and more from a coverage standpoint. But today, it's a mix of low, mid, and high. That's all 5G today. And then you have 4G LTE, which entirely complements 5G. And when you fail over to 4G and at the speeds it's at even today, you're not gonna notice the difference.

(Ed at 00:28:30) So from a cellular standpoint, you're gonna see a mix of all these different technologies depending on where you are overlapping. It's not an either-or, it's a combination of all those different bands and layers and spectrum that you'll be able to take advantage of. Now what 5G really does is drive down latency and drive up performance. So latency is the time when you click on something, it goes to the internet, comes back the response time, right? And if you start to get into things like autonomous vehicles, it's gotta have extremely low latency.

(Ed at 00:29:04) It's gotta have high performance. It won't work unless you have those things, and that's what 5G enables, right? It allows low latency but very high performance that allows you to do things like autonomous vehicles or augmented reality. Are you familiar at all with the Microsoft HoloLens and so forth?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:23) Yeah. Yeah.

(Ed at 00:29:24) Okay. So when you have technologies like that, augmented reality or even in a factory setting where you have robotics and automated vehicles and so forth, they're all requiring much, much higher performance, but lower, lower, lower latency. That's what 5G is gonna give to you. And what you've seen is really LTE has exploded in where you can get good cellular coverage is not everywhere, but pretty much everywhere, you can get a pretty good cell signal from one of the carriers. Right?

(Ed at 00:29:57) So it's exploded in performance and availability, but the price has come way down. And so now, it's very advantageous over traditional connectivity, and we're even seeing this in retail where we have retail customers that are cutting the cord and not doing cable modem, DSL, T1s, and so forth. They're going all cellular. And what it's doing for them is dramatically reducing their operational footprint and simplifying the environment, but driving costs to the tune of millions of dollars for some of our customers out of their wide area network. And that allows them to be more agile, more innovative, to fire up a location that day rather than waiting weeks and months for a service provider to provide connectivity.

(Ed at 00:30:42) But we see 5G as an enabler to allow not just innovation, but part of that is allowing businesses to go faster, right, to execute, to develop new applications and services. And I think that's really the promise in what we're seeing from a 5G standpoint. But again, 5G is a mix of spectrums and layers, and you're not always gonna know which one you're using, but the blend of those is really what 5G is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:11) Gotcha. Yeah. I mean, it especially makes sense when you're talking about the latency and autonomous vehicles. I remember I was reading recently about an initiative to do driverless ride-sharing where it's not an autonomous vehicle. It's a vehicle that's being controlled remotely by a person who drives it when no one's in it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:34) And then so you order your car, and it pulls up empty, and then you get in the driver's seat and drive to wherever you wanna go yourself.

(Ed at 00:31:42) That's it. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:43) That's really interesting.

(Ed at 00:31:44) And if you're riding in there, you don't want that connection to be lost. Right? Yeah. So you want as clean a spectrum, as clean a channel, as clean a connection as you can get. And that's really what 5G provides. Now we're seeing a mix of it, even in some of our energy customers, utilities, deploying it for next-gen, securing critical infrastructure from a security and sensor standpoint, but also enabling things like drones to transmit high-definition video and whatnot.

(Ed at 00:32:14) So we're seeing drones take off in capability, but they gotta have connectivity to transmit that video back and so forth. So we're seeing the utilities take a look at, hey, can I build out a private cellular network? One, to extend smart metering and SCADA and kind of their distribution of energy and whatnot, their actual business that they're in and so forth and some of the newer things they wanna adopt, then allowing things like drones to survey transmission lines and things that happen after a storm comes through and so forth and recognize if there's any issues that need to be resolved ahead of time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:52) So, to change gears a little bit, I always like to make sure when I'm talking to a CEO, I get to touch on some questions about culture because I know that's a big part of something you gotta think about for your company a lot. And actually, we just, a little while ago, did an interview with a company called LaunchDarkly. Have you come across them before?

(Ed at 00:33:14) I have not, but I will definitely check them out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:16) Yeah. So they're like a developer tool. They make it a lot easier to do continuous deployment in developing with feature flagging tools. And it's really interesting stuff, but we had their CTO, John Kodamal, on, and he was really passionate about building the culture there. And a big thing that he was talking about was making it open and transparent and making sure everyone's comfortable sharing and communicating openly with each other without any fear involved with the communication.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:53) And that just really struck a chord with me, and I've been thinking about it recently, how you really can't have any fear involved with the communication with your coworkers because that obviously is gonna slow down the company hugely. So I was curious, how do you encourage that kind of open culture at your company?

(Ed at 00:34:15) Yeah. No. I think that's great. Yeah. Culture is everything, you know, for us.

(Ed at 00:34:20) And the company was built on great culture, great foundation. It's hard to keep that sometimes when you grow as rapidly as we have. But fundamentally, at the end of the day, we don't want this just to be a job for folks. And we attract a lot of talent. And at the heart of what we do, our DNA is really engineering execution.

(Ed at 00:34:41) And we talk about, you know, you've seen the movie X-Men, you understand mutants. We use that term in affection and love, but we've got a mutant engineering team, but really we've got mutants across the board. And it's, you know, we try to go figure out who's the best of the best that we want to attract to the team. And quite honestly, a lot of folks are understanding who Step is or, you know, our brand is getting out there and so forth, and folks know what we're capable of. And really, that's what we're all about is attracting top talent and then unleashing that talent.

(Ed at 00:35:15) And what I mean by that is a lot of times folks are in an environment and they're extremely talented individuals and they might be an engineer or what have you, and they're kind of told, hey, be in this box. But don't get out of that box. Here's your lane. Stay in that lane, and so forth. Here, we want folks to explore what's possible. We not only innovate for our customers, but we want everybody in the company to constantly get outside your comfort zone, learn something new.

(Ed at 00:35:44) And a lot of the engineers come in here and they're like, well, you know, that's really cool. I get to pursue and look at private cellular or LTE. And, you know, I always wanted to explore that, but I was told I couldn't and whatnot. Here, we want them to explore that. Push the envelope.

(Ed at 00:35:58) And then you gotta, I think what you gotta do is create a framework where people need to know that it's okay to screw up. We all screw up. I mean, we're all constantly evolving and learning, and we make investments because we constantly push. I mean, our tagline is where innovation meets execution. We can't innovate if you don't try new things. And I'm talking about individuals as well as what we do for our customers, and what we try to do is kind of learn from, you know, our mistakes.

(Ed at 00:36:27) So, you know, we're gonna make mistakes. We fully embrace that. But you gotta have to create a support framework that people are comfortable that, you know, if they make a mistake that, you know, there's not severe repercussions or whatever. We want people to explore what's possible. And at the end of the day, you know, we want folks that can collaborate, be part of a team.

(Ed at 00:36:48) There's a couple books that we kind of, we give to everyone when they come in. And one of them is The Energy Bus. And if you read The Energy Bus, it really is about having positive energy and being willing to be part of a team and collaborate and be open and transparent. We're pretty flat. Anybody can call me. I answer the phone, you know, probably shouldn't do this, but seven by twenty if someone calls me, I try to get back to them as quick as possible.

(Ed at 00:37:15) It's just the way I'm wired. But anyone can call. It's not like real hierarchical. We want the feedback because we know we don't have all the answers. We're constantly evolving. And if you go check our website out, and I'll send you, it's kind of funny because we built this 8,000 square foot innovation center overlooking downtown Cincinnati. And we joke that, you know, the best view of Cincinnati is cross river in Covington, Kentucky, and that's our heritage.

(Ed at 00:37:40) And if you think of Kentucky, you know, what's Kentucky known for? Horse racing, right? Very good basketball teams, you know, and got better football teams here too. And then, you know, they've got a very strong history and heritage in bourbon. And we actually, about a month ago, we lit up the Bourbon Festival in Bardstown.

(Ed at 00:38:00) They gave us about two weeks notice, and they're like, hey, can you help us? Because, you know, we want to have a dynamite festival. And it's been going on for many years, but they're like, we need help with connectivity. So we pulled in our cellular on wheels, which is our COW, cellular on wheels, and we actually have it wrapped like a Wisconsin cow now. I mean, it's nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:22) It has—

(Ed at 00:38:22) —a no tipping sign on it. And we threw that 60 foot mast up. And with Cradlepoint and with T-Mobile and some other partners, we not only provided private cellular to light up 30 distillers' booths, public Wi-Fi, all the POS systems, the media tent over three days. We showed everything: traditional LTE, private LTE, 5G, all these use cases. It was pretty darn cool, and we did it without a hitch.

(Ed at 00:38:52) Well, in our innovation center, we actually have a full blown Kentucky bourbon bar. And that's, we like to say we innovate better when, you know, you have some bourbon, but we responsibly have the bourbon bar there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:06) Bar there.

(Ed at 00:39:07) But it's an experience. So we've got folks right now coming in from all over the country, from Texas, South Carolina, Michigan, you name it. And the manufacturers realized, you know what? We don't have a Midwest briefing center. And we really don't have a briefing center that can show all the traditional technologies plus all the cellular stuff that Step's doing.

(Ed at 00:39:28) And it truly is an innovation area and cool center. They're sending their customers from all over there. But to get back to the original point is, we try to drive, you know, a positive collaborative culture where folks want to learn. It's continuous learning. There's another book, Adam Grant, Think Again. And what that's all about is I liken it to when I was at Cradlepoint.

(Ed at 00:39:53) George Mulhern always talked about humble and hungry. Brian Adamson, great culture. Right? Hire really smart folks. And but it's about being humble.

(Ed at 00:40:03) It's about understanding that you may bring in all this experience from, you know, wherever you came from and so forth, and you might have been everything, all that in that environment, but it may or may not necessarily directly apply, but it probably applies, you know, what you learned in that environment to this environment. But be humble that you don't know it all, right? Be hungry that you will, you're always continuously learning and not just, you know, at Step, we encourage not just learning for what you need to do your job, but go learn something new. Go learn to play the guitar, learn to play golf, learn to cook, learn to play cornhole, you know, whatever it is. Do something that you kind of get into that where you're pushing yourself and constantly innovating from a on a personal level.

(Ed at 00:40:46) So we took the Cradlepoint humble and hungry, but then we added thirsty. Now thirsty means thirsty for continuous learning, and it made me thirsty for bourbon as well. So we try to attract, you know, the best talent. You know, we call them mutants affectionately. I think they like that. I'm not sure. But, you know, try to get the talent in, and we pretty much feel that whatever you're trying to accomplish from a customer standpoint, we can provide a solution for, but we don't assume anything. It's kind of like, what are you trying to do? And then we help you innovate. But we expect that of our employees, and I think that's what, it's gonna be key to our growth is continually investing in the employees and their development and helping them learn new things. That's what's gonna keep the growth engine for Step going.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:35) Man, that's awesome. You hiring? I'm sold.

(Ed at 00:41:37) Oh, jeez. Well, yeah, sure. Go to our website. You can check out careers. But you'll see some fun stuff that we're doing.

(Ed at 00:41:45) And then our friends at Cradlepoint are gonna be putting out some more videos, I think, around the Bourbonfest and what we pulled off there and so forth. And what's cool about it is that the Bourbonfest was on a very short time frame. We pulled off an amazing connectivity experience that showcased everything from a cellular standpoint. We also did video security for it. We ran some of the carrier, provide, you know, service provider analytics that I was talking about.

(Ed at 00:42:10) That was really kind of a showcase over three days that turned into much, much more than we anticipated. And it's driven a lot of folks interested in what we were doing there, coming up and understanding and seeing the COW and whatnot. And that's driving briefings on the back end for us into the innovation center. And you're welcome at any given time. Innovation center, you know, it's just a fun environment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:35) I gotta check it out when I'm in Cincinnati. Gotta see the cow.

(Ed at 00:42:38) Absolutely. See the cow. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:41) That's awesome, man. Well, before we wrap up, can I ask you a couple, like, general leadership questions?

(Ed at 00:42:48) Yeah. Go ahead.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:50) So what's something that you're learning right now as a leader? What's something that's challenging you?

(Ed at 00:42:56) Oh, wow. Well, you know, so I tell the team, and this is great because being in this role, you kind of learn all the things that were going on that you maybe weren't aware of or didn't have a front row seat to. Right? So you're constantly evolving, and I learn every day. I learn from our employees, learn from our customers.

(Ed at 00:43:13) And, really, it's how do you, when you're growing as fast as we are, adding 90 people, gonna break through $100 million next year. It's really stepping back and making sure that you got the right infrastructure, you know, folks in the right positions, you got the right processes. We actually relaunched all our internal systems, and we really think at the end of 2022, we're gonna hit the ground running and even, you know, it's kind of scary, maybe even go faster. But really, I think you just have to pause and you have to reflect. And sometimes you just need to take a step back to go forward. And, you know, what I've learned is I certainly don't have all the answers. Constantly, you know, learning all the time new things that I wasn't aware of: financial systems, reporting, all these things that, you know, I've been at places where they were in place.

(Ed at 00:44:09) But when you're building a company from scratch, some of those things you just, you gotta dive in and just make it happen. And when you launch something, and this is what we're, you know, as we give it a new, like, statement of work process, phenomenal work by the team. They actually documented, cross-collaborated across, you know, all the different groups. Hey, here's how it should work. Let's launch this.

(Ed at 00:44:32) And the process launches, and it's a little bit painful at first, but that's okay. You adjust as you go. And now it's settled in, and we're going even faster on that front. But our customers are getting a better experience. You know, proper expectations are being set.

(Ed at 00:44:48) And folks are learning to embrace that change we talked about, the new systems and process. And it's not gonna be perfect when you first launch something. But if you learn to adjust and evolve and streamline, in the end, it's now, wow, how did we do without that? So I'm constantly amazed at, you know, what our customers are pulling off, you know, what our employees are thinking of and coming up with. But then just the fundamentals of building the right infrastructure allow us to scale moving forward.

(Ed at 00:45:20) That's something that I've definitely learned a lot about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:24) That's really cool, man. So I get the feeling that you guys probably do some fun stuff to celebrate the victories at your company. That's just, I have an inkling of that. So what are some of the things you do to celebrate the wins with your team?

(Ed at 00:45:38) You know, we have a quarterly call, but even between that, I think we're constantly sending out little thank yous and so forth. And certainly during the pandemic, we want to make sure we supported the team. Everyone felt safe. They were keeping up to date as to what's going on. But I think just recognition is important, and you can never have enough of that.

(Ed at 00:46:01) And we can even do a better job on it because we're winning, like, big, large deals. They're coming in left and right. And we're really not, you know, what's cool about it is we revamped the brand. We got a new website. We're capturing the customer wins and so forth.

(Ed at 00:46:16) And then, you know, it's not necessarily yet a lot of outbound marketing. It's just because we're able to execute. The vendors are bringing these deals in, and we're solving a lot of complex situations that they don't have anyone else who can solve them. And I think what we're doing is trying to recognize the efforts along the way, and it's not, it's that's what you have. You have a field team that'll win a deal, but it wasn't just the field team.

(Ed at 00:46:42) It was the 20 people behind them that won the deal as well. So working together and recognizing everyone all the way through the system and the back end and getting the orders placed or tracking it with the vendor or getting the invoice. I mean, that's what makes a winning team is, you know, so you gotta make sure that folks that a lot of times may get glory because they won the big deal and so forth. We didn't win it alone. There was a whole team behind you. And if that team wasn't there, that deal wouldn't have been won and so forth.

(Ed at 00:47:15) So we do all sorts of different crazy wild events. You go to our website, look at the event page, you'll see a long litany of traveling roadshows, festivals. And those are opportunities for us to not just showcase the technology, but allow our employees and customers to have fun and drive new conversations and relationships. So that, at the end of the day, is that, like I said, this shouldn't just be a job. This shouldn't just, you know, if it's just a job for our employees, then we're not doing, you know, the right things.

(Ed at 00:47:46) This should be fun. Life's too short. But let's go, you know, make stuff happen, innovate, get outside your comfort zone. And then, you know, if you drink a little bourbon along the way, there's no harm in that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:58) No harm in that for sure. Well, before we wrap up, is there anything we didn't get to touch on that you want to make sure we get out there today?

(Ed at 00:48:06) No. Just check out Defeat the Digital Divide. It's a really cool site. It's a joint effort we're doing with Cradlepoint and Ericsson to educate communities and school districts on solving, you know, a major pain point that was exasperated by the pandemic. And just making sure that, you know, we're helping communities, you know, get their poor and underserved members online and able to do things like virtual learning.

(Ed at 00:48:36) But then, you know, the community can take advantage of that technology as well. And we really think that's, you know, an innovative approach and initiative that we're helping to launch, you know, with our friends at Cradlepoint, and a lot of folks are gonna benefit from that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:52) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.