The Evolution of Telecom & Network Traffic with Luis Fiallo, Vice President of China Telecom Americas

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Lewis from China Telecom Americas about 5G and edge computing in the telecom industry and leveraging culture in the workplace. You're listening to the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:17) You know, it's a culture thing. What's the culture like where you're at?

(Lewis at 00:00:21) You know, for us, we're an American division of the Chinese company, one of the largest Chinese companies in the world, right? And our parent company is a state-owned enterprise inside of China. So for us, we were the first international subsidiary. So in many ways, we built the initial foundation and the culture of this company to sort of fit into the US, right? And over the years, we've expanded to South America and Canada, and we've started to become a little bit more of an international company with little flavor. At the same time, our parent company started expanding as well. But for us, the culture, I would say, you don't come work here if you were expecting to have water cooler conversations about the Washington Commanders every week, right?

(Lewis at 00:01:09) You come here to talk about technology, talk about where things are headed. We have a lot of smart people that are really engaged in the next generation of technology, and they're here, you know, to do their job, but more importantly, help us think about where everything is going and how our company, as part of a very large conglomerate, fits into the world of technology and telecommunications. So it's pretty cool. It's a mix.

(Lewis at 00:01:39) Majority of our employees are actually US citizens. You know, so we've maintained a very good balance. And telecommunications is a...

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:49) is a massive industry. What do you specifically do? Or if you do many things, what's your largest line of business?

(Lewis at 00:01:55) Oh, that's a great question. For us, China Telecom Americas, we are an international broadband provider. And I break that down into two areas. One is that we help companies get access to China. But inside of China, obviously, we're like the very large mammoth, one of the three main incumbents.

(Lewis at 00:02:17) And we have a network, a fixed line network, you know, a terrestrial network that's the largest inside of China. We have one of the largest mobile businesses as well. We have a lot of consumer services. We have business services. So when American companies are moving into China, you know, we are the default solution. The advantage of working with us is that you get to work with us here in your time zone under US contracts with, you know, Americans or English-speaking individuals who will be able to help you. We have some of that over there in China, but here, it's a dedicated team. And we were set up for the purposes of being the window into China on behalf of China Telecom. And last year, we actually celebrated our 20th year anniversary. So it's a big milestone, right?

(Lewis at 00:03:08) We've come a long way since the beginning. And for me, I was employee number 12. And to see the company grow to what it's become, and, you know, we've added a lot of value into companies going to Asia and China and also companies coming from Asia and China to the US. So we bridge both sides.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:31) How many employees are you at now? Like, roughly?

(Lewis at 00:03:33) We're over 250 employees. We're at an inflection point of our company. And by that, I mean is that we've made some strategic decisions as to pull back in certain businesses. And at the same time, we're transforming ourselves to be better suited to serve the needs of the next generation of communications that's required. And that's in the areas of cloud computing, in the areas of software-defined networking, in the areas of, you know, security in the cloud.

(Lewis at 00:04:04) If you assume that everything will slowly migrate to that world, and then you even have the bigger challenge that everything beyond the cloud, you're actually going to migrate to the edge. We're in the process of building that out here in the Americas region. Our parent company actually, we're fortunate that they're probably one of the leaders in the world in Mainland China, developing these technologies and deploying them. We started getting into the business of IoT, for example, using sensors and stuff, you know, prior to the Beijing Olympics of 2008. And we built a platform that today allows third-party application providers to integrate their technology into that platform, which is called Wing 5.0.

(Lewis at 00:04:48) And that technology allows you to put sensors into the cloud, okay? Then we have the wireless piece, when we started deploying our 5G solutions in 2020. And then we really made it robust, and we started focusing on key verticals inside of China. And now we're just starting to look at that. How do we take some of those capabilities? We're not going to go and buy a wireless network outside of China, although we built one in Philippines, and that was a separate deal and probably a one-off. But in the Americas region, we're going to work with, you know, the wireless providers to utilize their infrastructure to be able to offer what we call private 5G solutions to the enterprise. And we're very much aligned and cooperating with a lot of other American companies. Because like I mentioned, you know, we started doing these things a long time ago. And as a result of that, we have a lot of history.

(Lewis at 00:05:45) And one of the biggest industries, obviously, for obvious reasons, that we're very successful at is in the area of manufacturing. You know, we've actually done quite a bit utilizing, you know, 5G radio stations to build these private facilities for, you know, manufacturing companies to take advantage of the speed and the resiliency of 5G technology. So it's been a pretty cool experience. And it also dovetails to what we've always done in China, which is really try to build smart cities. And now the world is actually, you know, we have an energy crisis. We have a supply chain crisis. We have a lot of different crises. But when there's a crisis, there's always an opportunity, right? So for us, we're trying to bring in new technologies that would allow the deployment and development of smart cities.

(Lewis at 00:06:35) We're in discussions with many of the Latin American countries and, you know, not only the governments, but local municipalities that want some of these technologies to be brought to them and lessons learned. So, you know, for us, it's a business opportunity, but it's also a way to help the rest of the world and accelerate getting into this space because it is an investment and it is a change in mindset and it's a different use of technologies that we haven't done before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:02) Can you explain to me this private 5G concept?

(Lewis at 00:07:07) Absolutely. So 5G, there's two types of implementations. There's the companies that build, you know, their core 5G infrastructure inside their network, okay? And then there's companies that take the 5G technology and put it in for private use using a bandwidth of airwaves that allows them to be able to use on a common shared basis.

(Lewis at 00:07:33) You know, companies like OTT companies are actually taking advantage of that to be able to offer cloud services and work with other companies to provide things at the edge, okay. So what 5G is doing is really helping you accelerate the way information flows. And it's closer to you. When I say closer to you, it's actually because of its limitation as far as the distance it can carry. They have more of it distributed out across the network, but it's moving at much faster speed. So if you think about like a manufacturing industry company, they can actually see at a very much higher resolution and almost instantaneously what other people would see right in front of it, okay? And they can then tie that into their investments that they've made in machine learning or artificial intelligence for those systems to be able to take advantage of that information that they're pulling. And that's a lot of information that's being pulled, okay? And then be able to do something with it. That's where we're seeing, you know, it's a change, right? Because before, if you think about telecom companies, we go dig up a trench in the ground, or we build up a cell tower and we put it there in place, and then we multiply that location, and we get to your house, and we get to your office.

(Lewis at 00:08:49) But that's changed, you know, the world of, you know, through the technologies like 5G, actually allows us to do more things. And we don't even have to be the incumbent anymore, right? You can just buy and cooperate with other carriers to do some of these things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:04) That's pretty cool. Can you give me like a specific customer example use case of somebody using the private 5G?

(Lewis at 00:09:11) Yeah. So one of the customers that I've recently been in communications with is a company out of China that manufactures cement. The way they do it, they have a place, a quarry where they go pull information and they blast, okay? So they have these autonomous vehicles that move over there and do everything and prepare everything, and they're watching it, okay? They're watching it, you know, from afar, okay? And then they actually conduct the activities that are necessary to be able to break up whatever they need.

(Lewis at 00:09:44) And then they ship it over, all autonomous robotics, okay, back into the factory. They put it in, okay? So now you have people not only at their home office that can actually, I mean, at their corporate office that could be watching this, but also people that don't have to be in the middle. So it also presents a safety measure for them, so they don't have to be involved.

(Lewis at 00:10:05) We also have opportunities where we're starting to see in the area of telemedicine. For the first time, we're starting to see where doctors are using technology. I think in the US, we where everybody gets to do, you know, virtual doctor visits and stuff like that, utilizing some, you know, technology, web conferencing technology, right? But over there, now they're actually being able to consult other doctors while things are going on to be able to see what's actually happening.

(Lewis at 00:10:35) We haven't, I haven't heard of anybody developing robots to actually do the surgery yet, but maybe that will one day come. But these are, using the technology, you know, to utilize, to be able to conduct, and to sort of, you know, collaborate a little bit more is phenomenal. It's going to help people a lot more. There's going to be less issues, I hope, in the future that can be eliminated because you have more people participating.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:01) Is that one of the drivers for you personally, the fact that you're building new technologies to do cool things?

(Lewis at 00:11:08) Yeah. Actually, you know, I think for my industry, I'm really excited. I'm sort of geeked up about it. You know, I've been in the telecom industry for over 20 years. And, you know, when I first started getting into providing data services, you know, just the connection to your house was like a big thing, okay? Well, now, you know, everybody, you know, do at least a gig of traffic going to your house. And your office is, you know, maybe, you know, a larger amount of capacity goes to your office and so forth. But now that's not what telecom companies can, you know, are going to benefit from now. Now what we're doing is we're going up the stack, as they call it, and providing more solutions that are, for example, for us, you know, we provide something called the ECP, Elastic Computing Platform, where you get into the cloud, you can actually access other cloud-native providers like the Amazons, like Microsoft and Google.

(Lewis at 00:12:09) And we allow you to shift between the different platforms, including using our cloud platform, okay? And we give you this on top of our SD-WAN platform. So what we're seeing is the, you know, the migration from focusing on building a line to your house or to your office to building capabilities that are in the cloud, so to speak. You still have the wires and everything else that's necessary, but it's really now focused on developing things that are in the cloud, and that's what we're doing, okay?

(Lewis at 00:12:43) We, you know, going back to the manufacturing examples, today, we have over 200 different APIs that people have built, okay, for manufacturing industry, right? So they can, you know, these apps are going in there and being utilized and stuff like that. And, you know, for us, it's a, for telecom companies in general, it's a deviation of the way we thought before. We always looked at the network as something that we did not want to have anybody on. We did not want anybody touching it and stuff. But, you know, with the advent of the Internet, it's always been a shared facility. And now what you're seeing is the continuation and really empowering the end customer to be able to do more as what they need. And, you know, I think we're still at the very beginning stages of leveraging all the technology that's coming together.

(Lewis at 00:13:37) If you think about the amount of traffic that's pushing through globally, I was told there's over 400 exabytes of traffic, okay? And that's a large amount of data that's traveling and growing, okay? There's over 42 billion devices that will be connected to the Internet by the year 2025, okay? That's just a phenomenal amount of information that's going to be captured. And then at the same time, that's traversing through a network. And then you have things that you want to put in the cloud. You may even have things that you want to put into your own data centers.

(Lewis at 00:14:13) And then you also want to do things at the edge where your computing is actually done at the edge. So these are things that are happening relatively quickly. And there's a lot of different new business models that are sort of disrupting the traditional business models. So for me, I like that. I welcome the competition, and I look at it as coopetition. You know, we're going to partner with some of these companies. We're going to continue to work with our own resources and to develop some of that. But it's a change in the way we do telecom, right? It's no longer just, like I said at the beginning, you know, it's no longer just building a pipe to go to one place.

(Lewis at 00:14:51) Before it was all point-to-point and that's how it's supposed to be done. But now it's everything sort of embedded into the cloud.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:58) I'm curious to talk a little bit more about you. How did you get into technology?

(Lewis at 00:15:04) You know, for me, I graduated from undergrad from George Washington University, and I was thinking Wall Street. I was an international finance major. My teacher was a retired executive from Salomon Brothers at the time. And I was thinking, you know, he was like my idol, right? And I was like, he was my mentor early on, and I was like, I definitely want to do that. But what happened is I just, I started applying locally in the DC community, and I got involved into a technology company, and then the company was being acquired. So I sat there and I go, okay. Well, I could stick it out and see what goes on. But I'm like, 24, 25 years old.

(Lewis at 00:15:49) They offered me, if I take a package, a year of severance. I'm like, you know, 24, 25. I got a whole year, you know, upfront. I was like, I'm taking it. And I ended up sending out a couple of resumes. And one of them was a company called Cable and Wireless. These were technology companies that I applied to, and I took the job. And I was like, you know, I had no expectations as to what, you know, or really any deep knowledge of telecom. But I realized that they needed technology inside of telecom. So I started getting involved in different projects and different activities inside there.

(Lewis at 00:16:24) And I started, you know, I led Cable and Wireless getting back into the voice business. Because previously when I joined, this tells you a long time ago, you know, it was only the big incumbents were allowed to provide voice. So we had a deal that we cut in New York with a local provider that allowed us to resell, and we started chipping away. And then shortly thereafter, the Internet was being born, and Sprint reached out to me and said, hey. We built something. And Sprint was a pioneer at the beginning of the Internet. They owned the majority of the Internet traffic in the world. They said, we need somebody to help us build these off-ramps into websites. So I was hired on to build that business, and I did that for about three years. And then I joined an Internet startup that we went public.

(Luis at 00:17:14) And that's how I got involved with China. Because when the company went public, we still wanted to raise money as any startup. Especially back then, you always were raising money every day, right? So we ended up, one of our board members who was pretty wealthy individual, he said, listen, I have a lot of operations going on in China. This is in 1998 and '99 timeframe.

(Luis at 00:17:37) And he said, China's gonna emerge and join the WTO. It's gonna be a force to be reckoned with. You guys go over there and start it. And we took his money. And then the next day, I was actually packing up to fly to China to start getting to know people, hiring people, and building up our operations there.

(Luis at 00:17:58) And we did projects. We did a lot of projects in helping with website design. We did a partnership with Intel China and Fudan University, which is a very prestigious university. We used Fudan's telephone closet essentially to create somewhat of a data center, mini data center, where we could put servers in and stuff like that. So I left and I went to go work for a very large telecom company that was owned by Bell Canada, a company called Teleglobe.

(Luis at 00:18:28) And I was the executive running our e-business practice, which is really web hosting, CDN, and VPN services. And as a result of that, you know, I continued to do some business in China. But when China Telecom opened up, they reached out and recommended a friend of mine. By this time, I was actually working for, I was the COO of a distance learning company. And then I ended up, we sold the company.

(Luis at 00:18:55) And then I had some free time, so I decided, well, I'm gonna do this China Telecom thing again. It's interesting. And this is in 2003 when I made that decision. So, you know, China wasn't really well known at the time. And, you know, when I first joined, it was like, we gotta grow this.

(Luis at 00:19:11) We gotta grow this fast because I don't want anybody else to take advantage of this market. And we were also going through a lot of changes. Our parent company was coming out of being a monopoly. So the majority of our employees were engineers. There was less and less thinking about how to do business.

(Luis at 00:19:30) So for us, we had three objectives when we started with what was called at the time China Telecom USA. One, to generate revenues outside of China. So the US market is a very large market, so we can start generating revenues here. Two, to teach people how to compete. There's not a more competitive market for telecom services in the world than the United States.

(Luis at 00:19:55) And three, is to help prepare the business for the future. Because it wasn't, you know, telecom was never gonna be, through technology like the Internet, was never gonna reside in one country. It wasn't gonna have to be deployed across the world. Right? And in order to do that, you need to be a global player.

(Luis at 00:20:13) So we accomplished that. We grew pretty quickly. And it was a startup inside of a very large organization where we had a lot of autonomy, and we continue to have a complete, mostly autonomy to build what we call today China Telecom Americas. So it's been a fantastic experience. I tell everybody, you know, one of the things I like to tell people when I hire them, I said, you're gonna come work in a company where there's controlled chaos.

(Luis at 00:20:41) And people look at me a little bit confused. And they go, what do you mean? And I said, it's gonna be crazy. Okay. Now literally, maybe not crazy every day, but you're gonna feel that things are gonna be falling apart because you know why?

(Luis at 00:20:54) Because we have to rebuild it and we have to be better than the next day. Okay? So if we all communicate, we all have the same focus on the end result, then we can build controlled chaos into our operations. You know, sometimes it's a little bit more chaotic than others, but any company that aspires to grow or expand, you know, you have to go through rebuilding yourself. Okay?

(Luis at 00:21:17) It's not always noticeable, but it's something that people have to be able to sort of buy into to say, okay, we have challenges in front of us. How do we get out of these challenges? And, you know, how do we sort of, you know, improve ourselves on a daily basis? And some progress is made, you know, one day. Some progress is made a year later.

(Luis at 00:21:40) But you still have to sort of get there and show that progress.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:44) Did you achieve fluency in any of the Chinese dialects?

(Luis at 00:21:48) I did take Chinese classes, Mandarin speaking classes. I would walk out of the class exhausted. And exhausted is because the pronunciation and the tones that are used in Mandarin speaking is very difficult. Sometimes in pre-COVID, I was finally starting to pick up. Okay.

(Luis at 00:22:11) My pronunciation of the words, of the language, was not acceptable, but I could understand what people were saying. Right? It's like a child, you know, you spend enough time around people speaking, you know, you're gonna pick it up. But I think I'm very rusty. One thing that has happened because I do lead also our Latin American expansion.

(Luis at 00:22:32) I'm actually from Ecuador, South America. And my Spanish has gotten better because I deal so much with, you know, colleagues and partners in Latin America that it's forced me to speak Spanish. You know, most of my career was either in the US or doing business in Europe and some of it in Asia. But, and then it was working for China Telecom where I really accelerated my experiences in developing relationships in Latin America and actually speaking the language. So, but my Mandarin, I'm not very good at it, unfortunately.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:05) Well, there's no quiz today. There's no quiz. How has traveling and working, well, specifically working and building your career in telecom internationally in these different countries, how has that shaped your, the, like, have you built a family, or did you just go the career route? And how did it shape the family if you did build one?

(Luis at 00:23:24) That's a great question. I used to travel about almost 200,000 miles a year. Okay? That's a lot of miles. Right?

(Luis at 00:23:32) The airlines that I get on, sometimes I would see the same people because I'm flying overnight or I'm taking a long distance flight and stuff, and the airline stewardess would come up to me and say hi. I would, I started making friends with them and stuff like that. I built a lot of relationships outside of the United States. With COVID, it taught me something. It taught me that I had neglected my US friends.

(Luis at 00:23:57) I have a core group of friends that were buddies, and we get once a year fishing and stuff like that. But I just really didn't realize how disconnected I was from my, where I lived. I do have a family. I have a daughter and a son, and we are very close. I have a fiancé that we've been engaged for probably as long as I've been working at China Telecom now.

(Luis at 00:24:21) But I love my family. We're very close. COVID has actually taught me to appreciate that part of my life more. Because before, I would just say, hey, why don't you just meet me in Argentina tomorrow, this weekend?

(Luis at 00:24:36) And we'll just spend the weekend in Argentina, okay? But now because where I live, I didn't realize I was so close to so many different little rivers, so many creeks. So we go fishing, we go tubing, a lot of fishing though. And, you know, so my life has changed, you know. It's brought me back into a balance.

(Luis at 00:24:54) I still miss the international piece. I'm doing some of that coming up in the next couple months and beginning of next year. But I don't think I'll necessarily have to go back to doing it to the volume that I did it before. So, yeah, it's been refreshing.

(Luis at 00:25:09) And I, you know, I think everything has a purpose in life. Yes. Unfortunately, you know, our world has been through a very dramatic experience. But for me, it had a positive impact on me in that it taught me, hey, there's more to it than just being on a plane and heading out someplace.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:25) Yeah. For me, it was there's more to it than, you know, having a business. The pandemic, honestly, was one of the greatest things that had ever happened to our family simply because, you know, when you get forced together like that just to have that time, you either, you either bond and take the relationship to another level or you split, but it's, you don't really hang out in the middle when you have that massive sudden change like that.

(Luis at 00:25:49) Well, I remember, you know, we went into lockdown in February of 2020. Like, in April, Martina was asking me, when are you gonna go on a business trip? I was like, where you, the world is shut down. I can't go anywhere. So there's gotta be a place you gotta go to. Don't you have people that you're worried about? I was like, of course I worry about it, but we got this thing called Zoom. We're good. But it made me realize it was like, you know, I was infringing in her life.

(Luis at 00:26:16) Okay. I was disrupting her life because she was the CEO of this household, and she still is. But more importantly, she was the lady who was actually used to a certain routine, right? And that included with my kids. So I had to become a little bit more observant, you know, and it's different.

(Luis at 00:26:36) You know, you can have people that report to you, and you have to deal, you know, in a certain extent, they have to sort of listen. But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:44) Not your wife.

(Luis at 00:26:46) They don't really have to listen to anything. And no. As a matter of fact, you're sitting there trying to convince the lady to do something you wanna do. So it's a completely different way of doing things. But it's been a, you know, like I said, I agree with you.

(Luis at 00:26:58) It's been a refreshing start for my life. I think it's made me understand things better. And actually, I think it had tremendous positive impact on my ability to be a business leader. It's taught me to be more compassionate. It's taught me to be more understanding.

(Luis at 00:27:16) I've learned a lot from my colleagues. You know, I, you know, because I sit there and I go, why did you do that? You know? Before, I didn't probably have time. You know?

(Luis at 00:27:25) I had to go from one conference room to the next conference room and to the next. Now I just listen more and I observe more and I have to think more. You know, I do miss the interactions, so we're slowly opening up our offices. And like I mentioned, I'm gonna start traveling a little bit again. But I don't expect to be in a situation where I'm racing down Dulles Airport to catch a flight anymore. You know, it's all about life balance.

(Luis at 00:27:51) Right? You know, I'm a big proponent of balance your life, you know, your work, your family life, and your health. And you keep all three of them at the same level. I think I before, pre-COVID, I think I was more focused on the work.

(Luis at 00:28:03) So, what is happening is my family probably and my health was probably behind a little bit. So now it's, I've learned how to bring it back into a balance. And I'm, and as a result of that, I'm actually better at work than I was before in my opinion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:20) That was a maturing point for me too, to realize that sometimes you have to slow down to speed up, and it's hard because you don't want to. You wanna just grind through it and push and push and push.

(Luis at 00:28:30) Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:32) But that doesn't always work. And then I realized that when I'm doing that, it's because I don't understand how to make it work efficiently. So now if I find myself, like, over, like, you know, working too much or things like that, I'm like, where's the flaw in my system? Like, what's not set up right? Do I need to hire somebody?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:50) Do I need to delegate? Like, where is that pressure coming from? And then resolving it. I don't think it's about keeping it so in line that it never gets out of line. I think it's for me, it's about reducing the time from the moment I recognize it's getting out of line to the moment that that's resolved. And I just try to get that really small.

(Luis at 00:29:11) Yeah. No. I think that's right on. And I call that being on the helicopter. Right?

(Luis at 00:29:16) Looking down at your life and seeing, what are you doing? Okay? There's a lot of times I sit there and go, oh my God, what is going on with you, Luis? You need to sort of get grounded again, or you need to pick it up or do something else. But it says a lot about you because you're starting a business.

(Luis at 00:29:24) You know, that's, so a lot of it is your passion that you have for this business. And, you know, and then you, when you have your family life too, you know, and you're starting that too. You know? And you're still in the early stages of that. So it says that you're a busy guy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:49) Well, I wanna make sure, was there any specific call to action or anything that we didn't get out there about the company? Are you hiring?

(Luis at 00:29:57) Well, you know, the last thing I'm probably that's worth discussing is that we're in the process of sort of redefining ourselves into the space of, as I mentioned, in the cloud and the SD-WAN space. And we're going to be extending that capability outside of the United States into Latin America. Okay? But our focus is a little bit different. Right?

(Luis at 00:30:19) We're looking to partner with companies where they have an edge so we can bring it back to the core. Okay? And it's different from what we've done before. We're not going to go and build a beachhead in different countries in South America. We're not gonna build a network that, you know, goes around the whole country.

(Luis at 00:30:39) Okay? And we're gonna depend on partners. And it's really to get us back onto the cloud, our cloud and our partners' clouds. And it's to be able to take advantage of all the technology that we're gonna put into that space. So when customers think of, hey, I need to activate additional capacity for storage, or I need to have some security capabilities, or I need to have even bare metal type of services.

(Luis at 00:31:06) They don't have to make a huge investment. They can just utilize our assets and take advantage of that. And that's really where we're headed in the future. And, in the next eighteen months, we'll be sharing more details about that. I think it's an exciting proposition because we're a very large organization, one of the largest telecom companies in the world.

(Luis at 00:31:28) And we made the decision to refocus our energies into things that are traditionally not something we would have done. We would have been more of an infrastructure. Let me lay fiber. Let me build cables. Let me do all those things.

(Luis at 00:31:42) We're moving away from that. And I think it makes a lot of sense for us, not only financially, but also to better serve our customers. Because the other model is something that's very laborious, expensive, a lot of CapEx. And I feel like we're gonna miss out on the real, providing the real solution that our customer wants if we were to take that approach. So we're fortunate that we didn't make a lot of investments. We're gonna take advantage of those investments that have been made by our partners and utilize their infrastructure to be able to provide services on top of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:16) And if people wanna learn more, what's the website? Where do they go?

(Luis at 00:32:19) www.ctamericas, with an S, .com.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:25) That's easy. That's an easy one. Yeah. We'll put that in the description. And then last question for you here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:31) Over your entire career, what is the single best piece of leadership advice that you've received?

(Luis at 00:32:36) I don't know if it's the best, but the most prevalent one that I've always recalled in my life is really to follow your own path. Okay? And that was actually something when I graduated from college. My mother gave me one of these success stories, little thing that I keep around. And actually, it's in my office right now.

(Luis at 00:32:58) But I've always thought to myself, you know, I can follow the path that's in front of me. But that's only gonna take me to what I see. Okay? But if I follow my own path and create my own journey, then I'm gonna go to places that I can't see. Okay?

(Luis at 00:33:16) And I'd rather be looking at things that, where it's going to take me. Because I'm comfortable and I understand that I can actually solve problems through my own journey. It's a better path to take than it is to just continue to be following somebody else. So, you know, I always recommend to people, you know, hey, you gotta do what's in your gut. You got to do what you feel because that'll take you to a place that you're going to be happy with.

(Lewis at 00:33:41) If you're following somebody else, guess what? You're probably following their journey, and that's not necessarily yours. So I think about that quite a bit throughout my life, especially when I get into tough moments.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:53) Dude, that is well said. 550 episodes, I haven't heard that before. That was awesome, man. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:06) Thank you so much for listening, and if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague that 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.