Speaker 1:

Integrity is everything. Our way of life in this country rises and falls on the integrity of our leaders and the integrity of our infrastructure. Because integrity impacts everything, this is The Integrity Podcast, powered by Exo, hosted by Zachary Oliphant.

Zachary Oliphant:

All right, welcome everybody to The Integrity Podcast. Today I’m honored to have Justin Evans with us. A little bio on Justin Evans. Justin Evans is a graduate of Baylor University with a bachelor’s degree in marketing. Early in his career, Justin was given the opportunity to lead large-scale tech projects in Austin, Texas with dozens of direct reports and thousands of contractors. His passion for people and his leadership became evident and eventually landed an opportunity in the infrastructure industry.

Over the past five years, Justin has been the senior account manager for the Lighting Division of Exo here in Houston, Texas. And at Exo, Justin focuses on serving top 100 US retailers and commercial real estate firms by helping them make their infrastructure safe for not only their employees but for their customers. Justin, welcome.

Justin Evans:

Thank you so much.

Zachary Oliphant:

Appreciate the time today.

Justin Evans:

Absolutely.

Zachary Oliphant:

I think it should be a good conversation talking about our lighting business. But let’s start with background and your career. How did you start? Maybe there was some moment in your career that moved you into sales.

Justin Evans:

Yeah, absolutely. Great question. Pleasure to be here. As a kid, my grandfather, we grew up in Dallas-Fort Worth area, not a lot of money. And my grandfather was what you’d call the old school sales guy. Sold produce, sold cars, sold really anything that he could make money on. And as a kid I rode around with him and I watched him do what he did. And I was always curious as a young kid, “Man, how does he know all these people? Why do they want to buy from him? What’s going on? They can go to a store and buy these things. They can go to a car dealership.” And through that I learned that relationships was the one thing he loved to do in life, is meet people, build relationships, and just through that he would be able to sell them and make money for the family.

And so with that experience with my grandfather, being a guy I looked up to at a young age, I was always curious of how that worked. And so as I got older and was able to go into the career field in high school, I started out at Chick-fil-A at 14 cutting lemons. Not a lot of relationships happening behind the scenes at Chick-fil-A, but got the opportunity quickly to move up into the register at the mall. As you can imagine, a mall sees a lot of people and we saw a lot of the same people. And I got the opportunity to build relationships and I always remembered my grandfather doing those things as a kid. And I was like, “This is fun. This is exciting. I see the same people. I get to know them.” And I carried that through my life, through high school and college. I just loved meeting people. I never met a stranger.

Through that I started to meet more professional mentors and they said, “Justin, this is something you could do. You could go into sales and make it a career.” I didn’t know what that meant. I just knew I liked meeting people. And my first big boy job, we’ll call it, at Aerotech, got that opportunity to go manage one of our largest vendors and it was a people business and we were staffing. it was about putting people in the right positions for their career, and clients needed people in those positions to be profitable and be successful. Young in my career, early in my career, I had that opportunity and I just carried what my grandfather told me, it’s “Build relationships, do the right thing and be nice to people, and it’ll carry you far in life.” Grateful for that opportunity to be here to do that.

Zachary Oliphant:

Absolutely. Running through that really quickly, in all of that did you have a particular mentor or somebody that helped drive where you landed?

Justin Evans:

Absolutely. By the name of Stacy Campbell, she was my mentor at Aerotech. She’s the one who gave me that shot to manage that large vendor at a very young age, only a year into my career at Aerotech and said, “Hey, I see something in you. I don’t know what it is, but you have a sense of confidence and an ability to meet with people and talk with them.” And so she gave me that opportunity to manage that account and we had about 1600 contractors. I had a team of 15 or 20 people. And she said, “You get one year, prove it and see if you can do it.”

I took that and I ran with it and I said, “Hey, this is an opportunity I’ve been looking for my whole life.” Luckily, we were successful. I received my award at the end of the year of the number one on-premise manager for Aerotech, which is a large firm. And from there my confidence just built and I knew this is something I want to do and I know I can do to provide for my family. It’s very similar to what my grandfather did for us as a young kid.

Zachary Oliphant:

Absolutely. Flash forward, you have all this experience with Aerotech managing really a people’s business.

Justin Evans:

Absolutely.

Zachary Oliphant:

And opportunity to join Exo, which is a people’s business. Completely different business but a people’s business. Walk me through that, maybe walk me through your early experience with us and then maybe we can dive a little bit into what we’re doing with our clients.

Justin Evans:

Yeah, absolutely. At Exo, it all actually started, we were on a meeting with Aerotech. I was joining with one of my new sales mentees we’d call them. He had a meeting with you, with Exo, to try to hire you guys some drone pilots at the time. And I just decided to join in and to hang out. And that’s when I actually saw you at the office and through conversation learned what you guys did and was like, “Man, this seems like a really cool industry that I wasn’t aware of” and it sounded like something that I could bring some value to. And it sounded like something that all of my skill sets that I had learned, I could also continue to help you guys grow.

And so reaching out and getting that position and you saying, “Hey Justin, we need to build this lighting division, let’s go do this.” And I said, “Great. What do we need to do?” And learning the industry and the infrastructure side of things is so intriguing to me that light poles were a thing that could cause risk. And it was like I don’t look at light poles, but now I do at every place I go. And so starting at Exo not knowing what infrastructure was, taking the time to sit with you guys and learning why you do what you do and where you started was enough for me to say, “This is where I want to be.”

And so I took that and ran with it and through the past four or five years, had the opportunity to grow our division and focus on those retailers and commercial real estate guys, places that I shop at and you shop at and my wife shops at. And these are places that I go with my kids and my family every day. Being able to make an impact on the risk of those clients was enough. But even on the other side of that, the people side of the client, helping them understand that risk and saying, “Hey, this is not only protecting my family and friends, this is something we can do for you guys.”

Zachary Oliphant:

And this is a really interesting part of our business in the sense that we’re around these things every day, these pole structures in commercial parking lots or in school districts or whatnot. We inspect a lot of whether there’s little league stadiums all the way up to NFL stadiums, you got thousands of people sitting in the stadium. Most folks don’t understand those things need to be looked at.

Justin Evans:

Yeah, absolutely.

Zachary Oliphant:

Some of our clients didn’t even understand some of those things need to be looked at.

Justin Evans:

They still don’t. Some of the new ones, [inaudible 00:06:45] clients.

Zachary Oliphant:

Maybe walk me through the first project once you joined Exo, what that experience was like and what you learned from it.

Justin Evans:

Great question. It was about a week into my career actually at Exo. You get a call, and as any salesperson does, you take the call and you just go with it and see what it is. And it was in Frisco, Texas, a very high-end development builder for an outdoor mall area, very high-end, very high-quality renaissance hotels and very high-end restaurants and got a call that they had just built this development several years earlier and their polls are falling and left. And being a new salesperson in the career, I obviously came to some of my leaders and said, “Hey, this sounds like it’s a bad thing, let’s walk through it real quick.” And through the conversations with the client and their manufacturers and things of that nature realized that the polls weren’t designed well and that they had just put these polls in, they looked great, and they threw these banners on them for marketing. And no one thought about the risk and the consequences of doing things that you’re not supposed to do with infrastructure.

Through that project, I was able to learn quickly, you can’t just put a pole up and say, “Well, it’s made out of metal, it’s going to last forever.” You have to maintain those and look at those. And so through that project I was able to understand, one, risk that’s associated with it, and two, what a client needs to do to maintain high level of quality and safety, but also mitigate the cost they’re going to have if they don’t do anything. And so through that project, we got out of it early because it was a battle between the client and the manufacturer, but were able to ultimately help them with the solution of, “You need to replace these poles with a better grade pole, better design.” And ultimately they have a safer location now that we actually go to every other year for a conference. We go and shop at this place, which is really interesting.

Zachary Oliphant:

Yeah. No, absolutely. And we see that quite often on the commercial side of our business where it’s an architect or somebody specing something. And really the focus on engineering gets lost through all those layers of contractor and architect and lighting contractor and purchasing folks. And so yeah, you have a development that’s a couple years old and you got poles falling over all over the place. Pretty scary proposition.

Justin Evans:

And they care more about the look of it. That was the ultimate end game was-

Zachary Oliphant:

Aesthetics.

Justin Evans:

The aesthetics was more important than the risk and safety. And we see that a lot.

Zachary Oliphant:

Yeah. No, absolutely. We do. And to me, in our lighting business, probably more than any of the other markets we serve in, we do run into a lot of this. It’s not us mentality. “We don’t have a problem.” And I think the scary piece about that is we as Exo have been involved as expert witness. I think maybe even before your time with us. Really sad story. A kid here, a young family here in Texas, there was eight year old boy that was going with his parents to go have dinner at a restaurant and in about a 10 or 15 mile per hour breeze a pole fell over and killed this kid, hit him and killed him. Very unfortunate situation. We were involved as an expert witness because they had the pole inspected, but lo and behold, they had the pole inspected by a lighting contractor.

Sadly, we see this all the time in the lighting division of our business where “Well, I’ve got a guy that does LED upgrades for me” or “He replaces light bulbs for me.” I know one of our real frustrations and one of the things that we really have to educate our clients about are those the right people that should be inspecting structural components and assets? Maybe walk me through that a little bit, your thought or view on how certain clients or potential clients maybe view what they’re currently getting related to this infrastructure.

Justin Evans:

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s a great question. On calls and on the meetings that I have with these retailers and commercial real estate guys, they do have the it’s not us. It’s “Well, poles fail because of other reasons. Cars hit them or there’s a big storm” and it’s just not the case. And so through conversations we’re able to bring to the forefront that pulse fail because they’re not maintained and pulse fail because they’re not designed properly for certain wind zones and things of that nature across the country. Also, you put banners and marketing items on these things that people aren’t thinking of from an engineering perspective. And so the aesthetics is something that these clients care of more. Through the conversations with big retailers, they know they have posts fail, they just don’t want to say why they fell and they don’t want to agree to why they fell until we come in and be able to prove to them through data that these are the reasons that post fell, on a daily basis.

Zachary Oliphant:

And that is a good point you make. Empirically, we get a lot of this feedback from folks that we’re talking to of, “Well, it’s only falling down because someone hits it in my parking lot” or “It’s only falling down because it was a hurricane.” No.

Justin Evans:

Not the case.

Zachary Oliphant:

Of the millions of assets we look at, very few are falling because of mechanical damage and winds that are exceeding their design capacity.

Justin Evans:

Less than 1% are probably failing because of some reason outside of natural failure, we’ll call it.

Zachary Oliphant:

That’s right. So the gross majority 90, 95, 99% of them are really failing because of poor maintenance programs or lack of a maintenance program is probably a better way of looking at it. Walk me through an example on maybe how we’ve built a program with a client and how did they come to us or how did we find them? What was their problem or challenge and how did we help them solve it?

Justin Evans:

Yeah, absolutely. Big-box retailer that we shop at every day reached out to them in my role and said, “This is what Exo does, this is the service we provide.” And it happened to be that this client of ours had tried to do this internally. They had picked 400 locations nationwide. They picked the coastal regions, the snow regions, all the different high wind regions and said “We can tackle this problem. We know we have a problem.” They’re one of the few clients I’ve talked to that realized they had an issue and tried to fix it themselves.

And through conversation with them, there was a sense of urgency in their voice that said, “Hey, we know we have a problem, we’re trying to fix it but we don’t know how to fix it and we don’t know what the data tells us.” And they spent a large sum of money internally to build this program over a two-year span. And call it timing as it will, but this is quickly into my career with you guys. And through the conversations, I could sense the urgency and I could sense the risk that they felt because they knew that if something was to fail and hurt someone, some of the story you told earlier or even equipment, or their employees, it could be a big PR issue for them.

And so through that conversation I was able to at least have a conversation about what we’ve done in the past for other retailers and help them maintain this asset management program that they were trying to build internally. “Let us put in an engineering look on it, let us put a technical NDT look on it, something that we do every day.” And through those conversations, and as you could probably remember it quickly, three to four months later we were getting told, “Hey, we’re interested in what this service looks like. What does it entail though down the road two years from now? We don’t want to just have a bunch of data points.” And I was able to say, “Hey, we can come in and inspect these assets for you guys and we can manage this program, but on top of that, let us repair and remediate these assets. Let’s take it one step further than what you guys are already trying internally. Let us fix them while we’re there.”

And that was something that really hit home with them to say, “Not only are you going to go out and inspect these for us and survey them and tell us what to do next, you’re going to do some of that on your own.” And that eventually turned into replacement work as well. We really became a turnkey full program for these guys to say, “Almost let us own your assets that have lights on them. Let us own that whole management program. Let us inspect them, repair them, and replace them. And let’s just do that in a cycle that makes you guys comfortable that the risk is mitigated, your cost is leveled.”

And through this retailer, we’ve now been with them for four years and we’ve added other assets such as their signage, their garden center structures. These are all things that are risky to their customers and their employees and these guys are employees. And so it really was beneficial to walk them through this asset management life cycle and ultimately our goal is to extend the life of these. You got to get rid of the things you can’t extend and ultimately get to a level where everything at that point is now good and great.

Zachary Oliphant:

Absolutely. And I remember one of the real drivers for them, as you mentioned, was this normalizing of a maintenance spin. And we see this with a lot of our clients on lighting side, is everything’s reactionary, it’s pole falls down and you’re emergency deploying somebody out to deal with it, which anything that’s an emergency obviously costs more. You’re not doing it with any economies of scale. And you’re not doing it with any consistency of application or consistency of the work. You get contractor A, their work may be really good, contractor B might be garbage and with very poor consistency across their portfolio.

And I remember that meeting you’re talking about. I think the data is the really important piece here that a lot of these facilities owners… And a lot of these facilities owners have so much on their plate. You think about a grocery store facility owner or big-box retailer, they’re trying to get thousands of people through their stores every day. They’ve got parking lots and HVAC and coolers. They have so many other things on their plate. Most of them think about these assets that we manage as lights. They think of it as the lights are on.

Justin Evans:

The electrical side of it.

Zachary Oliphant:

And the electrical side of it. And that’s important too and a portion that we help our clients with. But they forget about what’s holding the lights up. And how important what’s holding light up is really critical. And we’ve seen really time and time again they’ll go through and do all these LED upgrades and they’re putting brand new light fixtures on poles that are ready to fall down. And you just go, “Man, don’t beat your head against the wall.”

Justin Evans:

Yeah, absolutely. It is a shocking thing.

Zachary Oliphant:

And so from our perspective, one of the things that we like to explain to our clients is one, ask the question. You should as a facility owner ask the question. Should a guy that’s changing light bulbs that is not qualified, not an engineering firm, not an NDT firm, should they be inspecting welds and corrosion and critical infrastructure? The answer to that is pretty obvious. It should be no.

Justin Evans:

I think we know the answer to that. No, absolutely. It’s hard to pass up when our clients are getting this for free. A lot of the conversations I’ve had is, “Hey, we’ll up upgrade your LEDs and during that time we’ll inspect your light poles for you.” It’s a no-cost solution, that we know it’s not a quality solution, it’s a quick solution to get another dollar. And through those conversations, that’s where we’re battling right now. Definitely my role, I’m battling the idea that all these other electrical firms or companies are telling all of these retailers that they don’t have a problem because they want to put the LED up and if you go tell them that eight to 9% of all of their poles are ready to fail, well your LED program is now at halt. It’s halted until we figure out the structural issue. But they can’t fix that. So now they’re going to have to go out to somebody else. And so you nailed it on the head there.

Zachary Oliphant:

And maybe you can give an example too, the opposite of that. Sometimes we see the lighting contractors come in and say, “Everything’s fine, let us go put LEDs on.” And they’re not fine. They’ve got some, like you said, I think we find on average six, seven, 8% of poles are ready to fall down, which is a pretty scary statistic. You think about it.

Justin Evans:

Count the number of poles you drive by when you go home today and add that six or seven percent. [inaudible 00:18:07].

Zachary Oliphant:

So 7%. You’re driving by several that are ready to fall down, which is a scary proposition. And we all have kids and families and probably everyone that works at Exo, we tell them, “Don’t park near light poles unless you see an Exo QR code on it.

Justin Evans:

That’s it.

Zachary Oliphant:

But one of the interesting things you see as well with a lot of lighting contractors and you get it, they’re trying to go sell their service but they’ll try to sell a client to do a whole site sweep. Maybe give an example of that, that you’ve seen with some of our clients as well.

Justin Evans:

Yeah, absolutely. Great question. We actually had one in particular in Florida, lighting vendor that had been working with this top five retailer, one of the largest in the world. They had a location that they were actually going to be taking over doing a building remodel. And the lighting [inaudible 00:18:51] went out and said, “Hey, you’ve got 97 structures on the site, all of them need to be replaced.” And when you’re talking about cost and costs you weren’t assuming that were going to happen in your project, that’s a high-cost project to do 97 pole switch outs.

We got a call from the vendor and at the time we had already been working with them somewhat on a pilot program. So they called us and said, “Hey, can you guys go give us a second opinion? Can you go out to Florida?” And we absolutely did. And we got out there and only about 32 of them needed to be replaced, the other 60 or so were actually in really good shape. And it was the opposite. It was more of a cash grab in my opinion of we’re going to be the ones doing the pole replacements, the vendor. And so they wanted all of them.

At that point we realized very quickly like “Hey, we bring a value to the table that not only is the correct engineering look on it, but it’s also an integrity piece of it where you don’t just go tell them things are at risk when they’re not.” And we were able to show that to that very large retailer, very clear that what you got from your vendor is not accurate and what we’re giving you and here’s the reasons why. To your point earlier, the data does tell the story. And right now a lot of these vendors and retailers are using reactionary situations to drive program needs rather than letting the data tell the story of what you should be doing. And I think that is where the data we have truly tells a story on where you are, where you’re at today and where we need to get you.

Zachary Oliphant:

You’re absolutely right. And I think that this idea where once you’ve inspected millions of components and millions of assets and you can start building models for a client, the data really drives it for us. As an engineering and inspection firm, we’re just as happy to tell a client your stuff’s in great shape as we are to say, “Hey, you’ve got a big problem.” For us it’s black or white. A lot of folks aren’t driven that way. But that’s for us where integrity really is everything, that’s the only way you can operate. We’ve got lots of clients where their system is in good shape and lots of clients for their system is in really bad shape and some in between. But you just don’t know unless you’re out looking to understand where your assets are.

Walk me through on this data-driven program, maybe an example of how that matters to our clients and an example of how that data can help make wise decisions for a facility manager.

Justin Evans:

Absolutely. And when we talk about top [inaudible 00:21:13] retailers, you’re not talking about four or five locations, you’re talking about nationwide locations that, like I mentioned earlier, high wind zones, salt air effect zones in the northeast of the country, the West Coast, we have the Gulf Coast and salt water. How do you pick the sites? Where do you start? Is it a three year program? Is it a four year program? All of that stuff matters. From a flattening out cost and looking at risk. You can’t do it all today and there’s going to be risk all over the place.

Perfect example was with one of the retailers that we talked about where we called them and they tried to do that internally. That was the first question “Well, Justin, where do we start? We want to pick 500 of our sites, about 25% of our entire nationwide locations, where do we start?” And we let the data from our past experience say “You definitely need to start in the coastal region.” This is where we’re seeing 80% of our assets for our clients are corrosion and that’s the highest risk of failure, is wall loss.

And so we were able to pull the data from our system and pick the exact states they should start in. What they thought they wanted to start with, we revamped. And we ended up starting in the Southeast and in the Northeast around the Great Lakes. And it was so easy to go to them and say, “Here’s the data, look at it, this is why you need to do this here.” And they trusted in us that first year and from that we were able to build that three-year program to complete all their locations across the country.

Zachary Oliphant:

I do remember in that meeting with them, they thought we were crazy by able to tell them before we started work, here’s what we’re going to find. And they said, “There’s no way you can know that.” And we said, “No, we can because your stuff is… Your assets are not too different than your neighbor’s assets that are just down the street.” And lo and behold, we get through a year and then we were almost spot on with our expectation a year prior. I think they were shocked by that. All that builds trust with the client. Where we’re not trying to ambulance chase in any way. It’s “This is what we believe we’re going to find and we’ll let the data guide where we [inaudible 00:23:03].”

Justin Evans:

And I think the brick and mortar boom really helps us. A lot of these facilities we’re getting built all the same time and all these poles were getting designed and built and installed all about the same time. And so good thing, the consistency with the timeline really helps us tell that story with data, is “We know what you got because we know what the guy next door to you has.” Anywhere you have a Walmart, you’re going to have a Target. And a Home Depot, you’re going to have a Lowe’s. And so you can talk to all of these retailers and say “I know what your competitor has because we’re working with them.” And it really helped us solidify why the data mattered.

Zachary Oliphant:

That’s right. And you hit on it, a lot of the infrastructure in our country is degrading and aging, certainly on this commercial retail build out. If you look back historically, the seventies, eighties, nineties was this huge boom and suburban areas growing, all these retailers growing nationally. And so you’ve got all this infrastructure now that’s 20, 30 years old and a lot of it’s never had maintenance done. The most maintenance they’ve had done is a pole falls over and they put up a new one. And so you’ve got all this infrastructure that was probably built with maybe a 10 or 15 year original life that is now 20 or 25 years old. Maybe walk me through that as a facility manager. Maybe you don’t know you have a problem and someone like you calls them and says, “Hey, let me explain this to you or try to boil this down to some simple terms.” What would you tell them?

Justin Evans:

Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of times when I’m on these calls I hear, “Well, nothing’s happened during my time here.” And they may have been in their role two or three years and they may absolutely right, maybe nothing did happen while they were there. But I can assure you something happened before and something will happen. A lot of these conversations I’m having are, “I assure you a proactive approach, it’s going to cost you today in money but ultimately the life cycle and the cost over time is going to be much lower and flattened out.”

When they come to me and say, “Justin, we just don’t have a problem.” I don’t understand why you can say that, one, I have photo, have data, I can walk through that, no problem. But it really helps them understand the need for this program. Because at the end of the day, like you said, the brick and mortar boom did happen and there were no maintenance programs. And there are no regulations and codes that say you have to do it. This is truly a safety risk and this is why we step in and do this for these clients and help them out on these calls.

Zachary Oliphant:

And you’re right and I think that you hit on a big driver there. We can empirically show with our data, our photos, our reports and our data portal what we’re seeing. And usually they’re trying to throw that against the perception of what they believe. Look, like you said, maybe your system’s perfectly good, but if you’re not looking you don’t know. And I think this reactionary view that the market currently has, has some real fallacies in it. And primarily it’s a cost driver. We can inspect and remediate, light remediation, touching up paint and deal with proactive maintenance for cycle upon cycle upon cycle, versus the cost of replacing. And so we can extend the life of those assets for decades with just a little bit of proactive maintenance versus thousands of dollars to replace one. And sometimes much higher than that if it’s in a emergency replacement where it’s something fell down.

And so when you look at the cost drivers, makes complete sense to do a proactive maintenance program. To me, I like to liken it to going to the doctor. You go get an annual physical, because you want to catch the things that might be catastrophic before they become catastrophic.

Justin Evans:

Hope there’s no bad news.

Zachary Oliphant:

Exactly. Right. And it’s an odd world we live in as an inspection engineering firm that if we do our jobs really, really well, nothing happens. And for a facility owner, that’s a strange thing because okay, this kind of… All right, it’s boring, nothing’s happening. Well, that means we’re doing a really good job.

Justin Evans:

Absolutely. And a lot of conversations that I have and a lot of questions I get is, “Well, what’s our return on investment and where can you show me in the data you’re going to save me money?” You really see that on the LED side. You can take watts and costs and all the output from electrical LED versus an old halo… Shoebox halo old fixture and you can formulate it right then and say “You’re going to save X amount of dollars over this time span. We’re saving you the potential risk, one, of catastrophic failure and injury. But we’re also going to…” It really is a life cycle. It’s the life of that pole is where you’re going to save your money. So it could be 20, 30, 40, 50 years.

It’s hard to show that. But we can prove that to you with the data and we can show that by what we do. Our pole replacements that we do are very high quality, high quality pole that are much different than what you see in the industry. And there’s a reason for that. We know that that can last many, many years past what you see today.

Zachary Oliphant:

That’s right. And it’s really a paradigm shift. If you ask all these facility managers, they’ve got a maintenance program on their HVAC system and you go, “Why? Well because we don’t want it to break down.” Well, your lighting infrastructure’s no different. It’s just a longer life cycle. But you’re starting with all 30 year old HVAC systems because that’s where most of them are starting. And you’ve also seen just as an industry, as Amazon has taken on the world as of the big retail world and their delivery model, you see now a lot of the retailers are not building a store and being in it for eight or 10 years and then mothballing it or selling it off and then building a new store, they’re staying in those stores much longer.

And so this really is an emerging need for a lot of these guys where in a prior life, decades ago, a decade ago, 15, 20 years ago before Amazon, a big-box retailer would build, stay for 10 years, sell, build. As they’re selling, they’re getting to the end of the useful life of these lighting assets. Now they’re holding them much longer. And so this is a need that’s there for them that they’re going to have to maintain.

Justin Evans:

Yeah, absolutely. And on the commercial real estate side, I think we saw that, where these guys were going in, these big-box retailers were selling locations. Well, someone has to sell it. So who handles the infrastructure? Is it the next person or… Who’s at risk? And so working with them, we see that a lot in the takeovers where an older retail store maybe going away and someone’s going to come buy that property.

We have the opportunity, we’re doing a project right now where we’re going to go inspect an old retail store for our clients to go buy it and remodel it for their own store. And they wanted to understand the risks they had in the parking lot lighting. And it really was something that I liked because there was a proactive approach before the remodel to say, “We know you guys can bring us the data. We need to know what it is before we go do all the remodel on it.” And that’s something that I think we’re going to start seeing as well as people are keeping stores and buying existing buildings to keep up with the Amazons, they’re going to have to have that need of “What do we have here?” You do that with the building, you do it with the pavement, you do it with the HVAC, you do all of that, you just don’t do it with the lighting. If the lights come on, they assume it’s all good to go and they keep moving.

Zachary Oliphant:

No, absolutely. On top of normalizing their maintenance spend and giving them a predictable maintenance spend, this ability to reduce risk is just huge. And you think about the intangible benefits of that. Think about the PR that you would get nowadays, a pole falls down on a car or God forbid kills somebody, which does happen, you’re talking millions of dollars in just litigation and you’re talking untold sums of dollars in PR hit. And certainly you hear a little bit of, “Well, I don’t need a program.” Well, when all of your competitors have a program at some point from just a risk management perspective, a lawyer loves to eat that kind of stuff up.

You can go to all these other clients of ours and say they have a program and they have a program, they have a program, they have a program. Well, you don’t and got pole falls over and hurts somebody, you’re getting into negligence. Just because you want to bury your head in the sand and think you don’t have an issue when you do. We have a client of ours that before we start working with them, they’re having what, a pole a day falling down?

Justin Evans:

Pole a day.

Zachary Oliphant:

Pole a day.

Justin Evans:

Pole a day fall down.

Zachary Oliphant:

Just think about that conceptually. A pole a day falling down in their system. That’s high risk. It’s high risk [inaudible 00:30:52].

Justin Evans:

Super high risk. In the meeting that we had, the individual we spoke with was aware of the situation and wanted to do something about it 10 years ago and has really waited for someone to come in and help him tell this story. And it’s been really beneficial for us because a pole day is a lot. And you think about… My kids are young and every time I see a light that’s not working, they say, “Daddy, you got to go fix that light pole. It’s broken.” And it’s a funny… But it’s almost the same mentality with our clients. My seven year old says, “The light isn’t working, that pole is broken.” Well, that’s where it starts and stops in the retail space and it makes me laugh. But at the end of the day, that’s the outlook and that’s been the outlook since the brick and mortar boom. It’s been real exciting to be involved in this new wave of what we’re doing.

Zachary Oliphant:

Absolutely. And we’ve seen with the clients we work with, how it champions for these facility managers, their cause internally. They can show this empirical data, it’s not them just trying to report up to C-suite executives about this risk. They can show them. “Here was our risk before. Here is our risk after. Look how we’ve mitigated all that risk and look how we can predict our spend.” Which any C-suite executive wants to understand, how can we predict our spend over the next five or 10 years? And the only way you can do that is with good data. We haven’t seen anyone in the lighting space have that data. Like you said, they’re very good at “LED’s going to save you this many dollars and electricity,” but they have no ability to build a model around what is your infrastructure? How long is it going to last? Where you going to spend the money? And if you’re not planning, you’re going to have these big lumps in spend and it’s all going to be reactionary and cost you a lot more money.

Justin Evans:

Yeah, absolutely. And I always tell people on the calls, on these meetings, “What you don’t know will hurt you.” It’s the opposite of what we always get told, the age old joke. But what you don’t know will hurt you and what you don’t know and don’t want to know will hurt you. And we run into that a lot where we pitch a pilot program or something where “We’re going to be in the area, let us go do three or four stores for you.” And we run in these situations where it’s like, “Ah, we don’t know if we’re ready for that yet.” And I’m like, “It’s no cost. There’s no risk to you besides you having to be reactive to what we tell you what the data tells you.” And it’s an interesting way of them approaching the program is, “Well if you tell me something’s wrong, I then have to do something about it.” And you look at it going, “What? You should do something about it.” It’s the piece of “I’m calling you because I shopped there.”

It’s really interesting on all fronts, you’re getting told from either an unqualified vendor that everything’s good or you want to assume everything’s good so you don’t have to do anything about it. And you can spend that money elsewhere to make the store look better or the LEDs shine brighter. Well, LEDs don’t shine when they’re laying on the ground when the pole fails. At the end of the day, it’s catastrophic.

Zachary Oliphant:

And you’re ruining a brand new fixture too, which we see quite often. The fixture’s a year too old, an LED fixture, and you get a 10 or 15 year old pole that falls over and you just spent good money. Now you got to send money again replacing the fixture.

Justin Evans:

And warranty doesn’t cover fell pole.

Zachary Oliphant:

No. No, it doesn’t.

Justin Evans:

[inaudible 00:33:48].

Zachary Oliphant:

Certainly it does not. Walk me through maybe in the outside of the commercial retail lighting space, maybe a little bit on the athletic field lighting space that we service as well.

Justin Evans:

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s a big one. There’s a lot of schools, a lot of ISDs, a lot of universities, a lot of little league ball fields. Like I said, I have little kids and I’m there all the time. I got a really, really cool story. For me when I first started with you guys, my wife was a teacher at elementary school near our home here in Houston. And about three weeks into my job I had realized that we worked with the ISD that she works at. And so I logged into our data portal and was able to tell her which poles not to park at, which one’s not to park next to because of the risk. And it was a big client of ours that at the time elected not to do repairs replacements. And it was just, we gave them the data but unfortunately I found out that the principal’s parking spot was actually next to probably the worst pole on their lot.

Through that timeframe and being able to actually tell her that, we were able to speak to the client at that point and say, “Hey, you’ve got major risk. My wife works there, let us have the next conversation about what we’re going to do next.” And it ended up being a repeat client of ours. And the universities, you see the same thing. You’ve got big programs like the Big 12. We’ll talk about that. I went to Baylor as you spoke of. You’ve got World Series and football games and all these things that happen. Poles are at risk and you fill the stands with thousands of people.

Zachary Oliphant:

Yeah. No, an interesting story. We get a phone call as it relates to athletic field lighting. It was on a weekend and one of the athletic directors of one of the big Power Five Conference schools calls us and says, “Hey, I’ve got a light pole and it’s waving like 15 or 20 feet back and forth and the stadium is full of people and we’re in the bottom of the sixth inning and it’s College World Series regional playoffs. Do I need to evacuate the whole stadium?” That’s a scary phone call to get. And I’m sure that athletic director was under severe pressure, where you’ve got thousands of people sitting under this, a big athletic field lighting pole, 10 or 15,000 pound structure sitting above them, waving back and forth 10 or 15 feet.

Tongue in cheek, the question was “Why? Are you winning or losing?” And we’ll decide if you should call the game. Fortunately for that client, that particular pole was okay to finish the game, but lo and behold they had other issues on their infrastructure and had a lot of weld cracking, wind-induced vibration issues related to these structures, and a lot of original installation problems. And we see that quite a bit as well, where because you don’t have the same code standards and specs that are really driving regulation on the lighting part of our infrastructure, like we do on the utility part of our infrastructure, you have these folks out there that it’s just like the Wild West on quality of installation and quality of contractors and oversight.

And so it’s not uncommon that we’ll see brand new stuff that is in really bad shape because a contractor sets an anchor bolt cage wrong and decides the solution is take a cutting torch and cut half the base plate off. We’ve got a lot of engineers in our business when they see those photos. We have actually a hall of shame and it’s somewhat funny, but on the other hand it’s really alarming. Luckily, we’re catching this stuff and we’re helping the clients resolve it. But where you have someone that’s cut half a base plate off and the engineer’s like, “Well, that half mattered when I designed it.” And we see that quite often where it was… It’s really just an error of knowledge. The contractor didn’t know, he’s trying to… “My job is install this thing and the way I’m going to install is a cutting torch.”

Justin Evans:

It’s the duct tape mentality. Duct tape’s fixes all thing, right? But it’s not the case.

Zachary Oliphant:

I get paid and I move on to the next job.

Justin Evans:

We see far too much of that unfortunately in the field.

Zachary Oliphant:

And maybe I’ll tell a little anecdote of another one of our big-box retailers that came to us and they actually reached out to us. It was actually an inbound call and they’ve got thousands of sites around the country. They were having poles fall over all over the place. And very similar to the other client you were talking about, they decided, “Well, let’s let our lighting contractor try to tell us what the issue is.” They went down that path for about a year. Lo and behold, they were still having poles fall down and they said, “Well, we got to find another vendor that knows what they’re doing.” And they reached out to EXO and we built a program for them. And what they were finding was the same thing we find with a lot of our clients, it’s you’re trying to take a non-technically competent lighting contractor and have them do something that is highly technically important.

Our business is really a synthesis of engineering, non-destructive testing and then remediation recommendations. All of those take a real technical view and look, and take licenses and take certifications and take training, which we don’t know of any lighting contractors that have any of that. And so we were able to build for them a program that’s separate from light bulbs not working. And now we’re six or seven years into that program for them and have mitigated just thousands and thousands of poles at risk. And that’s a great story. A facility manager to be able to show up to a C-suite executive “Look at all these poles that were going to fall down and kill somebody or hurt somebody or fall in a car or fall in our inventory.” And that makes a real big difference.

Justin, maybe as I think of… On our podcast here, we talk about integrity, integrity being everything. Whether that’s integrity in what we’re trying to impart in our work, whether it’s the integrity in the people that work for us. Maybe walk me through an example in your career where you’ve seen integrity either be a positive or you’ve seen someone cut corners and integrity be skirted past and what the net impact was.

Justin Evans:

No, absolutely. It’s a great question. I talk to my boys about integrity a lot and we define it as it’s what you do when no one’s watching. It’s the moral compass of what we do. It’s the idea of leaving things better than you found it. That’s where I land when it comes to integrity. And so we have clients on both sides of this fence. I would say on the positive side, we have a client that when they see something wrong at one of their locations and they know it’s at risk or failure, they don’t wait. They come to us and they say, “Hey Justin, we know you all are the guys, this happened.” And this is a situation that it’s behind a store maybe. And we see a lot of these light poles and things of that nature that are never seen by us because they’re behind the store or they’re behind a fence and the risk of it hurting anyone is very small.

But they still come to us and they say, “Hey Justin, we know it’s a lower risk asset. Maybe the sign’s a little bit shorter, but we want to come to you guys to fix it. We want bring that to your forefront, because we know there is still risk.” And so we get a lot of those calls with one of our biggest retailers and they come to us all the time. In my opinion, they have a true want to fix their problems and they lean on us to do that and provide that solution. And in my opinion, that’s a high integrity move on their part. Because on the opposite side, we do have… Which I think I mentioned earlier, the low integrity side is when you tell me you know you have an issue but you don’t want to do anything about it and you prefer us not tell you that you have that issue. It’s the idea of not proving their concern. It’s “So no, no, no, we’re not ready for you guys yet. We’re going to push you down the road a couple years.”

For me, it’s an impact that is extremely negative, one, in my eyes to them, but to their company. And it makes you want to think of, “Is that all levels or is that just the person I’m talking to that has that outlook?” And maybe they’re spending a lot of their own end budget on other programs and they have that pressure. But I think that’s why even with this podcast, we got to reach everyone because some people are pressured into making a less integrity type decision where some other people have the opportunity to just say, “Hey, I’m going to do the right thing every time. If that’s going to cost me more money or make me go to the C-suite and have to beg and barter for this budget.” I’ve seen both of that on the client side.

Zachary Oliphant:

I’ll tell you a little anecdote on integrity and lighting side of our business, we inspected a school district in Arkansas. And the big high mass lighting pole that was literally where all the buses lined up. And our inspector inspects this thing and it had weld cracks all the way around and some of the weld cracks were… You could see light through where the pole shaft and the base plate meet. And this pole in a very light wind was going to fall over and we quarantined it. We said to the school, “You got to quarantine this area, this pole can fall down at any time.” And the superintendent decided, “No, we can’t do that because this is where the buses park to pick up kids.” And we go, “Are you out of your mind?”

Justin Evans:

That should be the one area.

Zachary Oliphant:

That’s the one area where you don’t. But that’s the kind of pressure that some of the either superintendent or facility owner’s under, is “Well, this is how I’ve always done it and I can’t move where the buses pick up the kids.” “Well yeah, you could. Do you want the pole to fall and kill 10 or 15 kids?” Absolutely not. And those are really tough calls for us to make as a engineering inspection firm to say, “No guys, this is serious, serious problem and you need to do something about it.” And sometimes they just don’t understand the seriousness and it’s like, “No, it will fall down and if someone’s around, it will kill them.”

Justin Evans:

And we’ve had those situations where… We live in Texas, the big thing here in Texas football is Texas High School Football. It’s almost the biggest college. We’ve had clients say, “Justin, I can’t not have our game. We’re Friday night lights, we’re here, we’ve got to move forward.” And we explain to them, “There is a large level of risk of that pole failing if any wind comes through here.” And we’ve had that also on both sides where they’re like, “Well, can we make it through Friday?” And it’s like, “That’s not our decision to make, we’re telling you that it’s catastrophic failure. It may be imminent. You need to shut it down.” And they’ve continued to have the football game and luckily nothing happened, which we’re excited to see that, but you have other guys that are willing to shut it all down and move that game to another field. I think that’s a true sign of integrity of “We’re going to protect our students and our families and friends before a football game has to be played.” But there is that pressure and it’s real.

Zachary Oliphant:

No, absolutely. And like you said, I think doing what’s right when nobody’s looking is what really matters and doing what’s right when everyone is looking really matters.

Justin Evans:

Absolutely does.

Zachary Oliphant:

And we see some of both. And a lot of what we’re trying to do here in our podcast is just talk about… Educate folks so they understand what the risk and challenges are. Hopefully folks today will hear five to 8% of all the lighting infrastructure, they walk around or they run around or they’re around every day is in really catastrophic shape. That’s a big, big number. And you’re talking millions and millions and millions of structures just in the US. And so we’re just telling folks, that maybe don’t know, be thinking about this, be thinking about building a pilot program or a budget. Maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones your system’s in great shape, but at least you’ll know that. And then you can have a plan on several years down the road to reinspect. But if you’re not looking and you don’t know, there’s a big risk out there that certainly you need to look at and focus on.

Justin Evans:

And they truly are everywhere. They’re in our neighborhood streets, they’re in the park, they’re in the parking lots of places we shop and eat. They’re at the schools that our kids go to. The sporting fields that we go play at. Anywhere you are, you’re more likely to be next to a light pole probably than another car that’s similar to yours. They’re literally everywhere. My kids play around these light poles all the time. It’s a great point and it’s… Truly is something that people need to focus on.

Zachary Oliphant:

Well, one of the things I’d ask you, Justin, as you now are moving 10 or 15 years into your career and I like to ask all our guests this, is when you look to someone maybe just coming out of school, what would be some advice you would give them or a younger version of yourself if you look back over 10 or 15 years?

Justin Evans:

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve always been taught attitude and efforts, number one. There’s two things you can control. And the attitude, in sells specifically is how you react to your wins and your losses. I’ve unfortunately had some that I haven’t gotten go my way at Exo and I’ve had some that have. And that number one, you come in with a great attitude and your effort is always top notch. There’s really not many things you’ll fail at. It also in sells, you’re not just on the phones, you’re doing a lot of other things. And definitely somewhere like Exo when I was lucky enough to join you guys, we all wear a lot of hats. We may have steel-toe boots in the yard, one day and we’re making calls to big-box retailers the next. And never be afraid to put on a different hat and go just help out wherever is needed. And I would say that even outside of your career, just be that person. Be willing to just do whatever it takes to help somebody, help your business, help yourself to do that.

The other one in my field specifically is that effort piece. It’s that idea of make the phone call, don’t be afraid to pick up the phone, make the activity happen. Truly care about the output. Because you cast a lot of lines, eventually you’re going to catch some good fish. And for me, it’s one of those things my grandfather used to do. He may talk to 85 people in a day, but he may sell one car, but that’s a win for him. That’s his number he’s trying to hit. So have goals, have short-term and long-term goals in sales because it may be a long sell, but once you get there, it all is worth it. It’s really trusting the process over the product, which for me is a big, big thing. It’s put all the steps before the sale in the forefront and make those priority. After you do that… The product will happen, it’s going to happen. Not on your timeline either. It’ll be someone else’s timeline.

And other than that, I think for me it’s the idea of learning. When you start a career, you can’t just learn how the cell cycle works. You’ve got to learn everyone else’s role and how they impact you and how you impact them. And luckily at Exo, I joined a team of very, very inquisitive and educational people that were willing to pour into me. And I sat down with them every week, “Why do we do this? I keep saying this term, NDT on these phone calls, what does it actually mean?” Taking that time matters. So attitude and effort, trusting the process, doing whatever it takes to be successful in your life and career with everyone else. I think lastly, putting the company first, putting your company and clients first. If you do that, you’ll take care of them, they’ll take care of you.

Zachary Oliphant:

That’s right. And we’ve always seen that. You put the customer first, you put your people first, the financials and all that just work out. Because you build integrity, you build trust. Ultimately, it’s how you build a successful business. At the end of the day, people still want to interact with people, as much as everyone’s tied on digital devices these days. And sadly so much today, especially for young people coming out of school, so much is driven to them, driven to their device. That we really do have to teach our young people to reach out and build relationships beyond just a device. That’s something that I’ve got to teach my kids. And they’re growing up in a fully digital world where they think a phone call has to be a video call. Times change quickly. But certainly that piece I think is really important for someone coming out of school.

And I think to echo your comment, just someone young coming out of school or starting a career willing to raise your hand and take on a difficult challenge that maybe puts you outside of your comfort zone. That’s really where you learn. If it’s something easy or you’re not being challenged every day in your career, in your personal life, man, find something that’s going to challenge you. Because that’s really where you learn, you learn something about yourself, you learn a skill or you learn a trade or you learn a value to the business. And I think, like you said, you do enough of that and you’re bringing value to your business. Once you bring value to your business, in turn, a good company will show value back to you. The business has to win and then the person can win and it all works out that way.

Justin, awesome. Thanks for the time.

Justin Evans:

Appreciate it.

Zachary Oliphant:

And shedding some light for some of our retail clients or commercial clients or school clients or prospective clients that maybe just don’t know where to start. Give Justin a call, he’ll be happy to help you and the rest of our business supporting him to help you. And just understand maybe what you don’t know about your assets and your system, happy to come out and help you guys proactively manage your assets. Again, Justin, thanks for the time.

Justin Evans:

I appreciate it.

Zachary Oliphant:

Thank you.

Justin Evans:

Thanks so much.