 Welcome to ITW Extra powered by JSA TV. We are here live at ITW 2023 in National Harbor on the Expo floor. The floor is buzzing and we are super excited to have Kyle Hildebrand of Vavacity Infrastructure Group here with us today. He is the EVP of Business Development and Marketing for Vavacity Infrastructure Group. Kyle, welcome. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's an honor to have you here today. Before we dive in, viewers that might already not know about Vavacity Infrastructure Group, can you tell us a little bit more about the company and what makes Vavacity Infrastructure Group so unique? Sure, absolutely. So, Vavacity Infrastructure Group plans, develops, designs, builds, operates, maintains and commercializes fiber and wireless networks on behalf of its customers. It was founded in 2019. It's a wholly owned portfolio company of Columbia Capital. It operates in a few main sectors, that being government, local government, state and local governments, transportation, energy, wireless services and private enterprise. Has three primary operating companies, EX Squared Technology, which is the arm that focuses on designing, building, operating, maintaining and commercializing fiber infrastructure, and Terra Consulting, which focuses on design, engineering and wireless site development for wireless carriers. In addition, there's Vavacity Networks, which is an asset holding company. Well, we've heard that there's been some exciting changes over at Vavacity over this past year, including your new role as EVP of business development and marketing. First, congratulations on that new exciting role. Thanks. Thank you. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about your new position and what you have plans for your new role? Sure. I assumed the position of EVP of business development and marketing, a spot previously held by Misty Stein. Misty Stein is transitioning to focus all of her time and efforts on our commercialization and monetization customers. As the company's grown and as the market's changed and evolved, we wanted to put a lot more focus into the commercialization. So that's where her efforts went. I stepped into the role to lead the business development and marketing groups, retain the project development responsibilities that I had. And we think it's just an opportunity to put more focus in different areas as the company grows. We're really excited about it. I'm going to leverage all of my experience in implementing and developing large-scale critical infrastructure projects. I've worked day in and day out with Misty Stein for the last 15 years. So I'm really, really in tuned of what she was working on and how things were going. And so it was a very easy transition for me to step into that role. I think we'll be able to take this to the next level and develop our relationships and opportunities. Well, that sounds exciting. Congrats again on this new role. I mean, in addition to your promotion, there's been some exciting other new hires within your group. Why don't you talk a little bit more about some of your colleagues and their roles? Okay. One of the first things we did was we realized that we need to expand our business development side of our group with some really high-powered great folks. And the first hire we made was Jeff Sabatka. He's a long-term industry expert. He's been working in telecom for a long time, most recently as the director or state broadband director for the State of Arizona Commerce Authority. So what he brings to the table is a understanding of all of the complex things that our government clients are dealing with as they look at the inflow of government and private monies into the broadband space. And he understands what they need to do to maximize everything that they're going to work on to get as much broadband out there as they can. The other one is Jen Hawkinsmith. Jen is a longtime wireless industry veteran. She has a lot of experience in that, but also she has the outside plan experience on the fiber side. So as we find more and more places where fiber and wireless are coming together at that intersection, she's really spearheading that effort. So all of our opportunities and client relationships where wireless is involved, she's involved. So where Jeff is focused on local and state governments, she's really focused on the wireless. Great group. It's the first of a few hires, but some of the most critical first. Well, congrats to Jeff and Jen. Yeah. I really like that you have a female leader on the team. Yeah. She's amazing. Yeah. Looking forward to maybe interviewing Jeff or Jen one day. I hope you can. Yeah, that would be fun. So tell us a little bit more about what other initiatives that you have going on in vivacity and what you're focusing on for the months ahead. Sure. Well, vivacity has a lot of things going. We're really busy, but just like everyone else in this space, we have to do things wisely. So we have projects going on. We're very focused on middle mile fiber development as well as fiber to the premises development and intelligent transportation and the build out of a lot of different wireless infrastructure. So examples of some of those would be middle mile projects going on from Grafton County to Hampshire where we're connecting 39 municipalities to help them expand and attract new ISP entrance to their area. We also go Upper Midwest, Livingston County, Michigan is another place where they're building out a countywide middle mile or we're building out a countywide middle mile to support their anchor institutions and all of their different government facilities and schools or Navajo County, Arizona, very rural area, reaching the corners of that county very sparsely populated in some places to help them take control of their own broadband destiny and leverage the funding that they have available to bring broadband to a vastly underserved area. So a lot of things, a lot of things going on. On the, as you say on the terrace side of things there are wireless projects going on from coast to coast and they're really busy involved. They have dozens of projects going on at a time. Everyone's having a good time and we're really busy. Well, I mean it's great to be busy and it sounds like some of these projects are critically important to bring this much needed infrastructure across the coast to coast like you mentioned, all across the country. So congrats on all these exciting projects ahead. Is there anything else that you wanted to add? Not really. I think that Vivacity has, we put together a great company and a team to really focus on turnkey operations and we can handle projects of all different sizes and we really focus on a partnership model. I mean sometimes that's an overused phrase but that's really what we try to do is to find that win-win and when we can find those, everybody benefits. Yeah and partnerships are so important. Absolutely. Especially we're seeing that here live on the floor here at ITW. That's right. And they're everything today. Where can viewers go if they wanna learn more? You could go on the web to vivacitygroup.com or connect with us on LinkedIn and Twitter. Great. Well, thanks again, Kyle for joining us today for ITW Extra powered by JSA live here at ITW 2023. And thank you viewers for tuning in. Happy networking.