 Live from the JSA Podcast Studio, presenting Data Movers, showcasing the leaders behind the headlines in the telecom and data center infrastructure industry. Hello, everybody. Welcome to our new podcast series, Data Movers. I'm your host, Jamie Stato-Cutayah, CEO and founder of JSA, along with my fabulous co-host, top feed-a-beat social media influencer, Mr. Evan Christel. Evan, you're looking good today. Thanks so much. Looking forward to our next guest and I see you have a brand new background, so you've moved. I have. I'm officially further south now in California, in Laguna Beach. I can't see your wall behind you, but do you collect art or collectibles or chachkies? I do have a fabulous piece of artwork, but it's in Virginia. Yeah, I do every now and then, something moves your soul and you're like, I need to have it, but very rarely. So, yeah, I feel the same about art. Now, what about digital art? Have you been following this phenomenon of digital art or technically non-fungible tokens where creators could create essentially a coin or a blockchain-based digital piece of art and then sell it out into the marketplace? I mean, that's insanity. So, people are paying millions for this, huh? People are paying millions, tens of millions today and NFT, as they're called, sold for $69 million at Christie's. The artist Banksy, who, you know, we've all seen his paintings around London, had a piece of art that was sold for tens of millions of pounds. The buyer actually burned the original, but kept the digital version, the NFT for himself. So, are we in peak insanity now? Or what's going on, Jamie? I mean, we're all living our digital reality, like reality always, right? I mean, we're here on Zoom. This is like, I feel like it's somehow related to the pandemic, you know? Yeah, I may even have an Evan coin coming out soon. So, we'll talk about that the next episode. In the meantime, I think we have a great guest. Yes. I am very excited to introduce you guys. Of course, you know, we love our guests. We love diving into their background stories, their careers, highs and lows, unique perspectives on the future of our industry. And today, we are very honored to welcome Todd Tweedy. He's the director of sales and marketing for Blackfoot Communications. Todd, welcome. Good morning, Jamie. Good morning, Evan. Yeah, good to see you. You're in the beautiful state of Montana. I see here that you were founded in 1954 at Blackfoot Communications as a local cooperative telephone company. Is that kind of like socialism? Yeah. It's a different business model, if you will, for service providers or telecoms. We've got shareholders. Those are our cooperative members. And we're actually really proud of that heritage. And on more than one occasion, I've seen our CEO, he literally pumps his fist in the air and says, cooperatives are cool. So we're very proud of that heritage. And believe it or not, some of those first cooperative members, they were Montana business owners, Montana ranchers, Montana farmers. And it's gone down through their family. And that actually explains the, Evan's outfit today, right? Range that on. Yes. Yes, I love it. And I love cooperatives, actually. Really shows how important the service that you're providing really serves the community. Makes people rally around it and feel as owners. So it's amazing. So tell us a little bit Todd about yourself and how you got involved in the telecom industry. Sure. A trip down memory lane, lane here. So I've been a Montana resident for about 21 years and I worked for three different telecom companies in that period of time. And the start was, I don't know, somewhat opportunity, opportunistic, maybe somewhat intentional. I had worked for a couple of IT bars and personally found the WAN, the wide area network side of that business. Interesting. And early in my 30s, again, I'm dating myself here, but early in my 30s, I guess I was struck by the entrepreneurial bug and decided to be a partner in a startup ISP company. And it was long enough ago that we were talking 56 K modems and dial up at the time. But really that was my first job, if you will, my first foray into the telecom industry. So you're at the present time deploying fiber optic communications, taking Montana into the 21st, 22nd century. So how did you get there? I mean, what, what have you learned over the years to get you to this, you know, this point in the telecom world? Well, it's interesting to me and in some regard, I feel like it's a little ironic, you know, fiber optics, fiber communication, it's been around for decades. But today it is absolutely the backbone of telecom infrastructure. And, you know, one of our big focuses recently is fiber of the home for those cooperative members. We were talking about just a minute ago, but we also do business with several of the major mobile carriers, the mobile providers in the U.S. And those towers are serviced. They're fed by fiber optic cables. And there's kind of this interesting, you've certainly heard the phrase digital divide. And in some cases that's referring to economic disparity. Well, in the rural West, sometimes that's referring to just the availability of assets and 5G right now is such a buzz phrase or buzz term. And it's very exciting and the capabilities associated with 5G versus 4G and 3G. I mean, exciting times. But those technologies tend to be deployed first in the NFL cities, right? Where the population is the most dense, where you have the most fiber optic assets at your disposal. We get to very rural Montana and there might or might not be fiber available. So when we hear all this buzz about 5G, you know, in certain corners of the rural West, certain corners of Montana, honestly, it's a question mark when those type of services will be available simply because of the infrastructure that may or may not be present. And you know, Todd, as we talk about Blackfoot, we should really mention it to your fabulous reviews, your customer success. You guys are really driven for a culture of excellence, particularly around customer service. What does it take to build a great team? Shoot, I feel like we could have a series, a podcast series on building successful teams. And I really don't think there's a single silver bullet or a single ingredient. I mean, it starts with talented and dedicated professionals. And then I think, you know, starting at the top with the leadership, building a crystal clear understanding of what we're here to do, what's our focus? How do we make money? What are we really good at? And maybe some things that we're not so good at and be willing to walk away from those things that we aren't so good at. And I've heard our CEO, Jason Williams, our CEO talk about, you know, Evan, you commented how long we've been around being founded in 54. Well, he wants us to be around for another six decades. And what we need to be doing from a leadership standpoint, from a strategy standpoint to make sure that happens. So it's really easy to get caught up in tactical things in the here and now. But I think one of the things that's critical to be building a successful team is we always have a vision. Where are we going to be in three years, five years, seven years? And what do we need to do to transform our organization, meet our customer needs, transform our team to be successful in that regard? I'm sure all of us have some folks in our professional career that we would look at as true mentors. And I can remember those, this was a gentleman I worked with years and years ago. You can tell the impact that he had on me because I can still remember to this day some of his quotes. And one of them that I'm so keen of, it was you can't lead where you won't go and you can't teach what you don't know. Which again, from a leadership standpoint, yes, you can surround yourself with talented individuals, but it starts at the top. That vision starts at that top. The dedication starts at that top. And then hopefully you can impart your team members with that vision and that focus and hopefully success is the product of that approach. So, Todd, one of the most interesting aspects of your career right now is on the carrier and services side, working with predominantly rural customers around Montana. That looks like a challenge. Given some of the photos I saw from your customers in a photo contest, give us some good stories there. Do bison regularly dig up your fiber optic lines or what's going on out there in the countryside? Yeah, well, again, a compare and contrast what goes on in Montana to some of the largest metropolitan areas, the NFL cities, where you've got, you know, significantly population density. You've perhaps got a lot of fiber and oh, by the way, you don't have a mountain range in the middle between two cities or a mountain range between two sites where you want line of sight. So the topography can be a challenge in Montana because you don't always have line of sight or line of sight can always be assumed. The lack of population density, of course, there's all kinds of economics of scale that come into play when you're building fiber, deploying networks and, you know, a little while ago we were talking about the difference in population between Southern California and Montana. Southern California has 10x the state of Montana does. So the economics of plowing fiber in some of the rural areas can be challenging. And oftentimes that's where federal subsidies come into play, FCC subsidies. Matter of fact, Blackfoot did just recently participate in the Rural Development Opportunity Fund auction, and we were successful in winning some of those areas. And again, that's an FCC subsidy. So that will actually help expand our network footprint which has advantages to both our residential and our wholesale or carrier services customers. I love this comparison between rural Montana versus other metropolitan areas. And I have a hunch that what you're going to say to this question that I like to often ask our guests, probably might be different due to location, location, location, but what do you see as the top telecom trends that are keeping you guys awake at night or you're keeping a watch on? One was what I touched on a little while ago that 5G is such a buzzword right now, it's an exciting technology it's an exciting time. But I'm a little bit worried in certain corners of the rural west do we really have the infrastructure to support that. When you're talking about connectivity to a cell tower, we have conversations with the providers today that they're talking about we need a 1G backhaul connection. There's talk about 10G and I know this might get a little technical, but some of the small rural providers in Montana their entire core network, their main fiber might only be 10G. So how can they possibly service multiple cell towers if they've got network limitations? So that is one thing that I would like to point out. It's an expensive situation to solve. It takes a lot of money and hopefully the federal government can help us with that. The other one doesn't necessarily keep me awake at night, but it's a trend we're keenly keeping an eye on and embracing and frankly shifting our business model to hopefully meet the marketplace needs and that's been in services to customers, Montana customers, customers across the United States. They're using an MPLS network very secure, very reliable, unfortunately also very expensive. And one of the transitions is to a SD-WAN architecture where I'm using deployment of appliances, deployment of devices and then I go out and procure a couple of what's known as commodity circuits. Just think of everyday broadband circuits. They have a great balance and a great redundancy through the use of these commodity circuits and their studies have been shown that just from a tax saving standpoint, there can be a 40% savings, OPEC savings between an MPLS network and an SD-WAN network. So Jamie, when we think of our enterprise customers and meeting their needs and how their business is trending, that was one we are keenly aware of and we're trying to keep our crosshairs on. And I really can't wait to hear more about the broadband funding and look forward to hearing some great stories on rollout particularly in areas like education and healthcare where there's just a huge gap between bigger cities and suburbs and rural communities. It's one of the pressing things in our country right now, I think. Let me end here with rapid fire questions and feel free to share the first thing that comes to mind. Favorite movie and preferably something based in Montana maybe a cowboy movie, what do you think? No wrong answers then, right Evan? I will be grading these, so yes, don't worry. So favorite Montana movie, River Runs Through It. Oh, a classic. Yes, Robert Redford matter of fact, when that movie was popular, I think that was early 90s. Some of the economic development and tourism businesses and offices in Montana said that movie did more to prop up their business, support their business than any advertising initiatives that they could ever do. Phenomenal, I'm going to re-watch that one. That's definitely a classic. Favorite sport or sports team secretly hoping you'll say hunting and you'll tell us the pheasant story of passion in mind, but favorite sports team hands down the Minnesota Vikings, the NFL. I grew up in Minnesota and my joke is I bleed purple, so big Minnesota Viking fan. Well, there's always next year. Would you say a lot as a Minnesota Viking fan? So, number one spot in the world, you know, where would you like to go now the pandemics as an end in sight? What's on your bucket list? Oh, that one's tough. Greece, Greece. Beaches in Greece look amazing. Yeah, I imagine you don't have beaches in Montana if I know my geography. You have the eighth grade geography, you're right. Ocean's a long ways away. People, the farmers around town, how would they describe you in one word? We have children listening, so please. Passionate. Passionate. I've described myself trying to use more than one word as kind of the poster child for the work hard, play hard. So I've got professional passions. I've got personal passions. Passionate would probably be a good one word description. Awesome. One of our GSA core values, actually, to be passionate about our clients and our industry and our team. I love that one. Good job. Thank you so much, Todd, for joining us. We really got such fabulous insight, not only on Blackfoot communications, your company, but also your leadership, your insights into our industry. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks, Jamie. And if you guys enjoyed watching today's episode of Data Movers, please go ahead and check out jsa.net slash podcast where we have upcoming episodes being released every other week on Wednesday morning. So check us out there. And follow us on Twitter at Jay Scotto and Evan Curstell and look forward to networking. Yep. And as always, guys, networking.