Darcy Guidry: [00:00] And I don’t know why it’s still, somebody just called.
Max Clark: It’s actually a good reminder.
Darcy Guidry: Yep.
Max Clark: do not disturb you know, silence, turn off teams, slack, all that good fun stuff.
Darcy Guidry: I did. I just quit teams. Um,
Max Clark: these things, even when you turn them off, have a, have a nasty habit of beeping at you still. So it’s,
Darcy Guidry: yeah. And I’m not sure how to turn off my notifications on Outlook if I’m not even logged in, but
Max Clark: fun?
Darcy Guidry: sometimes it still pops up.
Max Clark: Yeah,
Darcy Guidry: Um,
Max Clark: that one, that one. They really, they really wanna get you, you know?
Darcy Guidry: yeah, it happens. It never fails. It happens during a slideshow
Max Clark: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Darcy Guidry: when I’m presenting.
Max Clark: they wanna make sure you get that notification that that email is super important, that you have it, that you see it, you respond to it, and you do something with it.
Darcy Guidry: I’m gonna turn off my [01:00] phone while we’re power off, just to confirm. All right. That way we don’t have any of that.
So how are you?
Max Clark: well, I’m just doing a billion things, trying to get ready to get outta town for two months.
Darcy Guidry: Oh really? Two months. Wow.
Max Clark: I mean, summer summer’s here,
Darcy Guidry: Yeah.
Max Clark: you know,
Darcy Guidry: Well, you really, uh, go all out. I mean, I know a lot of people that vacation during the summer, but, um, two months. Where are you going?
Max Clark: we’ve, we’ve got a, we’ve got a big trip. Um, my sister-in-law’s in London through the end of June, so it became, normally we end up in Los Angeles or basically the summer. So we’re from la our family’s in la everybody, we, you know, like it, it’s this, this, there’s this gravitational pull back to Los Angeles that just happens. Um, I’m gonna mute, make myself smaller here while I’m thinking about it, ’cause it’s distracting to look at myself. Um. So we end up in Los Angeles. So this year, so [02:00] my sister-in-law’s in, in, in London through the end of June, that kind of became this like, you know, she and my wife were talking and, and it was, um, you know, Hey, come out and visit us while we’re here, you know, kind of thing. And, um, and then, uh, just kind of, you know, on a life of its own a little bit. I went a little extreme with it, I guess you could say. Like, Hey, you know,
Darcy Guidry: I mean, you’re already going over the pond, right?
Max Clark: we’re gonna be there, we might as well be there. You know? Um,
Darcy Guidry: Yep.
Max Clark: really it’s also this thing where it’s like, um, you know, it’s like you start adding up things where it’s like summer camp that they would normally go into. It’s, it’s like they, they. Sending out this thing, and it’s like, you don’t know what’s gonna happen because of the fires and the post fires. And can they do the camp? Can they not do the camp? Oh, if we do the camp, it’s gonna be a week for them to be in camp. And then
Darcy Guidry: Sanity.
Max Clark: like, okay, so it’s $5,000 a week for them to be a month to be in camp Plus, you know, [03:00] and then you start like running through everything and you’re like, well, I mean, and for a penny in for a pound, like, might as
Darcy Guidry: Mm-hmm.
Max Clark: just like go really nuts and just do something cra, you know?
So it’s like I, I talked myself into this like, nutso thing. My wife thinks I’m completely nuts. She’s probably right. But, you know, here we go.
Darcy Guidry: Well, nuts is not always bad ’cause it’ll give you a lot of stories to tell and a lot of experiences in life. Uh, but my.
Max Clark: just, they just finished first and second grade. So we’ve got rising second and third graders and this kind of trip, like you, have a, you have a limited horizon for when you can pull this kind of stuff off. I think.
Darcy Guidry: Yeah, they may or may not remember all of it, but I’m sure there’ll be a few key memories made. Um, my son’s 11 so he’s already like, when are you gonna take me to Europe? And I’m like, whenever, you know, I can afford it, but I know he really wants to make some more memories. Um, we waited to take him to Disney until he was nine ’cause we didn’t want it [04:00] to be something he wouldn’t really remember.
Um, if we’re gonna spend that kind of money and go on a trip like that. ’cause Disney’s not cheap. But yeah, my girlfriends and I were texting yesterday and she sent a meme to the group and, uh. There, it was like no one told me when I had kids that camp would be a million dollars, like every summer. I said, I know.
Last summer I tried to keep him busy almost every week of the summer and I, it almost broke me like, um, every bit of my commissions went to summer camps last year. This year he’s 11 so he can play with his friends and keep himself occupied and I’ve got him signed up for like a library club and all this stuff, but the only weeks that he’s actually in camp are weeks where I have to be on the road for more than, you know, a couple hours.
And, um, I just couldn’t, I couldn’t do it and justify put myself in a poor house because of camp. It’s ridiculous.
Max Clark: a couple of camps that are really popular [05:00] are like $5,000 a week. And I’m like, I’m like, and you, you, you hear like fa and like 10, you know, kids go for two weeks, three weeks. You’re like, you’re like, how, how, how do, how? Like, how, you know,
Darcy Guidry: Rich people.
Max Clark: it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, and I mean everything.
It’s like, um. You know, show me your calendar, I’ll show you your priorities, you know, kind of thing.
Darcy Guidry: Mm-hmm.
Max Clark: and yeah, I mean, there are some just obscenely wealthy families and then there’s families just as like, this is what we’re gonna do with our kids. Like,
Darcy Guidry: Yeah,
Max Clark: to,
Darcy Guidry: we make it happen.
Max Clark: do it.
You know, I, I know of some families that do Disney every year, and I have no idea how they do it. I don’t think they
Darcy Guidry: No,
Max Clark: else, but they do Disney every year, you know, and, but also, you know, in that case, like the parents are, are really into Disney. So like the kids are just kinda along for the ride,
Darcy Guidry: There’s one in my neighborhood like that. They go every year, [06:00] but she’s a Disney travel agent on the side. So she books other people’s Disney trips and all the money she makes from that allows her to take her family. Actually a couple times a year they go more than once. It’s insane. I don’t, yeah.
Max Clark: Um,
Darcy Guidry: So how do I sound?
Everything sounds good
Max Clark: good.
Darcy Guidry: your side. Okay.
Max Clark: uh, any, any last minute questions or anything you want, you know. I can tell
Darcy Guidry: Um, I didn’t really prep much. I mean, I figure it’s just a conversation. Yeah. I mean, it’s just a conversation. I actually do better with that then I don’t, then I don’t psycho or overanalyze what I’m gonna say. Um,
Max Clark: jacks
Darcy Guidry: conversa.
Max Clark: get like, you
Darcy Guidry: Yeah, right. No, I’m good. I’ve got my coffee shake. Uh,
Max Clark: a thing I read. There’s like, there is actually a like, science behind like doing jumping jacks or burpees or something before you get on stage. Like it actually is, it’s like,
Darcy Guidry: pumped you up.
Max Clark: thing. And I’m like, so then now of
Darcy Guidry: I’m not that girl.
Max Clark: of all these keynote speakers, like off in the, off in the background behind the tent, [07:00] you know, like behind the curtain doing burpees before they go out.
It’s just like,
Darcy Guidry: Check the checks, maybe burpees, snow for me, uh, my knees and back wouldn’t allow it. But, uh, jumping the jets maybe. I did, um, do an event two weeks ago and I’m not great at public speaking. I’m good at small groups and one-on-ones and stuff. I mean, I talk for a living, right? Uh, it is basically what we do and everybody was like, just be yourself.
And I’m like, yeah, that’s so easy to say. But when you’re in a room full of 50 plus and everybody’s looking at you and you have to hold a microphone and not drop it and not trip. And I started like, really?
Max Clark: yeah. You can
Darcy Guidry: And I got up there and I told ’em as soon as I got there, I go, anybody else afraid of public speaking?
Because that’s me. But once I got going, I couldn’t shut up. And it was fine. It was just getting over the nerve stage. But I did listen to some pump up music before I.
Max Clark: Love it. Uh, uh, just to confirm, we can’t name this company by name, right? This is an anonymous [08:00] Okay,
Darcy Guidry: Oh yeah. Uh, there’s very few customers we have that are public facing names. Um
Max Clark: just like to ask, you know, some people say yes. I mean, we do a lot of security stuff and like, I’m surprised with the ones that then disclose what’s really funny about that. Um, I’ll just, this tangent before we get into this, um. I, uh, I have a lot of conversations around cybersecurity, you know, whether it’s
Darcy Guidry: mm-hmm.
Max Clark: or whether it’s with, with an end user, right? And, the end users are always like, really cagey. Like, they don’t wanna talk about what they have. And it’s like, I cannot, in my job capacity help you. Like, I cannot help you if I do not know what’s going on, right? Like, I need to know in order to help you. And, and I remember this one conversation really clearly, and the, the guy was, um, it’s a relatively big in, uh, nonprofit.
They had, uh, there were like a thousand and, um, the CIO and he’s like, he doesn’t wanna disclose any of their cybersecurity. And I was like, look, I know everything that you’re running. You don’t have to tell me anything. Like, you’re running this, you’ve got this, you’re doing this thing. [09:00] You’ve had problems with these things.
You’ve got this other thing going on. And, you know, and it’s like, there aren’t that many, there aren’t that many flow charts, like, like flow paths here. You know? Like you answer a couple questions a certain way, it’s like, okay, that eliminates that one, that whole like tree, that branch, that tree just went bye bye.
You know? And.
Darcy Guidry: Yep.
Max Clark: And, and, uh, it’s, so, it’s, whatever. I don’t care. You know? I’m not offended by it. It’s just, it’s just the, it’s just a game that we have to play. So, um, we are recording. Okay, cool. Uh, um, I was thinking about how to start this, Darcy, and, um, I, I want to, I think I’m gonna do this a little outta order from what I normally do. And let’s
Darcy Guidry: Okay.
Max Clark: can you give me, gimme like a, the, the foot view, like of Epic io, right? Like, let’s just start all the way at the top and then we’ll jump into customer story and then we’ll kind of jump back and I think that’ll help set the stage a little better. Yeah.
Darcy Guidry: Okay. Yeah. So [10:00] I’ll just tell a story. Uh, EPIC IO is actually culmination of a couple of companies. Three to be exact. Uh, originally in the channel it was Broad Sky Networks. So we’ve been the wireless experts for over 25 years. Um, actually have done satellite and wireless and POTS for many years. And then about five and a half years ago, a private equity firm came in and decided to acquire us alongside a company called Intellis site.
And Intellis site is the IOT side of our business. Uh, they had proprietary AI tools, um, site security, computer visions, um, smart compute at the edge. They saw a trend in the market and a need for making this a safer, smarter world and wanted to be a part of that evolution. And so they acquired both because A IOT needs connectivity.
Every device at the edge needs some sort of connectivity and or failover. Um, in some cases if they’re using their primary network, but a lot of times they wanna separate [11:00] the network too. To just a wireless connection so that it’s less likely to be hacked or corrupted if the primary network is. Um, so they acquired both and rebranded us under the name Epic io and I was actually on the partners side of the community whenever that whole acquisition happened.
I sold Broadsky for years. Um, set up an internal practice with them. Um, the partner group that I was a part of is still one of our top sellers and, um, one of our strategic partners and on our advisory council. So that says a lot about the longevity of our partnerships too, even through an acquisition and a rebranding, we’ve never lost our gold standard in connectivity and our superior customer service and post-sale support, plus our, um, channel team is just.
Rockstar Stellar. And, uh, we, we do a very good job of supporting our partners in doing everything we can to help them run their business. Um, and then about a year ago, actually April, a year ago, [12:00] we acquired another company out of Irving, Texas called 2020 Solutions. And they were actually one of the few, um, A IOT competitors in our space.
And we shared a lot of the same clientele, um, split books of business with them, did a lot of the same, um, solutions, and it just made sense to absorb them and their, you know, their clients. We didn’t just absorb their business, we absorbed their team and their pro processes and their COO is now our CEO.
So he’s done a lot of, um, process improvement optimization. Um, we ha we absorbed their, their live soc. We have a, a new HQ two in Dallas opening now, uh, which is real exciting. Our primary is in Fort Mills, South Carolina, which is where the Epic IO brand kind of was born. Um, and not a lot of people know this, although it’s becoming more common knowledge, but Ken Mills, that [13:00] is the, um, president at ScanSource Intelysis used to be our CEO and his, his team is a big advocate for us too because they see that, um, there is a need and that we fulfill that very well.
And the technology is just, um, is above standard. And, um, anyway, so we combine the two, but we still sell them separately. Um, we do like offering a full turnkey solution, a full package, uh, you know, if you want to utilize all of our strengths, but we can also sell ’em a la carte. Uh, we still have a very strong channel centric practice.
We do have a few direct customers, large accounts, mostly on the A IOT side of things, but we’re starting to cross sell and learn, uh, and bring in some of that team to the channel as well. But I was like
Max Clark: No. Yeah. No, no. That’s what I wanna do. Okay. Um,
Darcy Guidry: me to start over.
Max Clark: We’re not starting over again.
Darcy Guidry: Okay.
Max Clark: this [14:00] together. It’s been wonderful. Denise is gonna have a lot of fun with this. Hi,
Darcy Guidry: Mm-hmm.
Max Clark: Um, okay. There’s, uh. I want to, Darcy, I’m gonna come back and I’ve, I’ve, I’ve scribbled notes. ’cause I wanna, I want to tear a lot of this apart.
I wanna start with this case study, and then I want to come back to the overview and then talk about industry and terminology. And, you sent me a, um, a story around, um, a na uh, a physical therapy practice. And this is, I, I love this kind of stuff because so many companies wouldn’t say like, Hey, we’re a technology business. I, I don’t think very mini, many, like physical therapy practices are like evaluating and thinking of themselves as like, a technology company. No. It’s like, no, we do physical therapy. Right? Like, you know, we have a computer but we don’t think about it. You know, like that’s. I, I, gonna go out on a limb here and say it’s a pretty common experience I’ve had, you know, interacting with companies and, and, uh, I, I [15:00] think it becomes really relevant.
So I, I, I, what I’d like to talk about and get into a little bit is beyond this, like, well, they’re a national physical therapy practice. Like, what did that actually mean? What is the profile? What is the, the profile? What were they doing? how were their operations running? You know, like, what can you tell me about from like a background from like, um, like where they were as a business?
Darcy Guidry: Well, so they were a regional company that was starting to expand and go national. Uh, so their footprint was growing rapidly and they needed to be able to scale and get those, um, brick and mortars up and running quickly. And they ran into some issues with, uh, getting primary connectivity installed in a timely manner, which we all face that from time to time where fiber and, and or coax is gonna need construction to build into a new building.
And it could be six months, it could be a year. You never know, right? Um, if it’s already at the building, it’s, it can still take 60 [16:00] days or longer to get, get it deployed. So, um, wireless gave them the option to. Bring a primary connection with a high usage plan temporarily until that wire line or terrestrial internet could be installed.
And then we were able to roll that back to a backup solution once their wireline solution was in place. So it saved a lot of,
Max Clark: a physical?
Darcy Guidry: I’m sorry.
Max Clark: was having an internet connection an issue for a physical therapy practice?
Darcy Guidry: Well, they have to be able to host their EMR system and phones and, um, be able to upload and download HIPAA compliancy. I mean, there was, there’s a lot to it. They need internet connectivity. Every business does, right. Um, just like they need power to the building or water. Nobody’s asking questions about that.
Uh, but it never fails that executives are like, yeah, let’s open 20 new stores, um, next month. And they don’t realize that, uh, technology’s just as important to get [17:00] the business up and running in a lot of cases. Um, and they think it’s easy and that it can just be popped up right away. And the reality is, is that wireline service for internet connectivity, which is the baseline of everybody’s business right now, um, it’s the backbone of operations is takes time to install and implement correctly.
And, um, wireless has grown and become more robust and more stable to where it can provide that and keep not just the point of sale running, but other critical applications going. So it gets you up and running and or be there in the event of an outage.
Max Clark: I deal with this a lot, right? And I, I think this is true with a lot of people that are in the like, operational side of the business, whether it’s IT operations, facilities, operations, you know, a decision is made. Somewhere within the organization. Like, we’re gonna go, we’re gonna, we’re gonna sign a lease at this, at this property.
We’re gonna, we’re gonna buy a building, we’re gonna sign a lease, we’re gonna move into this thing. And, you know, until, until organizationally, [18:00] it like evolves to the point where like the operations or facilities operations are really developed. And part of the process, you know, you get this phone call, it’s like, Hey, we signed this lease, we’re moving in in two weeks.
Like, let’s go. Right? And then there becomes this mad dash and this mad scramble, right? And, and again, companies that are not, let’s say, uh, like it first don’t really think about these things the same way. It’s like, oh, okay, again, we’re doing physical therapy. Like, what do we need? We need, you know, bouncy balls and, and you know, and, and stability boards and balance boards and like this and, and tables.
And we’re gonna do, you know, exercises and put people, you know, through the paces. But, you know, um, from a basic standpoint, right? Like you have to schedule clients to show up. Well, how do you schedule clients to show up? You have. Scheduling system, which is now running via the internet. Right. Or you have point of sale, so you have to process credit cards or you have to fill out forms, or you have to connect with insurance or, okay, so internet internet’s really [19:00] important in this case.
So, so how, you know, as this expansion is running, then hit a wall, right? Where it’s just like, wait a minute, I can’t expand the business anymore because now I found that got this thing that’s keeping me from opening locations, which isn’t impacting my cash flow and like revenue and, and scaling plans and everything else starts to apply. what was the wall that really like forced this as a, was it, was it just as simple as like, we just need to go faster, or, you know, what, what
Darcy Guidry: And then cost. Cost came into, yeah. Um, it becomes costly if you’re just throwing more money at it and hoping that you can get it up and running. Um, and then you realize, whoa, we need to slow our role and come up with a. A more simplified solution and aggregate into a bill, uh, have true management over all of [20:00] our connections.
Um, so that’s a value add that we have to using our wireless window platform. Now, uh, is a true sim management platform. So you can see all your sim connections across all your locations, see who’s pulling what data, um, who’s trending towards overages more often. Uh, you can really see that analytical data and how it’s all performing.
Um, now in a lot of cases, um, they were also experiencing, um, hey, let’s go back and revisit our existing store, our existing locations, right? Um, yes, we wanna expand and we’re growing and we’re implementing new at our new locations, but let’s evaluate what we have existing and how we can show some cost savings there.
So that we can then use that, that funding towards the growth of our business. So we actually started there too, is just providing them wireless backup at every location. And now we’re doing a POTS project for them too. So POTS replacement over [21:00] LTE and now 5G. And with the new devices we offer, it’s pots plus failover connectivity all in one device, which helps reduce cost, uh, eliminates an extra point of failure.
Um, it’s a bundled solution and it is 5G capable now. So it brings even more reliability to those and, um, stability to those essential, uh, alarm lines and elevator lines and things of that sort.
Max Clark: let’s, I wanna jump back to that. I wanna come back to something else that you said, which was, um, businesses constrained, can’t open locations, has to wait for internet service to get installed, causing financial impact to the company, right? Expansion can’t occur, can’t have revenue, have people waiting in leases, probably staff already, you know, trying to hire,
Darcy Guidry: Yeah.
Max Clark: hire therapists at different locations. Um, that creates a lot of strain. So, okay, we need a different solution, different solution becomes, let’s install, you know, wireless internet, right? Which is like for, I think for a lot of [22:00] people, becomes this idea of like. That’s like your, your like last option, right? It’s like if people kind of, kind of, you know, I find that like wireless is really this idea of like, oh, we’re gonna do everything else and if we can’t, if nothing else works, like, okay, we’ll try this wireless thing.
Right? And okay, so,
Darcy Guidry: Yeah.
Max Clark: so when they try this wireless thing, wireless thing works, is works and, and then that turns into, and, and the next thing that, the next part that you’d said was a reevaluation of existing locations, right? And what costs do they have in the existing locations and can they change that cost? You know, the how much and the scale of things. I’m trying to think, I’m trying to phrase this in a way that’s not like too much like inside baseball or like leading here too much. I’m trying not to lead the witness, but the. Wireline services, you know, dedicated fiber, and then you have broadband services, cable modem, and, you know, [23:00] um, fiber to the premise, you know, solutions, you know, some sort of shared, shared fiber access, like how much cost differential do you really have, you know, across this portfolio of saying like, let’s go get rid of wireline take 300 stores into wireless.
Darcy Guidry: So. Let’s talk about the evolution of wireless a little bit too. So it started with 3G uh, you know, 25 years ago when we got into this, it was, um, I think it was like HughesNet or 3G, and that was about it. And then, um, we kind of got out of the satellite space and focused more on the wireless. And it has evolved over time to, uh, more stable 4G and towers everywhere.
Uh, and then now you’re seeing that 5G and 5G plus, uh, growth in the market. Uh, 5G is a much stronger signal and has more advanced capabilities, less jitter, more throughput, uh, more stability for the connection. Wireless can’t be cut, I [24:00] mean, unless a tower is taken out by a natural disaster, which we saw back in October, uh, during the hurricanes, right?
But there was few and far between, and there’s always another tower nearby. There’s always another carrier that can kind of, um, fill that gap. Um, so 5G is becoming more prominent. They are having, they’re popping up more and more 5G towers and they’re going back and converting 4G towers to 5G capable. Uh, so you’re seeing more and more of that.
It’s becoming just as stable if not already is, um, as a coax connection and in some cases a fiber connection. Uh, I, I saw the evolution of wireless, um, from another point of view from the customer side for a while, and it was wireless as a last ex, uh, last resort. Like you said, it was always fiber and then coax if I could get it, um, or coax and coax even in some cases.
Uh, and this was even before the su wan [25:00] boom, right? It was all MPLS networks where it was, um, dias everywhere I could get it, uh, with MPLS and, um, the evolution there has changed too. SU wan kind of changed the game where you don’t have to have that MPLS network anymore. Uh. Technology’s always evolving and changing to the rapid needs of the, of the public.
And wireless is no different. Uh, we can provide a failover solution with a low usage plan that’s sitting, waiting to be needed in the event of an outage per se, and it can be a one gigabyte or a two gigabyte. And if it’s across multiple locations like this customer, it was probably a one gigabyte pooled plan, which if you think 500 locations, one gigabyte each, what does that give them?
Right? That’s a pretty big bucket of data that they can use in the event that one or even five other stores have an outage one month. Then we can also do proactive alerting, letting them know when they’re trending towards an overage and when we need to [26:00] possibly upgrade them temporarily for that month or during that, um, catastrophe.
Uh, there’s a lot. We have a lot of flexibility there. Um, where I was headed with this is that, um. Wireless as a failover and a low usage plan in a dormant type situation where it’s just kind of a passive failover if needed, can be as cheap as 50 bucks a month versus a coax, it’s gonna be, um, 50 to 250 depending on the carrier.
Yes, they’re bundling. Um, yes, aggregators are really getting competitive on that, but you also often see that coax and fiber follow the same paths, point of entries, D marks, they’re in the same pipes in the ground in some cases, if not right next to each other. If a backhoe is doing construction down the street from your business and they hit a pipe more than likely, or the chances are high, they’re gonna hit both, and then both your terrestrial internet are gonna be down [27:00] and you’re gonna be looking, well, why didn’t I have a tertiary well.
In that scenario, you’re kind of outta luck. And the good news is, is that Epic can also deploy out emergency connectivity even as quick as next day if we get an expedite order by noon central time. So there’s a lot of ways we can help. We can come in and be the, the hero and rescue them, but also then stay in, stay in place as insurance for not if there’s gonna be an outage, but when is there gonna be an outage?
Max Clark: The
Darcy Guidry: Did that answer your question? I feel like I tend to ramble.
Max Clark: we’re, we’re, I, I’m taking notes. Don’t
Darcy Guidry: Okay.
Max Clark: let, I’m, I’m, I’m not gonna,
Darcy Guidry: Okay.
Max Clark: back to a lot of stuff here. The, I think I ran about a lot within the tech space is marketing and this like, um, bastardization of, of terminology in a marketing construct to try to create solutions when there’s no [28:00] problems. 5G 5G launches as a marketing term by a carrier that just pushes in firmware update down to cell phones and say, Hey look, we’re 5G now. And by a technical standard it’s still like a an LTE network. Right? You know? And now we have like towers being replaced and five G’s out there. And so now we have this thing of like 5G plus is there, which is like really 5G that’s come out. Carriers have been pushing 5G as like the like savior for the last decade plus, right?
We’re like, we’re gonna empower, you know, like flying cars because we have 5G on the edge. You know, you see this like marketing things that come out of it and like, I think the average person and, and, and you know, unfortunately the adoption rate hasn’t gone through the roof on 5G because the average person or executive is looking at this and being like, I don’t have a flying car.
I need to empower at the edge and I don’t even understand how 5G makes this work. Right? It’s like really nice ad campaign fill in the blank carrier, but like what, what’s the, what’s the purpose here? And [29:00] um, you know, and so, you know, that crosses over then, then get kind of two, we get a couple of issues, right.
That Epic has to contend with. Right? So like the first one becomes like technology acceptance by, I. By the enterprise. Can we, does wireless even solve this problem for us? What is the problem we’re trying to solve here, um, is in the headspace of a potential solution for this problem, right? Like, oh, we’re gonna go wireless primary for primary internet at, at our retail locations as we’re, you know, deploying, you know, 10 locations a month.
We’re just gonna go, you know, like until somebody’s crossed that bridge, like that doesn’t, that’s not like a primary head space for them. Um, and, and, you know, so, so like, how, you know, like, where, where, I’m gonna actually try to make a question here. It’s like, and this has been available for a really long time.
Three G’s been available for a really long time. You know, we’re talking like first generation iPhone, like really go [30:00] back, you know, this is not new. been the inflection point where like adoption has finally started to curve up for you guys in terms of like, people understanding like, we can actually use this and this is actually applicable to us.
Darcy Guidry: I think the biggest thing is when they have the need when there’s nothing else, like you said, and it was a last ditch resort, and then they see, oh, it actually does work. It actually does, you know, solve our, our issue in previous iterations, like 3G and some of the 4G, right? It was just a few essential applications, being able to stay up and running, like I mentioned before, point of sale per se, in a retail environment.
That’s number one. They wanna be able to process transactions and make that money. We, we actually rescued quite a few retail stores the week of, uh, black Friday, because never fails when a holiday’s coming up and they’ve got big sales going on, that’s when you start having outages. Uh, [31:00] but once it’s there and they see that it works and they’re like, oh, well we can do this at more of our locations while we’re waiting for fiber.
Oh, well then we can keep it after the fiber’s installed and we don’t even have to get coax now. And you know, and then word of mouth spreads. ’cause CTOs and CIOs talk to other CTOs and CIOs and, um, IT managers hang out with other IT managers. It never fails. Like word of mouth spreads. Right. Um, I mean, how did you hear about Epic io?
Did you visit our website? Did you hear about it from a friend?
Max Clark: I, I’m,
Darcy Guidry: You tell me. I.
Max Clark: I’m a different, completely different animal. Like, like I, I’m in the business of, of finding technology solutions to sit, you know, in different categories, right? Like, we have a team.
Darcy Guidry: Googled it.
Max Clark: Did we Google you? No, we didn’t Google you. Like I, I’m
Darcy Guidry: Okay.
Max Clark: that like, that’s actually what we did not do. Like, it’s
Darcy Guidry: Okay.
Max Clark: it’s not,
Darcy Guidry: What’s usually word of
Max Clark: yeah.
Darcy Guidry: mouth? Uh, or, or like you said, people, the experts are doing that [32:00] research and then they share what their findings. Um.
Max Clark: tell you I wasn’t, um, you know, I have a team that does a lot of this now in our portfolio, but like, um, this, this actually is a good segue into another question, right? Which is. When you look at, um, IT infrastructure and technology infrastructure, a lot of times you have an underlying carrier, right?
And so in the data center space now, people are referring to it as getting closer to the metal, like bare metal versus cloud, right? And in the, in the telecom space, you had the, the lack, you know, the infrastructure provider in this case, you know, the mobility network, I hate that term, but you have the mobility provider who has owns cell phone towers and is the network provider. even though, like MVM N BMOs have been a thing, MVNOs have been a thing for a long time now. you, you run into the second part, which is why use an epic versus using, you know, the carrier directly. Now, I, I have my
Darcy Guidry: Good
Max Clark: answer, but I, you know, this, this is for you to answer.[33:00]
Darcy Guidry: Good question. So we don’t, we’re not an MVNO connection. Um, ours goes straight to the, the pop. So. We have a little, it’s, it’s a business grade solution. Um, of course everybody spots that they’re doing the same, right? Um, EPIC is different in that we have been doing wireless so long. We have so many smart people on our team that ha are experts in the wireless field.
Our VP of solutions engineering has worked at at t and T-Mobile and Verizon. He knows the ins and outs of, he helped develop those programs. So there’s an expert on our side that’s making sure we have the best solution possible. Another thing is we run every address or every location through a best carrier selection process.
So we have a live crowdsourcing data tool along with our historical data over the years. Uh, that tells us who’s performing better in what areas. When you pull up, say Verizon’s website, they’re gonna show you a blanket of color and say, we’re everywhere. We have 5G everywhere. Right? [34:00] They all say that. Um.
Not saying that they’re lying, but there are gonna be some areas where one is stronger than the other, or there are gonna be some gaps where there maybe aren’t any of ’em. Uh, which is where starlink comes into play, right? That’s gonna be your, Hey, I can’t get anything else nowadays. Uh, but on the wireless piece, we’re gonna truly vet out who’s gonna be the best carrier.
Where are the towers position? What’s your building look like? Do you need an external antenna or an external modem? Um, we’re not just slinging routers and hoping they work. We are here to provide a solution that works and to create longevity with our customers, um, create true partnerships and, um, we make wireless work.
We always do dual sim, so there’s a built-in failover redundancy with sim in slot two, uh, as a secondary carrier. Um, as soon as I got my epic router last year, my home office, uh, T-Mobile is the nearest 5G Tower. So T-Mobile’s my [35:00] primary. Sure enough, a month into it they had an outage. And luckily Verizon is also near nearby, so I was able to activate sim two and ride on the Verizon network.
Now, on a typical day, I’m getting like 600 down and six up, uh, on my T-Mobile ’cause it’s the closest and the strongest signal. Uh, but whenever I was on the Verizon, I was still getting 300 down and, you know, 40 up it on any typical day. Now I’m not in the middle of town. I am on the edge of town, so I don’t compete with a lot of other wireless business users.
Um, there’s mostly cell phone users in my neighborhood, but that just goes to show you, there is a secondary sim there for a reason because nobody’s perfect and carriers do have outages. It’s not if it’s when. And, um, wireless works. I mean, I operate 20 operating systems all day long. I’m on. Every kind of streaming service, every kind of [36:00] podcast, um, Google Meet, you know, uh, teams.
I must be in three or four different hosting sites a day. And my internet never fails me. Never. And I’m only on the epic router.
Max Clark: The, uh, the other, the other version of that answer is, is until you have worked with the carrier directly, you don’t understand maybe why you don’t wanna
Darcy Guidry: Oh
Max Clark: carrier
Darcy Guidry: yeah. Right. So since we are the aggregator of wireless, right? We hold those, um, wholesale agreements with all the carriers, and you don’t have to worry about who, who the carrier is, even at your edge, we’ll manage that relationship. You never have to work directly with the carrier. Um, if there’s an outage, our team handles the trouble tickets and does the troubleshooting with you.
Uh, we have proactive alerting on the system that tells you when you’re having an outage. Right. And, um. It really is just letting us be that ISP instead of them one throat [37:00] to choke. I know everybody says that ’cause it’s not technically one throat to choke. Uh, we’re not every carrier in the world and we don’t do wireline.
But in the wireless space, we would be, we would be your one stop to call for help and get support. And our customer support’s definitely better than an at t or or Verizon Direct. Most of these businesses, like the case study we’re talking about today, they have over 500 locations. Can you imagine them working with all three carriers?
Depending on which location, which carrier, what a mess that must be. We’ve saved them man hours, headaches, cost. Um, there’s, there’s a lot of, um, stuff that’s not just financial impact. It’s what’s it worth to you so that you can rest easy knowing that you’re being taken care of and that your sites are, um, gonna have that uptime that they need for, um.
Max Clark: A million years ago, I was working as a field engineer. I was a network engineer for a, uh, a consultancy, and we [38:00] were on nextels. And these were like, of course, if you, if you missed the Nextel era, this was like the greatest thing that ever happened in the world of like cellular connectivity. We little walkie talkie action. uh, and I’ll never forget it because one day they just stopped working at the office. And in this case, what ended up
Darcy Guidry: What ended.
Max Clark: the, um, I’m getting a lot of feedback. All of a sudden. Hello? Oh, there it went and came back. Uh, so what had happened was Nextel had taken and angled the antenna, the cell phone site to push it out a few degrees and another angle to get like, coverage over, you know, this is in Santa Monica over the bay, you know, and get some like water coverage. And it took, I think it, it was, I mean, we’re talking like it took over a week before they finally got somebody that knew what had happened and what the resolution was. And in this case, we were a big enough customer that Nextel was like, okay, well [39:00] somebody out and we’ll like push it back for you.
You know, because like, but it, you know, like nowadays, like there would be no resolution. That’d be, they’d be like, oh yeah, whatever. Like good luck. Have fun. Sorry. Sorry, it doesn’t work. You know, like what? You know, like I can’t do anything to help you here. Um, there’s a transition. There’s a transition when we talk about like wireline to wireless, that affects a lot of people, which is understanding the billing, understanding the consumption of it, right?
Because in wireline services, we talk about speed. What speed are you, are you purchasing? And, and you, and you, you know, you get a menu of speed options usually for the location. And it’s like, how much do you want to pay? And like, there’s an, there’s this like access between speed and affordability or budget or whatever it is.
And you’re like, I want the fastest speed within this dollar amount. And you’re like, okay, great. You’re gonna get this speed. You’re gonna get a hundred meg, get 500 meg or a thousand meg. You’re gonna get, you know, 10 gig, whatever, whatever that speed is with most wireless services. And what you’ve said earlier here is that changes to a consumption. You know, it’s not, it’s like you have, you still have this construct of [40:00] speed. You know, you’re quoting speeds between T-Mobile and Verizon and you know, for yourself. But then in addition to that, you’ve also got like, oh, what kind of plan are you on? Is it one gig? Is it two gig? Is it 10 gig? Is it how many?
And. How do you walk a customer through that transition and understanding? Because like if you asked me how much data throughput do you use in a given month, I have no idea. I don’t monitor it, I don’t pay attention to it. I’m not looking at that, you know, and, and until, you know, so like, what, what, how, how does somebody figure out and understand like, what is this gonna cost?
Like how much do I actually need? What, what is our, our data, you know, pro, you know, profile, right? Like,
Darcy Guidry: So if they’re not already using any kind of wireless, so they don’t know what their usage has been in the past, uh, and they’re starting from scratch, I usually just ask, what’s the use case? Uh, is it gonna be temporary primary until your internet’s installed? Um, is it gonna be strictly failover? That tells me a [41:00] lot about which router category we’re gonna go.
Um, do you want it to be wifi capable? How many users are gonna be utilizing this connection? Uh, what other appliances are connected to it? Is there an SD wan or a firewall appliance connected to it? ’cause that’s gonna ping a certain amount of usage as well. Just monitoring the upstate and um, if there’s any kind of VPN tunneling or anything that helps us.
Uh, direct them to maybe the right usage plan. And if they really don’t know, I would start them. Typically, uh, my default is like a two gigabyte failover and then we can increase as needed. Um, I usually only do one gigabytes if it’s multiple locations where they can have a large pool of data, uh, because more than likely it’s gonna be connected to some sort of firewall or SC WAN appliance, and they’re gonna need that little bit of extra data.
Um. Even when it’s not in use, it’s just verifying that there’s a connection there as needed. Um, if they have more than that and they know they’re gonna be [42:00] running some applications over it, that’s when we jump to five or 10 gig. And then there’s high usage plans for those customers that are gonna be using it a lot more.
Um, if they’re only using it for their iot devices and we know it’s gonna be live streaming video content from, um, cameras or something along those lines, or iot or any kind of sensors, right? Then we wanna look at how much data does that device pool. Uh, typical, I mean you can even Google it chat. GBT will tell you, you know, like what is a typical usage on so and so device.
Um, and then you can go from there. And I usually like to start low and then upgrade as needed. It’s much easier to upgrade than it is to downgrade. Now we can, we do have that flexibility where we can do temporary upgrades in the event of an outage or high usage month. Um, busy season for our tech consultants and our CPAs right now, you know that that was a big push just in the last two months.
Um, and then now they’re [43:00] downgrading again and we have that ability because we are the ISP of record and we can, um, at the first of the month, then downgrade them back to a, a lower usage plan as needed. Um, but when they’re just not sure, I start low and work my way up from there. You never wanna sign ’em up for more than they need.
Uh, we’re not in the business of selling customers something they don’t need, and we definitely don’t wanna make our money in overages. So we have that flexibility where we can upgrade as needed.
Max Clark: You mentioned pots, a K, a, Plano telephone, a K, a Analog lines. What is going on in the
Darcy Guidry: Yeah.
Max Clark: today?
Darcy Guidry: Hot topic, man. Um, I know POTS has been around forever, so play no telephone service. Uh, most people are like, what’s pots? If they don’t know what it is, it’s, it’s your, uh, phone line, your landline. Uh, most people had one in their house growing up. Uh, not this generation, but my generation and before, right?
I remember having a landline even before wireless phones, like at all. We had [44:00] a long cord that stretched through the house and we’d fight over it. We’d drag it down the hall and hide in the laundry room and talk on the phone. But every business has phones and most. Operating businesses have an alarm line, a fire alarm, fire marshal, code compliant need.
Uh, if a building has elevators, they have pots lines. It’s all running on a copper infrastructure that is becoming expensive to maintain. And about five to six years ago, the FCC, um, was, uh, pressured by the Lex into allowing them to transition from copper. And how do we incentivize customers to move off of an ancient technology that we wanna decommission?
We jack up the rates, um, we push ’em out financially, we force ’em out. So that kind of started and then they rolled it back and they were like, okay, we’re gonna slow roll this a little bit, because customers were in a panic and we’d never want [45:00] life threatening things to happen during a transition like that due to panic.
Um, so they kind of slow rolled it. The aggregators got involved. Um, uh, epic. Well, broad Sky at the time was a, a front runner. Uh, I think there was maybe two or three others that were doing it around the same time. And they were the traditional pots aggregators already in, in play. So they were like, okay, well we’re gonna start converting our pots lines, but we’re locking in your rates and protecting you until then, well, we were wireless right out of the gate.
We are only a POTS replacement solution. We never owned any kind of copper, nor do we want to. Uh, but bringing LTE 5G to the edge for that essential line, why wouldn’t you want an expert doing that? Not just someone who, who is selling it as an ancillary product. Um, we are fire marshal. Friendly NFPA code compliant in all 50 states.[46:00] Every single type of line. We need to know if it’s an elevator or an alarm or a fire alarm, or even if it’s just a basic fax. We need to know, because every single port on that router needs to be properly, um, programmed with the right codec. And that takes time. And we wanna make sure we’re thorough because lives could be at risk if we do it wrong.
Um, we’ve, he heard a lot of, uh, talk in the market about, oh, well pots, it’s such a headache. Um, well, why would I wanna convert my copper customers to a wireless product and save them some money? And it actually is gonna decrease, you know, my. Commissions or something like that. But on the customer side, um, what they’re looking at is an increase in cost.
And if you don’t help them with that, and if you don’t bring them a solution that can save them some money, they’re somebody will. So if we’re not doing it, somebody else will, and they may not do it [47:00] very well, and they may not be code compliant. Uh, then ours is gonna be the dual sim solution as again, so some are only doing a single sim, um, and they’re just not wireless experts.
There’s over 40 million lines, I think, I think they searched it in chat GPT the other day too, just to see, uh, the typical response is 40 million analog lines still in play, that they’re, that need to be converted. And these iex are starting to truly shut them down now, not just jacking up the rates to force you out, but they’re starting to actually say, I’m done.
We’re shutting off on at a certain date. There’s one actually in South Carolina that just released last month that they’re shutting down this September. So move it or lose it, basically. So there’s a whole group in South Carolina. We’ve seen an influx from that. Um, if you’re not doing it already, you should be, uh, it’s gonna save you money and money, you know, you keep up with the time.
They’re just not maintaining those lines. They’re not even [48:00] new hires that these, um, carriers are bringing in. They’re not even training them how to work on copper. That’s how outdated it’s becoming.
Max Clark: um, I mean, saving costs the most, say egregious billing that I’ve personally seen. Was what was a $40 a month line, turned into almost a thousand dollars a month line to maintain copper. And this is not an unusual story. And what’s also really interesting to me is a lot of times the people that are seeing these bills, you know, are like, it’s like, you know, facilities management has ownership over the phone lines because it goes into the elevators, the alarm systems or you know, um, you know, the fire panels or whatever. and like, it just, it’s just, it kind of, it gets like, like ignored to a certain degree and then all of a sudden it gets discovered and you’re like, you’re, you’re, you know, and then, then people realize like, you’re paying how much for what you know, and you’re like, and [49:00] so, so it’s not like save some money.
It’s usually like a dr. Like a dr. A drastic, you know, and you know, you were talking about alarm, firelight, safety systems, elevators, I. It’s not unusual for companies to have, you know, a dozen, two dozen phone lines in a building and not realize that they’re there then find out that
Darcy Guidry: And are they even using them?
Max Clark: or, and then one of two things happens is either they, some they discover this bill that’s like all of a sudden it know, gone stratospheric or, um, something happens and they realize a service was disconnected and they thought that they had service and they thought that they had an alarm panel that would actually signal out somewhere, and then they find out it actually doesn’t because it was unplugged. Nobody knows. it’s, uh, it’s crazy. Um, not, not only are
Darcy Guidry: we’re seeing a lot of like this, um, hey, well, like you said, it’s swept under the rug, or they put a bandaid on it and they don’t wanna address it right now. Um, a lot of IT [50:00] managers, they’re like, well, we’ve already converted all of our phone lines. Why do we need to think about that? And like you said, it falls into the privy of the, um, facilities managers and they don’t always know where to take it either.
They’re like, help me. Um, and then. We’re seeing a huge trend right now where the CFO gets catches wind of it. The bills have gotten so painful, it’s gotten to a point where they’ve been autopay it so long, they don’t know what they’re paying for. And they’re like, what is going on? Why are we, why are we leaking all this money into something that we don’t even know if we’re using it or not?
Um, that’s where we’ll come in and help audit and determine what lines they’re still using, um, and then convert the, the lines they actually need and save ’em money and get them back down to that $50 price point instead of hundreds of dollars a line or even a thousand dollars a line. I’ve seen that recently too.
Like you said, it kind of took my breath away.
Max Clark: surprising.
Darcy Guidry: um, a thousand bucks a line is, um, a lot of money.
Max Clark: Well, there are also, uh, the other thing that happens a lot that we see all the time is, um. [51:00] A company will do, will do a fiber upgrade and that’ll trigger a decommission. And it’s, it’s just like, Hey, we’re installing fiber into the building. We’re decommissioning on the copper here. Like, like, you can’t, you can’t keep it if you want it.
Like it’s being ripped out as part of the installation of this fiber that you ordered. Like it’s done. Sorry, it’s not even, it’s not even, sorry. It’s just like, that’s just, that’s just the fact of life now.
Darcy Guidry: Yeah, some elevator companies and or alarm companies are starting to adopt it too, where they’re offering a pox replacement solution. I will say, when people ask me, well, why can’t I just get another voice line, uh, for that, well, it’s not co compliant. Um, there are gotchas with voiceover IP that prevent. Uh, essential emergency lines from, from being able to ride over the top of those.
I don’t know all the ins and outs of [52:00] it, but I know that, um, early on where a few tried to use that, um, there were, uh, lives affected by it and nobody wants that on their, on their conscience. Um, it’s a liability for the company and for the provider that does it. Um, lots of things to do with like E 9 1 1 being programmed wrong or I don’t even know.
There’s, there’s so much behind it and I’m not, I’m not the brains behind that operation. I just know that, um, that is not a viable option for emergency essential lines at this time.
Max Clark: most
Darcy Guidry: Now.
Max Clark: boils down to a codec issue where the a TA that people put in place only supports voice codex or it’s terminating into a platform that’s voice code centric. And you know, people find this problem out usually because they try to fax through it and they find out that fax codex and data, so data does not flow through a voice codex.
So you need to have something. It’s not just the appliance on the edge that gives you the copper port, the RJ 11 port that comes out. It’s [53:00] like everything that goes into it that then that plugs into supporting end to end. And then how does that actually plug into and interact with then, like the actual phone network itself, right?
Like it’s, a seemingly simplistic like, oh, I can just get this thing and plug into it and it works kind of solution that turns into like, no, like all of the underlying infrastructure between you and where it needs to actually go. And, um, E 9 1 1 and next gen 9 1 1 and, um, Ray Baum and Kari’s Law and all these other things apply in different ways and how you actually signal and what does this thing does, you know?
And, and, and, you know, this is one of those, like, it, it burns really bad when you, when you get trapped in it, you know, like it’s, it’s, and it imposes a lot of risk in the organization too, right? You know, like, I don’t know about you. If I got stuck in an elevator and then found out that the company did not have working elevator emergency call buttons, and that they acted in, in a negligent [54:00] manner because like, like I, I wouldn’t be happy about it, you know, like it wouldn’t be
Darcy Guidry: I from.
Max Clark: well, right.
Like, you know, you, you just, you know, you hear about horrible stories, people getting stuck in el I mean, there was, um, uh, I had, I had, uh, data centers in a building um, you know, if there’s too much wind or little earthquakes or whatever, like, it, it, the elevators stop. Like it’s a safety mechanism, right?
And so,
Darcy Guidry: Yeah,
Max Clark: um, employees actually that of the building were stuck in the elevator. And I think it was like four or five hours it took before, because, you know,
Darcy Guidry: because now like every single city,
Max Clark: I’m getting a lot of feedback
Darcy Guidry: I’ve got a lot of feedback.
Max Clark: So strange. Um, so like every elevator in the city has gone down. So the elevator companies, and there’s only a few of ’em, like, you know, have to go out to every single building to get the elevators working again. And, uh, and they were, they were there for a really long time. Like, I mean, you know, like take away like any sort of emergency, [55:00] medical emergency claustropho. Like, what, what would you do if you’re stuck in an elevator for five or six hours? You know? Um, you, you, you talked about, you talked about aiop, ai, ot, um, and I’m gonna not not go after the marketing buzzword here too much, but what we did see, and what we’ve seen is a lot that the need became surveillance, remote surveillance, like parking lots, right?
Construction sites. know, like how do you, how do you deal with and react to, um. security at remote locations. While, and especially like the construction markets, like the best example of this, there’s nowhere to install internet here. It doesn’t exist yet.
Darcy Guidry: Doesn’t exist yet. There’s no building. Yeah.
Max Clark: talk.
Darcy Guidry: And is there power? Um, so let’s talk about construction first.
Max Clark: first
Darcy Guidry: Um, I have several ai,
Max Clark: What is a IOT in the epic world? What?
Darcy Guidry: [56:00] so it’s a mesh word.
Max Clark: Okay.
Darcy Guidry: So AI is the buzzword, right? Uh, IOT is. Internet of things, it could mean anything. But in our world, I-A-I-O-T is using our AI tools and our smart compute, um, technology laying over the top of just a dummy sensor. A camera’s just a sensor in a, in a way it’s a visible visual sensor. Um, you have vape sensors, you have fire detection, you have all, there’s all these things we can offer within our, um, solution portfolio.
Uh, but A IOT is just a, a word that we, or not a word, but a, um, acronym that we came up with to classify us in a way, because there was no simple way to say, well, we do all this, here’s thousands of things we can do. Uh, so we just kind of put it into that category and, um. [57:00] So the AI tool is proprietary, like I said.
So that’s the, um, the smart stack behind it. The, um, proactive, uh, reactive. Uh, most, most customers find that something is event driven. You had a break in or you had a fire or you had a car accident in your, on your property. Then you wanna go back and pull that video feed. Is this stored on prem? Is this stored in the cloud?
Do you even have enough storage? Is it a dummy camera that’s not even recording? In some cases, these cameras are so old they don’t even know if they’re still recording or not. They’re just there. Right. Um,
Max Clark: Visual deterrence. They’re just
Darcy Guidry: yeah. Right. They’re visual deter. This is just a dummy. Right. Um, it’s what do you want to accomplish with this?
Do you wanna be purely reactive and be able to just go pull that feed as needed? We can do that. Uh, do you want it to be. Proactive. Do you want it to do real-time alerting to you and your team? Do you want our [58:00] soc to monitor it live? Do you want this device on site to be able to do a talk down service where there’s a speaker involved and it can say, Hey, you with the red hoodie, you’re in a restricted area.
Or, Hey, you, uh, employee, you’re not wearing your, your hard hat in a, in a, um, area that it’s required. Right. So PPE, right. Um, we do a lot in construction and facilities management. Uh, it’s all safety. It’s all about making a safer, smarter world safer and using AI to get us to a, you know, a, um, a zero event year or whatever you wanna call it.
Max Clark: It’s
Darcy Guidry: Uh,
Max Clark: days since the accident.
Darcy Guidry: yeah, right. We wanted to be 365 days since an accident. ’cause we were able to proactively. Avoid, um, issues or catch it early enough that nobody was hurt. Uh, nobody wants to see one of their [59:00] coworkers get hurt because of negligence or just an accident. They just stepped in the wrong spot or, um, there’s a lot to it.
So if we’re talking about construction, new construction, so you talk about they’re popping up a construction trailer, possibly, they gotta get power to it. Um, once power’s there, we can stand up internet connectivity, whether we mount it on the building or on a pole. Um, if it’s just getting, um, surveillance around the property, all we need is a pole.
Uh. A wood beam or something to mount a camera on. We have these uig, which is a universal IOT gateway. It’s basically our smart site security in a box we can deploy out. It’s pretty easy. Um, we have solar cameras where maybe power isn’t there yet, but we can get, you know, connectivity to that edge. We’ll put a sim card in that device, but it’s solar powered, um, mobile surveillance units where it can be on a skid or on wheels, depending on what they need.
And those mobile surveillance [01:00:00] units can be fully customizable depending on what they need. So a base version would be just with a boom and a camera and purely, um, reactive. So you just pull the feed when you need it, or you can install speakers lights. So it can be reactive in the real time. Uh, they can be solar powered and or generator powered.
We’ve even mounted drones on the top of Theseus for a couple of our customers to be able to cover a larger piece of land, um, and determine if someone’s crossing that fence line or breaking and entering, or if it’s just a, I use this example, one of our largest customers is, um, in the oil and gas industry, and they have huge properties like miles and miles of fence line to ma manage.
And if a tiny sensor on that fence goes off and they don’t know what it is, they can deploy that drone and go see, well, was it a bear? Was it a tumbleweed? Is it really a person? You know, like, what do we need? How do we react? Um, there’s a [01:01:00] lot of stuff there. Um, which is why Internet of Things is that terminology we use because the the possibilities are, are pretty broad.
I. Now we don’t do everything. We’re not gonna boil the ocean and say, we can do just anything you bring to us. It’s gotta be something that we can, um, scale and monetize and provide to other clientele. I get a lot of those where they’re like, Hey, this one off odd ball requests, send those to me. I’m happy to tell you yes or no.
If we can do it, um, most times 10, nine times outta 10, it is something we could do. Um, I mentioned a few of those key words earlier too, which is, um, not just the smart compute at the edge using visual video feed from cameras. We can use existing camera infrastructure in a lot of cases as long as those cameras are, um, a model that are, um, compatible with our system.
But, you know, if they’re 20-year-old cameras are older, they may not have [01:02:00] the minimum requirements we need, right? For that, um, true AI tool to work and function properly. Uh, but. We’re pretty agnostic when it comes to that. We can deploy out new hardware if needed, especially in new build situations. We’re gonna do that.
Uh, they could bring their own cameras if they want in some cases, as long as it’s a model that’s compatible. Uh, but we can do fire detection, uh, we can do active shooter, location identification, vape sensors, uh, environmental monitoring, temperature monitoring. Um, that right there, those five or six things right, can show you that we can play in any vertical.
Everybody has a need in some form or fashion. And usually we can provide that. We’re not gonna be the cheapest because you get what you pay for. We’re gonna provide a quality service to the end customer and, um, help them solve some of their safety and co compliancy needs using geofencing or whatever it may be.
Um, and I have experts that I bring [01:03:00] into those conversations. I don’t claim to be a SME in that space. There’s too much there.
Max Clark: You know, from talking and working with a lot of business leaders, when you rattle through a lot of these solutions, immediately get into um. Construction sites, right? Simplistic examples, you know, people see surveillance cameras and they think theft, theft, you know, theft, deterrent in, in reaction, right?
Which is of course a big thing. You know, if you have tools, tools are expensive, and if you have materials, materials are expensive. from a, from a risk standpoint, you know, like the risk tail, the, the tail end of risk is so much more than just theft, right? Because now you start talking about construction delays, project delays, you know, penalties for delivery if you make it or not. Um, injury and theft. Somebody breaks into the building, you know, if site steals a bunch of stuff gets injured on the way out. Like, are you negligent now? You know, is there civil action that occurred? It’s crazy. Like I live in a world where like,
Darcy Guidry: To worry about.
Max Clark: I live in the world where like the whole, the whole [01:04:00] thought process of that this is like, is completely crazy loony, you know, tunes to me, but. It happens, people get injured and then all of a sudden, like, it’s like this, like civil action starts around like, oh, well you didn’t do X, Y, and z. It’s your fault. I got hurt stealing from you. You know? and, and like workers’ comp issues. And you start talking about like, PPE requirements, um, against workers’ comp claims, but not even workers’ comp claims, like actual workers’ comp insurance rates.
Like, you know, and, and this is wild. I mean, when I was running data centers, we got classified as the same level of risk as like farm workers, like people servicing like tractors, like combine tractors. And I was like, I’m, I’m, I’m installing servers in a data center in Iraq. Like, why do I have the same insurance premium as like somebody servicing a farm tractor? but anything that you can do then to, like, you, you know, hey, we, we uphold standards, we can enforce it, we can document it, we can prove it. You know, what does that do? That makes a lower risk profile. It means you’re less expensive to insure. It [01:05:00] means, you know, like. Like percentage points in workers’ comp are like dollar amounts in terms of like profitability for an organization.
You know, like any, any percent not going out is coming somewhere else. Right. the, know, and then you get into these other things, right? Which is, um, you know, certain industries have real risks of, terrorism, you know, and, you know, like how do you, how do you deal with that? Especially if you start talking about you have large, expansive facilities and lots of fence line and, you know, it’s, um, you know, these are real, like, again, people probably don’t like, immediately go to like, oh, what I need is I need a wireless connected internet sensor that then can go on.
It’s like, no, I just need to make sure that like, there’s not, there’s like a bear and not a person coming over my fence somewhere. Right?
Darcy Guidry: Or a deer in those cases [01:06:00] too, right? I mean, any mammal could set off that, that heat sensor or whatever it is you’ve got in place. Um.
Max Clark: Wild
Darcy Guidry: I feel good knowing that I work for a company that, um, truly has human safety at heart. And, um, like you said, it’s yeah, uh, insurance purposes and things like that too, but we really want, um, as a mother of a child that’s in grade school, uh, we work with schools and, um, we’re kind of ruining it for that generation where they can’t sneak a cigarette in the bathroom or, um, in this case, vapes, right.
Um, but it can sense CO2 levels where they’re congregating, where they shouldn’t be. Um, some sensors can be set up with trigger words, um, which, you know, it’s a sad thing we have to talk about that, uh, that that’s still a prevalent thing. But being able to shout fire or, um, heaven forbid.
Max Clark: Yeah.
Darcy Guidry: in some [01:07:00] way.
Right. Um, and being able to trigger a nearby classroom teacher to respond as quick as possible. We can set up cameras just outside the bathroom door to catch the culprits as they’re coming and leaving. Um, vape sensors that can determine the difference between nicotine versus THC, which then will determine their level of punishment, right?
Um, there are a lot, there’s a lot of things there, but for me it’s act, the active shooter thing, when we acquired 2020 last year, that was one of the, um, AI tools that we adopted from, from their product set. And being able to offer that to the public now is, um, really something I’m proud of. Uh, it sucks that we have to deal with that, but it is what it is.
And the more we can help prevent, um, and deter people from even stepping foot onto school grounds with anything like that, the better. Um, we’re working with law enforcement, municipalities, smart cities. There’s a lot there. I know I keep saying that, but there really is. I could talk all day about it. Um, [01:08:00] and I’m not even quoted in it, believe it or not.
I just love talking about it and selling it.
Max Clark: What, um, we’ve talked a lot about, I mean, fundamentally, right? We’re talking about connectivity delivered wirelessly, right? So let me, let me phrase this, this way to you, which is, what is something that, what, what do you wish a people knew more or understood more about wireless connectivity? You know, what, what’s a, what’s a misconception that’s out there, or what’s a, what’s a gap that people have that you wish more people or thought differently about?
Darcy Guidry: Well, you said it earlier, it’s a, Hey, it used to be a, a last resort or a hail Mary. Right. Um, I wish people would start to understand now how far we’ve come in the wireless space and that having a true wireless expert that makes wireless work properly is so important to have them in your corner. And that’s what EPIC IO is.
Um, there, there are a lot out there that are selling it, like I said, as an [01:09:00] ancillary product. Um, a lot of aggregators. Claiming that they do it the same way, but they don’t, um, they haven’t been doing it the way we’ve been doing it for as long as we have. They don’t have the same data we have, they don’t have the same experts that we have.
Um, they have large names and large footprints, uh, but they sell a lot and they provide a lot of things. But if you’re providing a hundred different product sets, how can you be really good at any one or two of them? We kind of stay in our lane. We are wireless. Um, when I, when, when they categorize us in a mobility space, which I hate that word too, but, um, we’re not cellular cell phone mobility.
Um, that’s a common mistake too. I always remind everybody data only, uh, data, internet connectivity over wireless. Um, just knowing that it has evolved to a point where it’s really reliable. It’s not what it was 15, 20 years ago. Uh, it’s really come a long way. I was, I was [01:10:00] guilty of that too before I started working with Broadsky and Epic on the client side.
I knew that, um, wireless was not for me. I, I did the fiber and coax and wireline only. That’s, that’s where my, um, where my background comes from. So that’s all I knew. And when I really started to see the benefits of wireless, it really changed my mind. And it took doing it to finally get on board and see it, you know, see that, that it really is, um, a, a really stable play.
And, um, aqui a very nimble way to get your, um, your business to scale. Um, but it’s good for small businesses too. They can’t always afford, you know, two and $300 circuits with a. A hundred dollars backup as well. Um, and like I said, these aggregators are bundling, they’re primary with their wireless, and if they’re adopting it too, you know, it’s gotta [01:11:00] be good enough.
Um, they’re not, like I said, they’re not doing it the way we are. In some cases, they’re doing a single sim, um, when they’re not crowdsourcing the data like we are to make sure they’re sending out the right carriers. But, um, I just, that’s, that’s it really is really seeing the evolution of wireless and knowing that it will work.
Max Clark: Uh, try it. You might be surprised, is basically
Darcy Guidry: Buy it and buy it. Yeah.
Max Clark: try it. You’ll
Darcy Guidry: Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Instead of build it, they’ll come,
Max Clark: It’s, it’s been
Darcy Guidry: which is what a lot of people do.
Max Clark: just, just try it and you’ll be
Darcy Guidry: Yeah. Yeah.
Max Clark: Darcy. Thank you very
Darcy Guidry: And yeah, I’m here anytime you need. I’m happy to do a deeper dive anytime you’d like. And I’m, I can bring in an expert next time if you want.
Max Clark: I mean, you’re pretty expert here. I mean, we can get into the nerd chat, I’m sure, but you know,
Darcy Guidry: Yeah.
Max Clark: Darcy, thank you. I.
Darcy Guidry: Thank you.
