Essentia is quickly establishing itself as a major player in the field of network infrastructure, but their high-level growth didn’t materialize out of nowhere. Rather, Essentia’s breakthroughs can be attributed to their culture of company-wide innovation and collaboration, fostered by CEO Lindon Hayes. Essentia has established a team of trusted experts to design and build turnkey networks, and provide tech-enabled infrastructure services that target real customer pain points and inefficiencies.
Essentia believes that great people are at the core of successful networks and that they’ve found the best. Under Lindon’s leadership, Essentia has been named a Great Place to Work® among other distinctions and awards. Be sure to check out this episode of 5G Talent Talk with Carrie Charles to hear more from Lindon Hayes on talent retention, servant leadership, and investing in your organization’s culture.
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Efficiency And Automation In Network Infrastructure With Lindon Hayes of Essentia
I am excited, as usual, to introduce to you our guest. I have known Lindon for a long time now. I was thrilled when he said that he would come on the show. This is Lindon Hayes. He is the Founder and CEO of Essentia. Lindon, thanks for coming on the show.
Thank you for having me. It’s fantastic. We’re excited.
I’m excited, too. We’ve got a lot to talk about. I always enjoy our conversations. First, I want to know about you. Tell me about your background, your journey, and how you got to where you are.
I’ve been unqualified for every job I’ve ever had. I was a Psychology major in college and somehow got a job as a strategy management consultant up in DC. I got a chance to work for companies like P&G and General Motors and John Deere and Raytheon Hughes. I figured I didn’t know anything about finance or accounting. I got a job as a stock analyst to try to learn finance and accounting. I got a chance to cover technology and telecom. That was pretty cool. I learned a ton in that job. I started working for a company that built OSP networks for large carriers, which is where I got enough background to start my own company.
I knew nothing about running companies like that, either. I got into the industry in 2000. I started the company in 2003 with my brother. Our total assets were two Ford Taurus’, two laptops, two cellphones, and $20,000. We were bootstrapped. Since then, we’ve started all kinds of different services within that, engineering indoor networks, small cell towers, EDGE data centers, and a service platform for network deployments, which we’re excited about.
Tell me more about Essentia and everything you said. Who do you serve, what markets, product, services, all of it.
We probably worked in maybe 46 or 47 states at this point, Canada and Puerto Rico, although that’s not part of our footprint. We do a couple of different things. We do networking engineering and construction for telecom, cable, electric utilities, and other critical infrastructure. We do the top two of two cable companies, the top five of five wireline carriers, and some of the largest companies in critical infrastructure. We also design and build indoor networks for companies like AT&T, Amtrak, L3Harris, and others.
We’re also excited about EDGE data centers. That’s a huge new thing that takes a lot of our small cell skills and we can apply it to EDGE data centers. Maybe the thing that we’re most excited about is our new SaaS platform for network deployments, something we call eSpeed. We believe that, and not without a lot of evidence, that we have the best network deployment platform around. We’re super excited about that.
Tell me more about eSpeed. How was the idea born? What problem are you solving there?
I hired a brilliant innovator as an A&E engineer. His name is Zach. The minute he got here, he began developing software solutions for network deployment. He didn’t ask. He just did it. After about three months, I looked at Zach and I said, “Zach, you’re not even doing the job that I hired you to do.” He looked at me and he goes, “I know, Lindon, but isn’t this better?” I was like, “Yeah, it is better.” I gave him a new title, a new budget, job responsibilities, and we haven’t looked back since. What allowed us to recruit someone like Zach and what empowered him to do something game changing without permission was our culture. Without that investment in our culture, we wouldn’t be where we are now.
I was going to say that’s a testament to your culture and leadership as well that he felt safe and comfortable in that environment that he could do that. Now look at where you are with eSpeed. That’s exciting. I’m hearing more and more about companies turning to technology and automation as our talent pool continues to shrink. There’s a lot going on in the world now, but we are still facing a challenge when hiring talent and companies looking at automation. I know that eSpeed is a part of this. Talk a little about that transformation and how companies need to focus on automation as much as possible because of the shrinking workforce.
One thing to realize is that we’re already at full employment and haven’t had the full impact of these tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure spending coming. The Federal trillion-dollar package is 2025 is when it maxes out. There aren’t enough people to do it the old way. That’s before we get all the spending.
We’ve been talking with a couple of Fortune 50 companies. They basically shared with us that they don’t know how they’re going to build what they’ve announced. Unless they come up with new automation, they’re not going to be able to build what they’ve announced publicly, which is a problem if you’re a publicly traded company. They’re forming teams to try to address this problem. We’re working with some of those teams, which is exciting for us.
We think the disruption is coming to the industry and you’re either going to be the disrupter or the disrupted. A lot of the large engineering companies have the Kodak problem. They make money by selling engineering services and engineering time. It reduces their revenue and profits by innovating and becoming more efficient. It takes someone without that large base of profits to destroy like us to be able to create that innovation and have the incentive to do it. I’m hoping it’s us, but somebody’s going to solve these big problems soon. It’s either going to be us or somebody else. Right now, we think we’ve got the lead. We’re looking to wait for ways to expand that lead.
Disruption is coming to the industry. You’re either going to be the disrupter or the disrupted.
What do you see is the future of eSpeed and being able to solve this problem for companies?
We’ve broken it down into different chunks of value, and then we’re looking from a competitive analysis perspective at where we stand in each of those chunks, and then we’re constantly saying, “What’s the most elegant solution for a customer regardless of hardware, software, or process?” We whiteboard that and then we figure out, can we pull it off the shelf or do we have to build it?
In a lot of cases, it doesn’t exist. Do we have to build it? The future is going to be determined by the advances in technology across the work streams that we perform. We’re constantly looking at how we are doing things and is there a better way? Is there existing technology, new technology, or a way that we can innovate something different? That’s a forever process. We never stop that. If we get complacent, that’s when we know we’re in trouble.
I’ve always known that about you. You were always one step ahead. Every time we had a conversation, you sent me an article, a link, a book, or something saying, “You got to check this out. This is the future.” I am not surprised that you’re on the cutting edge of this.
It might be my ADD. That might be part of it.
A lot of successful entrepreneurs have ADD, trust me, a lot. You’re always on the cutting edge, too, of culture. I’ve always known that about you. You’ve got some cool ideas when it comes to attracting, retaining, engaging talent. Let me ask your opinion on something because I know you read a lot and you keep you know so much about this area. What challenges do you see that companies are facing right now when it comes to culture and retention?
In the industry, subcontractors and employees are hard to come by. Many people are starting to give lift service to culture, but it takes years to build culture and you can’t fake it. It also takes years to change a culture. For the companies that haven’t invested in culture, at this point, they’re going to miss this next upcoming build cycle. If you look across the industry, we heard this at Metro Connect and other places where industry-wide network deployments are taking longer and longer, especially long for people that aren’t using our platform. The A, B, and C teams are already busy. You’re lucky if you can get the D team on your project at this point.
Everyone that I talk to says, “We can’t do all the jobs that we have today. We can’t do all those jobs. We don’t have enough people.” They’re going to pick the people that treat them the best. If it’s a large carrier, they’re going to trick the carrier that pays them the most and that treats them the best. It’s the same thing with an employee or a team member. We call them team members. They’re not going to go to work for somewhere where they’re not going to treat them well. They can get the money pretty much anywhere that they want to go, but they also have to have that benefit. People are going to try to change. I got coached for about eight years.
We hired an outsource chief people officer. He coached me for about eight years on culture. We’ve been working on this for a long time. We’re far from perfect, but we try to get better every year. Without that, I wouldn’t know what to do. Maybe it took me longer than it should, I don’t know. That’s important for what we’re facing because I don’t see this lack of talent problem going away. It’s probably going to accelerate.
I agree with you. What you said was interesting, that people do have more choices. They have more choices of where they want to work and who they want to work for. Another thing that’s interesting is, do you think that companies have choices of who to work for and based on how they’re treated in their experience as a vendor that they would say yes or no to working for a company or are people taking all the work they can get?
I hear all the time there are a couple of companies in our industry, and I’m not going to name any names, but people will refuse to work for. They’re not going to ever work for them. Life is too short. That’s going to be an ongoing challenge. People are picking among their best customers with the nose profit, the best projects. That’s going to go on for a long time. Glassdoor is such a big deal here in the recruiting space. Your reputation economy is a big deal.
It wouldn’t surprise me if, one of these days, there’s not a Glassdoor for these large organizations around their treatment of outside vendors. That’s going to be a game-changer if that ever happens. They’re going to be more accountable and publicly accountable, even to the individual level, not just the company level, for bad behavior. The people that are right might be able to extend their lead in those situations.
Maybe that’s something that you can take on in your spare time.
I’m not sure how to monetize that.
That’s a great idea, though. It’s like that vendor experience, the experience of a vendor, like the candidate experience, the employee experience, and the customer experience. It’s all about the experience that we’re having as human beings in the workplace and beyond. I love that idea. Let’s talk about the essential culture. I want to hear all about it. Kudos to you for hiring an outside person or even an inside person to help you with culture and create culture you said for eight years. That’s what it takes, expertise that we don’t necessarily have sometimes as entrepreneurs and leaders. What are some differentiators in your culture?
One of the things we think about when regard to culture is that it’s a journey and not a destination. We’re always trying to get better. In my opinion, you’re either going backwards or forwards. There’s no status quo and standing still. It has to be a constant focus every week, month, quarter, and year. One of our differentiators is innovation. People don’t like to be stuck doing the same thing the same way for their entire careers. One of the things we say around innovation is we have a healthy disregard for the impossible.
Culture is a journey, not a destination. We’re always trying to get better.
If you want to get one of our people fired up, tell them they can’t find a better way to do something. That’s exciting to be in that place. Our other core values are impact, judgment, and collaboration. We have to work to instill those every day in how we behave each and every day. My view is it’s better and easier to be a values-based culture than a rules-based culture. You can’t make enough rules up. As soon as you do, they’re outdated anyway. If you base it on values, you’re going to get better behavior, and it’s a more fun place to be. We also are a certified great place to work. There are about 1,000 certified great places to work institutes in the US out of about 10 million. That’s pretty exciting for us. We were number nine great place to work in North Carolina on the latest survey.
We got to keep improving, so we got to figure out how to start making the national list. One thing that we also talk about is purpose. Our purpose statement is connecting everyone everywhere to a better way of life. It’s not like we make bombs or cigarettes. We make people’s lives better, which is a wonderful thing to be able to offer the world. Post-COVID, it’s pretty easy to see the impact of how we help people. It might have been a little harder to draw that line pre-COVID, but we’re closing the homework gap. We’re enabling Telehealth and remote work. We’re building the foundation for economic growth and job creation. The work we do matters to a lot of people. That’s an awesome industry to be in.
Do you have any secrets or something you can share around what’s working for you right now with attracting talent and maybe even retaining? I know that your culture’s a big part of this, but anything around, let’s say, attraction and getting the right people in the door in those seats?
We’re extremely careful, particularly our top leaders, because one of the things you hear is people leave companies not because of bad company but because of a bad manager. We’re diligent about hiring great, interesting, highly motivated, highly skilled, competent experts in their field, but that are also fun to work with, right? You can do a great job and be serious about the job, but if you’re not fun to work with, who wants to be in that environment? You got to spend a lot of your life at work. We try to find people that have a fun time doing what they’re doing. We have a couple of tactics, like we use Topgrading. We use those tools to evaluate talent. We try to provide a lot of autonomy as well.
We look for ways to provide autonomy and flexibility. I mentioned fun in the workplace. We’re also almost fully remote. That has tradeoffs, but it allows us to recruit nationally for most positions. We’ve got folks in many different states right now. If we recruited in Charlotte only, we’re not getting A players that way. When we need a position, we’ve got a certain amount of time to fill it, and we’re only in Charlotte. If we’re recruiting nationally, we can get A players in the door and A players to play with other A players. Finally, we try to foster a high-trust environment.
We’re surveying. We do it about twice a year. People get a little tired of surveys. We have an extensive survey that we do twice a year. We see what we’re doing well and what we need to improve on, then develop initiatives around what we need to improve. As long as we don’t lose focus on what we’re doing well and continue to improve that, our results continue to go up in terms of employee satisfaction and our rankings on the Great Place to Work survey. There are not 5 or 10 initiatives. It’s each time that we get that survey, we see all the areas that we need to improve. We might have 3 to 5 initiatives around every area, and then eventually we figure it out. A lot of trial and error as well.
You listen to people and you act on it and execute. Let’s go back to the remote work because I know that so many companies now are confused about that. People want remote. Do we need to go to hybrid? How do we maintain a culture with remote workers? What should we do? My question is, how do you keep that culture consistent with your remote workforce?
It’s not easy at all. We have celebrations that we do. We’ll basically buy people a bottle of wine and we’ll have celebrations on a team call and things like that. We try to look for areas where people are geographically focused and do quarterly events, the ball game barbecues, axe throwing, which is probably a terrible idea. We did axe throwing. It turns out I’m not that bad at axe throwing. We do stuff like that. We try to create some special benefits for people. We have a book club, for example. We have a curated list of books. They’re not just books about how to get better at business. They’re books about how to be happier and more satisfied.
There’s not one thing that we do. We try to figure out as many ways as possible to build that community. It’s not as easy if you’re all around the water cooler. The collaboration culture helps, too, because people are always willing to help. When somebody helps you, that makes you feel good about that in return. That creates a good atmosphere and a good community for us.
The other thing I love about what you said is that you’re a values-based culture. Every single day you keep those values present. I’m sure that those values are present in every single team member throughout the country. They wake up thinking about it. They finish their day thinking about it. That also helps to keep people together. It sounds like you’ve experienced some success here. Congratulations with that.
I know it’s challenging. We have a remote team as well. I know many companies right now that are challenged with this. There’s no easy answer, but it sounds like you are definitely doing the right things here. I want to talk a little bit more about leadership. You did talk about how you identify leaders in your organization. Do you have a way that you develop leaders, let’s say, from organically inside the company?
Yeah. We want to be a trusted advisor for our customers. You can’t be a trusted advisor if you’re not an expert. Lifelong learning is critical to our success. Every person gets a quarterly learning goal or goals. That’s something that we focus on every quarter of every year. The other thing about learning is it gets you excited. It keeps you energized. It fights stagnation. Learning makes you happier, based on research and studies. That’s a great thing.
The other thing with our leaders is they have to believe in servant leadership. The inverted pyramid of servant leadership. They need to be asking questions like, what do our team members need to be successful? How can we help our team members grow as people and as professionals? What coaching and training do they need? We can identify specific coaching and training.
Are they willing to roll up their sleeves and help someone out that needs help? Do they have the attitude of never let a team member fail? Those are all things that are important for a leader. It’s what you want in a leader. Obviously, you have to trust your leader. They have to be competent. They have to care about you. They just can’t be a great expert. If they don’t show that they care about you personally, then you can’t develop that trust with your leader. That’s important as well.
What is a lesson that you have learned as an entrepreneur that has brought you great success? If there’s one thing top of mind that says, “This is it,” what would that be?
Focus. It’s like swimming upstream. It’s a constant challenge to be focused. There are a lot of ideas, a lot of good ideas, a lot of great ideas. You can’t pursue them all. Emotionally, it’s easy to get rid of the bad ideas, right? We can say, “That’s not a great idea. We can get rid of that.” It starts to get harder when you start talking about good ideas. That’s a good idea. That’s emotionally difficult not to pursue because we have great ideas. We have a list of great ideas. It gets a little harder to get rid of the good ideas, but most people can get there. When it gets tough, you’ve got a list of great ideas and can only pursue 1 or 2 of those great ideas.
Entrepreneurship is like swimming upstream. It’s a constant challenge to be focused. There are a lot of ideas. It’s easy to get rid of the bad ideas, but it gets harder when you start talking about good ideas.
You might pursue five and none of them work well, but if you focus on 1 or 2, then you’re going to be able to accomplish those. That’s something I’ve frankly struggled with. I’ve always struggled with I want to pursue every great idea. I’m constantly having to check myself and saying, “You can’t do everything. Your bandwidth is limited. You need more focus.” If you’re a salesperson, you want to sell that deal. You want salespeople to want to sell the deal, but it might not be the best for the company in the long-term. That’s one area where it’s tough. A lot of people struggle, including myself, but if you get the focus right, it makes life a lot easier.
In today’s world, people want a voice. They want to be able to express their ideas. The fact that you are talking so much about an overflowing amount of ideas means that you are offering your team the ability to express their ideas and bring their ideas to the table. That is what people want in today’s workforce. That right there is everything. Kudos to you there again. I wanted to hear about your vision. I know you’ve got a big vision. I want to hear about your vision for Essentia. What is it? How will you manifest it? Obviously, this could be hours to go on and on, but maybe a quick version here.
We want to change the way that network deployments are performed globally using our SaaS platform. We’re going to start here in the US and then we’re going to expand outside the US. We think it’s going to give our first customers a competitive advantage and a long lead against their competitors by adopting and perfecting our platform first. Others are going to have to scramble to catch up, but from a global benefits perspective, unlocking infrastructure unlocks everything. That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to change the way infrastructure’s done globally. We think we can do that.
I know you can. You can do anything. This is wonderful. How can we learn more about Essentia and all the great things that you’re doing and eSpeed? Where do we go? The jobs, I’m sure you’re hiring with all of this that you need to accomplish.
Essentia-Inc.com is our website. I’ve been told that we almost post too much out there because it’s almost like a roadmap to copy our innovation. There’s a lot out there. We have a careers section About page that talks about our culture and job opportunities. Lots of information about what we’re doing around innovation and our core values as well.
There’s one thing about you, the word that comes to my mind of you is generous. You said there’s a lot out there. It is. It’s because of your heart and your generosity. You’ve been generous to me. I want to say thank you for being on the show. This has been special.
It’s been wonderful. Thank you so much.
You take care.
Important Links
About Lindon Hayes
Lindon Hayes is the CEO and Founder of Essentia. With a focus on company wide innovation and by embracing culture as a key differentiator, Lindon Hayes has positioned Essentia as a high-growth, trailblazing firm that’s fundamentally evolving network infrastructure. Today — bolstered by Great Place to Work® Certification, regular appearances on the Inc. 5000 list, and other prestigious accolades — Lindon leads Essentia’s ascension as the go-to partner for the top companies in Telecom, Cable, Critical Infrastructure, and a growing list of verticals.
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