Subscribe to the Next Level BizTech podcast, so you don’t miss an episode!
Amazon Music | Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify | Watch on YouTube
Transcript is auto-generated.
Welcome to Inside the Win. We’ll break down real world wins, showing you exactly how strategic partnership with our experts empowers you to tackle your most ambitious opportunities with confidence. Let’s jump in.
Hey, everybody. Welcome to another version of Inside the Win. My name is Graeme Scott. I’m the vice president of networking and mobility here at Telarus and really excited to be joined today by one of our fine engineers, Mr. Brinton Gunderson, known affectionately as Gundy on the team. Brinton, how are you my man? How are you doing today?
I’m doing great, Graeme. Thanks for having me. Excited to chat.
Awesome. Yeah, we love doing these sessions because it really helps, I think, our advisors understand that usually these opportunities don’t come in the way they end up, right? And then walking them through this process as to how we get from point A to point B, I think is really important. So let’s talk about this one, pretty cool opportunity. And it came in as a circuit, a request for a circuit and a rather large circuit.
So talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, and Graeme, I love highlighting this. This is the most fun part of my job. Just understanding what a customer is doing, why they’re doing it, and and, you know, getting to a solution in the end. So, yeah, this one started out pretty curious.
Really large request for a ten gig Internet circuit for a gas station and EV charging station. So why would they, So why would they need such a crazy amount of bandwidth? So that was the first spark of curiosity to dig in. So we held a call with the client, and we really just started digging into what they needed, what their requirements were, and learning more about the business, how they’re set up, what their plans to do, etcetera, and really what this service was for.
So that was initially just the basis of the first call. That’s it.
Got it. And so then once you get on this call and you start getting under the hood, kind of learning a little bit about this business, you found a fairly fragmented and a very small IT team that you were working with, right? Really kind of undermanned with a lot of different things going on within the organization.
Yeah, just like in every opportunity that we start to dig into learning about the organization, how they’re set up, what type of challenges do they have from an IT structure perspective. In this case, it was a DevOps organization. So their IT team was built. First of all, this is a startup company. They’re growing really rapidly. And so their first initial team members, part of the IT group, were all DevOps.
So understanding interfaces and bandwidth and how everything’s gonna plug in together, they understand that that’s all there and they’re very highly intelligent, but maybe they haven’t done that before. Maybe they haven’t connected a circuit to a firewall, to a switch, etcetera, and architected that infrastructure before. So understanding that that was probably the case right up front and knowing that we needed to guide a little bit of the conversation around that, that was the initial call.
Got it. So then you’ve got a couple of these stakeholders that you’ve now engaged with. You’ve sort of talked through what they’re trying to accomplish, what their strategy is. What happened there? At some point you were dealing with a construction manager. Is that right?
Yeah. So we had entered the conversation after this company had already started a few projects.
Okay.
So one of those, we we were started out by sourcing the Internet circuits. As as this progressed and we communicated that there that we had more capabilities than just sourcing Internet circuits. We started to get into conversations further and further into the the architecture and into the network. So at one point, we’d already started to talk to the the construction managers. So the construction managers literally were working as part of the IT team to do infrastructure deployment. And in this case, who designed the firewall and LAN services didn’t match that appropriately with the Internet circuits. So we got on the phone with one of the construction managers as he was literally trying to connect the firewall to the Internet.
Just connecting A to Z and what had to happen, that’s what was missing, somebody to connect the dots from the Internet to all the way into the infrastructure. And in this case, it was a project manager.
Yeah, that’s pretty, wouldn’t say that’s typical, right? But you never know who you’re going to be dealing with on some of these opportunities. And especially when you’re in a startup environment, you’ve got so many people that wear different hats. Sometimes you’re talking to somebody that you wouldn’t expect. So Brinton, talk a little bit about when was the moment where you kind of knew, all right, we’ve got something here. These guys are starting to lean in. Like what was it that kind of made you realize, okay, we’re gonna win this one here.
Yeah, I think there was two points. There was first the initial qualification that there is a real opportunity here. And second, when we knew we had, those were definitely two different segments of the conversation. I think the first one happened when we understood what type of growth strategy they wanted to have over the next couple of years and also how their IT team was structured.
They were so thin that they really were going to have to lean on an outside group to help architect and and push to help them hit their milestones. But second, it really took several meetings with different groups. So meeting with operations, meeting with the IT team, which was DevOps, but also the construction manager. We met with all three groups individually and made sure the messaging was the same.
We have this solutions map, we can hit all of these swim lanes, and we have these capabilities. We’ll help and be your procurement arm, but also the glue that ties everything together.
Educating what is between projects, meaning the LAN infrastructure and the Internet infrastructure and what components need to happen and what to expect in between.
Awesome. So obviously great progress on this one. Talk a little bit about where we are today, what we ended up with. We started with a fairly large circuit. Where is the deal today and what do you see going on with this in the next couple of months?
Yeah, so interestingly, we went from that very large circuit down. We we actually scaled it down to a smaller set of circuits, but with resiliency. So that’s the first thing is we we talked about resiliency, what the requirements for the business were. But we added and resiliency into their firewall, into their switching, into their APs, how they track vehicles coming in and out of the property. So we added Vercada and access control, security cameras.
Literally, every conversation we would have, we would add a component to the infrastructure.
We also found out that one of the troubles is they deploy sites so quickly and the legacy telco fiber infrastructure processes do not match their timelines. So we had to come up with a way to deliver a site and get it into production before a fiber connection would get there, but with more than a cellular. So we relied on our wireless partners to do wireless microwave, Internet. But that’s that’s the thing is we we just are really in a a listening mode, an education mode of understanding the requirements and then delivering solutions based on those real world challenges that they’re having. And it’s going to continue. This is a really exciting account, very fun account to work with.
And the TA has done such a good job in messaging, staying in contact and wrinkling the cats that are around a project like this.
Yeah, love it. So let’s talk numbers. We started off with a ten gig circuit. So far billing on a monthly recurring basis, well over twenty thousand, right? So pretty good. But then a huge equipment number on this one, right?
Right, right. So we’re up and over a million dollars in our C. So one time infrastructure cost. There’s management that layers onto that.
And as we discovered with their IT, their slim IT group, we’re going to have management fees and things that feed into this. But from a pure circuit perspective, we’re at around twenty thousand dollars in monthly MRC, which is not a gigantic deal. However, this is one that’s going to happen over and over again. Every two months, another site will turn up.
And what a great account. It’s a fun account.
Awesome, yeah. So take a step back right out of the gate, figure out what’s going on here. I mean, lot of advisors probably be like, hey, ten gig circuit, where do I send you the paperwork? But taking that process has actually unlocked a much larger opportunity.
So good stuff, Brinton. Thanks so much for joining us on this one. We hope you guys out there enjoyed it. These conversations are happening every day with the team at Telarus.
So if you’re not working with us on this stuff, we’d love to have you join the team. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll catch you on the next Inside the Window.