Beyond The Lowest Bid

**Andy Leake** (0:00)
I think we're going.

**Benjamin Yost** (0:01)
Cool, what we do and how we do it, or anything in this industry.

**Andy Leake** (0:06)
And joining ElectriCom to understand what that is. It made a lot of sense. They're doing magic.

**Benjamin Yost** (0:12)
Tell us a little bit more about your background.

**Andy Leake** (0:14)
I grew up in a pretty blue collar family. ElectriCom is working on providing that utility.

**Benjamin Yost** (0:31)
Welcome to Grid Connection.
Today, I'm gonna be the host of Grid Connection. My name is Ben, I'm the Director of Marketing here at ElectriCom, and I'll be interviewing Andy, who's our CEO and president here at ElectriCom. And going forward, Andy's actually gonna take over as the host, but I thought it would be cool to kind of do a flip on that for our very first pilot episode here. So yeah, we'll kick things off. Andy, excited to learn more about you, and for our audience as well, to get kind of a background on you. So Andy, how did you get into this industry in the first place? I know you came, sounds like from manufacturing. Tell us a little bit more about your background.

**Andy Leake** (1:16)
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Ben, and appreciate you helping us get this launched and looking forward to seeing what we can do with it.
So I grew up in downstate Illinois, central Illinois, small communities, small town. And as we look at what is available there from a utility and infrastructure space, it's pretty limited, right? And so specifically, ElectriCom is working on providing that utility infrastructure both on the power side and the telecommunication, the fiber broadband side to those communities and to those areas throughout our geographic footprint. And so naturally, in my life, moving from the manufacturing world to the construction world, it made a lot of sense when we saw the vision of what ElectriCom was doing in my past and what I've experienced through my life to be part of it and to continue to help build and grow in ways in which we can help those that grew up in a very similar geographic footprint that I did to have opportunities. So it was a great fit, made a lot of sense.

**Benjamin Yost** (2:23)
Are there any kind of like lessons that you learned throughout those early experiences that you've kind of taken into what you've been doing at ElectriCom?

**Andy Leake** (2:33)
Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in a pretty blue collar family. And so naturally it was a, you really, you get to eat what you kill, type of a way to think about that. And so we were hard working, a lot of farm area, those types of things. And so it's really that, you have to put in the hard work to get the reward in order to get there, right? And so I actually spent about four years welding on the shop floor in order to pay my way through college. And that really grounded the way in which I think about our crews and our leadership and the way we interact with our customers. And it's not just that it shows up. It's because we make it happen. It's because we get our hands dirty, the shovels in the ground, those types of things. And that is really a completely different way of thinking and what I've experienced from other key leaders.
And this industry is pretty unique in that. We've been pretty blessed across the industry with those who have kind of come up through the ranks and are now leading businesses. So it's a good community to be part of.

**Benjamin Yost** (3:47)
That's cool. So you mentioned a little bit about key differences and how maybe other leaders think about this industry and how they operate. Can you expand on that a little bit more and how maybe you're doing things differently?

**Andy Leake** (4:03)
Yeah. So here at ElectriCom, as we think about the way we interact with our vendors and our customers, they're just as much part of the ElectriCom family as our employees.
And you can think about several events that we've had in my time here at ElectriCom, where the vendors have probably been just as much of a support in helping us meet our customers' needs as our own employees have been. And so we continue to perpetuate that into the future. And we look at the way that we go to market and the way that we do business as a partnership. It's truly a partnership.
And we value that relationship as opposed to it's just who's the lowest price or who's the fastest. We take pride in the quality of work that we do, the suite of options that we bring to the table for our customers, and really our safety record speaks to that as well. We're not fly by night. We are truly here to meet those needs and to help our customers grow and meet the needs of their customers. That's ultimately what matters for us.