What is the Bathtub Curve and How Can We Prevent Failures | Damien Robinson Ep 11

In this episode of Power the Network, host Tim Locker interviews Damien Robinson, Director of Sales for Megger in the US. They discuss the importance of testing and diagnostics for utility and communications networks. Damien explains how assets like transformers and cables have a "bathtub curve" for failure rates, with high rates at the beginning and end of life. Testing helps identify issues to prevent premature failures during stable operation. Protective equipment like relays and circuit breakers are the top priority for testing. Damien shares how he transitioned from engineering to sales and eventually to management, pursuing an MBA to prepare for leadership roles. He emphasizes the need to understand reps as partners, taking manufacturer training to learn their perspective. Damien offers leadership advice on leading by example, listening to your team, taking blame and sharing credit. He describes Megger's cultural journey to be more customer-centric and unified across internal silos.

Testing helps utilities diagnose issues and plan for asset replacements before failures occur.
Protective equipment like relays and breakers are the top priority for testing.
Sales roles require extensive demos, training, and customer hand-holding throughout the long sales cycle.
Manufacturers need training to understand the rep perspective and build partnerships.
Leaders should set the example, listen to their team, take blame and share credit.
Breaking down internal silos helps companies take a unified, customer-centric approach.

In this episode, Damien Robinson provides an insightful look at testing and diagnostics for utility networks. He shares valuable perspectives on making the transition into management and building a customer-focused, collaborative culture. Manufacturers and reps can learn a great deal from his experiences to strengthen partnerships and better serve customers together.

Hi, and welcome to Power the Network.

I'm your host, Tim Locker, vice President of Broadband for CBM.

You know, one of the things I enjoy about the opportunity to do this podcast is it really opens me up to meet a lot of the different people that we work with here at CBM.

It kind of gets me out of my little bubble of you know, working in the communications space, and it spreads me across all these different markets.

So I really enjoy the opportunity to meet some of these people that are new to me and learn from them and dig into what they do on a daily basis and some of their leadership aspects and etc.

So with that in mind, we're going to welcome to the show today mister Damian Robinson.

He's the director of sales for the US for Meghar.

Let's see what he's got to say.

Well, Damien, thanks for joining us today.

I really appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to come and be with us US and join us on the podcast.

So, Mega Manufacturers testing and diagnostic equipment for utility for communications, cable TV industries, tell me why this is important?

Why is testing and diagnostics important?

And really what's your elevator pitch.

Okay, well, first off, why it's important is because society.

Society says it's important.

I mean, think about we're trying to record a podcast right at the moment.

What if electricity went out.

You know that we're going to have a problect lout r Right, air conditioner goes out, We're not going to be very happy.

So society we're built upon electricity.

Now as part of that, they're I don't know if are you familiar with a bathtub curve.

You ever heard that urn before?

I have not, So a bathtub curve is it's basically a failure rate curve, and the science behind it is that as products are manufactured, assets are manufactured, they have a higher than desired failure rate in the beginning, but then after you get past that beginning part, it kind of settles out and it'll last until roughly till it's design life, right, as long as it's used in a proper manner, and then as it gets to the end of this design life, then the failure rate goes up.

So it looks kind of like a bath cub bathtub as you look at it, right.

So what testing does is it allows you to hopefully lessen the amount of premature failures.

And as you're going along the stable part the design life, you can see where you are in that curve as far as what you might be able to do to extend the life of the asset or make some changes to the asset, maybe change how you utilize the asset and that kind of thing.

So that's that's the reason why it's important.

And the other part of it is that it's cheaper to plan for a replacement than it is to just replace.

I mean, think about your car.

You know it's cheap.

It's cheaper if you can maintain your car and plan.

Okay, we got about two years left on this car.

We can start planning for that, as opposed to it just breaks down tomorrow and now you got to worry about how am I going to get the kids to school?

How am I going to get my wife to school?

Or well, if she goes to school, how am I going to get my wife to wherever she needs to go?

How am I going to get to work?

Yeah?

Oh, and that makes sense.

And like the planning, well, one thing, so we're you're talking about protecting networks, Yes, basically, and so in my mind.

If I think about, okay, just a simple product, and if this product fails, well you know, whether I test her, this product is going to fail.

Right, So but that that's incorporated differently in protecting a network, I guess, help me, help me walk through a little bit of how that product failure affects the network.

Well, what we're doing is we're testing the assets that are part of the network.

You know, a network just means that I have a bunch of different pieces working together to create something.

I mean, the Internet is a network, right, I mean I have to have routers, I have to have switches, I have to have cable.

So if one of those things failed, If one of those things fails, it affects everything and it's a cascading effect.

Right, So the power grid is no different.

I have transformers, I have circuit breakers, I have batteries, relays, all these you know equipment that you know, people may the normal public won't know what they are.

But if one part fails, it can jeopardize the reliability of the Where I flip my white switch and it doesn't come on.

So we're testing those assets individually to see where they are, to see what kind of maintenance needs to see if we need to talk about replacing it in that kind of thing.

So what would be the order of priority of what needs tested?

I mean, I understand it's all important, but is there certain levels of you know, what gets tested more often, what's more important?

There are some standards out there that say that you should test this more often than that.

What I'll generally say is that if it's something that is a protective piece of equipment, it needs to be tested more than other pieces because what the protection does.

Think about it from like your home.

In your home, you have a circuit breaker panel.

Okay, if one of those circuit breakers goes bad, then either I'm going to blow up my microwave because it and trip, or I'm gonna melt cable in my I'm gonna melt the wire going, you know, running in my outlets, which is gonna be a bad thing too.

I'm gonna have to start replacing, doing expensive replacement inside my house.

So making sure the protective gear is operating properly is probably priority number one, and that's that's where a lot of focused gut does go around.

But then beyond that, it's then what things are take a longer time to replace.

So if you look at transformers, for example, to build those can take a year, two year, three years down the road before you can get a major transformer replace ahead of it.

Yeah, so you got to stay ahead of the curve on that, gotcha.

Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

We've had an issue at home with our stove.

There's I don't know if it's a glitch in the computer board or whatever, but it goes into cleaning mode and it just out of nowhere and it just gives you raging hot.

So like you've got to shut it off.

And it happened a couple of times, like, oh, that's kind of weird.

Well, now it's like I've literally shut the breaker off in the garage so that the stove cannot operate because the thing gets so hot.

So now we can use the stovetop.

So if I want to make eggs, which I you know, just this weekend, I wanted some eggs Sunday morning, So I go and I flipped the breaker on, and you know, the ovens already, you know, crank, So I shut it off, make my eggs, sit down to eat them, and then things raging again.

So so we've been living the last week with our breaker off to the oven, so we haven't burn the house down, So I kind of understand that's going something something inside to the oven went went faulty.

Yeah, and it's there are assets that have some form of self diagnostics.

So even like I bought a refrigerator here recently and it has in there like a speaker that you can put your phone to and it will send some signal to sam No LG LG website and it'll tell you, you know, hey, here's what's wrong.

So so some form of self diagnostics built in, and even the even the power grid is to a degree going in that direction where there are some online monitoring things that are going on to try to give you some heads up while it's operating, as opposed to taking an outage, doing some testing diagnosing what the problem is.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, you know.

So testing, you know, we've sold test here for you know, quite a while, and you know my background is in fiber optics and so you know, we did obviously a lot of testing on fiber.

But from a sales standpoint, you know, testing products is very time a sensitive deal.

You know, you spend a lot of time in the field a lot of time uh physically with the customers.

Uh you know, whether it's demos or training.

But it's kind of a very intense sales cycle.

How how does that affect what you do?

Or can tell me a little bit about you know what that sales cycle for you looks like?

So they I mean you, you definitely hit it on the head that there is with in what we do.

There's a lot of Okay, show me.

You know, I can see a data s feet, I can see a spec sheet and I see it outputs this and it measures that, and you know that there's so much memory of this and yeah, okay, great, the accuracy is that.

But what what does all this mean to me?

How are my guys going to use it?

How are they going to interpret what it's telling me?

So there certainly is a lot of handholding, a lot of trialing, a lot of demoing.

I would say from general standpoint, our first objective is to establish some form of a need for the customer.

They got to understand that if you let this asset run to failure, the cost is going to be this and there are some direct costs of Hey, I need to buy a new in and replace it.

Just like just like the car example, a car breaks down, I got buy a new and replacement.

But there are potentially some indirect costs in that.

There could be a public perception issue.

You know, even if your car breaks down, perhaps you start becoming late to work because now you've got to take public transportation.

So now you've got a perception in your boss, hey you're running late and it all stems from my car broke down.

So there's some direct costs, there's some indirect costs of related to that, and we got to show there's a return if you actually take the time to do this.

So that's the first part.

Then from there it's it's establishing you know, hey, we're better than the competition.

Let us show you how, let us show you why.

Uh.

And then then there's once they're convinced, obviously make the purchase.

Then there's the after support of Okay, let's train and train your guys how to do this.

Yeah, hopefully I answered your question.

No, that makes sense because you know it would get calls.

You know, you go out and you do a demo, you make a sale, you come in and you train everybody how to use it, and then you know, these two technicians leave, they backfill them, and now you know, it could have been two three years from when that sale has happened, and now you still have two new people that you're going back out to train.

So it can be a lot of repetition, you know, for that same individual sale.

It is.

The nice thing about our industry is that, well, there's several nice things.

One with the utility market in particular, things actually move fairly slowly, and there's a need for that because the last thing you want, the last thing a manager or director a VP wants to do is invest in this brand new thing and then it makes the grid unreliable.

So it's like, okay, let's try this out for a little while before we actually make a change.

Make sure it's proven.

Make sure it's proven exactly.

So that's a nice thing about it.

So when you get in a lot of times you can have repeat business afterwards.

So while there's a lot of work up front, you know, in the back end, it may not be as much as just retraining the people that come through, because obviously we have turnover and that kind of thing.

Yeah, okay, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

So you've been with MegaR seventeen years.

That correct, Yes, that is correct.

What did you do before that?

Were you right out of college or no?

I was not right out of college.

Interestingly enough, I actually was doing insurance sales before I started at MegaR for a particular company or I was, it doesn't matter.

But I was an independent agent, so I could contract with any insurance insurer that decided that they use independent agents.

But did you like that or was it something you just felt in needed to make some money?

And that's what we where we ended up.

Yeah, there's a backstory to it.

Can you tell it?

Yeah?

I can tell it.

I won't say I disliked it.

There were definitely some benefits to it.

What I what I will say in short, is that when you go into insurance sales, the barrier there's this in in sales or in business in general, there's always this this term called barrier to entry.

Sure like, how hard is it for somebody to do what you do?

And insurance sales, it's all you have to do is get a license and most states, you know, you just take a course, take a test, and here your license and now you can go be an insurance agent.

So the barrier entry is very small, So you have to learn to differentiate yourself like immediately, or there's no reason for anybody to do business with you.

I mean, just think about it.

How many times have you changed your insurance provider and health and auto?

Probably not very often many, right, I've had a fu try, but yep, just not very many.

Yeah.

So it did teach me differentiation and it matured me as a salesperson.

But the backstory is I did graduate with an electrical engineering degree.

Back in bachelor's in electrical engineering, I started out going to a utility working as a distribution planner, and within about a year I realized this does not fit my background.

I'm an out going, like to talk kind of person and I just got to sit here and do engineering drawings all day.

This is this doesn't fit.

So after that I went into my first sales job working interesting and left testing equipment, but it was on the telecommunication side.

Fell in love with it, but regrettably got let go from that company.

And then as I got let go, I had seen at this time, this was right around two thousand and two, I had seen the telecommunication industry kind of took a bit of a die, a little dip there yeah, And I had seen some people be let go before me go work for a competitor or distributor or something, and then three months later they were let go, and so I was like, okay, I can't go back into telecommunication because I'm just going to repeat the cycle.

So fell into insurance.

Got sold on this whole concept of residual You know, you kind of build up your book of business.

We rely upon people who don't change.

They called a sticky industry.

They called it sticky where Another another analogy to that is banking.

How many times do you change your bank?

You know, yeah, exactly twice in fifty years or however loan?

Yeah, right, fifty I'm not fifty Okay, sorry, all right?

What I round up just for the record, so that works.

But yeah, I mean you've changed your bank twice.

I changed.

I guess technically I've changed my bank twice from when I was a teenager and had a bank, opened a bank account open, my parents opened it to when I started my utility job.

It's sticky industry.

So once you kind of get sold on it, you stick with it.

And I was sold on that.

You build up your book of business, you get your clients they're likely not going to change and you just keep going from there.

Yeah.

So in that industry, it's the long term what you're looking at.

You're going to suffer through a few years working your tail off and going to theoretically get all that and then the long term is the big nugget at the end.

Theoretically, Yeah, that's how it's supposed to work.

It didn't quite work for me that way.

So how did you end up then with MegaR?

Well?

I ended up with MegaR because I got married.

So I got married, had a child, and first child I had in two thousand and six and two thousand and seven.

My wife pretty much made I won't say an ultimatum, but she's like, Hey, we need your income to be this level.

Yeah, and if you can't get there with insurance, then you need to go back to doing something else.

I had a similar conversation after I got married.

Yeah, I think the conversation was you need to get a real job, because I was doing it at that time.

I got married when I was twenty three, and we'd met when we were twenty one, but I was doing construction.

I'd actually dabbled in I'd worked for about a year for a contractor doing fiber splicing, and no kid at twenty one years of age needs to make that much money.

Back in that day, I was.

I was getting paid by you know, piece work, and it was the money I was making was crazy and I was immature and couldn't handle it.

We had a small trailer fire burned the splice trailer down.

Oh wow, lost a couple of splicers, OTDRs and all the test here.

So you know, that was obviously a big impact on my IMpower at the time.

So absolutely I was out of work for a while because you know, they had to figure out how they're going to replace one hundred and some thousand dollars worth of stuff a small, small company.

So I started doing construction.

So I'd had a construction background anyway, so I just started doing small jobs.

Next thing, you know, two years later, I'm still you know, remodeling bathrooms doing this kind of stuff.

I did have a small fishing addiction, so like if it, so I've worked at all Cloudy, Okay, boys, wrap these tools up.

We got work.

But you know, we might go fishing.

Even though you're supposed to be model in the bathroom.

Let's go fishing.

Right, yea, So my financial responsibility was not that good and got married and and she quickly told me, uh, you know what things need to change?

Yeah.

Yeah, So then I actually got back into fiberusplicing and did that for you know, a lot of years.

But it's interesting similar, yeah, similar for us.

Probably probably the story of a lot of married men.

You need to do something real with your life, yep, absolutely, yeah, So walk me through your transition.

You started as a sales engineer.

That does that just mean sales?

Yeah, I was responsible for a territory.

I was actually responsible for the Chicago territories what we called it, Okay, it's Illinois, Wisconsin, and Upper Michigan.

So yes, I started there.

And because of my previous sales stint, not the insurance sales, but the first telecommunication sales roll I had, I was actually driving up in Upper Michigan and just starting to think reflect more, what do I want to do with my life?

Is this really what I want to be doing?

Driving, you know, just remaining a sales role.

And we've had a lot of people do it.

They've been very successful.

They made more money than I have, even as a director.

So but I kind of just thought yeah, this isn't what I want to do all my life.

I love what I'm doing, but I want to go somewhere else.

So there actually was an opening that happened.

The guy who hired me, he was my sales manager.

He ended up leaving the company opened up a position.

Now at that time, I'm only about I think I'm maybe about a year with a company, And as I had already mentioned, I wasn't Although I have an electual engineering degree, I didn't really work in power grid test equipment, right, so I'm still learning.

I was like, well, when I interviewed, I told him that I do want some upper mobility put in for the position.

Didn't work out for the right reason.

It's good.

It's good that it didn't.

So I ended up going back to get an MBA.

Oh good.

Yeah, in two thousand and nine, started my NBA program, finishing twenty eleven.

Right as I was finishing in twenty eleven, about three months before I finished, I did get the promotion to a regional sales manager.

Great, and did that for about eleven years, and then just in the last year and a half, I got promoted to a director level to help manage the sales managers.

So it was just more of an epiphany where I wanted to go with my life that want to remain in sales and wanted that upper mobility.

Geared myself for it.

And how do you find yourself traveling more with this new role or less in the director role, less in the sales manager role.

It was more, Yeah, because now as a sales manager, I'm managing people who had a territory like I did, and so I'll be responsible for instead of just two or three states, I'm responsible for maybe ten states.

You know, mixtures of manufacturers reps like you're like CBM, or some direct tires like I haven't, like I had in the Dallas territory we called it North Texas and just trying to help them to achieve success.

And so now you've got those managers reporting up.

Yes, now I have those managers reporting to me.

The eShop at CBM makes this different than other manufacturers REP firms.

We've got some of the best people in the market.

That ESOP allows them to be able to make decisions differently.

They're able to do whatever it takes to take care of the customer, take care of the manufacturer, gives them the flexibility to make decisions when they need to be made.

If you need expert advice on a project or looking for representation from these fine folks at CBM, reach out to us here at cbmrep dot com.

How many reps do you guys have across your under your reach?

We have just firms.

It's nine REP firms if I believe if I'm counting correctly, well, actually I should take a step back.

Just this year we implemented a industrial rep organization where we're also hiring some repfirms there.

Okay, prior when wherever you were giving whenever someone was given a territory, they covered all markets.

Well, megar's starting to diversify its portfolios so much that it's really it's pretty much impossible for us to go with one REP organization or direct hire in them be able to cover utilities, industrial service companies, OEMs, you know, whoever would be interested in our equipment.

So we decided to implement an industrial rep firm so we could separate utilities, which is a lot of what our CBM organization is calling on utilities and service companies and then industrials.

And so because of that, we added three industrial reps and we already had comings or remaining with US nine utility reps, so we have about twelve.

Are you over both markets?

I am over all of it.

Yes, okay, okay, so you've got a bunch going on.

Yes.

As you know, CBM we've long been a part of this program.

It's called CPMR, you know, Certified Professional Manufacturers Representatives, and that really is designed almost like a small master's course for designed for reps really how to run their business, how to deal with manufacturers, those types of things.

And they had a program I think you went through was MBP Manufacturer's Best Practices.

Yes, we've actually they've rebranded that now it's called Grow Sales with Reps.

Tell me about that experience.

You know, I've been through it on the REP side, but you know, what's your perspective from the manufacturer side.

Yeah?

Absolutely, that's good question because when I started as a sales manager, I had only known working with my peers who worked for the same company I worked with.

I didn't understand yeah, direct people, right, I didn't understand this whole REP organization.

I mean I understood that they had a territory, they had sales, but how they organize, how do they think, And so it was let's see, I got the regional sales manager position in twenty eleven, I believe I mentioned, And it was right about the end of the year I had first brought up to my boss at the time, Horace Davis, said, you know, hey, I'd like to learn about managing reps.

You know, I feel like this is an area for me to grow in.

And so I became aware of this through CBM actually and yeah, so went I went through it.

It was very eye opening.

It's really just more so about giving a different perspective of how you think of how you manage your time, of how you manage your expenses.

You know, I had never worked with an ESOP company this year BM is and and you know it does impact you know, what types of things I I might request or how I might request it.

You know, at the end of the day, we have to work together, right and we're working we are ultimately working towards a common goal with MegaR.

The thing that I that I had to understand is you also have a you had other Damiens Suh that you're working with that they had a common goal with whoever semens Uh, Thomas and Bett's or whoever it was, and just how to get the most out of our relationship.

And I think everybody, you know, everybody in your position, wants the most of our mind share, and we owe that, you know, to everybody that we work for, and we understand that.

I think sometimes one of the benefits that I see, you know, for manufacturers is that you know, we have a whole portfolio and they're all very complementing products where maybe we're not able to get into X, Y Z utility to talk about meyor but we are there because of another manufacturer.

So that kind of brings cohesiveness to where we can then begin to bring all the pieces in.

Uh.

And I think sometimes manufacturers lose sight of that that there is a tremendous value in having that everything all connected where we can bring one in in support of the other.

Yeah, and you know, that's that is one of the really positive things about having a REP that when it's it's actually kind of funny when when I used to go out and do travel, some of the rest would be like, you know, hey, I'm we're starting to grow things, but I'm a little concerned about growing too much because if I grow too much, you're going to take it away and go direct.

And I mean it's always a concern, right, it's always a possibility, right, But but I would always look, we are trying to grow, and if you grow, then there's no reason for us to change.

The reason for us to change would be is if you're not growing and we see we feel like we're missing opportunities, then I'm going to be like, Okay, yeah, we need to look at a change, but a lot at MegaR.

If it's not broke, don't fix it.

You know, we're having success with these with this repform, let's continue with that repform.

Actually, quite honestly, within MegaR, we've probably gone more the other way where we've taken a direct territory and gone to a manufacturer rep.

Then we have gone going from a manufacturer REP to a direct But when we we look at those synergies, because that there is an advantage with the REP in that they have transformer, cable, fiber optics, lighting, you know, all these things.

That's getting them in front of our clients more often than if we just went in with just MegaR.

So it's our benefit.

It's like, well, hey, even though they're not representing MegaR.

They're there harnessing that relationship, developing that relationship, strengthening that relationship, and hopefully in a consultative manner that whoever that relationships with they'll trust.

Well.

I like Tim.

Tim has always stirred me straight.

So he's coming in with MEGA, I'm going to trust what he says.

So it's you know, there's a lot of synergy there.

Yeah, no, I get that.

So you recommend then other manufacturers, you know, go to this training or what's your thought?

I recommend it for sure.

If you're I mean, if you're a direct model, you're a direct model.

Find you know that there's there's not going to be a lot of a ton of benefit that you get out of it.

But if you have or are considering hiring a manufacturer rep, then absolutely go through it.

As matter of fact, I have some of my team that we already have it earmarked to go through.

We're just waiting for it to start back up.

Yeah.

Oh that's great.

That's great because you know, I do think I'm glad you shared that.

You know, if you've not worked in that relationship model, it's easy to look at the at the bottom line, look at the numbers, like, well, this is a huge expense, why are we paying this?

And and you know, cross it off.

But yeah, I'm glad you got that insight from that.

So yeah, awesome.

So I'm very interested, uh, you know, in leadership and how people's journey of how they got from where they started to where they are now.

Tell me a little bit, how you know some of your previous roles, your background experience has helped you in your new role of leadership.

How do you how do you diagnose problems with personnel?

How do you redirect people?

What are any good tips in leadership that you've picked up?

Okay, a lot to unpack there.

I'll try to address as much as possible.

It first all started on that road I talked about way back when I'm driving and where I want to go right, and that I knew I wanted to get into upper management or elevate my career, and so I started just kind of thinking on, well, what do they do?

So the first thing I started doing was asking, all right, can how can I be involved with the decision making on how do we choose what product goes to market?

How do we set our pricing?

How do we negotiate our sales agreements with our reps, you know, just higher level things than I needed to necessarily be involved with.

One of the first things that really kind of happened was I started becoming a member of these teams within Mega to launch a new product or to lead some sort of initiative.

And you know, I certainly can't take all the credit.

It was certainly a team effort.

And also I have to say, you know, it's a lot of us, by the grace of God that uh, you know, in a lot of these situations, I had success.

And so it started kind of becoming this kind of snowballing.

Yeah, snowballing.

I was going to say, self fulfilling prophecy where I started asking and then after there's some success and people saw my work ethic, that people started, hey, can I have Damien on my team?

And so I started being requested to beyond team.

Then next thing, you know, I got more than I can do well that we got an issue called Damien.

I've had those calls, but but yeah, that's where it really started.

Just a desire to learn and then having some success and then just getting more responsibility of the success.

That that happened as far as advice.

I think you asked that question.

One of the first things I had to learn or recognize is that you can't you shouldn't really ask anyone to do something that you're not willing to do yourself.

And so because I came from being a salesperson, it's like, Okay, there were some times where you know, I was maybe asked to do this that I can't think of a specific example right now, but I've been asked to present something to a customer in a certain way, and it's like, yeah, I'm not I don't think that's really a good idea to present it that way.

I'll present it, but I'm going to do it some way differently.

So you know, because of that, I can bring those experiences back and say like, Okay, well how would I handle this?

Okay, this is how I think I would handle it, So this is what I would ask you to do.

So that that's one piece of advice.

The other piece of advice that that i'd give someone is listen as much as possible to your team.

When you become a sales manager or a director, a sales leader, a leader of any type.

You know, some I think get into it for the wrong reasons they get into it.

Okay, now I get to tell people what to do.

It's like, well, no, that's that's not not it.

That's I mean, I guess in a sense, Yeah, you get to tell people what to do, but that's not the purpose.

The purpose is to lead the team, right, Yeah, to make them better and be willing to listen.

Now at the end of the day, yeah, there there's certain times a decision has to be made and say, all right, this is the direction we're going.

But at least get the input first before you start just making edicts.

Probably the last thing I would say, and I feel like I've said it in this is that you share the credit.

Be quick to share the credit, but also be quick to take the blame.

Yeah, you know, I think I'm in earlierly, Hey, I was on these teams and I said, we had success.

Now I had success.

We as a team had success.

So share it.

Even if you did ninety percent of the work, share it.

It was a team effort.

You know, without these others, I wouldn't have been able to do this.

Oh it went wrong, you know what, It's on me.

I'll take the blame for that.

Yeah, that's mine.

I'll learn it from gain credibility, you know, taking the blame for things.

It's not really about pointing fingers.

It's about owning up to it.

And you gain credibility with the team, and you know that builds trust.

Yeah, and as long as you learn from it, right, you know, we all make mistakes, absolutely, but you know what we what do we do with that information afterwards?

So absolutely, you know, I listened to just a little motivational deal every day Darren Hardy.

Uh he puts out his Darren Daily clips.

So it's just a little five minute video on business and leadership and all that stuff.

And actually the the message this morning was exactly that about leadership and you know, taking the blame and sharing and sharing the success.

So see, I know I learned a little bit.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Thanks for backing me up on that.

I'll pay you later.

So tell me a little bit about the culture at MegaR.

You know, what's a culture like, what do you want it to be?

How do you how do you ensure that your your people, you know, live up to that culture.

It's a good question.

We actually have started a journey just before I became a director, actually just shy of two years ago, more than a year and a half ago, we there was a there was a reorganization that we called Project five hundred sorry quests to get to five hundred million euros worldwide, and with that became some change in the sales structure and marketing structure, how we go to market.

Well, as part of that, some things that came out of it.

I forget the third one, but the first two our customer centric and the second one and the second one was one megger.

And so what we're trying to do is obviously I think that I heard third one.

The third one's operational excellence, but I'm going to touch on the first two.

The customer centric.

If you imagine a whell, right, and let's say this, all around the wheel is you know, your sales results or whatever comes of it.

Right at the center that will is a hub.

That hub is the customer.

So no matter what we're doing, if we're marketing, if we're trying to sell, if we're doing support, if we're doing product design, everything has to be centered around a customer.

We got to keep them the center of it and of our focus.

The second thing is one mega So we have in the past had some silos.

Okay, well, oh you want that, you got to go to this group over here.

You want that, you got to go to this group over there.

And to a degree, there's still some of that, but one of the things that we have done is we've placed a lot of these separate sales groups underneath one leader.

Now I'm not that leader, it's my boss.

But with that, we're trying to bridge the gap.

Like, if a customer wants to do something with MEGA, no matter what it is, we should be able to help them, no matter who who the party is.

So that's the culture we're trying to get to customer first one MEGA.

How I share that with the team.

That's a good question.

That makes me ponder a little bit.

Sometimes you're not always doing things necessarily right and a little evaluation self evaluation is good.

Yeah.

I think most of it is how we represent, you know, and the times past is like oh you need to go somewhere else with that, or that's not how they would say it, but like oh you need to talk to this part you need.

Now it's more hey, let's take care of the need.

Yes I can I help you with that, Yes I can.

Now how it gets done we'll figure that out behind the scenes, but just the answers, yes, if the customer asks a question, yeah, answers yes, Yeah, No, that's that's a great message.

I mean always, you know, for us, uh, you know, we've always said, you know, take care of the customer and please the principles.

You know, we've got customers we've got to obviously are number one focused, but obviously we have to manage these relationships as well.

And you mentioned silos.

Think there's a lot of companies that struggle with that.

I you know, maybe it's just how business was set up back in the day, but you know, even internally here where you know, markets are changing, business is changing, and those silos really have to come down so that you can work across all those lines.

Yeah, and the silos they're saying, hindsight's twenty twenty, you know, they're whoever, these economists or consultants, whoever said hey, this is the way you should run a business.

They decided that, and a lot of people gravitated towards it.

That's fine, I'm not going to go down that road.

But inevitably, what happens when you have the manufacturing site is a profit center.

The sales is a profit center.

Each one's going to be concerned about their own well being as opposed to looking at it from a whole, and and that's what we're trying to tear down.

It's like, okay, let's try to look at this from a whole, all right, if we need to, if we need to try to satisfy this customer need, why don't instead of the factory saying hey, you take care of it, or sell saying hey, you take care of it, It's like, hey, let's work together and figure out how we can make this work.

And we both may have to sacrifice a little bit, but in the end we'll gain.

So that's one of the things here at CBM that our ESOP allows us to do.

You know.

So we're you know, we're we've got our different markets, and we're all worried about our own little world.

But at the end of the day that AESOP really brings us together.

How do we benefit as a company, you know, so we can take assets from one to another and take care of those issues.

So how does one get their face on the side of a mega van longevity I'll say no, no, actually interesting story about that that actually took place in CBM territory is actually in in Kansas, probably not too far from where we are right now.

We went out, I'm trying to remember.

I think they were still Kansas City Power and Light at the time.

I may be wrong.

They may have changed the everergy, but I think they were still Kansas City Power and Light.

We have a good relationship with them.

They use a lot of our cable equipment for cable fault locating and testing.

And one of the teams I was on we were releasing a new product and they're like, okay, Damien, hey, we want you to help us release us into the American market.

So we came out with an idea to create a video, which regrettably never panned out.

But we came around this time snow was on the ground and we were at one of the training yards at Kansas City Power and Light.

I'm down messing with it, taking some images, and the rest is history about that took place.

I can't remember the exact time frame, but it was probably about five years ago, six years ago, something like that, and it didn't roll out until just last year, and so out of know, I'm like, what like that was that was six years ago.

So anybody watching, I want you to send in pins of where you see Damien on the road.

Let's let's track Damien.

Yeah, there we go.

Oh that's great.

Damien.

You know, I'm super appreciative of you coming in.

I've learned so much from you today.

It's been great to chat with you.

Thanks for having me, Thanks again for joining us.

Appreciate it, thank you, thank you, thanks for following along with us today.

I really enjoyed that conversation with Damien.

I learned a lot from him today.

If you're looking for expert advice on a project, or you need sales repors from an excellent firm, look no further.

Reach out to us here at CBMT cbmrep dot com.

Also, if you follow along on the podcast wherever you get them, please take a moment and comment.

Give us a little bit better feedback.

We'd like to know you know what you've got to say, like comment, subscribe all the other good stuff.

But thanks again, and until next time, we'll see on Power the Network

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