All right. Joining us in the studio today is Rodney Gray. He's the CEO of Zietel. Welcome to the show. Thank you, thank you for having me. You got a tell a bigger story for us. So yeah, my brother and I we just got back on Monday. We spent the weekend. Yeah, it took those tail private jet there's no tel private jet now. We went to we we drove down to Florida, I mean to Atlanta to spend the weekend with my uncle, and then drove over to Talladega to watch the race. And just like you guys said, the first two stages were boring as could be. Where where'd you sit? We set right at the dog leg exit, right just before the start finish line. Yeah, and we were about halfway up, so we got a good view. We could just not see the backstretch, which was just where those two wrecks were at, but the and wreck because my guy ended up going from twenty ninth to tenth right there and the right in front of me for the last lap. So I was who was that Harrison Burton but not really the driver the team the Wood Brothers brother my dad is still classic too. Yeah, my dad and my uncle worked for the Wood Brothers. Oh wow, in the pit crew back in the seventies and eighties. And this was my first trip to Talladega, although my mom tells me, you've been to all the tracks, and like, well, I was four or three, and I don't really remember that was that Stewart Virginia Stuart, We're gonna Patrick County. Yeah, we've been to the museum and there's tons and tons of pictures of my dad back in the old David Pearson Neil Bonnet day. So my brothers and I grew up racy. Do you think anybody in those days just drafted with each other and went fifty bottle, no run right over if you put fifty over, twenty miles an hour slower, just going around and around, just a different Yeah, we get those tickets thinking, all we're right outside the dog lag here to start finish line. We're going to see some action. Yeah, it was just the first two stages were just and my last lap was the last lap was pretty crazy. Corey La Joy, did you get see what? Did you know? He was up on his side? Could you ask that? Yes, I didn't see it because I was trying to focus on Harrison to see, Oh my god, did he make it through? Is he going to get there? And I'm focusing on him because it's all you know, being live at any race and even on the super speedways. It just happened. So yes, yes, you can't see anything. So I did see the part where coryla Joy spun out in the water coming out of the pits. It was right in front of us. He hit the puddle of water and the next caution they had the jet drivers down there, and I'm sure cordlod Joy's going why I couldn't do that twenty lasts ago. So we had a great time. It's a easy drive in and out of that track and it is a town there highway and nothing around you. This is a guy's name that shoot, I forgot his name now, the one that was leading at the end of No very beginning well, Michae Wadala said on the pole he led the race and then this was midway. This was just before the end of the first segment there. Oh you're the guy that you put money on. Yeah, yeah, seventy eight the black car back on it. I don't know why I'm missing his name now, but it's not Brendan gone is it anyway? Anyway, he's leading the race, he's not supposed to be up there. And of course he didn't get the memo that everybody else was half throttle, which is why he ran out of gas. But I had just put five dollars on him on FanDuel and literally two laps later he ends up hitting the outside wall and because he runs out of gas. And I'm telling him now it was five dollars if he had won somehow, which anybody can win tallidata. Yeah, it was a eleven payoff, so it was worth a bet. But if he ever finds out that I'm the one that jinks bj J McLeod, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what that's my brother says. He says, every driver that he roots for, that's not well. Henny roots for Harrison with the Wood Brothers, they wreck, and then any other driver he says, well, you know what, I'm going to go for Daniel Swis today he'll wreck, you know, so whoever he picks, And that's that's exactly the way it is. All right, Well, let's dive into zytail here a little bit before before you get to zi Tel, where are you raised where are you born here? So I'm born and raised right here in Bedford County. My parents still live in Jordantown, right on Jordantown Road there in Steorgesville. Went to Steorge Elementary, I went to graduate from Stanton River, moving back here where I lived in Rollanooke over on the Cape Spring Side for twenty years. And my wife and I are building a house in Goodview. Oh and we're living with my parents right now, which is you know. We were in an apartment and the apartment prices and rent are just sky and we were ready to renew the lease and they wanted to. I was like, you know, mom, the basement looks very appealing right now. So we're staying with her, living right over on Jordantown Road, right in the middle of the Zie Tail footprint. Perfect. So all right, So tell me how how did Zetel come about the company? So Zytel started in twenty seventeen and our president CEO of Brandon Camden, who I worked with him running a company called Strategic Global Networking Group. We were an IT consulting company that filled that niche of companies that are too big to have a relative come in and do their IT work on a Saturday, but still too small to hire that one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars year IT person. So we were doing that. We're all IT computer nerds. That's what we did by trades, what I've done for twenty some years. He built the house in Minita and one of the bigger cable providers wanted some astronomical dollar figure to put co X you know, cable TV down his driveway, and he was like, for that amount of money, we may as well just put fiber in the whole neighborhood. So we did, and he started Zytel. We went after some tobacco grants back with the whole tobacco grant that yeah, R Jr. Back in the day didn't win those. And then we were building slowly, you know, and making moves and trying to develop what Zytel would become. And then COVID hit and that hit us hard from the IT consulting side. But one of the nice things was a picture came out in the Bedford Bulletin where they had closed the schools down, and it showed all the kids sitting around a folding table with a you know, tailgating canopy over them and you know snotting those little kids and the you know, cold weathers sitting shoulder to shoulder and college aged kids lined up against the brick wall, all just to get on the WiFi outside of one of the local libraries. Yeah, and that picture kind of it made people think, and I think the rest of the country thought like that, and they're like, you know, internet should be that essential utility, just like water, electric and gas. And sure it's one of the few things that I think that the governments, the federal government, the local governments did. They were like, we can they could have you know, socialized it or regulated it to the hilt like they do the power companies and stuff, or or even brought in you know, but they didn't. They they wanted to invest in local companies and in the big national companies and set up grants and subsidies that we can use to build in the rural areas. So we got a grant through Bedford County and then another one through the state of Virginia to put where we ended up putting five hundred At the end of the project in March twenty twenty five, we'll have over five hundred and fifty miles of in Bedford County. Wow, that's awesome for a local company. So it's amazing roughly how many employees now. So right now we're employing I think the last count twenty eight twenty nine organic employees into our building. So most of those are construction outside plant construction or splicing a fiber and putting the fiber into one of the things we do a little differently than the bigger companies. We put our own fiber in the ground. We run the construction side of the business. We don't subcontract. We do subcontract somehow, but we don't do as much as some of our competitors who that's all they do is subcontract out the construction and the engineering. We do a lot of that in house. So what are your future plans? Obviously we've seen some of it in the news about possibly body camp. What is your what is your future plans with for expansion? So right now, our where our expansion is on as much fiber as we can get in the ground, as fast as we can get it in were we're applying for grants and subsidies in both Franklin County not knock on Wood will get those in Carroll County are a big one. We're expanding some southward towards North Carolina. But one of the things we've noticed is that our growth over the next five years is going to extremely outpace the space that we're in where our headquarters is in downtown Menita, right there off of one twenty two, and we're definitely going to bust at the seams on that. And so the opportunity came up. Bedford County put out an RFP I think it was back November of last year for Body Camp Elementary that have been sitting empty for ten years and falling apart. And if any of you have been down for six and seeing the old Montvale Elementary School, the gymnasium floor's falling in, the roof's falling in. It's just it's a drain on county resources and nobody can get and do anything with it. So we had the opportunity to put a bid in on Body Camp Elementary, and we won the bid, and so we entered into what we call a due diligence period where it's not really the county. It's not like they're immediately going to sell the building. We wanted to go into the building and have access to it, bring inspectors in make sure it's not going to cost ten million dollars to that we get in there and that floor is not going to fall out yea. So we've had over the past three months, we've had people inspecting the roof, the boiler system, the weills, the septic the make sure there's no ay's bestus in the building. This building was built in the fifties and sixties. Checking out the gymnasium. All of our employees are super excited about the fact that we may have a gymnasium in our corporate headquarters. So working to get some conceptual designs and actual art done of what we can see the building morphing into so that we've closed that due diligence period and put the ball back in the county's core and now what they need to do is up to them. I think there's some I can't really you know, really know what the county, what their process is. That there's some public hearings that have to happen before and get input from the general public. And really we want to get out there and tell everybody what we're doing and what our plans are for the building. No, it's perfect. A similar situation here. That's how the studio came about. In the other buildings, this used to be the Town of Bedford's utility public works, and it had been vacant for thirty years, and we had to go through the same process to purchase the buildings, and like you said, you go through a due diligence process, you go through public hearings, and there was some pushback from certain people in the community, which I think comes with the territory. But the point of it is you've taken a vacant property and you're investing funds in it and you're making it a vibrant, you know, part of the community now. Not to mention that that's revenue for the county, and that's definitely one of the things we want to make everybody aware of. We're not going to turn this into some you know, private company that's off limits to the public, and we really want to become part of the community. This is right where we want to be. This is right where we're all from. These are our friends or neighbors or relatives. We all live here in Bedford County. It's not like, you know, the building won't be open to the general public. We have plans that are you know, you know, plans are fluid. They have to be fluid with a project like this, But we want to partner with the community. I notice they have a sign up that they do a trunk retreat there every year. We'll still gladly postal Body Camp trunk retreat and we'll have a table set up, provide free Wi Fi for Internet, and pass out a ton of candy. By the way, they're your customers, and I would imagine Body Camp is the heart of the county, right it's central location, right in the center, and you want to go and you you're trying to spread your tentacles. M hm. That's a that's a great spot for you to run to customers. We have we have great plans. We're gonna We're gonna keep the gymnasium open. We've got quotes and bids out there to refinish the gymnasium floor, keep it a gymnasium. Some of our employees have started talked about starting an AAU league. We'll let Parks and rex still come in there and use it. We're going to convert one of the classrooms that attached the gymnasium into a fitness center and the two bathrooms that are attached to the gymnasium tournament actual men's and women's locker rooms. You know, have that available to the community if they want to use it or sign up to use it. And we're we're talking about some of the four classrooms down on the end towards the gymnasium side. We'll we'll have that space stay classroom type space and and lease that space out to some adult education type training facilities. Example, we'd put some telephone poles up in the back and sponsor certification courses to come in to teach people and get them certified to climb poles, to gaff poles, work in the electric space. It's a great field helps us because that's what we do when we put fiber on telephone poles. But they don't have to work for us. They can get that certification and go to work for AAP Southside Bedford Electric, Bedford Electric. You know. So we've got you know, and we we want to get community input. We want to hear from the community about what they would like to see. You know, there are aspects of the building that we want that will be our corporate headquarters and research center and you know, we've talked about putting a data center in there and hosting a micro cosm of what AWS does, but right here in Bedford County, you know, and in five years we project we could have thirty forty fifty high pain high tech jobs that you don't have to go to Ronorck and Lynchburg for they're right there in Body Camp. And we all the money that we'll invest in this building, it'll be invested locally, you know, local contractors that we get, local people in Bedford County. So we're spending our money to renovate this building and get it, you know, back up to worth a lot of money, and money that we'll be paying, you know, worth money that we'll be putting in the tax coppers. That's awesome. So what are the I'm curious in the Internet side there, What are some of the biggest obstacles that you find? I would imagine technology is changing so rapidly. How does Zietel keep up with some of those challenges? So lots of research. But one of the nice things about fiber is that fiber that we put in the ground is literally the same fiber that was put in the ground back in the seventies and eighty when NASA invented fiber optic cables. There's not much difference in it. More strands, tighter spun, different things like that, but it's the same fiber. The speeds of fiber optic cable, the top end of that has yet to be achieved. They're still lab testing things in Switzerland or wherever they do those crazy tests. And what he does back there right now, pushing buttons right now, it's work faster, you know. Develop They can't develop like ttronics fast enough. And then the point is they keep the electronics cool. They can transmit as much data across that fiber as they can push it. Haven't found the top end yet, whereas all this copper that's in the ground from the nineteen fifties and earlier, that copper is it's met its max and they cannot get any more speeds out of it, you know. So that's the nice thing for us. The challenges is we'd have to do a lot of research and the electronics that are on the either end of that fiber, we have to make sure we stay on top of the game. Where we're researching right now. To switch over what they call XGS pawn XGSPWN is the ten gig so residential Internet at ten gig speeds, which is you know, I look back at my computer world and think, oh my god, I had a full mag of Internet that never need anything faster than that. Now we're talking about ten gig speeds up and down. It's similar to TV. Right, Yeah, I see something that was produced in two thousand and I think, how did we even watch it? Like you can barely see the graphics, but even then it was great. Now, like if you watch Terminator now, when I was a kid, I thought Terminator was like the coolest thing. Ever, how do they do that? Now? You watch it like you watch it with one of your kids and they're like, really, right, you thought this was cool exactly, So I would imagine in your world, speed is everything? Right? Is that? And that? You know? What's vital that people don't understand is the economic development side of it. Having Zytel a local company that's providing this service allows municipalities like Bedford County, the town of Bedford to attract business because the very first question that is asked is what is your Internet capability? Oh that's why they you know, some of the industrial parks that are out there. They advertise them as what they call giga parks. Yes, it's advertises a giga park, because that's the number one people What type of Internet can I get in this in this community and or in this industrial complex, or in this business park or where you want to And so even for just residential home sales. I know me personally, I'm gonna you know, when we sold our house in Cape Spring and decided to move back to Bedford County, I was like, well, I'm not going to buy land out in the absolute middle of nowhere, so I've got to build fiber just to get myself Internet. I'm going to make sure I'm within my footprint or within somebody else's footprint where I buy to build my house, so that I because it's it's reeltors to tell you, and when we tell that to customers that we talk to, you know, getting the fiber run to your house, you know it's going to increase the value of your home because now you have the capabilities that it's open to market. I'm much larger market for you to to potentially purchase your house. That business comes in and everything. You both might be able to answer this because I don't know, but when you do, when you're laying out a development, Yeah, I mean is internet something that you how does that work? Rodnie? I'm an engineer. I designed subdivisions that type of thing. So no, actually, well well, I mean honestly, all we do is water and sue if there is we're available. But there's the only thing we do is a fifteen foot public utility easement. And we just know that power and cable and get telephone would get put into that easeman. We'd never think about fiber optic and how we get that to what's what's the difference in speed? And I'm I don't mean to sound ignorant, and if you laugh at me, I'm sorry, but what's the difference between a fiber optic line service for cable or for the Internet versus Exfinity or a Comcast or you know, like a traditional cable Internet. So the Cox, the co X systems, they're gonna you know these what they call it Dox's three point one modem for the Cape for the for the Copper cable and is there's just limitations, there's limitations about the band with the introduced and right now you can get a gig circuit from one of those Cox cable providers. But it's a gig download and you're you're maxed out at twenty five minute upload. There's been advertisements in all the talks from all the cable dividers all we've got doxes four point zero come in docs four. But it's it's in my opinion, it's a pipe dream. This is never gonna work. Fiber is the only future to Internet that's gonna last. You know, Fiber we put in the grounds, got a lifespan of about fifty years. You know, we have to talk, you know, then we have to work towards replacing it just because of degradation. Yeah, but the copper, it just has. It's all about limitations for the speed that you're gonna get. And so because of those limitations for speed, you see things because everybody's realizing it. Before it was like how fast can I download the latest video game? How fast can I download this? And all this? But now as we transition and everybody realized from the pandemic that people can work from home, they can tell a commute and they can be just as productive. Yeah, and that upload speed with your zoom meetings you're passing data back and forth from work, all the kids that are taking online classes down work from home. That upload speed is just as important as your download speed. That matters. Yeah, and the only place you're gonna get a synchronous circuit is with a fiber connection. All right. I got a big question because I've always often wondered this. You hear storys. We never know what's true and what's not true. So when it comes to internet and you've got internet and everything seems to be working fine, and then all of a sudden it starts to get slow, and you hear people say, well they throttle it down. I mean, does that actually happen in the world. Yes, oh, I'm getting it. But it happens based on what your usage is. And it's one of the things that I Teel doesn't have. We don't have data caps. You get throttled down based on your deada cap and it's all about the network size and how much bandwidth they can provide to your area. And that's why they put you on a data cap. So if you're downloading too much and you get that that you hit that data cap for the month, you get throttled down. Especially in the cellular network. The cellular network is big in that that the coex cable. I know, I was a Cox customer when I lived in Roanoke. They didn't really you just got like a nast little email and you always thought it seems slower, but they said, we don't throttle you. And we're if you keep continue this trend of downloading too much, we're going to charge you. I and and I never got charged. But I didn't, you know, download a ton of content off the Internet to download it and get it down on my computer. So and streaming TV when I was in extreming was just still kind of taken off. We still had Cox Cable TV. Yeah. So, but that's one thing we have no data caps. Was I tell you can download, as I tell our customers we sign up, you can download the entire contents the Library of Congress and watch every Netflix show, including the Sopranos. I can't believe that. I know, Rodney, you mentioned earlier and I loved it. Was before we went on air you mentioned about and you just said it earlier too. In body Camp is in the middle part of the county, but you could pull talent unheard of from Lynchburg and Roanoke. It'd be Bedford pulling talent. Oh took a place to go to work in the middle of Befford County. Look at look at Redmond, Washington, for example. It was in nowhere a Bristol, Connecticut for ESPN esp Bristol, and nobody thought Bristol was a big talent Yeah, exactly. Microsoft came in and put their campus in Redmond, and now you look at the statistics, more people commute out of Seattle to Redmond or out of the bigger cities into Redmond than vice versa. Wow. So I'm not saying we're Microsoft and we're not gonna, you know, even if we're one tenth of one percent of what they can bring. If we are, we are going to yet till G six just so you know, we'd like to be a max for staffens. But yeah, I mean, even if we can get you know, having a base business like ours, having a core campus business that's going to bring in talent, bring in people, we've got to eat lunch, you know, we've got to we've got to go and we've got to run out, run out to the you know, most people pick a doctor or a dentist based on where they're working because they can run out there during their lunch hour, and and that brings that economic development and the growth to an area that will that you're not going to get when you have a resource like this, it's just either going to sit empty or become something that's not profitable or beneficial to the entire community as in general. I hate to sound ignorant, but we talked about you coming on last week and you had said something about a controversy. This sounds like, how could there be any controversy at all about the well? And it's fantastic, just like whenever you're doing things, you're again, the RFP was put out, they answered the RFP, and then you get a phase where you're working with it. In this case, I tell and then there gets to be people that want to stir the pot. Yeah, well I look at it. And so there's a separate group that doesn't want to see this and they would rather have it be a community center for the community. I know Rodney's not going to say anything, but I guarantee you there's twelve bumper stickers on the back of one of those super ears. I'm just saying fascinating, right listen, and always you're right, but it's always people want something, you know. This was the same thing with this building. We had the same problem. They didn't want you know. Luckily the town did the RFP properly, which is, you know, they said, it's not going to be based off price. It's going to be based off who's going to bring a tax base and renovate and make the space you know, relevant, because they didn't want because somebody can come in and buy it and make it storage, right yeah, or just leave it vacant, and so it's not just a price thing. You want to know, what are you going to do with it? And you've got phenomenal plans with it and having someone come in later on, you know, and it sounds good to the public, but just understand you've got a lot of time and effort invested into this. We have. We've we've put you know, ninety days in and out with quotes and stuff, and almost all Bedford County vendors, Bedford County contractors, Bedford County personnel, our engineers right now here in downtown Bedford. Our excavator contractor that we're going to use is right based out a good view. That's who we want to use. All the money we're going to send to renovate this building are going to go back into Bedford County and Bedford County businesses and all of our friends and neighbors that live here. Whereas you let a nonprofit take possession of this building and they build a community center using federal grant dollars, those federal grant dollars come with a lot of strings. So the cost to renovate this building that we have developed, which could be anywhere from about a half a million to half a million dollars, it could now be one point five one point six million dollars to cost to build. And you're going to have all the vendors that are federal government approved that have to come out of Culpeper or federal facts wherever to come here and work in Bedford County to get this done. Sure, and then it's the operational expense to keep it running. We have private dollars, We have revenue coming in from the community, and we will employ the community members and will keep this building running every year. And nonprofits are going to have to go back to the government coffers every year for those operational expenses. Here's an example. The boilers in this building which are still functional. The heat in this building has a ten thousand gallon diesel fuel tank attached to these boilers. They estimated that I would go through two tanks of diesel fuel for one winter to use the boilers. To E that's ten thousand, three dollars and fifty cents a gallon for off road diesel. Yeah, yeah, that's a lot of money. Yeah, to heat the building. So we you know, we were going down there's hother avenues, yeah, that people don't talk about. So you know, as we can flag Brad next time it comes by on the train, that's right, you know. And and the contrary, like you were talking earlier, people, we may have shot ourselves in the foot with that because we are in dire need of space for our equipment, our trucks and everybody. The rumor mill started. And we have a company policy we don't respond to internet comments for good or bad. We don't get into I don't let my employees do it. My wife keeps me from doing it. To jump in there and start answering comments on Facebook, and you just want to I'm not I'm not that guy, and she's my wife, looks at me and says, don't put your phone down comment and I don't. But we needed a place to park equipment and trucks and the counties, and I went to the county and said, hey, can can we lease the parking lot and and and and use the parking lot and and park equipment over there while we're going through this due diligence period And if if it doesn't go through and you don't sell it to us, the least will expire and we'll leave and yeah, go down you know, Avenue B And they're like sure. And then so all of a sudden, our trucks just immediately started showing up from our equipment was parked there, and everybody's like, what's going on, what's going on? And nobody had said anything, and so everybody just started let's make assumptions. Yeah, and I was in the marine, so we all know what they say about and assume. So, well, look, we appreciate you coming in, uh, and we love the work that you do in the community. For those who don't know's I tell was a major sponsor that allowed growth Strey at FM Sports to start. Yeah, I mean we started from nothing and we were able to do sports out at Liberty High School and we want to keep expanding that footprint. So we thank you for what you do in the community and bringing economic development to the community as well. Before you go, we got to put you on the spot like we do all our guests. Oh no, what he didn't want me about that disclaimer. You get to choose one person. It can be somebody current or in history. But if you got one day with that one person, who's the person and where are you going and spending the day with them? Ronald Reagan, it's one of our tops. There you go and cool, We're going to San Francisco. Current day, San Francisco. I want him to see what it's been, Yeah, what his hometowns and home area of California. Want to see what he has. It's a great answer, Man, that's perfect. Well again, thank you for coming in the studio and hanging out with us. Good luck to you, and we'll keep keep everybody updated on this process. Thank you, thank you, Thank you for having man, Thanks for giving the service to people.
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