5G Talent Talk with Carrie Charles (00:00)
Thank you for joining me today on 5G Talent Talk. I'm Carrie Charles, your host. And I have a guest with me today that just inspires me so much. And I cannot wait for you to hear this episode. So please make sure you've settled in for the next 30 minutes because this is going to be something special. I have with me today, Gary Ervin. He is the founder and executive chairman of Ervin Cable Construction.
and so much more that we're going to hear about. Gary, thank you for coming on the show today. Thank you, Carrie. And thanks for that great introduction. It's maybe sound a lot better than what I think I really am. Well, you are so humble. And that's one thing that makes you so inspiring. So but I want to start by asking you to just describe, you know, your your journey and your
you know, how you got started. And you know, we'll get into more and more stories later, but I want to hear that part first. Well, it's not like it was a well thought out plan. I was a grad assistant in college. I went to in Missouri, Central Missouri State University, and I was a wrestling coach and a grad assistant in the business department.
I ended up coming home in the summers in Kentucky, where I live, and I worked underground in the coal mines and I shot dynamite. Last year I was a grad assistant. My dynamite job got paneled. I couldn't get hired back at the coal mines and I applied for a cable TV lineman position. And that's where it started 45 years ago this month, actually.
So it started out with me and then two years later a brother joined me and then two years after that another brother joined me. And today we've got 2 ,500 employees and they're not all relatives, a lot of them are. Well, tell you Gary, what is the story behind Ervin Cable? Like let's...
Let's dig into this a little bit more because again, it is so inspiring. And how many years have you been in business again? Forty -five years. I started. Forty -five years. I guess I'm aging myself, but this will be my 45th year that I've been in business. And we started out, we started in the cable TV business, building coax, and it evolved into all forms of telecom.
We ran copper, we got electrical license in several states. And where we're at today, we've done a lot of wireless. We've built fiber for a lot of the 5G rollouts. And now we do mostly fiber optic construction. So it's evolved in the last 45 years from...
and me and my brother and a couple trucks to, we do a little bit of everything. We've got a pretty robust engineering department that does a lot of really neat stuff with GIS software. So that's how we got there. It's 45 years, not to get too deep in the weeds. There were a lot of twists and turns. And one thing I love about this industry is,
how it does change. Anytime you're in technology, you can't sit on one thing for too long. It seems like it's constantly moving. So, and I like that. And a few years ago, you became a subsidiary of Dycom. Yeah, about 20 years. So I've got about half of my telecom career in privately held and owned. We not only constructed
cable fiber networks. We also owned and operated several cable TV systems. We had a local exchange carriers license in Illinois. We built competitive local exchange carriers in Texas and Kansas City and all over. So we kind of done a little bit of both in that timeframe. And then Dycom is a construction.
only company and I tell everybody I went to work. They acquired us and I'm on year 22, 24 of a two -year employment agreement. So I love what I do. I never wanted to get out of the construction side of it and I'm still doing it today. You know, Gary, you have so much passion for what you do and
You talked about the mission for connecting rural America, right? And how many miles of fiber you build a day. And when I hear you talk about it, you light up. What's behind that? What I'm doing right now, the majority of what we do, not the majority, most of what we do now is
a lot of the broadband work, rural broadband. And we worked for a lot of small entities, a lot of small municipal utilities, rural electric co -ops, and that are all ran by a board. And it kind of brings me back to when I first started in the cable business. I would show up in the city council meeting and I would win a franchise in order to
build a cable TV system, you had to have a franchise and franchise got you access to the easements and right away some pull attachment agreements. So that's kind of how it started. This kind of is kind of a full circle. This I'm controlled by these small boards, not a large corporate entity that is obligated to shareholders. This is a board that is obligated to their members and to their customers. And I kind of like that.
You know, currently we're building a hundred miles a day of fiber optics. We're building over 500 miles a week in probably 17 states. And, and I just love going to these jobs. And I love the fact that what I'm bringing to rural America, these are areas that don't have cell phone services. And what I'm bringing, I know will change the culture and change their life.
by this infrastructure that we're building. So I feel, you know, I'm just the guy doing the climbing the poles and building it, but I know what it's gonna do. I've seen it in my 40 years, what this resource brings to a community. And I'm glad to be part of that. That's probably what I'm more excited about than anything I've done in the last probably 20 years. So you have an innovative method.
to place fiber in inner cities. Can you talk about that method a bit? Yeah, and it's something that we developed. We work a lot with Google. We do a lot of inner city builds. When we rolled out 5G for a lot of our big customers, we were having to go into existing networks and markets that had a lot of stuff in the ground. And to get to their antennas,
We started a group that specialized in micro trenching where we saw in the middle of the road, we're not where the utilities are. And then we sealed a small sliver that we cut out that road back up with concrete. And it's aged well and it's been kind of a unique thing that we've gotten a lot of experience with over the past five to 10 years of developing it.
we're proud to be kind of the innovator on that part of it. And, you know, it's led to a lot of companies being able to deploy these fiber networks in inner city a lot cheaper than what it normally cost to the normal drill and pull pipe type of architecture. So Gary, you are passionate about so many things and
You know, just we we did have a little prep call before this call. And I don't know, I just got off that call with you and I was so inspired and excited about, you know, my bucket list and trying new things and, you know, really going out there and conquering life. And so I want to talk to you about some of your other passions. So you are a pilot, right? Let's start there. When did you start flying and what sparked that passion for flying?
You know, I started when I was 18 years old and I was in college. It was a program where I went to school at that I could get my license for like $400. And I did that. And then when I got out of school, when I started in the construction business, I traveled a lot. And, you know, I was a young father with young kids at home and staying out.
the road every night, I bought a plane to get me back and forth that I piloted myself. That was probably 30 years ago and 35 years ago. I still have a plane. I'm still flying myself around. It's just a little bit bigger, a little bit faster than what the old Cherokee 6 I first bought was. But I love to fly airplanes. It's a mode of transportation. It's like a bucket truck or
of piece of equipment, but it's something I enjoy operating. And do you have an office on a military base or? Yeah, it's a it was old Camp Breckenridge property. We're in World War Two. That's where the 101st Airborne trained. And it's a huge abandoned military base that I think I'm the only jet that's parked there now. So it's right behind my office. So it's very convenient.
And it's a important infrastructure for me living in a town of 1200. I have access to that airfield to where I can be in just about any one of my offices in just a few hours. So it's a very valuable tool for me. So another one of your passions is mountain climbing. And I spent quite a bit of time actually on your website, garyclimbsmountains .com.
Gary climbs mountains .com and gosh, how I would encourage just everybody who is listening right now to go to that website. And again, that just lit me up. but I want to dig into this a bit with your climbing. And again, you know, I want to look at your why behind it. Like what was it that made you start climbing? That was it something that you've always wanted to do? Did you just do one and got hooked?
You know, it was, I was always athletic and I was a lot younger when I started this, but what started me 10 years ago, actually on the big mountains was I had just came back from doing two seasons of Amazing Race with my daughter. And I was gone for like six months and back to back seasons I felt. And, and I kind of felt a little guilty. I had four kids and my two sons were
senior in high school, senior in college. And I said, what a perfect time. Let's go to Africa, which is one of my favorite places in the world. And we're going to do something with just the guys. We're going to do something physical and challenge ourselves. We're going to climb Kilimanjaro and then we'll go to Zanzibar and hang out on the beach. And that was the first big mountain I ever climbed. And I just climbed it a month ago again, 10 years after that.
It's something that called to me like nothing ever did. And after I got done with it, I scheduled the next mountain, the next big mountain. And then it led me to Everest. I had a couple of temps, eight years of practicing and training in Nepal. And finally, some of it at Everest in 2018, I was 60. So...
It's something that I still, I've climbed all seven summits. So everybody says, are you done? And I've just started. So there's a thing called the Adventurer's Grand Slam, which is you climb all the major mountains, the highest point in every continent, and you trek to both the North and South Pole.
That's my next challenge that I'm working on now and training for is in January going to the South Pole and April next year, I hope to walk to the North Pole. my goodness. You have a blog also and you have it's "Lessons to My Grandkids." And I'd like to know what is, let's say, one of your favorite lessons from that blog? You know, in
The reason that started is my oldest grandchild just turned seven this week and I was on Everest in 2018 when he was born. I had felt terrible. I felt a lot of guilt about missing him. But it started me on leaving a message that something had happened during the day or during the week that I need that I learned something about myself. One of the things about Mount
climbing and alpine type of climbing is, it challenges your mental, physically, and you learn a lot of stuff. I learned probably more about myself in the last 10 years climbing mountains than I've had the 55 years before. So I started writing down things that I wanted my grandkids to remember about me, things that I see important.
in life and some of it would be something silly like beware of potato sellers, a lady fell and broke her leg in a potato seller and my lessons to my grandkids were you're always going to fall in life and it's not how your injury occurred, it's how you recover from it and move on.
Probably my favorite one, I would say if I had to pick one was my message to him about pursuing happiness. And don't let anyone define what makes you happy. Do that on your own because if you let the society define what happiness or true happiness is, you'll always fall short.
The oldest is seven. They may remember their read this in 20 years when they're older than I'm saying. And like I said earlier, I was in a lot of cases, I was at high altitude with lack of oxygen to my brain. And I just wrote, I was by myself. And the only thing that works at high altitudes is pencil and paper, no electronics. Typically my Sherpa doesn't speak English and it's just me and a tent. So, and my thoughts.
And I just wanted to make it count, make my time away from home mean something in the future to my grandkids. So that's what started the blog and I'm still writing them today. What is the process that you use for climbing mountains? Is there a process that you? You know, there is. And I talk a lot about this and I still talk to a lot of school kids. I enjoy doing that.
2016 on my first attempt at Everest, I saw several people die. I was with them. And I was physically tore up really bad. I tell everybody, my kidneys quit functioning. I had frostbite in my face. I had loss of feeling in my toes and fingers. And I tell everybody it took...
It took months to recover. It took me a year to convince my wife I had to go back in 18. But one of them was mental scars of seeing people that were dying out there. I couldn't do anything. So, you know, it helped me to talk about it to school kids. And, you know, in a lot of it, I talk about how I recovered from the PTSD I had from seeing that by going back at it. And then the other one is
Kind of a process that, that I put together that I use on every mountain. And then, you know, after I started thinking about this, I used it in my business career. I applied it to everything I've ever done. And, and you know, I, I got it, I called it the five steps to getting to the top. And, and you know, the, the, I'll go through them real quick. First one is to plan, you know, plan a mountain, visualize the summit, know the pitfalls, know the route you're going to choose.
And the same thing in business, good engineering upfront, know what you're building, know how it's going to cost to get it built. The second one is execute and be a doer, not a dreamer. Don't just sit there and think, I wish I would climb this. I wish I would have done that. That's the difference of the doers and the dreamers.
framers and so execution and being fourth, make your plan and then execute on that plan. And the third one is, is constantly assessed. You know, in mountaineering, it's, it's about how am I feeling? Did I eat enough? Did I drink enough? What kind of clothes have I got on? What's the weather going to be like? You know, and constantly as you're in it, constantly measure.
how these things are doing. And if it's not there, then change the plan. That happens in business all the time. And a lot of times people will get set on a summit that they see and people that die, they didn't turn around. They didn't assess and change direction. In business, it happens all the time. I see people that carry a failed plan too far.
dying as a result of it. The other one is know your limits. I've got some very graphic pictures of people that lost fingers and people that I've seen die. I took a picture of them because they were more peaceful dead than they were struggling. So, and that limit that you learn in
Mountaineering is a very fuzzy limit when you start, but it gets better defined as you climb these mountains. You know how much pain and how much that your body will take. And learning your limits is the key, knowing when to turn around. I've turned around on three mountains, three of these big mountains and a lot of money. Everest in 2016, I was 300 yards from the top and a storm was coming in and I turned around.
I met up with a buddy of mine, my Sherpa was sick. I was alone and he'd seen the same devastation that day for all the people passing away. And he said, I know I could make it to the top, but I'm not real sure if I can make it back down. And I started thinking about it and he was right. And we both turned around just short of the summit. But knowing that limit is...
is another key point. And then, you know, probably the one that's kind of a lot of people don't understand and you mentioned it earlier is know your why. Why am I doing this? And my first mountain in Kilimanjaro, it was, I had so much fun and I had to go by and write down and for the next mountain I climbed, I wrote down why and then why not. And I took a list and I looked at this list, what
why I'm having fun doing this because it's real easy for people to understand why not. You're cold, there's not oxygen, you're eating bad food, there's no toilets, there's no chairs, there's no beds. But the beauty that I've seen and the experiences that I've had on these mountains is just so hard to put into words. So knowing your why, and it's like anything in life, I want to quit smoking.
how am I gonna quit smoking? And before you know how you're gonna do something, how am I gonna climb Mount Everest? You gotta know why you're doing it and why I'm gonna quit smoking. I'm gonna be around for my kids a little bit longer. And if once you understand why I'm gonna do something, then the how comes a lot easier. How am I gonna climb the mountain? How am I gonna quit smoking? How am I gonna live a healthier life? So you know the why is the final one of the, my,
my methods to getting to the top of a mountain. And my why is a lot clearer than it's ever been. My how is more dictated by age and lack of physical ability at 67 than I was at an earlier age. So that's kind of the secrets. There are no secrets. They're the tips that I use to getting on top in mountaineering or in business. So what is your why, Gary?
My why? I've got pages of them. You know, God gave me the ability to do it at this age. I can still do it. He gave me a great family that puts up with me being gone long. An Everest adventure is two months. He gave me a good industry that I'm involved in that allowed me to afford it. Most of the guys that I climb with are in their 30s and they've sold their car.
before they go on this expedition just so they can afford to climb. And I can afford to do this. The company I work with, Dycom, allows me to take these months off on these expeditions. And I tell everybody that it's bad that I'm gone that long. My family misses me. My work life misses me. But when I come back, I feel that I'm a better person. I'm a better husband.
father, brother, employee, you know, I come back with a passion for accomplishing things that sometimes you don't have if you don't take a break and look away from it from time to time. So it's a complicated answer to my why, but there's a lot of whys. So much gold in what you said and
Not only that, Gary, but the inspiration that you are to other people and the difference that you make in other people. I want to learn more about the secrets of your success. And let's go back to the days with maybe the early days of Ervin Cable and all the way through the 45 years. What is your revenue now?
we, you know, we will do, I think last year was, we will, I gotta be careful because we're a public company. right, right. I've got this closed, Dycom makes - I don't want to get you in trouble. I just - A multi -billion dollar company. Or what's your goals? Maybe you can say what is your goal for this year? We're one of their largest subsidiaries, so I'll put it that way. Okay, you got it.
Yeah, you know, and you were talking about the secrets for my success in the telecom industry and in this. And it's been three real simple things that we follow. And it's been the same way since I was climbing the poles or digging the ditches myself. And I call it the three follows. We follow the money. The companies we work for, I made sure that
I looked in their public reports, I saw what their CapEx budget was. Right now, we're following a lot of the Hardoff, the CARES Act money, a lot of the government funding for building out broadband. So follow the money. You want to make sure that what you're doing, you're going to get paid for. So we follow the money. We track different fundings, whether it's private bank debt or government.
We follow that money and usually where the money is, the work is. The second part is we follow the tech. The technology has evolved so much over the past 40 years. It's just unbelievable. I've been told so many times that after this, you're going to be out of a job. After they deploy fiber, it's infinite.
voice calls can be made and you're going to be out of a job. After my very first cable system I built was 450 megahertz and it carried 72 analog video channels. And they said, there's only three networks and 12 channels on satellite. What are you going to do after you build a 72 channel system and you're going to be out of a job? And it never fails. There's always...
It always fills in. And now broadband's the same thing. We built one gig networks for Google and for Verizon. And they said, well, that's too much. Nobody can ever use one gig. Well, we're building 10G Pond now. And it's the same thing with you're never going to build or fill up a 72 channel video.
you're never going to, you're going to overbuild the capacity that's been going on for 40 years. And, and I've never seen it. And so the, I guess my message on that part of it is my, my confidence that people are wrong when they tell me that is really, really high. And I said that even if I can't put my finger on what's the next big thing, it seemed like there's always going to be something. So the technology, following the technology is important.
The most important place to follow is following people. And I tell everybody that I'm successful because of the people I met in this industry, the people who may have been on a pole or digging ditch with me that now are the CEO of the company. And the people that I worked with that have been with me for the 40 years that I've been at it, I still have, I've got probably.
30 people that have been with me over 25 years out of the 2000. And so I followed both the people that I work for and the people that I work with, people that have got talent I want to keep. And that's probably the most important asset I've got. It's more important than any truck or trench or computer that we have are the people that represent my company. And I call it my company, it's a shareholders company, but
I pretend and I still treat it and work in it like it is mine. So the people are the most important thing that I follow in both employees and customers. So Gary, I've just finished reading for the second time a book called Good to Great, and my leadership is reading that team now. And you are one of those great leaders. Like that chapter that describes
a great leader is you. And I thought about that the last time we spoke. So can you give us some of your guiding principles as a leader? Yeah, I guess. I guess the, you know, I'll take them off the mountain here. You know, find your why, why you're doing why you're doing this. You know, leadership, I think I've done by example, and I continue to
lead by example. In the early days, I would admit my brother and I would say, we'll never ask you to climb a pole that we wouldn't climb. And so they would always save a 90 -foot pole crossing an interstate for us to come into town and climb that pole. And they saw us work hard and they saw how we treated our customers and how we treated the people that worked for us.
think that it created a culture within our company that brought us to the hundreds of millions of dollars of work we do and the thousands of people that work for us have got that culture. And I think that was a culture that was taught and maybe is continuing to be taught not by me, but by people that I taught. And so leadership by example is what I prefer to say.
know why I'm doing it. You know, and one of my lessons to grandkids probably is what are you going to do in life? And, you know, I got in, I'll do this to people that ask me this. And I said, money shouldn't be even on the top of the list. It should be, you know, it should be things like, is it something I'm good at?
Is it something that I go to work every day and I wonder where the day went or where the week went or where the month went? It's those types of things that are important in the job and important in it. And then when I talk about money, I say, can I support the lifestyle that I want to live? And that's the only thing that, and that's way down the list. That's after everything else. If they're happy,
turning burgers at McDonald's and can afford a double wide trailer if they are, then I'm happy for them. So that's leadership. I learned it from my family, my dad, I grew up on farm in coal mines. There's so many pieces to my leadership style that I've learned from manual labor and hard work.
So I don't know any one secret that I possess that I can point to. It's probably a lot of different pieces. It's the mosaic of the careers that I've had and the people I've met and the places I've been. So that's probably not a straight answer, but it's about as close as I can get to it. I got a lot out of that. We all did. Thank you, Gary.
To end closing, what is one piece of advice for an entrepreneur who has really big goals and dreams, maybe somebody who's going through a challenge right now? You know, I guess the, and I bounced on it. One is first thing is pursue your happiness. If you're going through a challenge, break it up, you know, like,
It's a mountain. The challenges is mountains are a great challenge and break it up. Everybody asks how you climb Mount Everest. And I said it's one step at a time. You focus on the one step. You don't look at the top. You focus on the next step. And lack of focus on the next step could be disastrous, but don't focus on the top of the mountain. Focus on the next step.
Maybe that's one of them. The other one is it's a wonderful career, what we're doing and what we bring in infrastructure to people that make me and you speak on and look at each other on a Zoom call that just wasn't around five, 10 years ago. It wasn't used on an everyday basis and has enabled us to work from home. And we bring this to people and it's an amazing gift, me for being able to do it.
for people and enjoy the industry you're in. These fast moving industries like this too are very exciting. They change a lot and embrace that part of it. I guess the one that I talk to my kids is pursue your own happiness. Don't let someone tell you what you need to do. Listen to your inner self.
pursue that. That's, if you listen to yourself, you'll never go wrong. So. Yes, I love it. Gary, I could just talk to you for hours and hours and days. I would like to share all the ways that we can learn more about you, about Ervin Cable. The website for Ervin Cable is urbancable .com.
that's spelled E -R -V -I -N cable .com. And then the other website to learn more about you, Gary, is garyclimbsmountains .com. I would encourage everyone to check that out. And I do want to give a plug for your daughter here because she, I went on her Instagram page. She is a massive inspiration. And again, we should all follow her, Mallory Ervin. She's a podcaster and author.
and an influencer and a powerhouse woman. And I'm sure every one of your kids and grandkids are the same. But Gary, you have been such an inspiration to me. I've had tears in my eyes this entire time I'm talking to you. And I just want to say thank you so much. Thank you, Gary. I don't feel I'm that special. And I appreciate you bringing me on and letting me talk about what I'm passionate about. So thanks so much. Thank you.
I appreciate you, Gary. You take care. All right. Thank you. Bye -bye.
