Hybrid Workforce Solutions with MetTel’s Zachary Grant

Scott Kinka:

Welcome to another episode of The Bridge. I’m excited about this one, my guest on the pod today is Zachary Grant. He’s the Vice President of Solution Architecture at MetTel. Welcome to the show, Zach.

Zachary Grant:

Thank you, glad to be here.

Scott Kinka:

Fantastic. So let’s just get it out of the way, MetTel was Metropolitan. Give me a little bit on that, you just got to describe that for everybody.

Zachary Grant:

Yeah. In actuality, it started out as Manhattan Telecommunications. And then as we expanded, it became Metropolitan Telecommunications. And of course now doing business as is MetTel,  M E T T E L. So we shortened it and it makes it nice and quick when conveying to customers, our name and our email addresses.

Scott Kinka:

I get it. And you’ve been there for literally like a quarter of a century. I’m kidding. 14 years? Something along those lines.

Zachary Grant:

14 years and I started out as a customer.

Scott Kinka:

As a customer, how’d that happen?

Zachary Grant:

I worked for a Fortune 500 healthcare company, and on the third day, they went bankrupt, and I was shipped out to California to install some really expensive gear, and my entire team was laid off. And so I’m calling in, I have no idea who to contact, I have no idea what I’m doing, I’ve got about $80,000 worth of equipment, and I was not laid off because I was such a new employee that I was a part of the Rift. So by the time I figured it out and I came back, I had a big plate of responsibility on me, 700 healthcare locations. And I was just kind of promoted to IT Director. I was just a lonely data engineer. And I had to figure out how to invoice, how to manage, how to really take this healthcare company and keep it above water in our communications method, whether it’s data, telecom, digital security. And through those pain points, I found MetTel. And I found a great partner. We did some innovative things. And I started taking calls from large organizations such as the Children’s Place, Disney. And they said, ‘Hey, how are you doing this?’ And we built a success story on that. And eventually, after about 5, 6 years, I moved over to MetTel because I was doing more for their customers than I was for my own. So it was a good natural fit.

Scott Kinka:

That was five, six years. So we just spent 20 years of your career history in the first three minutes of this podcast.

Zachary Grant:

First three minutes, yeah, I was just thrown into the fire pit.

Scott Kinka:

All right, so now you would assume, or I would assume as I did in the pre-show that you were in New York. Where are you located today as we’re having this chat today?

Zachary Grant:

I’m in Salt Lake City. I’m in our divisional office in Salt Lake City, but I’m a work from home employee. I actually work out of Colorado. I have a little cattle ranch that I own and operate that I purchased after COVID.

Scott Kinka:

Well, all right, we’re going to explore that in a couple of minutes. Actually let’s jump into it now. Let’s just do that. So you are a cattle rancher, you’re a reformed Head of Infrastructure and IT for a medical organization, then becoming a Head of Solutions Architecture for Metropolitan or Manhattan Telecom at the beginning, now MetTel, throughout that process. And now you also can count yourself as a cattle rancher post-COVID. You gotta give us a little bit of that story before we jump into the tech.

Zachary Grant:

Yeah I was in Salt Lake City, I was about my 10th, 11th year with MetTel and the COVID lockdowns happened. And of course, all of us scramble, right? We had to enable technology for everyone else, and at the same time enable ourselves to work from home. We traditionally are not a work from home organization. But after being locked up for such a long time, having so much restriction, kind of as those restrictions started to lift, I said ‘what, I have the technology, I have the capabilities, I grew up in a ranching environment.’ So I said, ‘my kids are struggling in school, they’re not adapting to this lockdown, the masks, having individuality.’ So I made the decision that I wanted to try my hand at going back to my roots. And so I bought a little place in Southern Colorado and I have no wired internet, no wired technology there. So I had to improvise and use all the technology that I sell and design for my customers to really enable myself. And so I get up at 4 a.m. every day. The first hour and a half are chores for the ranch, a little bit of gym time, some exercise for me. And then I start work at 9 a.m. EST because the company is on the East Coast. And so I have a nice synchronized time schedule. And some of the funnest things happen, I’ve been on calls and had to put folks on call because I had wild dogs killing chickens outside of my front yard and I had to go silence them or I have cut myself and had to make a trip to the emergency room. So a lot of, a lot of fun stories live in the ranch life while trying to sell and architect solutions.

Scott Kinka:

I occasionally have a white fluffy, anything but wild, dog making noise while I’m trying to do podcasts as well in the other room. But I don’t, outside of that, I can’t share your experience, but it’s an interesting COVID story. All right, you got to just jump right in on that. How did you wire the ranch? Like what are you using for connectivity at your home?

Zachary Grant:

Yes, so it all starts with SD-WAN. So what I did was I brought in a couple of Linusite providers that are in that area. And Linusite is great. It works really well, but obviously it has some detriments when there’s bad weather or different types of ailments in the environment. So what I did is I kind of brought in Tertiary using Starlink. And so I’m a consumer of Starlink and those three individual services aggregated together give me over 100 meg up and down of really good internet and VPN access back to my corporate office. So working from home is seamless for me.

Scott Kinka:

We’re going to explore that in a little bit. That’s, I guess, a case study for MetTel at the end of the day. But let’s do that for a minute, and we’ve talked about this. You’ve also been a follower of the pod, so I appreciate that, by the way. And for those of you who are not and listening to this right now, hey, let’s get a follow please. And a thumbs up. And a five-star. But, as it relates to MetTel, as on the pod we give everybody an opportunity to just quickly give us, so that you know who you are, give us the pitch. What is it that’s unique about the company? What’s the superpower? Just lay that out for us.

Navigating the Changing Landscape of Network Security

Zachary Grant:

Absolutely. MetTel has a very vast library of products and services. And in no way are we trying to be everything for everyone. But what you’ll find with MetTel is we have a very centric belief in data management. And our belief is if you cannot measure it, if you cannot monitor it, you can’t manage it. And so when you look at the entire technology stack, whether it’s digital security, SD-WAN for routing, mobility, there’s a lot of analytics that live in each one of those products. And for us, what we do is we bring a centric model around the management of each of those so that customers can focus on what they do on a day-to-day basis. And a lot of what we do is normalize that experience. We have customer engineers that are like, ‘hey, I need X amount of bandwidth and it has to be this technology, it has to be this path, has to be this latency.’ And what we try to do is normalize that and get rid of that experience, say this is now a consumable product. Let us do the engineering. You just tell us what you need and let our array of engineers bring together a very simple solution that you can plug into and take a plug and play type aspect to it. And then we give you monitoring and analytic tools so that you can look at the SLAs, you can look at the flow, you can look at all the attributes around that service to know you’re getting what you pay for. And so MetTel is very unique in that there’s a full library. We would spend hours and hours going through the library, but it really all comes down to inventory management and monitoring of all the elements of what we offer our customers, giving them a single screen and a single ecosystem to manage their company assets.

Scott Kinka:

I’m going to read that back in a minute, but help us just categorize the assets that you are selling them, like put them in categories. I mean, you mentioned connectivity of various types. You obviously mentioned SD-WAN and SASE services. You guys are also in telecom. Can you just give us the top, I mean, there’s a million products, but just give us the top level categories. Start with connectivity access, who are you consuming access from?

Zachary Grant:

So in our portfolio, we have over 120 carriers that we have wholesale relationships with. So oftentimes, when a customer comes to us and says, ‘Well, what is your footprint?’ Well, that’s a loaded question, because I can give you service anywhere on the globe, wherever their services are today. So for us, our model is really about wholesale relationships, and being able to aggregate those services onto one bill, one project management experience, one billing experience, and one repair experience. So for us, we’re that single point of contact for access. That could be mobility, it could be wired fiber ethernet, it could be Starlink satellite services. So for us, we treat it all the same. Obviously from an engineering perspective, we use different technologies to meet the goals and the business criteria. But for our end users, it’s a global footprint of all services that they can consume. Then it needs to be terminated on something. We have to care for security. So we’re a really big organization around SD-WAN and security. And there’s some conflicts there that I’d like to talk to you and your audience about SASE versus SD-WAN. SD-WAN five, 10 years ago, that was the big buzzword and everybody was moving to it. But as the security model changed and the wanting to get to the internet or your resources as fast as possible, that breaks the SD-WAN model. And so there’s a lot of things or items that marketing material or marketing companies will just kind of wipe over that’s not really understandable in the details of the engineering. And so that’s what MetTel does is we really sit down with our customers, understand what they’re doing and say, ‘okay, this SD-WAN flavor is not a good fit for you.’ We’re not saying it’s bad technology, we’re just saying it’s not a good fit because of XYZ. So we really get into the nuggets deep dive with our customers.

Scott Kinka:

Let’s expand on that a little bit, because we talked a little bit in the pre-show about how your business has changed and your approach to customers has changed in the pandemic, right? And I think part of the conversation that you just laid out was sort of SD-WAN and SASE are in some cases a little bit at odds with each other, even though in a lot of ways they leveraged some of the same kind of underpinnings, right? I’d like you to read that back a little bit, but I’m going to ask it to you in the context of, are they different in that our footprint has changed? When I look at it, like, SD-WAN is a way to wire offices and SASE is a way to wire endpoints, right? But they still get everybody on the same network. But I think the way we think about our networks has changed. Fair way for me to think about it, or were you thinking about it a different way in comparing those two technologies?

Zachary Grant:

Let me give you an analogy. Let’s go back a couple of years in the wireless world, right? Your AT&Ts, your T-Mobiles and Verizon’s. Back in the day when you would get a cell phone and you would go to the internet, if you actually watched where your traffic went to, it went to the central point in the United States. Most carriers dropped all their traffic off in Kansas City. So you can be in California, but to get to the internet, your traffic had to get to Kansas City first, and then it went out to the world. The wireless companies looked at that and said what? That’s inefficient. Let’s put gateways in California, on the East coast, in the central. And then all of a sudden our cellular experience became faster because we’re able to get to our data faster. So in many ways, security was the same way. We used to have centralized security stacks where you had to go to a centralized point, get that security stack, and then go out to the internet. But as we started to try to optimize and make our applications faster, we realized that SASE was an amazing model because you can take that centralized security stack and move it to the end points. And now you can egress out to the internet immediately. The problem is where SD-WAN used to play. SD-WAN is a point-to-point technology, meaning SD-WAN will let you aggregate bandwidth. So if you have multiple 10 meg circuits and you run a speed test, you’d get 20 meg out of that, right? But since SD-WAN is a point-to-point technology and all of our applications are now being served from the internet, and what I mean by that is Teams, Zoom, YouTube, Netflix. There’s no SD-WAN endpoint on the internet for you to optimize that traffic, for you to aggregate your bandwidth. So what happens is SASE, and security is always priority, SASE, moving all that security to the endpoints, allows you to get to the internet quicker. But what it does is it breaks all that optimization that we’ve been designing for years. So MetTel’s taken a hybrid approach and said, ‘listen, we have a hybrid SD-WAN and SASE model that says take all these SD-WAN gateways and distribute them just like the wireless carriers did to their internet gateways, distribute as vast as you can so that as customers go to the internet, they’re still using the SD-WAN technology.’ So when I go to Netflix, when I go to a speed test, when I go to Teams, my critical traffic that I’m now consuming from the internet is still protected with SD-WAN. I have jitter buffers, I have packet duplication, I have multi-path brownout path resolution. And so for us, it’s all about improving the experience while maintaining the security. We’ve taken the SD-WAN model, we’ve taken the SASE model, and we haven’t deployed it like our peers. We’ve made a hybrid of both so that you get the best of both worlds.

Scott Kinka:

Got it.

Zachary Grant:

That’s the best way I can explain it.

Solving the POTS Problem: MetTel’s Innovative Infrastructure Replacement

Scott Kinka:

No, I get it. Let me compact it a little bit more, if you wouldn’t mind. I think we actually maybe said the same thing, in slightly different ways. The reality of it was in, call it March, April, May of 2020, and as you know Bridgepoint is the technology advisory firm. We have partnerships with companies like yourselves to distribute on behalf of our customers, helping them solve business outcomes with technology. So what was the problem they were trying to solve in March, April, May of 2020 is we sold more bandwidth to get people from their houses back to the office, only to get back out to the internet in those three months, then probably any other period in our history. And while it was great for us to deal with the access problem and to help those customers, the reality of it is we were throwing good bandwidth at the wrong problem at the end of the day. And that’s really what you’re talking about, which is, historically, we build an edge to a company’s network where there were two main assumptions, right? One, was that the majority of the assets that I was getting to were in my headquarters, and as a result, two, I could build my security edge there, meaning my path to the internet was through headquarters. The reality of it is, the headquarters is no longer the center of the application universe in nearly every business that’s out there, right? There’s no reason to get back to headquarters, if you will, logically over the network. And two, everything that we’re getting to is out on the internet. So why backhaul it to get back out? So your point then is, what you’re saying is, you’ve taken the SASE model, you’ve pushed that out to the edge. Obviously that’s the general point behind SASE, is to take that centralized security posture, push it out to the edge regardless of where the end user is, what have you. But you’ve combined it with the SD-WAN. So if they are compiling, like in your case, I love how this keeps coming back to the ranch somehow, you’re combining multiple access mediums to get that SD-WAN combo, right? If you will, available access, but the securities at your edge. Care to share a little bit about how you’re accomplishing that when you say combine them? Is it a unique MetTel device that you’re putting in there? Was it a unique combination of technologies that we might be aware of? Give us a little bit more detail there.

Zachary Grant:

So we’re a big VMware VeloCloud technology, but obviously, there’s a couple of good SD-WAN technology algorithms out there. And so we’re not going to single thread ourselves to one platform. But really, it’s the underlying network and how we’ve put our gateways distributed throughout the globe, really. So keep in mind, I want to1 make sure we don’t miss this one point. When we all went home to work from COVID, we went from business class access to consumer grade access. And that really was a driver for us to use SD-WAN. But again, we were still accessing those centralized applications. And then over the last couple of years, we’re seeing that push for it to go out to the internet. So now we’re using consumer grade bandwidth to business applications that are out on the internet cloud, the public cloud, and we have no control of that consumer grade access. So that’s where our technology comes in that says we’ll put a device at your home. We’ll put software on your cell phones. We’ll put software on your devices. Not only is it gonna secure you, what it’s gonna do is it’s gonna optimize your traffic because I’m gonna put you through strategic gateways before you get to the internet. So that last mile access is protected and we’re giving you business class experience over that consumer grade broadband that you, the home users are in charge of, that you or I as IT professionals have no control over. Regardless of preferred carriers, you go to North Dakota, you go to New Mexico, you go to, there are hundreds of different carriers that are providing services all with different protocols, strategies, modems. And so for us, we had to normalize all that. We had to get rid of that minutia, encapsulate everything into a business strategy. And that’s what we did. And that’s why our methodology was so popular with our customers throughout the COVID pandemic. They didn’t miss a beat.

Scott Kinka:

So in a lot of ways then what you’re saying is your business as a, let’s say a portion of your business, was historically a network aggregation, right? I’m going to bring in the right provider to get access to the address where your offices happen to be, right? Are you now solving the same network access problem for end users? Like I get pushing the SASE service out there to say, I’m going to optimize the access that you and consumers can get at home. But are you being brought in also to sort of end user access problems for businesses because they have to get to a certain employee? Or talk a little bit about that.

Zachary Grant:

Yeah, we are. We’re not doing it in the sense of, we’re not trying to sell access into residential homes. What we’re doing is saying, you already have something for your entertainment. You already have home internet. It’s consumer grade. What we wanna do is we wanna put the security on top of your work devices to make sure that there’s segregation there. We wanna make sure that we give you an optimized path back to your business apps and just over to the general internet. Because again, Zoom, Teams, these are all critical, real-time communications that we all have to use now to collaborate. And so for us, it’s about optimizing everything over the wire without caring who’s providing the wire and what that wire is or that wireless is. So for us it was taking that out, the complications out, and making it very simple for our customers.

Scott Kinka:

Super cool. I’m going to segue for a minute if you would, because there’s been a handful. All this technology is moving, it’s come and it’s changed over COVID. There’s been all this kind of hybrid work motion in the way that we operate today. But many businesses still lean on some traditional technologies out there. And one of the ones that we talked a little bit about in the pre-show was traditional post lines, which still live inside of businesses for a whole host of reasons, right? To open the front door, to support the elevator lines and faxes and legacy credit card machines. God forbid some of them be out there. Like that’s still out there. And I don’t know that they were necessarily timed together, but let’s just say this move to home made it a whole lot easier for the FCCs to give the Lex and out on continuing to maintain the copper network because all of this technology had to move so quickly. And we talked a little bit about POTS replacement, POTS in a box. Can you just speak to why all of a sudden that’s important?

Zachary Grant:

Absolutely. So if you look at the history of telecom since the early 1900s, we put copper infrastructure in the ground and we’re using the same copper infrastructure today. So when it comes to things like service level agreements or repairs, I’ve seen instances where a repair can take months, right? There’s no longer SLAs, yet we’re still dependent on it for business communications, whether it’s alarm line, elevator, 911 calls. So for us the FCC put a challenge to all the carriers that says, get rid of that infrastructure. But at the same time, you still had businesses that invested millions of dollars that they have not appreciated in their different infrastructure. So what the POTS replacement really is, it’s an appliance that takes digital signaling, fiber, 5G, 4G, coax, and then translates it back to the old analog signaling so we can put those same traditional lines in your PBX. You can put those in your elevator. And then there’s things like battery backup, so that if the entire facility loses power, just like in the old days that the central office would provide DC power to the line, same concept. You have that business resilience, you have that disaster recovery, and then we’re able to really modularize and say, ‘hey, let’s put your data network through this as well.’ Let us give you some redundancy here. Let’s make sure your 911 calls go to the right PSAP. So it really is an appliance that’s allowing these companies to get off of POTS, get better visibility, management, service level access and not be dependent on that old copper that we just could not service anymore in this industry.

Scott Kinka:

So it fits in a lot with the strategy we were just talking about around SD-WAN and SASE. I mean, at the end of the day, you’re basically saying the business is wired up multiple ways based on what’s available in that location. You guys are providing devices and management to make it intelligent, to be able to deal with the multiple applications that are out there, whether it’s handing off a POTS line to an elevator or optimizing traffic to Teams for an end user. Whatever that happens to be, sort of fits in with the methodology. I do want to just clarify one thing, make sure that everybody’s on the same page. One, I don’t think most people realize what you said about copper, and the fact that the copper that some of the access that we have running over right now has literally been in the ground or over a pole, you deal with it in New York City all the time, for a hundred years. I mean, and it hasn’t changed. The endpoints have changed, the way we terminated changes, but it’s the same copper.

Zachary Grant:

Yeah, it’s the same copper. And a lot of times what we see is repairing one customer will break another customer, right? Because there’s not enough facilities and we’re not putting new copper in the ground. So it really is a race to get everyone off of this copper. And it’s critical, especially when you look in the medical field, how many devices, how many appliances still rely on that copper type signaling? We have to maintain that. So for us, it was a strategy that we came up with that allows us to rapidly convert our customers. And again, not make them invest the millions of dollars to replace everything inside their infrastructure. It’s a translation and we deploy it rapidly. We are able to have a use case where we had a customer that had 3000 locations and we had four hours of work that we had to accomplish per location. And so this box really allowed us to get out there and do it in under an hour and convert 3000 locations in just a few months with a lot of constraints that the company had, just due to security and different issues in their ecosystem. So for us, we’re really happy with this technology and it’s really proven to save a lot of money. And when I say money, understand there’s some places in Texas that if you order a traditional business analog line, that’ll cost you about $800 a month, where now we’re bringing it back down to $32 a month.

Scott Kinka:

Well, what was that a year ago? That line.

Zachary Grant:

It was probably $600 a year ago. And before that, it was $400. It literally is taking jumps of hundreds of dollars for a single line. And so you have these companies that have no control of it and they’re now being charged thousands and thousands of dollars per location just because they’re on old infrastructure. So it’s an advantageous technology. Not the funnest to talk about but I think it’s very important. 

Pandemic-Driven Urgency in Replacing Legacy Infrastructure

Scott Kinka:

I think it leans into the story that we’re talking about here, right? So the secret sauce for you guys really is the customer’s have POTS lines in there. They’ve got cable circuits in there. They’ve got areas where they can’t get access really well. I mean, the bottom line on all this is, where you guys are winning, is in finding the opportunity to really make all of that intelligent. Don’t go buy six different things. You guys figure out what you can bring into the location, whether that’s replacing a piece of 100 year old copper or driving a Starlink connection directly into a location. You guys are kind of bridging the gap across all that. Is that strategy different? Changed, expanded, amended in any way since the pandemic in your mind? Or has that really always been in your DNA and the opportunities just gotten broader as a result of it?

Zachary Grant:

I would say the opportunity has gotten broader. It’s always been in our DNA. It’s something that we obviously offered pre-pandemic. I just don’t think the market recognized the urgency until the carriers started shutting off the copper plants. I literally have hospitals that called us and said, ‘hey, we’ve got 25 days and it’s gonna get shut off.’ Or I’ve had 911 centers call us and say, ‘Hey, we’re shut down. No one can make 911 calls. We have to get something replaced.’ And so there’s been a lot of pressure from the FCC and the carriers to get customers to evacuate this technology, this old technology. And they’re doing it right now through price motivation. 800 bucks a line. You don’t want to stay on that forever. And that’s what we’re seeing. And the pandemic just kind of made it worse. It drove it home.

Scott Kinka:

Is education and municipality an interesting vertical for you guys as a result? I would imagine that those are places where more of this legacy infrastructure sits. Can you speak to that?

Zachary Grant:

It absolutely does. And so when you look at a lot of the infrastructure of just government buildings in general, whether it’s municipality and a school or a government building. When those buildings were built, they were not built to have Coaxco inside. They were not built to have fiber, but they were absolutely built to have copper, right? And so you really come down to this dynamic where we’re trying to rebuild and put in new infrastructure and old construction. And so new schools, new municipalities that have new facilities, it’s a lot easier. But that’s not where the majority is. 95% of that infrastructure sits on 100-year-old-aged buildings. And so it is interesting. And of course, our most critical assets sit in those buildings, whether it’s your children, or their healthcare facilities, or our money, right? Those are the three things. And so when a 911 call comes across, you can’t get it wrong, you have to make sure that 911 call makes it. And so, for us, it’s balancing getting it deployed quickly, but at the same time caring for the criticality of what we’re trying to convert.

Scott Kinka:

Well, we talked about a lot of wires, man, in this session of all kinds, which I appreciate. and I think doing that sort of dictates where you guys, where your superpower is and playing and unraveling all that stuff and letting the customer focus on their business. I have one last question before we jump into a little bit of fun and you know, you mentioned, I mean the company started as Manhattan Telecom, right? And I think the people think about New York, they think about people going into an office every day, and that’s the business legacy of MetTel. Where are you guys on the spectrum of work from home with your own people?

Zachary Grant:

Yeah, so obviously for COVID, we adapted work from home and 90% of the staff work from home. But that was forced. Our CEO, Marshall Arono, he’s an old stock market guy, right? He was a trader. And so he’s a mover. He’s a hustler. He loves in-person collaboration. And I’m a work from home employee. So I empathize with those of us that like to work from home, but I absolutely see the dynamic of where I’m losing continuity because I’m not part of the day-to-day conversations that are happening in the office. And they make a lot of decisions. It’s very much controlled chaos. When they want to focus on a project, they want to focus on it now. They want to pull in the players that they have now. And so it’s a balance. I love working from home because I’m not disturbed. I’m not interrupted like I am when I work out of an office. But at the same time, that interrupt really drives home me being in the know what projects, what’s going on.

Scott Kinka:

So you guys are hybrid.

Zachary Grant:

I think MetTel truly is better as a hybrid.

Scott Kinka:

Truly hybrid.

Zachary Grant:

And I do have to say, I think the better experiences when we are in the office, I think more collaboration gets done, maybe less work gets done, but definitely more thought sharing, thought process, brainstorming happens in the office.

Scott Kinka:

Interesting.  So we’re gonna wrap it. I’m gonna rapid fire three things at you. Five minutes left. We’ll see if we can squeeze all this in and we’re gonna have a little bit of fun. Are you ready?

Zachary Grant:

I’m ready.

Keeping an Eye on Cryptocurrency and AI in Next 18 Months

Scott Kinka:

All right, here we go. I need a shameless prediction of any kind. Technology, sports, politics, whatever, in the next 12 to 18 months.

Zachary Grant:

All right, you’re gonna hate me for this, but I believe that we’re in for an economic downturn. I think that the downturn is gonna be focused around cryptocurrency, our phases of automation, AI, big fan of AI, but at the same time, I see the downside of AI and interest rates. So for me, I think everybody needs to start to prepare, have your supplies at home, have your cash reserves ready. I think it’s gonna be a little 2008 repeat tumultuous time. And I think in the next 18 months is pretty reasonable.

Scott Kinka:

We could read out on that one for quite a while, but I think that’s probably the topic of another podcast. All right. Two way more fun ones. This one’s pretty simple. Do you have a business book or tome of some kind you’re currently reading that you’d recommend to our listeners?

Zachary Grant:

So for me, Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink is an amazing book. Basically, the premise is simple. You’ve got a group of Navy SEALs, they were trained. And then that training, they discuss how that training applied in the battlefield. But then they take it a step further. They’re now business consultants. So they talk about how that training applies in the business world. And it’s really around extreme ownership, meaning you’re not doing everyone else’s job. Don’t misinterpret that. It’s really, how do you communicate? How do you take ownership of your daily tasks to make sure that what you do in your daily mission is successful, and that you’re making sure that others are adapting to your methodology for that success? So Extreme Ownership, amazing book. I can’t recommend it enough. In fact, I make my entire team. New employees, older, that is a requirement to join my team.

Scott Kinka:

Okay, I like it.

Zachary Grant:

You have to read that.

Scott Kinka:

I’m gonna download that on the iPad this afternoon. All right, last one, here’s the fun one. We had our pandemic. Let’s just assume the next dystopian event occurs. Maybe this one’s more dramatic, the zombie apocalypse or something. Thankfully people will have their cash reserves if they follow your advice. But what would the one app that’s still working on your phone be if you had your choice? One application is still working.

Zachary Grant:

That’s really tough. And my daughters are gonna, they always give me a gruff for being the old guy, old school, but I’m a Facebook guy. I think through Facebook, you can continue to communicate, you can continue to have friends on Facebook. I haven’t talked to him in person for 30 years, but I feel like I still know them. Because I see their family photos, I see their kids, I see how much their kids look like them when I was in high school. And I think it’s just a good way to keep that community together and communicate and know how your peers are doing, without necessarily that face-to-face or phone call interaction. So I’m going to say, let me keep my Facebook in the apocalypse.

Scott Kinka:

Got it. And you’ll be sure to immediately then join the Salt Lake Survivors Facebook group at that point. So you’ll know who else has a beating heart out there.

Zachary Grant:

Exactly! That’s right.

Scott Kinka:

I appreciate that.

Zachary Grant:

That’s right.

Scott Kinka:

Zach, this was a lot of fun. I appreciate your time today. For people who are interested, outside of getting a hold of your friendly neighborhood Bridgepointe Strategist, how should they find out a little bit more about MetTel?

Zachary Grant:

You know the best place is just go to our website www.MetTel.net. I cannot say dot net enough. There’s another very, very small company that’s the dot com.

Scott Kinka:

Okay, fantastic. We’ll do that. Zach, I really appreciate the time and I appreciate everybody and all of our listeners for hanging with us today. Great session and we’ll talk soon.

Zachary Grant:

Great, thanks, you take care, it was nice talking with you.