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Unwavering Commitment to Craft Skilled Labor with Rob McGee of Quanta Services

Quanta Services is committed to operating as a craft skilled labor company. Tune in as Carrie Charles talks with SVP of Telecom Operations Rob McGee about the impact this commitment has on company culture, as nearly 100% of leadership at Quanta has craft skilled labor on their resume at some point. At Quanta Services, people are the heart of everything they do, embracing differences and supporting an environment where all employees are valued. In this episode, Rob shares an industry perspective to help companies create effective solutions and develop fantastic teams in the organization. He shares valuable insights on understanding how people work and what motivates them to unleash their potential. Listen along to learn more on building excellent leadership and critical strategies for business success and growth.

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Unwavering Commitment to Craft Skilled Labor with Rob McGee of Quanta Services

I am so glad that you are here. I have with me, Rob McGee. He is the Senior Vice President of Quanta Services. Welcome to 5G Talent Talk, Rob.

Thank you very much.

I want to know a little bit about how you got to where you are now. I know that when we talked, you said that you had a very interesting background and I want to hear that story.

I didn’t set out a course to become a telecom professional or even working in telecom at all. I studied Philosophy and Psychology. I intended to go to law school and that didn’t materialize. In the mid to late ‘90s, I was married. My wife and I were about to have our first kid. I was working construction while studying for the LSAT or trying to figure out what I would do next. I needed insurance badly. That was basically it.

I had some family members that worked at GTE and they said, “We can get you a job. The pay is probably going to suck, but the insurance benefits are fantastic.” I jumped into GTE as an IBW technician and that pretty much set a course. Within 3 or 4 years, I was pretty much addicted to it and had found what I think was my niche. I understood what was going on a little bit. I was basically like kids now. If you take a fifteen-year-old kid now and you hand them an iPad, they intuitively know how to use it.

Back then, I could basically work a computer better than the majority of the people that had been there for years, understood the access and different fiber terminals, and figured them out a little bit more quickly than them. I think I was the geek early on. From there, I took a variety of different positions throughout the network, mostly central office and heavy transport and transport distribution. Eventually went into management and it kept moving. I felt like I had a basic premise of doing every job like it’s the last one you’ll ever have and it seemed to work well, and somebody always came along and asked me to do something a little bigger.

It’s been an awesome journey. I don’t think it’s over. I’ve been doing this for many years. I don’t feel old and I plan to keep doing it. I was under 25 years with what was GTE, then ultimately became Verizon. That presented a ton of opportunities. I got to jump around to a variety of different technologies, no power space and frame, central office, switching transport. Toward the end of my time at Verizon, I transitioned into wireless. I wouldn’t put myself in the category of a wireless expert, but I would say I learned enough to be dangerous. It made me a little bit better-rounded in regards to how telecommunication works end to end.

Do every job like it’s the last job you’ll ever have.

Also, something that made you round was your Psychology background because I’m sure that’s serving you well as a leader, especially in this talent market.

It was an unintended benefit, I would say. I didn’t realize that the technology, I think I had a niche for that and I learned that on the fly. Plus, I had some fantastic training throughout my career. As I moved up and got into higher levels of leadership, understanding how people work and what drives people was huge.

I was also in the army and got a good mix of leadership training there and got an opportunity to see how people respond to different leadership styles. I always looked at every leader I’ve had as well. Even the bad ones are great examples of what not to do and the good ones try to steal a little nugget from how they operated and made you feel. You put it all together and pay attention. You can make an impact on a larger group of employees.

Who is Quanta Services? Give us a little bit of information about the company.

I’ll give you from my perspective. At this company, I’ve been at Quanta for a few years. I’ll give you my perspective from when I was looking into them when the opportunity presented itself. It’s very complicated. I would say what I thought I knew when I was considering the position versus what I know now is completely different.

Quanta is essentially a roll-up. Quanta Services is the holding company or the mothership. It has 250 plus, you can look on our website. Their good number fluctuates. We do acquisitions pretty rapidly. Some small, some large, but when we make an acquisition, the idea is that there’s a term used within Quanta. It’s one plus one equals three.

If we make an acquisition, A) We don’t send them a bunch of new stickers for their trucks to say, “Quanta.” We don’t send them new ID badges. We don’t even ask them to change their behavior. We certainly don’t want them to change their leadership and the people that run it because that entrepreneurial spirit that grew that company to where it is, is what we’re trying to maintain. However, if you add a company, let’s say it’s a $30 million revenue company, into a company the size of Quanta, which is approaching $17 billion.

5TT 86 | Craft Skilled Labor
Craft Skilled Labor: The reality is the operators design and manage how they want their networks to be built. But ultimately when it comes to putting a shovel in the ground or climbing a pole, they hire a general contractor for that.

You get to feed off of all of the other affiliates. You’re embedded with other companies that are like-minded that are doing things similar and maybe they need your help. It creates an extremely powerful environment. The other thing that I was fascinated with is that not every company appreciates those that start at the bottom and can be almost looked at as something like, “You’re in a different class potentially. Maybe you didn’t come in a leadership development program through some fancy university or whatever.” You’re in a different class.

I don’t know that that’s a bad thing. The companies that are looking for extremely intelligent people, that’s clearly a good strategy. I wouldn’t take anything away from that, but Quanta has a different approach. To be a senior leader at Quanta, you have to start at the bottom. Everybody that I work with every day was a craft skill labor at some point. Nearly 100% of the leadership at Quanta was a craft skill labor at some point.

You’re kidding. Really?

No, it’s amazing. They don’t have some hard rule that says that’s a requirement. It’s a big company. There are different skills that we need and that’s not going to fill every position. The culture is extremely focused on craft-skilled labor. How do you lead and gain the credibility of a group of men and women doing a job in the field when they know you have never done that or don’t understand day-to-day what they are up against? That, for the first time, made me feel good about starting at the bottom and working my way up as opposed to trying to hide it at times.

Can you talk a little bit about the divisions of Quanta or all the different services that you offer?

We refer to them as operating units or abused. There are basically four. The fourth aisle is a little bit new. We’re primarily an electric power company, electric power, transmission and distribution. I’d say, if you look at our DNA, we’re 70% to 80% electric power. Underground utility, oil and gas pipelines, big pipes and distribution are a huge portion of the Quanta culture. Telecom is not the biggest segment within Quanta, but Quanta understands as an infrastructure company, that’s something people would expect from an infrastructure company.

We dig holes in the ground and drag pipe all day. Why would you not do telecoms? It makes sense that we do that as well. Telecom is the smallest segment within Quanta, but there are multiple operating units that are leaning into telecom as well. The newest one is the renewables. We got solar and wind energy. We made a relatively large acquisition. It’s very public, so I’m not sharing anything. It’s Blattner. If you look them up, Blattner is one of the largest wind and solar energy companies in North America and they’re now part of Quanta.

Not every company appreciates those that start at the bottom.

That was a strategic acquisition that was made. That group, Scott Blattner and that team, we’re at a leadership meeting. Scott said, “Every day that I interact with this group, I feel better about the decision to join this team because everybody’s very like-minded.” That’s the segment. It spans everything. If you think of infrastructure other than roads and bridges, we build it all pretty much.

Let’s talk about your role at Quanta and also the segment that you lead.

Quanta is very distributed. There are a lot of operating units that do have a ton of autonomy. The entrepreneurial spirit, you’ll hear that term over at Quanta, is encouraged. It’s like, “You’re part of Quanta now. We love you. Go do what you’re doing, keep doing that, and let us know how we can help.” That is probably how the average acquisition goes at Quanta, which is fascinating to me.

Telecom was fragmented and on autopilot, being the smallest of the segments. I think if you were to ask Duke. He saw that the customer didn’t particularly like navigating Quanta’s complexities. I was fortunate to have been in a meeting or two with Duke Austin, our CEO, prior to ever even considering coming here to work. Whatever interaction we had, he liked what he saw. I had become a little more familiar with Quanta and was fascinated with the culture and how people acted and behaved.

About a year later, he sent some people out and they found me and we had dinner. That’s how the whole thing materialized. What they basically did is I work for Quanta services. Officially, I’m a Quanta Services employee but I lead the telecom segment. My job is to create an environment where the client can leverage us as one large company instead of having to navigate multiple operating units. If you could imagine, they pick any large carrier. They want to do big projects and their projects span coast to coast, generally. Pretty much every telecommunications provider doesn’t consider a geographic boundary for the most part.

If they wanted to leverage the size of Quanta prior to my role and how I’ve adjusted our way of thinking, they would have had to go to mirrors broadband, Fibertel, Quanta telecommunication solutions, all these different operating units that do telecom throughout the country. They would have navigated each one of them independently.

What we’ve done is create a front-end process where we can reach out and interact with clients as a large Quanta. We go back and find the best operating unit to execute on whatever it is that client needs us to do. It’s changed how people view us in the industry. I’m excited about it. It’s in its infancy still. I started working on it on day one when I got here. As a former client of Quanta, I knew that was something that needed to be addressed. That’s my role. I lead the telecom segment across all of Quanta and work with the leaders of all the operating units to aggregate our capabilities.

5TT 86 | Craft Skilled Labor
Craft Skilled Labor: Employees want structure. They want to see that the company that they were working for has structure and can provide them and they can perform well on a job because of that structure. And they can become part of something bigger.

You have another role, Rob, and you’re on the board for the broadband development office in Texas. Did I say that right? Tell me about that role. What are you responsible for? A little bit about that broadband development office.

I’m excited for that role. It’s relatively new. I’ve been on it for months since the beginning of 2022, but I think everybody knows and I would go through the list of government funding available for broadband in general. Everybody generally knows in the industry, there’s a lot of money coming out. It’s very difficult for people to articulate what all the acronyms mean, how much is equated each, and where the money will go.

The NTIA, basically, Sigma of the FCC, requested or demanded. Each state creates a broadband development office and that office is designed to interact with the federal government to take in the funding at a state level and then distribute it based on some guidelines that the federal government establishes.

One of the board of directors for the Texas Broadband Development Office, you can look up Bead timelines and it’ll tell you different things that are happening. Basically, the government says, “Do you want the money?” Our job is to say yes, then they’re going to say, “What are you going to do with the money?” We have to provide a five-year plan. That’s the type of interaction that every state’s going through now in order to distribute this cash.

We’ve got the money, we need the people and we know that’s a very hot conversation now with all companies as well as municipalities trying to figure this out. I want to discuss these workforce shortages in telecom. When I speak to leaders all over the United States, I hear, “We need more training. We need to engage trade schools. We need development programs to bring more people into the industry and we need to get the word out about the industry so more people, more young people know that the career option for them.” What are your thoughts on this as a solution? Any other ideas based on your experience or your perspective on solutions?

I’ve been involved with some large-scale training programs that different groups are trying to establish. Quanta has a line college, Northwest Lyon College. I’ll throw a plug out for them. It’s an Idaho-based university. It’s accredited. They can provide student loans. They can take military GI Bills. It’s a legit line college. I get a front-row seat to see how it goes. I would say, at a minimum, where we’re missing the mark completely.

If you do a root cause and this is what I would ask. I had a call with the NTIA. I was fortunate enough that they reached out looking for an industry perspective. I’ll share what I shared with them. They’ve already created the solution. The solution is more training and they didn’t do a root cause analysis. If you do a root cause analysis on this, the root cause is one layer below that. You have to motivate somebody to want to be in that industry and make the training available for them.

Looking for extremely intelligent people is clearly a good strategy for companies.

I’m not taking away from any efforts associated with providing training and telecommunications. For sure, I think that’s hugely important, but more importantly than that, every young man or woman looking to enter an industry will look at a return on investment. If they don’t, I wish they would ask somebody and that’s what they should be doing. Everybody should be doing that. There’s the whole do what you love thing and you’ll never work a day in your life. When you look at our industry, whether it’s power, gas or telecom, you’re poking holes in the ground and you’re dragging pipe around.

You could jump around to any one of those three and feel like the skillset you have is appropriate for that particular segment. If that’s the case, then you’re going to pick the one that’s going to give you the best return, whichever one’s going to pay the best. Electric power has been subsidized by the government since the 1936 Telecom Act. I pulled that out of thin air, but I think that’s accurate. The 1936 Telecom Act was a huge subsidization of power and it’s been subsidized over since.

They’re going to pay to make sure every human being in the United States has access to power. With that, power companies can operate in a little bit of a different financial space. They still have to make money. They still have to operate efficiently. I won’t take anything away from the complexities of running a power company, but it’s very different than if you compare it to a telecom. That’s literally building a business case that if the capital investment is too high or the rate of return is too slow or too low, they simply won’t do it.

Over the course of the last several years of my career, I’ve pretty much watched the whole thing, fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you want to look at it. It’s driven the cost of labor down in telecoms. You can have a human being climbing the same pole, doing very similar work or running the same bore rig. The bore rig doesn’t know if it’s pulling power or telecom. The operator doesn’t care either. You’re drilling a hole in the ground and you’re pulling something back. If one of them is paid substantially higher than the other, then that’s where people are going to go.

Now that’s not a bad thing either because if you flip flop into the power segment, they’re also desperate for craft skill labor. I don’t want to take anything away from them. I want them to get all the skilled laborers they can. The reality is if your telecom professional is consistently making $10 an hour or less than your power professional, you’re going to have a hard time motivating people to lean into that as a curriculum. I think that’s the key. It’s not a doom and gloom deal.

If you look at some of the funding sources that are being handed out by the federal government, that’s a good step. I’m not a big fan of federal spending. I embraced capitalism more than probably anybody you’ve ever met. In this particular instance, it’s unique. Telecom does not operate well from that perspective. It needs something to drive. You’ll always have an investment in areas where your return is going to be good.

If you have nice neighborhoods, nice bedroom communities, it’s a no-brainer. Put fiber there, people are going to buy broadband and life is good. Those aren’t the areas that need to be addressed. The funding requirements, you’ll see that. It’s the urban areas that have been deprived of fiber infrastructure for years because simply people do an analysis and say the likely hood of people purchasing broadband or the average revenue per unit in those parts of town are generally going to be less, so they don’t build it. Nothing drives them to. Nothing forces them to.

5TT 86 | Craft Skilled Labor
Craft Skilled Labor: Hire people smarter than you. And then when they do cool stuff, defer all that credit to them a hundred percent.

If you can find a silver lining in this whole pandemic, that’s the silver lining. It opened everybody’s eyes to the fact that broadband does sit almost equal to power and electricity for somebody’s home. Without it, you’re depriving people of education, the ability to work remotely, which is a requirement in many cases and even healthcare. They can be taken care of via teleconference or internet sites.

Fortunately, a lot of things are in place. It’s still convoluted and complicated. It’s yet to be seen how efficiently we can disseminate those funds and how efficiently we can deploy broadband with them. We’re generally heading in the right direction, but here is an interesting fact that people don’t get. There’s not a single community in the United States that has more than one power company. That’s an interesting dynamic.

If you think about that, there is no community in America. I’ve tried to find it. If there is, if somebody tells me I’m wrong, I’d be interested. You may be able to pay a bill to a variety of people, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the actual infrastructure who owns it, who operates it, carrot feeds and expands. That’s one company in every community. Telecom is a hot mess. Maybe it’s a cable company. Maybe it’s an old ILEC.

Maybe somebody came in with private equity cash and decided to overlay because they thought it was a good financial return. It’s a hot mess and it confuses everybody. It makes it very complicated to fund broadband growth in areas that have otherwise been deprived of it. It’s far more complicated than electric power. What I would lean into is making it less complicated.

I haven’t heard that before, but it makes a lot of sense and here’s why. From the staffing perspective, when we staff craft skilled labor, they seem to be more sensitive to compensation than, let’s say, managers, director levels and above. Would that be so? If that’s true, then yes, it would make sense that we need to pay people or at least pay them enough to motivate them to enter telecom in that area of craft-skilled labor. Would that make sense?

It boils down to the simplest solution. At the end of the day, we’re coin-operated.

Let’s switch a little bit to culture. I want to ask you to describe the Quanta culture. What makes it unique, different and what’s special about it? Why did you join?

You’ll be happiest when building big things.

For the culture. That was it. A lot of factors. I had a fantastic career at Verizon. I could not do what I’m doing now without having spent the time I spent there and working with all the people that I worked with there. I left on the best of terms. You could imagine. I was there half of my life, literally. I’ve built friendships and relationships that’ll be around forever. I put a ton of ever going to leaving on the best possible terms, but it was very difficult. I had a great position there. There are eight regions. I led one of the regions in the United States for all engineering and construction for fiber transport and radio access network.

It was a position that many people would have sold their souls to get for sure and I walked away from it. You could imagine there was something very compelling. It wasn’t necessarily a lot of things. My kids are older, so my risk level was a little bit lower. I’m done paying for college and they’re off. I can afford a little higher risk at this point. I like to build stuff. The reality is that the operators’ design manages how they want their networks to be built.

Ultimately, when it comes to putting a shovel in the ground or climbing a pole, they hire a general contractor for that. For me, if I boil down the last many years of my career, I’m happiest when I’m building big things. There’s no question. Here comes Quanta, a company that literally has not lost its focus in the many years they’ve existed and they want to build big things. That’s all they do. They don’t try to be what they’re not.

If I had $1 for every time I’ve heard Duke Austin say, “We’re a craft skill labor company,” I could probably retire now. That’s the culture at Quanta. If you could get 5, 10 leaders in a room and we don’t understand that we’re simply overhead, that’s all we are. We’ve not swung a hammer, dug a hole, or operated a piece of equipment in years. Although we have and understand it very well, hopefully, we don’t do it now. This company indexes heavily on craft skill labor, and in our case, it’s about 60,000 employees. Without that of employees, we simply don’t exist. There’s no question about that at Quanta. It’s 100% based on craft-skilled labor. I think that’s a huge component of our culture.

I get asked a lot when I speak about retention. How do you retain craft skilled labor? Is it different than retention of a management level and above? What are your thoughts and what are some ways, let’s say, retention strategies that you use at Quanta that work for craft skilled labor?

I compare it to parenting. It’s an interesting dynamic. I always compare everything to parenting.

I do, too.

5TT 86 | Craft Skilled Labor
Craft Skilled Labor: At the end of the day, you get no credit for doing good stuff and you need to be comfortable with that. And when things go bad, it’s all you. If you can operate that way and it doesn’t damage your ego, you’re going to be okay.

If your kids ask you to go somewhere and you don’t think it’s appropriate, you say no and they get mad. When they get older, they’ll understand that you were trying to maintain a level of control and discipline so that they didn’t go off and do stupid stuff. They may have told you at the time they didn’t like that level of control. Employees are very similar and I don’t mean to say control as in controlling them, but they want structure. They want to see that the company they were working for has structure and can provide them and perform well on a job because of that structure. They can become part of something bigger.

Compensation’s got to be there but let’s assume for a minute that compensation is equal and it’s relatively equal, especially in our world where as much of it is union-based. You’re going to get the same pay wherever you go. A couple of things, the leader showing interest in what the person is doing, being present on the job and making sure that the job is going well and interacting with the labor force is huge. You can equate that to everything like in the military. It’s the same thing.

When you have leaders in the military, I thank you for your service as well, by the way. I know you serve as well, but whether you were under somebody that was leading or leading others, the interaction with them and making it clear to them what the mission is so that they feel like they’re part of the mission and not a piece of labor is huge. Being there with them every day to talk about different ways and listen to them, they do the job every day. How on earth or how arrogant is it for us as leaders to think that we have an answer better than the human being or men and women that are doing it every day?

If you listen and they can see their ideas being implemented in the execution of that mission, I don’t think you’ll ever lose people. Some are going to jump for a variety of personal reasons, but the workforce as a whole will stay based on that. The other thing is the company healthy. Wherever you work, even the lowest level employee will Google them and read up a little bit on what the investor community is saying or what the outlook looks like. Everybody wants security too. You can maybe go make a few extra bucks by jumping ship and it may be the last three to six months, maybe a year. If you’re raising a family and trying to hit your wagon to something that’s long-term and get invested. You’d be hard-pressed to find something better than Quanta.

Rob, I’d love to know more about your leadership style and what you think the characteristics are of a great leader. Maybe you can throw in there also how you develop your leaders.

I was very fortunate to have, again, whether it be the military or my professional career. There are good people around me that I could emulate. One of the things somebody told me early on is everybody has an ego, so don’t ever claim you don’t have one. It’s a matter of who you allow to feed it. I feed my own ego. It’s a little bit arrogant at times, I think, but whatever. I believe I’m as cool as I believe I am and I’m not looking for somebody else to validate that.

With that, when I surround myself with people or when I hire people, I am truly trying to find somebody smarter than me. When they do cool stuff, I defer all that credit to them 100%. I’ve always done this and I’ve watched people that don’t and I feel sorry for them because it’s their insecurity that drives that. When you can truly be secure and know that you have the intuition to build good leadership around you and your subordinates, they do awesome stuff and you defer the credit to them 100%.

Everybody has an ego. Don’t ever claim you don’t have one. It’s a matter of who you allow to feed it.

What happens is what people notice is you’re somebody that can develop fantastic teams. That’s the skillset. It’s the greater good of leadership of not what I contributed, because what I contribute is it as one human being is irrelevant. If I can expand capabilities and create an atmosphere where fifteen people are operating in a similar fashion or rowing in the same direction. It’s going to have a much greater impact. I’ve pretty much always been that way. I love deferring. Unless things go bad and when things go bad, you jump on the grenade.

As a leader, you don’t defer that. You take that one all day and that’s hard for people to do as well. Sometimes it may have been something you can point to that somebody on your team botched up and you still take it. You say, “This is what we did. It’s all me,” because it is at the end of the day, you get no credit for doing good stuff and you got to be comfortable with that and when things go bad, it’s all you. If you can operate that way and it doesn’t damage your ego, you’re going to be okay.

I always say, “We always need to look in the mirror as leaders no matter what. Every time there’s a breakdown. Every time there’s a mistake. Every time, no matter what the circumstances, we look in the mirror first.” That was brilliant, Rob. What is your vision for the next five years for your telecom segment of Quanta?

It’s interesting. Anybody that’s interested can go to our earnings. Right before this, we had our earnings call and the telecom segment came up. One of the questions came to Duke about telecom and its growth. I’m going to stay aligned with what he said and it’s what our conversations have been all along. We want to grow. It’s a no-brainer. We want to grow revenue. It goes without saying. We wouldn’t be in this industry if we didn’t want to grow revenue, but it’s a complicated growth cycle in telecom.

Some of the larger operators view it as a sport to be down general contractors on pricing. We’re not interested in playing that game. We offer skills and solutions above and beyond human beings to dig holes in the ground. The idea is not to grow revenue but to grow the perception outside of Quanta that we’re a solutions-based company. Not just a general contractor. What I mean by that, especially in the environment nowadays, a lot of this funding is going to go to municipalities.

If you read up on how the funding’s going to be distributed, it’ll go to municipalities. Imagine you’re you run a city. You’re a mayor or a judge that has been appointed in this. Somebody says, “You’re going to get $30 million to go to broadband.” You have no idea what broadband even means, except for the internet at your house. You have no idea. We have the capabilities. We have an unbelievable ability to engineer. We can do an upfront analysis. We can build differently. We can do route optimization to try to make the builds more efficient.

We have all these skillsets within Quanta spread around. I’ve had the unique privilege of aggregating them. Now, we’re trying to go out and show people that we’re a solution-based company. Don’t tell me what you want me to do because that’s no fun. I’ll go do that if you’re going to pay me, whatever. We are all coin-operated like I said, but I want you to tell me what you’re trying to accomplish and let me come in and help you accomplish that. That’s what we’re trying to be. I don’t think too much about revenue and operating income.

5TT 86 | Craft Skilled Labor
Craft Skilled Labor: The idea is not just to grow revenue, but to grow the perception outside of Quanta, that we’re a solutions-based company, not just a general contractor.

We’re a publicly traded company, so our operating income has got to be healthy enough that it justifies. There’s a juice worth the squeeze. That’s the general philosophy on that. I’ll put that to the side and assume that’s going to continue to be healthy. That’s the growth strategy for people to view us as a solutions-based company. We have a lot of very intelligent people that have worked in communications for many years. The other thing that we offer is we see a perspective that an operator doesn’t see.

An operator sees it from the perspective of, “This is how I do it and this is how I’ve always done it, so I’m going to continue to do it this way.” We see that times everybody we work for. We can share not in a way that would be violated the NDAs or anything like that. We see different methods and techniques and strategies that the whole industry plays in. We feel like we’re positioned very well to help people accomplish what it is they’re trying to accomplish versus sending us an RFP and letting us bid on some units. We’ll do that. That’s what we do. Our growth strategy in five years is to be a solutions-based provider. Not just simply those who dig in the ground.

You have an exciting future ahead of you, Rob.

The timeline is good. If you look at all the differences, everybody thinks we’re in a telecom bubble now or not. It’s agitated by a couple of things. The 5G race and private equity just intuitively know that investing in broadband is probably going to be a good return because of everything that’s going to happen. The actual government spin that’s going to create a legitimate bubble. We’re still a year away from that now. That’s the timeframe.

We’re in the timeframe now where we have to be looking at how do we staff this workforce? How do we retain it and how do we create and develop telecommunication professionals? There are not enough now, so we have to develop them. We’re all in. We’re 100% all in on that. Our joke is I don’t even need telecommunications professional. I needed a human being that’s reliable and has a good work ethic and can learn. That’s what I need. I’ll teach them everything else. I can teach them broadband. You can give me a whiteboard and in two hours, I can make anybody an expert on how broadband works.

Rob, I know you’re hiring. I know that you probably need so many people to accomplish your goal. Where can we go to find out more about Quanta Services and potentially the jobs that you have available?

Wherever you’re located in the United States, I would say if you pass a truck on the side of the road anywhere in the United States and it’s working on a power line. It’s about an 80% chance that’s a Quanta company. All of your traditional hiring platforms, you’re going to find Quanta companies in them. You can go to QuantaServices.com and it lists out all our different operating units. Eventually, the job posting throughout all of our operating units will be aggregated at a Quanta Services level.

I don’t believe it’s there. I don’t think that’s necessarily imminent. The jobs are everywhere. You’d have to go to the Quanta Services website and look at all of the affiliates, then look for jobs amongst those affiliates and find them. As I said, if you’re a telecommunications professional or somebody interested in getting into it, you hit an application and can meet those qualifications I described. You can show that you’re reliable and have a good work ethic and you’ll show up and do what you say you’re going to do. I promise you. There’s a job for you.

Rob, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you for your insights. I know I’ve learned a lot and thanks so much for coming on the show.

It was fun. Thank you. I appreciate it.

You take care. We’ll talk soon.

Important Links 

About Robert McGee

5TT 86 | Craft Skilled LaborRobert (Rob) has been in the Telecom industry for just under 25 years. Began with GTE as an IBEW technician in Bloomington, IL in 1997 and held a variety of technician positions until moving into management in 2001.

Throughout his 20 plus years he has held a variety of positions in network maintenance, operations, engineering and construction. Rob was the Director for FTTP (Dallas) with Verizon, Director Global Transport Engineering and Implementation and then Executive Director 1 fiber before transitioning to Quanta in January 2021.

Rob served in the United States Army and was part of the Enduring Freedom post 9/11 campaign. Rob attended Illinois State University in Normal, IL and has lived in the Dallas Fort Worth area since 2003.

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Carrie Charles
Carrie Charleshttps://broadstaffglobal.com
Carrie Charles is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Broadstaff, the leader in specialized workforce solutions for telecommunications and technology. Carrie is a thought leader on workforce trends, women in tech and workplace diversity, and is the host of the 5G Talent Talk podcast on RCR Wireless News for a global audience of 150K+. Carrie Charles currently serves as the Executive Director of Industry Relations of the WIA-affiliated Women’s Wireless Leadership Forum (WWLF), with 2023 marking her fifth year on the board. Carrie serves on the Board of Directors of CableRunner International and the NEDAS Technology Association, and as the mother of a childhood cancer survivor, Carrie has aligned her personal mission with her role on the Board of Directors of the National Pediatric Cancer Foundation. Carrie additionally serves on the board of the CEO Council of Tampa Bay as the 2023 - 2024 Programs Chair. Using her diverse background as a lifelong entrepreneur, Certified Financial Planner, Certified Master Life Coach and a US Marine Corps veteran, Carrie is passionate about creating a culture of wellness and excellence. For over 30 years, she has helped thousands grow personally and professionally, and has helped companies like General Dynamics, Hewlett Packard and Eli Lilly attract, engage and retain their employees. Carrie has been a featured expert on Axios, Entrepreneur, Inc., NBC, HSN, Clear Channel networks, Thrive Global and various tech publications. Under Carrie's leadership, Broadstaff's growth has received numerous accolades, including Inc. Magazine's Inc. 5000 (2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020), the Tampa Bay Fast 50 (2023, 2022, 2020 and 2019), SIA's List of Fastest-Growing US Staffing Firms (2023, 2022), WPO’s 50 Fastest-Growing Women-Owned/Led Companies (2023). In 2022, Broadstaff earned a spot on Inc. Magazine’s inaugural Power Partners list. Carrie is a member of EY’s Entrepreneurial Winning Women™ North America Class of 2022, and a finalist for EY's Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2022 Florida Award. In 2021, Carrie was chosen as Tampa Bay Business and Wealth Magazine's CEO of the Year, and in 2019 was an honoree of Tampa Bay Business Journal's Businesswoman of the Year.