In today’s digital age, technology can often overshadow the human element in business. But what if the key to success lies in putting people first? Join Carrie Charles and Robert Hessel, CEO of Source 1 Solutions, for a thought-provoking and engaging conversation on the role of human connection in driving business success.
In this episode, Carrie and Robert discuss the value of partnerships, customer loyalty, and attracting and retaining talent in the new world of work. With over 25 years in business management, Robert’s leadership strategy focuses on strong business relationships to stay competitive in the digital world.
Don’t miss this inspiring episode about the human side of digital and its impact on business success. Tune in to the full episode to learn more about Robert’s journey into technology, and to discover the people-first strategies that grew Source 1 Solutions from a small startup to a global business.
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The Human Side of Digital with Robert Hessel of Source 1 Solutions
I’m very excited to have you with us in this episode. I’m even more excited about our guest, Robert Hessel. He is the CEO of Source 1 Solutions, and my neighbor here in Tampa, Florida, kind of. We’re not too close. Welcome, Robert. I’m so excited to have you on the show.
Thank you for having me. You are right. We’re not too close. It’s all the way across one bridge. It’s about 5 miles long, and you’d never seem to be able to find your way on this side of town.
Robert, I’ve always had so much respect for you ever since I met you. I’d love to hear about your professional journey to where you are now and maybe some lessons you’ve learned along the way.
Like many people from Florida, I didn’t grow up here. I grew up in a small town in Northern Michigan, almost in Canada, through the top of Michigan. There are some benefits of growing up in a small town, especially now as a father. At that time, there were lots of disadvantages to the area I grew up in. It was a very seasonal type of place unless you were a professional like a doctor or a lawyer. I think there was one doctor’s office in my town if I’m not mistaken. Unless you were a doctor or a lawyer, you were pretty much either working in the tourist industry or the construction industry or something like that. I wasn’t in love with school even though I was a very good student-athlete.
After a year of trying to pretend that I liked school, I joined the US Navy, and the US Navy is what brought me to Florida. I finished off in Jacksonville, Florida. I remember I was going to move back to Michigan and it was this time of year. I was driving from the Mayport Base to NAS Jacksonville, the air base. I was in a Navy truck. I had the window down, a short-sleeved shirt on with my arm out the window. It was a gorgeous day. I thought about the weather in Northern Michigan and I decided quickly that that was a bad idea. I should try to find my way here in Florida. I eventually moved to Tampa.
When I got out of the military, I got into the health and fitness business. The only reason I picked that was that they were hiring and I needed a job. I started out as a trainer there. The manager of the gym when I first started working there showed me how they do a tour. On a Monday night, it was incredibly busy and this very impatient customer came in or a potential gym member came in. While I was trying to get him to wait for the membership director, he didn’t want to wait anymore. I could tell he was frustrated and going to leave so I decided I would take him on a tour of the gym as the manager took me on the day before. I pretty much did everything verbatim, including as this guy pushed me even more because he is in a hurry.
I went through the pricing for the lifetime membership. This is back in the late ‘90s. That was when men’s and women’s clubs and lifetime memberships with two-hour renewal fees and all this stuff. I got him to agree to the paid-in-full option on his credit card with a lifetime renewal or wherever it was. I remember going over to the manager and saying, “This guy wants that lifetime thing and he wants to pay by credit card.” He looked at me with a blank stare and walked over. He said, “I want to make sure that you understand everything.”
The guy got impatient at this time because he wanted to sign up and go wherever he was going. The manager looked at the paper and he stopped for a minute because he could tell I did everything exactly as he had jugged me the day before. I didn’t even talk about anything else. From that day on, I was in sales. I soon became the assistant manager, and then I became the general manager of a club within six months.
He’s the one who brought me down here and got me into technology. I came down to Tampa because he left the fitness business and worked for Lucid Technologies at that time, which is now known as VIA. He brought me down to Tampa and I got a job in sales. I went to their training. That’s how I got introduced to technology. I came out of my training class and made the first sale two days after I came out of training. I was the golden boy. I didn’t make another sale for the rest of the year and I ended up resigning so he didn’t have to fire me. I was awful at it. Over the years, I stayed in technology and fast forward skipping through working for other companies and working my way up through the ranks brought me to where I am now, which is the CEO of Source 1 Solutions, which I started back in 2011.
Please tell me the story of Source 1. What was your why behind creating it? I know that you had a very interesting path into technology. Also, talk about what you do and who you serve.
I wrestled back and forth. I was a partner in a previous company, and I wasn’t really a partner. I think your audience probably can relate. There are lots of people that can relate to that. I had a bad relationship and I break up with that company. I decided with a lot of coaching from friends that I’m going to try and give this a go on my own. While I was in Key West during the mini-lobster season, I finally made a decision. My CFO currently, was not my CFO at that time, was a good friend that was going to help me out if I decided to do this to manage my books because I didn’t know finance. I called him. I told him to register the name and he decided that he was coming to work for me at the same time.
All of a sudden, I had overhead. It wasn’t ideal, but I started Source 1 out of the backseat of a Toyota Camry back in 2011. In the beginning, it was like any startup. You sold anything that you knew how to sell to get money in the door and keep the cashflowing. The company has made shifts in what our focus was but through time, I got some good business coaching. I understood where the value was for Source 1 and where we could make money. I got more narrowly focused on that as an IT-managed service and professional services company.
While I was working with Avaya, another partner along the way, one thing that I’d always noticed was, for the most part, the territory restricted you if you were an authorized partner. It was supposed to be a fair playing field, but it never was. The big dealers or the big distributors for these companies get the most love. Their discount levels are 4 or 5 times sometimes what yours are. They’ve got deeper pockets and cash. The only place I could make money back then when I was working for other companies and being compensated off profits was on the services side of it. Those companies also restricted you if you were an authorized partner. You could sell in Florida, but you couldn’t sell in Georgia and I thought that was so stupid.
We started with the mindset of, “Let’s just be a services company and be a subcontractor to all these great companies. We’ll be able to offer services outside of the territory and help them out.” That morphed into a unique situation where a customer called and asked if we could do something in Brazil. I was in startup mode, keep in mind. I remember saying, “Brazil? How hard can it be? If something goes wrong, we’ll ship some replacement equipment down there. We’ll fly one of our engineers down. They’ll fix everything. As long as they give us a loose SLA, let’s call it four days, we’ll be fine.”
One contract became 2 contracts became 3 and became 10. Thank God nothing ever went wrong, which is the upside of maintenance because I didn’t think about the customs issues. There was no way we were going to ship equipment into Brazil and get it there. When the engineer got there, everything was going to be in Portuguese. He wouldn’t be able to read it. None of these things even dawned on me and saying yes to the maintenance contracts led to, “We want you to do installations for us.” That’s when I had to learn the value of partnerships. I partnered with some different companies. One specifically over in the UK who understood the global landscape and partnerships. It taught me a lot during that time.
That’s how we got our start in this whole global business of doing professional services and support. It was very much by accident. We took a lot of lumps along the way with learning the different cultures and ways of getting businesses done. Fast forward to now and this is going to be our twelve years in business in July 2023. We have SLA-driven contracts in 118 countries with offices in 3 countries. It’s been a pretty wild ride, to say the least. There were a lot of scary times. Right now, we’re enjoying a very good time in the business over the last few years but we realized how much we need to value and appreciate those because we have seen the other side of it as well.
You and I have connected over telecom. I’d like to know where you serve the telecom industry.
We have a limited amount of customers. As I said, someone asked me to do something for them in Brazil, which is called the international piece but SIs, we serve Systems Integrators and large telcos. We won’t mention any of their names, but that is one of our largest customer subsets. Our services are sold predominantly through the channel. A telco will sell a large global solution, and if there are 10 tasks, they might have the capabilities or desire to do 4 of those. There’ll be 5 or 6 elements of a big contract for them that they don’t want to do.
It’s not that they couldn’t do it, I guess, but it’s that they don’t want to do it. I’m not their core business. We do a lot of work in the telco space around network support. A large piece of our business, which I know is your specialty field, and why we chatted. We do a lot of DAS, Distributed Antenna work all the way from the initial design, iBwave Design, all the way through the installation and turn-up. We are a licensed provider for one of the telcos. That’s how we got into the space and how we service the telcos. We service them across many countries. Our customers are located in many different countries in the telco space.
One thing, Robert, that has always impressed me about you besides your entrepreneurial spirit. I love your story and you’re an inspiration to me, for sure, but something about your customer loyalty. Your customers are loyal. How have you had success here?
Thank you for that. That’s a nice compliment. Culture is a word that gets thrown around so much, but it is really important to us and our values. From the moment you enter our building, you’ll see our values. The posters across our wall are vision, mission, and values but our values are posted around the building. It’s also a part of our story when we talk to our clients and we tell them this is the most important thing. Value number one is relationships over deals. To us, that means internally. With our team, our relationship is more important than the deal.
We try to be very flexible and very accommodating to make this a great work environment, which is why we don’t have a lot of turnovers but more so we’ll tell our customers no for a few different reasons. One is we think the ask is not achievable, especially when you’re talking about global business. If somebody is not exposed to some of the regions around the world, through our experience and our data, certain things that you might expect in North America or across Europe are not the same things that are achievable in parts of Africa, Latin America, and different areas of the world.
Relationships over a deal have been almost our battle cry. What served us so well with our customers is the fact that we are not afraid to tell them, no, because we think something’s unachievable or we’ll tell straight up, “We’re not the best guys to do this for you. We could do it for you. We’ll be doing an all-right job, but that’s all it will be is all right. What you should probably do is go to X, Y, or Z company that we know and we’re happy to make the introduction for you.” I’m a sales guy from my background, and that’s a counterintuitive thing to do for a salesperson but those are the kinds of deep relationships and partnerships that our clients look for. That’s why some of our largest clients have been in our top ten list for 10 out of the 12 years that we’ve gotten into the business.
It’s honesty and I think our customers can see that we don’t have a tremendous amount of turnover here. A lot of people were big on anniversaries and I have been giving away so many 5-year anniversary awards and 6-year awards. Our customers and partners can see that as well. That gives them a sense of trust and comfort as well. They know that our team must feel secure in the environment of Source 1, which helps make them feel secure. If they feel secure, they’re willing to throw us more business and go attract more business. It’s a simple concept, but a very effective one. That’s been a big part of our success.
If the customers feel secure, they’re willing to throw us more business and go attract more business.
Let’s continue on that track. What strategies are working for Source 1 with attracting and retaining talent right now? Give us some secrets, Robert. That’s what we want.
I wish I had some great phenomenal secrets because the landscape has changed a lot. For us, it’s just consistency. This is not the most popular opinion right now. We do have people that work in some remote areas and there are days that people do work remotely because they have a sick child at home or something else but I’m very much an on-prem person. There’s a lot of value in being inside of the same four walls, not from the ability to train.
Let’s face it, this is a stressful business, and if you’re sitting in your house every day getting beat up by technology challenges and trying to fix problems because that’s what customers call you for. They don’t call you to say, “Everything has been great for the last four years. Thank you so much.” They call you when something is broken.
You need that energy and the ability to sometimes vent. Inside these four walls, we try to make this a really fun place to work. We do a lot of different internal events and we’re very methodical in everything that we do of demonstrating our values. I’ll give you an example. One of our values is lifting others up. It’s a very simple value. It can have a lot of different meanings, but when you come on board, you go through the employee manual, and we talk about how we demonstrate our values in writing.
For example, your child has a school play or whatever it may be. Don’t call in sick. Don’t take a vacation day. Don’t tell us the morning of the play because then I got to think maybe your child doesn’t have a play and you’re just using it as an excuse. We can sniff through that but go be a part of the moments that matter with your family and be there for them. Come to work when you can and get your work done. If that means you’re going to get here at 2:00, or if it means you’re going to come in early or whatever it’s going to do, just get your job done. We’re not too worried about the other part of it. We’re more worried that you don’t miss those types of matters.
We put our money where our mouth is and try to celebrate those moments with our team and let them be there. We do a lot of work in the community and all those things are what attract talent to us because we’ve been fortunate and we’ve got some incredible talent in this building and around the world. Those are probably the secret sauce. Also, the landscape has changed so recruiting is a different beast right now, which I know you understand more than anybody probably. It’s staying true to who we are as a company. Everybody is looking for a place where they can feel secure and a place that is consistent.
Is it a little different now from the challenges in tech with talent gaps, retention, and having enough skilled workers? Are you seeing anything different now than a few months ago? Do you think it’s going to be different in a year? I know there have been quite a few layoffs and things have changed a bit in tech.
There’s a shortage of people, especially in the 5G space. There is more 5G work to be done right now than there are people on the planet to perform the work, which is a great thing, but it’s also a challenge. This is an interesting time. Not trying to go too far off the rails, but you’ve got a lot of great talents that are coming towards the end in the sunset of their career. You’ve got a group of young people that are coming up. For the young people that are coming up, if I can give them any advice is how do I balance work, life, and all these other things I want to be involved in. It’s important to remember what you’re trying to accomplish.
For people that want to work right now, I’m talking to the younger generation that want to absolutely dig in, there are all kinds of companies looking for people that are hungry that want to work. The path to mentorship or leadership inside of these companies or being one of the greatest engineers on the planet exists, and there’s a huge opportunity for it. I do think there is a gap in the technology sector. We need younger and hungry people coming into the marketplace to replace some of these veterans that have been around that know the ins and outs of everything, and do have that level of work ethic still.
Robert, you said something once that I’ll never forget. It’s something about the human side of technology, and it seems to be a successful strategy for you. Can you expand on that?
I wish I remember exactly what I said. One thing that’s for sure is in this industry, we’re dealing with technology and humans. What could possibly go wrong? That’s a little cute because everything can go wrong. Probably the most important part even around here internally is technology is a beautiful thing, and we make a living and put food on our tables from it, but don’t lose the human factor. We’re all human beings working in this place. I get so irritated when somebody sends me four emails and they’re four doors down. Why don’t you get up and come in here and talk to me? Let’s have a conversation about things. It’s exciting and it’s scary where technology is going with AI and all these different things.
We try to balance all that and have a real understanding of the human side of our business, which is again, why we have customers for long-standing. For people that want to work with us, we understand different cultures, traditions, and the different ways that business is done in those areas. That’s also what brings the human side of our business and understanding of our business to our customers, which I appreciate.
A lot of our customers don’t understand how things get done in Brazil, Latin America, or Asia. Not that we know everything, but we have a pretty good understanding, and we can bring that to them and help them when it comes time to solution a deal. Also, when it comes time to manage those people out in the field that are working with us and for us to help them deliver and meet their customer expectations.
Robert, you’ve always been able to attract and retain strong leaders. What do you look for when hiring leaders and how do you develop them? Do you have a formal development program or is it more mentorship?
Inside our building, the people that are in senior leadership roles, people that are in key management roles, this business has been built over the years. In fact, all these people have been handpicked. I can think of one example of that on a leadership team. The guy did work with us as a contractor. He owned his own company for a number of years. For three years, I’d been talking to him knowing, “This guy, if he was part of us, it would be great.”
Eventually, that manifested itself. The president of the company, I met probably three years into this from one of our largest customers who he retired from. They referred me to him. I remember sitting in a meeting with him, I’m like, “We don’t have a car fast enough to drive for this guy. If he comes in and tells my customer our actual size versus our fighting weight, then we could be in trouble.” Five years later, the guy becomes the president of the company because I stayed in contact with him.
Our VP of operations, I courted him for two years. I was meeting him for lunches. I was not offering him jobs. I was meeting with him trying to understand him and what made him tick because even though there can be some differences in how we think, we have to have the same values at the end of the day for the company to be successful. Once those people are here, we have a very simple strategy for this very entrepreneurial company. This is what I expect of people. Know what you did, and why you did it, and be willing to defend that position. If you can do those three things and the outcome wasn’t great, that’s a learning experience for us because that means you made the right decision because we all make the wrong decision.
If you can do those three things, then we’re always going to be okay. I think that’s the mentorship side of it. We don’t do a lot of formal trainings with our leaders. We’ve got some that have come from companies that gave them tons of formal training. We do utilize that, but it’s through mentorships. We do a lot of reading here and we share a lot of, “I read this book. You should read this.” That’s the real strategy around the leadership side of things and trying to keep an open mind with each other. Also, understand that the most believable person in the room should be the one listened to. It doesn’t mean it’s the smartest one. It means on the subject that we’re talking about, that guy or a girl has the most experience and is the most believable person on what we should do on this.
The most believable person in the room should be the one listened to.
Robert, let’s talk about the future of Source 1 Solutions. What’s your vision?
We’re going to continue expansion. We’ve got a very large presence here in North America. We’ve got two offices in Europe and we’re in very serious negotiations on acquisition in Europe to grow our European footprint. Not only our customers but our footprint across Europe. Probably the step after that will be Asia, which will round out our true global business.
Our customers will be able to transact in the region. If you’re from the Asia-Pacific, you’ll be able to transact with our Asia-Pacific office, and deal with not only project managers, but deal with an entire business unit that’s located in the Asia-Pacific. If you’re in Europe, the same, and the Americas, maybe Latin America, but at least we’ve got this here in North America. To really round out to be able to give our customers a true global footprint, not only technical support, but a true global footprint to do business with and try to grow our businesses with.
What about you? What drives you? What makes you jump out of bed every morning? I don’t know what time. I get out of bed at 4:35. What time do you jump out of bed?
That’s usually dependent upon my daughters. They’re usually the ones that make me jump out of bed way before I want to be. In all seriousness, I love every bit of this. It’s stressful for sure, especially with the growth that we’ve had. I do have other business ventures, but I enjoy them. I love being around people. I love trying to solve problems and watching people around me come up in their personal lives and their professional lives.
This has been twelve years now, and I’ve got people that have bought their first home while they’ve worked with me. They’ve accomplished this or they’ve accomplished that or they’ve had their first child. The fact that I get to work with them every day, make money with them, enjoy them, and watch their success is probably the best part about it. I still love scraping every day and getting with a customer and trying to solve a problem. Also, creating a solution all the way through to the challenges that come with being the CEO of a company. I still enjoy those. Even the hard days are enjoyable to me, and I guess that is the future for me. As long as I can continue to enjoy it, I’m going to want to do it.
Where can you be reached? How can we reach Source 1 Solutions?
The website is www.Source1Solutions.com.
Robert, I looked at my email and I have a notification that I’m coming across the bridge to see you. I’m going to be there. I’m going to make the trip. I’ll pack a bag, lunch, and dinner, and I’ll get over there. It is booked. I’m coming.
The flight is scheduled all the way across the bay.
This has been wonderful. Thank you for coming to the show. It’s been fantastic. I appreciate you sharing your heart and your story.
Thanks for having me. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you and see you, Carrie. I’m excited that you’re going to travel to our side of town.
I will see you soon.
See you. Bye.
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About Robert Hessel
