Leadership in the last mile requires a unique set of skills, and in this episode, Co-CEO Jamie Earp of Ubiquity shares insights with host Carrie Charles. Discover the driving force behind Ubiquity’s success and Jamie’s leadership style focused on empowerment, authenticity, and transparency. Gain valuable insights into the industry’s future, particularly in the realm of artificial intelligence and automation. Join us for a concise yet insightful conversation on empowering teams and staying ahead in the ever-evolving business landscape.
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Empowering the Team That Powers the Last Mile with Jamie Earp of Ubiquity
We have a wonderful guest with us. Jamie Earp, the Co-CEO and Managing Partner of Ubiquity. Jamie, thanks for joining me.
Thank you, Carrie. A pleasure to be here.
I like to start with every guest to learn more about their journey. What brought you to your seat? Tell us your story.
I was thinking about this earlier, but my journey has been long and winding and not at all what I planned when I left college and went to the real world. I was a lobbyist, a campaign manager, and a fundraiser all before I even knew what digital infrastructure was, which wasn’t a term back then. It was what the tower industry was. I started as a tower developer in this space. Along this journey, two things were critical to where I am now.
One universal thing that carried me from all those different roles and backgrounds when I first entered the space was people. The relationships that I had established worked to cultivate people that I’d been a resource for and helped or they had helped me. Those people were always the door that opened for whatever the next opportunity was. The next job going to law school or whatever it was, a relationship with a person that I had in my life, either close or at arms length, always were the key component of me finding the next opportunity, challenge, or adventure in my life. That stuck with me. Those people, resources, and relationships always opened doors. That was the primary thing.
The second thing was hard work and drive. I grew up in a really small town in rural North Carolina about an hour and a half here from Charlotte. I was the first person in my family to go to college. My parents always joked that when I was born, I was always leaving, looking for more, and bored. Looking back, I may not think it was partly because of the values they instilled in me. They’re like, “No matter what you’re doing, you always do it to the best of your ability. You work hard and never quit.” That has been outside of relationships and people, which is the most invaluable thing that I’ve had in my life.
I’ve done a lot of entrepreneurial things. I didn’t always have a lot of people around me to help me do the things I was doing so you have to have that inner drive or ambition. It’s the willingness to work hard and never quit. There’s always a thousand things that go wrong before things go right. As you well know, you’ve done a lot of the same things. You, me, and our peers, if they didn’t have that internal drive to be successful, none of this would work. At the same time, you can have that internal drive, but not put the right people around you to do all the things that you don’t do well. They can see where your blind spots are and frankly, are much more capable of doing what they do than someone like you or I will ever be.
I’m always happy if I’m the dumbest person in the room. This means I’ve got the right group in the room around me that is exponentially more about the things that they’re engaged in than I will ever be. It’s that team. At the end of the day, having that drive and relationships, it’s what put me in my seat now. It’s a very fun way of describing it. I can’t emphasize enough how people like us in this industry are starting businesses and trying to create something. You can’t shortcut those two critical components of being successful.
I agree with you so much. When people ask me how did you experience success, I’ll say the same thing. It’s relationships, people, your network, number one, and then your work ethic. It’s everything. That’s fantastic advice for all of us at any stage in our career. Who is Ubiquity? Tell us the story.
Ubiquity started in 2018. I was in the tower space with a great partner and a group of people who did all the things well that I had no idea how to do well. We were successful. After that, I was looking at what the next thing to do was. A big part of what drives the values that we bring to our industry or the business generally is being a solution and not trying to create a solution that is in search of a problem. Seeing ahead and figuring out what’s going to be the next challenge with regards to the industry and what’s the next challenge that’s coming if we can be a resource for a solution to be an authentic provider of that and a good partner to our stakeholders.
Working on that brought me across, again, through my relationships with a group that has had some opportunities in the space. Ubiquity became the first to market but a last-mile-focused digital infrastructure solution provider. Infrastructure-focused is what we do. We want to build, own, and manage these critical infrastructure assets on behalf of our partners, but at the end of the day, it had to be something that was a need in the market.
This was in 2019 then COVID hit shortly thereafter. It expedited the entire industry that the need for, in our instance, last-mile fiber networks in underserved and underpenetrated markets was a real necessity. People working from home then weren’t at school or the office. Ubiquity became, through that experience, a real solution provider to the industry. We’ve continued to try and do that. We started with fiber networks, fiber to the premise, and we extended that to include building networks. We extended that to be focused on the data center space, but all focused on the last mile, where historically, these types of assets weren’t owned or managed by third parties.
The carriers have always wanted to own their own luck in the last mile because their reputation with the standards of service for the customers is what all these companies base their reputations on. They’ve done a great job historically. What we saw coming was the need to take all of those 21st-century services that these companies were providing to customers needed to be moved over to this 21st-century infrastructure. With COVID and the demand that drove plus the end-of-the era of free money is a resource to those companies to be able to build, own, and manage these types of critical infrastructure assets in the last mile in a way that was as good as, if not better than, they could own and manage them themselves.
It was critical to us being a real solution, not just to startups, but established brands who need to be able to trust us as a company and trust our ability to execute and finance these types of assets, which is hard. There’s a lot of work and expertise. They’re complicated and they cost a lot of money. With me and my partner whom I started the company and also the team that we established and built over that period. We’ve been extremely fortunate in doing that. It gave us real credibility in the market, not only to know how to do it but also to deliver. That’s been our story. That’s the brand that we’ve created. It’s become a very recognized brand in the market that comes with a lot of goodwill.
We want to keep that moving, keep that momentum, and keep delivering for not only our customers but all of our stakeholders, our customers, our investors, our team, and the communities that we’re working in, which are critical stakeholders in our business. That’s really what we’re doing. We’re bringing 21st-century technology to these markets so that all of those stakeholders can benefit, especially as we get into the era of 5G, 6G, and all those things. None of it works without these types of infrastructure assets in play. We want to play our part and do it to the best of our ability.
I travel a lot. I’m at conferences and in meetings all over the country, and I hear the name Ubiquity everywhere I go. You have done a phenomenal job with whatever you’re doing and however you’re doing it. I want to go a little bit further into that because now other players are doing the same thing. What makes Ubiquity unique? Is it about your model specifically? What is it that differentiates you?
It’s our people. Nothing that we’re doing I would say is necessarily unique or more. We didn’t create something that has never been in the market before. What we’re trying to do is be a resource and a solution. At the end of the day, our brand, the product, the solution that we bring to market, our reputation, everything is underpinned by the team. My partner is Ajay Ghanekar, whom I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to have met and come across in the early days of this journey and partner with.
From day one, we knew that our biggest differentiating factor was going to be the ability to surround ourselves with a team that was capable of delivering on what we thought at that time has since been reinforced and proven out in the market. What we thought was going to be necessary to change the way this industry operated in the last mile environment. We were able to build around us a team of hyper-qualified, tenured executives from the industry who knew how to manage all aspects of the business, the development, the asset management, the customer experience, and the financial. All the things that you have to do, everything has to go right for us to be able to deliver on the promise that we make to our stakeholders.
Ajay and I joke that we used to talk ten times a day and now we have to schedule half an hour a week to talk to each other because of everything that’s going on. Luckily, we built out a team from the 2 of us to now well over 200 people across the country if you add our third-party resources as well. We directly employ about 1,000 full-time equivalents across the country and all the different activities we’re doing. The core Ubiquity team, our people, are a little over 200 in our markets across the country.
We’ve had, I would say, a 99% success rate in attracting and keeping those people. You and your firm have been a big part of that as well helping us identify the right people. Not the most talented people or the smartest people but the right people. Everyone in our industry who is not looking for a job or hasn’t been on the market long, they’re smart and talented. They all have those attributes. Finding the right people is hard. Not only do they have to be able to do the work, that’s the floor. The floor is you have to be able to do the work. What differentiates what we look for are the people that fit our culture and with the team.
In the early days, we hired almost no one except those we knew, we had relationships with, and that they fit. In some instances, people that we didn’t know as well, we would bring them on as a consultant. It’s a two-way street. It doesn’t do any good to have good people that we can take complete advantage of their capabilities if they don’t like working with us. It was always something we wanted to be a fit for both parties and that goes for every stakeholder.
We want our customers and our investors to feel that way. We want our team, the communities we work in, and anyone associated with us to walk away better off than before they met us. That’s an underlying theme that we try to always keep at the front of our thinking and the way we execute. It comes down to that fit and blending into our culture of being reliable, driven, transparent, and a really good partner to me, our customers, and the team. Having all those attributes is like the no as***** rule. You want to have the right team. You can’t have any one person undermining that culture. As you know, that can become an invasive thing.
We’ve always been really careful, even now when we’ve grown a lot. We have a team that works only on finding the right team members. It’s gotten to that point. I can’t quality control that. I can’t micromanage that, neither can my partner or anyone else. That team is an extension of us and think about that when they’re hiring. Knock on wood, we’ve had a very high success rate of not only finding and attracting but keeping the right people. I can’t stress that it has to be the right people not only for the work but for the company. It’s something that a lot of firms probably don’t think about the same way. At the end of the day, that is what makes us who we are but also differentiates us from anyone else in the industry.
There’s so much goodness in what you said. What really stood out to me is that in business, we all have competitors. What will make us different? What’s going to make us stand out? Is it our services or our product? You continued to say the people, and you’re spot on. Nowadays, we need to recognize that as leaders. It’s the people that make a difference and the culture that you create. I know we hear about that over and over again, but it absolutely works. In your case, it worked.
You talked briefly about your culture at Ubiquity. Can you go a little deeper there? I do know what it’s like to be on the Ubiquity team because we staff for you. It’s actually pretty easy. You’ve got a great reputation. Once people become employed, they’re happy and they stay, but I want to go a little deeper. Tell me more about what it’s like to be on the Ubiquity team.
I’m trying to think of an easy way to explain it. At the end of the day, we empower our people to be problem solvers. We have value because we are addressing key issues that our customers and other stakeholders can’t address for themselves. Having a culture that really focuses on how can we be a resource and a solution for whoever it is that we’re interacting with. A teammate, the mayor of the city that we’re working in, the customer that’s on our network, the people that are giving us money, our lenders or investors. We always want to be responsive and reliable partners of all those groups to help solve their problems.
That culture of reliability and taking ownership of finding the right solutions that not only provide the solution but are fair. That is what is ingrained in us. To do that, you have to be authentic. You can’t fake this. There is no faking drive, fairness, transparency, or reliability. If you fake it, you can only fake it for a little bit and then you find out pretty quickly. Not only in this industry but in life, once you lose the trust of whoever that counterparty is, it’s hard, if not impossible, to get it back.
There is no faking drive, fairness, transparency, or reliability. If you fake it, you can only fake it for a little bit and then you find out pretty quickly.
I guess the folks that we work with and the people that we’re problem solvers for are the men and women who frankly are part of much larger and more established organizations whose brands are transcendent and can’t afford to have someone like us because of any type of negative impact on them. That’s why it’s been so hard since the beginning. It’s years of conversations, discussions, and building trust with different organizations and large carriers who again have never done what we are suggesting they do before. It takes all that. It can all come to a screeching halt in a second if you fall short of these pretty basic but hyper-important attributes that you have to have. It’s too important to bet on us if we can’t provide these things.
That’s what this culture is built around. We all make mistakes and we mess up. People go too fast and they break things, and that’s okay. Those things happen, but if you do all those things with the right goals in mind, do it the right way. With those levels of accountability, that’s how we’re going to be successful long-term. That’s what drives our culture about respecting the people that we work with and the people that we work for. If we can hold to that and hire the right people who truly believe in that and live and work under those pretty simple but still hard-to-find standards, we’ll always be successful.
The most important thing we do every day is who we work with and who’s on the team. It takes all of us and our team is focused on that. It’s folks like you who know and understand what’s important to us. We try to make sure that it’s the one thing that we don’t get wrong. We get it right enough over a long period of time. A couple of times that we don’t get it right, it’s a genuine miss and not a lack of integrity in the process of the way that we try to operate as a company.
Jamie, describe your leadership style. Also, would you say that there are some commonalities between each leader on your team, and if so, what are those? What defines a great leader at Ubiquity?
It’s looking at our leadership team, but then you drill down into the leaders at different levels of the organization. There’s a lot of commonality across that broad group. I would say we’re all very different, especially the core team that we started the company with and that we have at the top of the company now. I am very collaborative. I probably to a fault sometimes. Hands off, right behind power the people to go and do their jobs. We’ve hired people that are better at their jobs than we are at their jobs. That’s why we hire them.
At the same time, my partner is the same way, but he’s also a great coach. It’s a big part of what he does. Other members of the team have different personality traits that collectively, again, we fill in each other’s blind spots, which I have plenty of. I need that team around me to ensure that nothing gets missed. Also, the team that works with us and is closer to the activity that’s going on day-to-day has those resources to rely on so that they become better leaders, more well-rounded, can see where their blind spots are, and can help fill those in.
For myself, it comes from the fact that I was an entrepreneur forever and didn’t have a big team. I had people that helped and things like that but I didn’t have a big team. One of the things that I’ve had to learn over the past several years is to rely on other people, not just rely on, “I can do it.” I’ve got a four-year-old son. I’m constantly catching myself. He’s four and he’s learning. He is trying to drive the remote-control car and hitting things. I was like, “Let me have it and I’ll show you.” He’s got to do it himself. I can’t do it because you’ll never learn otherwise.
I’ve had to become a better version of myself over these past several years by relying on all these people. It’s pretty easy for me to do that because they’re also fantastic and talented. It’s very easy to trust and rely on them. It’s something I’ve had to do and focus on the collaborative piece being a resource where and when I can. At the same time, make sure that everyone is empowered, not only to do their work but manage their teams and their people. Know and trust that everyone is going to do exactly what needs to be done in collaboration with me in the broader team and we’re going to be successful.
Make sure everyone in your team is empowered, not only to do their work but manage their teams and their people.
It’s been a learning experience for me changing my leadership style from I have to do a little bit of everything to trusting everyone a lot of other people to do all those things very well. I tell everyone, my job is to keep you go far so that you can do what you do. Do you need me to get you coffee, money, or new people? Whatever gives you the ability to do your job better, that’s my job. If I do that well, then I have no doubt that they will be successful and make us successful long-term.
I’m hearing authenticity, transparency, trust, and empowerment. Those are the traits of these days’ leaders and tomorrow’s leaders. It’s inspiring me because I’m listening to it and saying, “Yes, that’s what we need to do.” Those are the leaders that we need to build for our future and these days workforce. Jamie, you mentioned something earlier and what came to my mind was that saying that you skate to where the puck is going and not where the puck is now. I would like to get your view on what trends and opportunities are you seeing in the industry now and in the future. Where is it going? What do we need to be thinking of right now and placing our bets on for the future?
As we look at the industry or the broader macro trends happening, at least from my seat, I see a lot of convergence. Historically, we have always thought about telecommunications companies. Those were our core focus, but at least in my space in terms of thinking about digital infrastructure and this compute and connectivity, how we’re empowering that type of data. In the last mile environment, especially where we operate, we see that expanding to more than just telecommunications. There’s a lot of convergence, at least for the need of what we do in the space, not only telecommunications firms, technology companies, and all the different service providers that fall into those segments, especially in the last mile.
There’s that convergence of technology and communications but also the pull to the last mile proximity to end users, direct connectivity, and ownership of those end users. Something that, again, historically, the telecommunications carriers had a purview of. They were the ones that owned the phone, the TV, the internet, or the wireless in your home as you travel. The demand for that connectivity to the end user just continues to expand. You see in this space some of the biggest proliferators of data centers and fiber outside the last mile are the technology companies. They’re building their fiber networks and data centers. They’re building their own things for their use. In the last mile, that was the solution that we sought to solve.
How can we build these things in environments where owner’s economics, single-use assets, single-use networks, and single-use computing don’t make a lot of sense? We’ll continue seeing that. Our core business is fiber. That’s more these days. That’s what is happening now. We see the adoption of that solution, not only by startups or smaller ISPs and data companies, but the adoption of that buy, the carrier-grade, and the larger customers in our space. That’s a near-term future opportunity that we’re working very hard to capture. Over time, you’ll continue to see that along all these asset classes.
Edge computing is still pretty nascent. As you see what’s happening in that space with the demand that AI is driving not only for more and more the compute locations, but power or water. They need so much and there’s only so much available. There’s a lot of demand that will necessitate the need for different types of solutions going forward or more distributed solutions. That’s where I see a lot of the industry going. Time will tell. We’ve done a pretty good job over the past few years of being prepared and seeing where we thought, to your point, the puck was going and skating in that direction so that we were ready when it got there.
That’s a big part of what we do in terms of the next iteration of our team and the people. How can we continue being on that cutting edge? At the same time, not losing sight of what our core business is now. It’s always easy to take a shiny object but most of the time, that shiny object is not going to be shiny if you’ve left your core business from continuing to be successful. We’ll keep a hard eye on where the industry is going. We’ve got a lot of the right relationships with all these different industries and segments of the industries and the different companies to have a pretty good idea of what their challenges are. They do a good job of seeing them coming and knowing what they’re going to be.
As long as we keep listening and talking as little as possible, which is ironic since I’m sitting here rambling on, but as long as we keep listening to our stakeholders and our customers, staying attuned to their needs, and always being creative and trying to find a way to facilitate that need in a way that makes sense for them, not only operationally, but financially, we’re going to be in a good position to be a good partner for them for a long time.
As long as we keep listening to our stakeholders and customers, as well as staying attuned to their needs, we’re going to be in a good position to be a good partner for them for a long time.
I would call you a great listener, Jamie, because in every meeting we’ve ever had, you respect us and what we need. We listen to you and you listen to us. You said earlier that every single person that you interact with at Ubiquity is important no matter who it is. Your customers and your team, but even more, your vendors. Staffing is a little tough sometimes. Sometimes, people don’t treat us nicely. Some clients don’t. It has been fantastic to work with you and your team because there’s such respect coming from both ways. What you put out there is what you get back. That’s one reason I know why you’ve all been so successful.
That’s a great point on vendors. I’m glad you said it because I’ve not said that word as much in this interview as I probably should have. Our vendors are integral stakeholders in our ecosystem, whether it be folks like you who find the right people for our company, but also that huge number of third-party FTs that I talked about earlier, they come from our supply chain. The folks doing our general contractors and the people in the field doing that hard work. If we’re not attuned to their needs then there’s no way for them to be a great solution for us. The amount of trajectory we’re on in terms of what we’re building at the pace we’re building is completely based on our ability to give groups like that and what they need to provide us a lot of resources.
We have to be like our customers. We have to talk to them, plan with them, and be transparent if we see any changes because if we wait until the last minute because we don’t want to tell them something or if we need more, they can’t provide it. If we need less, it’s going to impact them very negatively. If they are wanting to work with us in the future if they have options, we will always want to be their first option. If there’s a chance to work with us, we want you to choose us. You have to treat them like a member of the team. There can’t be surprises if you can avoid it.
It can’t be a surprise because I knew it and you did. You have to always be working to ensure that if you need them for the next 5 years, you’ve got to give them what they need to be a resource for the next 5 years. My partner is on the front edge of that activity. It’s as important as hiring the right people, having the right investors, working with the right customers, or knowing how to engage appropriately with the right communities. Everything has to work right otherwise, what we do doesn’t happen.
It’s a balancing act because there can be conflicting priorities from these different stakeholders. Every stakeholder thinks they’re the most important stakeholder. In a lot of ways, they are but balancing all that is critical. It’s a great challenge. It’s a good problem to have. We embrace it and hopefully, we’ll continue to have these challenges for years to come.
Let’s talk about that. Where is Ubiquity going to be in a couple of years? What’s your vision?
From the last couple of years, we’re starting to think about what ended up becoming Ubiquity. The last couple of year has been having a vision, establishing a brand, establishing a reputation, and credibility in the market. In the years to come will be executing that vision. The vision I don’t think has changed from the beginning. It’s expanded and morphed to fit where the industry and where the opportunity is now. Our vision from the beginning was to be a resource and a solution for carriers in an area where we knew the industry had to change for there to be success in this fiber-connected hyper-adjacent world where everyone needs to be as close as possible to the end user.
For the years to come are executing on that and continuing to adapt to the constant changes from our stakeholder and customer base. What we’re doing now is the foundation for that. It’s growing off of that foundation. We build a great foundation, our team, our people, our assets, our communities, and our customers but it’s expanding on that. We’re positioned if we take advantage of it to see unparalleled growth in our market. Our goal is to maintain a best-in-class designation. Whether we end up being the biggest or not, I’d rather be the best than have the best relationship with our shareholders than necessarily be the biggest. There are a lot of big firms out there that aren’t necessarily thought of very well or respected internally.
That’s not where we want to be. We want to continue being the go-to resource for our customer base anytime they have a challenge, especially if it’s a scenario that we have expertise in addressing. I have no idea about how big we’ll get, how broad our footprint will be, or any of those things. All I do know is that we have a team that can continue to be a reliable provider of solutions and we’ll grow from there. I have no doubt that being able to execute on top of this foundation that we’ve put in place is something that we’re very excited to undertake.
There are so many gold nuggets in this episode. I feel like I want to listen to it again and take a lot of notes. Jamie, this has just been fantastic. What is your website in case we want to reach you and find out more about Ubiquity, obviously if you’re hiring, open jobs available, or anything?
UbiquityGP.com is our website. We are hiring. I haven’t been on the website to see what we’re hiring for but we have opportunities across our footprint and different verticals. Our fiber networks, in-building team, data center team, and all of our administrative functions at the management level, finance, etc. UbiquityGP.com is a great place to learn about us and everything we’re doing.
I’d love to hear from anyone who would love to engage with us whether it’s a customer, a vendor, or a potential team member. We’ve got a great group. Everything that we do is like making a diamond. It’s all about time and pressure. Even if there’s not something that we can do with someone now, my goal is to make sure that in the future, that changes. I would love to hear from the audience and if we can ever be a solution or a resource to anyone, hopefully, we can be, and if we can be, we’ll do our best.
Jamie, thank you for your authenticity. Thank you for coming to the show. This is an incredible episode. I appreciate you.
Thank you, Carrie. Thanks for everything you do.
You take care.
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About Jamie Earp
Jamie Earp is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Ubiquity where he is responsible for all aspects of investment processes, operational excellence and value creation strategies across the platform. Previously, Jamie served as the Managing Partner of RCP Holdings, a communications infrastructure company.
He also co-founded Branch Communications, an infrastructure development company, raising and deploying over $100M in equity and debt. Jamie was integral in growing the company’s operations to 900+ owned and managed assets in 38 U.S. states and Puerto Rico, with combined leasing and services revenues topping $20M and a combined enterprise value of over $150M.
Prior to co-founding Branch Communications, Jamie worked in a wide range of management, financial, business development and government relations capacities for various business organizations. This included serving as Vice President of Public Affairs & Business Development for the NC Chamber, working with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and advising a variety of associations and political advocacy organizations.
Jamie earned a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a JD from George Mason University School of Law and an MBA from UNC Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.
