Carrie Charles (00:00)
Thanks for tuning in to 5G Talent Talk. I'm Carrie Charles, your host. And I am excited today to have with me a dear friend of mine, Leighton Carroll. He is the CEO of Baylin Technologies. Leighton, thanks for coming on the show. So glad you're here.

Leighton Carroll (00:18)
Carrie, it's great to be here.

Carrie Charles (00:20)
So Leighton, you have been in the industry a long time. You've sat in a lot of seats. And tell me how you have gotten to where you are today. And maybe a cool story in there.

Leighton Carroll (00:31)
Okay, well it's interesting, so I'll come back to Baylin, but Baylin is a business that is based on RF technology and we're a manufacturer, we're an OEM across multiple different markets. So of course it makes complete sense that a guy with a computer science background is running this company. So I was with AT&T for a long time. I started in consulting way back in the day and then I transitioned into cellular a long time ago and I was on the IT side and I was actually

Leighton Carroll (01:10)
thinking of leaving the company and I had too much respect for the guy I worked for and I did too much. I was running every system that touched the wireless network, every IT system, and I was telling him that I was probably going to end up leaving and we needed to plan something and he said I need you to talk to my mentor in the company. He's an executive vice president and he has a struggling P&L and it's this, it was a business that was putting cell service onto cruise ships.

and you will get to run a full P&L.

you'll get to learn a lot. like, you know what? This sounds like a great gig. And so I took the chance, went to that business. When I got there, we'd done about three million in the prior year total revenue. And we were able to really, really grow that business. ended up, so that business was, it's cell service on cruise ships. So it was carrier agnostic DAS back then, both GSM and CDMA, and then back called with satellite technology so that calls could connect. And then we had roaming partners all over the world.

world, really neat business, got it up running well north of $100 million with decent margins, had a board of, and by the way, private equity had a minority ownership in it. So was my first time dealing with a board of directors, with private equity guys, and I learned an absolute ton, great gig.

Well, you know, no good, no, at AT&T, no good deed goes unpunished. Basically I got tapped on the shoulder and from that point forward, I started running integrations for AT&T, which is another great gig because you're touching every part of the business when you're bringing a wireless carrier into AT&T. And, and it was, I mean, it was just, you know, it, kind of grew from just doing the integration to I would lead due diligence teams, work with the corp dev guys, do the budgets, do the book that went to the board.

Leighton Carroll (03:05)
to approve the transactions and then kind of where it ultimately went, if a business was a different technology, like we bought a divestiture from Verizon of Alltel.

I actually got to be the acting president of that business and I ran Alltel for well over a year in 17 states against Verizon. Soup to nuts, all functions, product pricing, marketing, supply chain, HR, service, sales, all the field. It was an amazing gig and you learn so much from doing that. just, know, honestly really blessed to have some of those opportunities. then they kept, basically I moved around all over AT&T as they kept rotating me through things.

Left AT&T in '14 and it was kind of that moment where I wanted to, I love running companies, I love running businesses and I had an opportunity to run a smaller P.E. owned business.

and really kind of not be in the mothership. When you're at a company like that, you have all these great people, all these great resources. When you're at a smaller company that's private equity backed, you don't have those resources. You got to figure it out. And it's a different transition. And so that business is SQUAN I still love those guys. Really, really good company. Proud of what we did together. That business was an intent in line company and it had a DAS capability

engineering and deployment really centered around Manhattan. And we did a couple of acquisitions, brought that business into fiber, fiber engineering, fiber delivery services, growth across multiple states, learned a ton. And by the way, all of these journeys, you make a lot of mistakes because nobody knows everything and it's just progressively get better.

In beginning of '17, I joined a company called QuadGen Wireless, another great company. That company was an RF engineering firm and wireless integrator nationally.

and we had two great growth years in '19 and '20. Again, private equity backed, but they had the P was minority, worked with the founder, really good guy. And ultimately we sold that business to MasTec, another good company. Again, going from a business that we grew, but still a relatively small business into a big business with lots of moving parts, lots of great people. Really enjoyed my time there. But what happened was a

board member of QuadGen who saw what I did there happens to sit on the board of directors of Baylin. And so effectively my phone rang in February '21 and you know, Leighton are you up for a new challenge? And I've been here at Baylin now for three and a half years and I've really enjoyed it.

Carrie Charles (06:08)
So, tell me more about Baylin.

Leighton Carroll (06:10)
So, Baylin is really a cool company and it's kind of a neat place to work. First of all, part of the reason I came here is I knew about the businesses ahead of time. I've run in my past two satellite enabled businesses. Both are customers of our satellite business at Baylin. Working in the wireless industry, I knew about Galtronics and I knew the quality of the product and the quality of RF of this business. So, I knew I was coming.

in and have kind of a good basis to work with. So you know it's funny and it's kind of a neat thing. I'm really blessed with it. I'll go out to lunch sometimes the people who work for me and I'm clearly the dumbest guy at the table. Everyone is a PhD in RF electromechanics with multiple patents and I'm like yeah I'm just here to try to help guys.

Carrie Charles (07:03)
Spoken like a true leader.

Leighton Carroll (07:04)
So, Baylin, we do three things all based on RF technology. We have a satellite communications division. It's under the brand Advantech Wireless. Easiest way to think about it, we don't put things in space. We don't make dishes or antennas. We make high-power gear that makes that work. Some really easy use cases, if you like football, you like golf, the Super Bowl, the Masters Golf Tournament, those broadcasts you see on TV, those are powered by us and many, many more. The NASA Artemis Space Mission, when the lunar modules are going out from

from the Earth, the communication to them is powered by us. The early warning defense system, NATO, it's a U.S.-Canadian joint NORAD effort in northern Canada, our gear is in that. Really cool stuff. Lots of, you know, it's military, it's scientific, NASA, NOAA, lots of really cool technology.

Kind of a neat business. And then we have two businesses under the Galtronics brands. Galtronics Embedded, we embed antennas into other people's products. So there are people in the IoT space and a lot of those folks, and this is not meant to be negative at all. They're trying to, how do I get this done as cheaply as possible? Okay, I'm going to go buy an off-the-shelf antenna. I'm going to plug it into my thing and we'll wireless enable it. Right? And there's a lot of, there's a big segment of that.

when the RF quality matters, that's when we get called.

because we custom-design, engineer and then manufacture RF products that are then embedded into our customers products to sell to their end consumers, right? So if you're an AT&T or Charter Communications fiber subscriber, a lot of those customers get their wireless gateways, their mesh networks from the carrier, our antennas enable those. We have a really successful product right now doing body

armor cameras. So if you think about police officers, you know that camera that sits right on their chest, that's critical communication. It has to work flawlessly. Cannot, cannot not work. Well, when they turn it on, the camera needs to take the video and it needs to be broadcast up to the cloud and back to the command center so people can see what's actually going on in the field. Our antennas are in that product enabling that communication. And we also do some automotive work when the next Volvo full-size SUV, it's the EX90.

because it will be electrified. The wireless experience inside the vehicle is us. Really kind of a neat business. That's a Galtronics business. And then the final business is an infrastructure business in the very traditional sense. So we do macro cell tower antennas, outdoor small cell, in-building wireless, stadium antennas. And actually that Galtronics business, I'm actually super proud of what we've done. Look, stating the obvious.

It has been a challenging market in wireless, right? What happened in the back half of '23 that has continued really in the first half of '24, everybody got nailed, right?

Carrie Charles (10:19)
Yep, they did.

Leighton Carroll (10:20)
Very few people were unscathed by that. We've actually been growing and it has been really a cool thing because of a lot of the things we've done, how we've chosen to play on the playing field and where we've invested our R&D in the types of products we've come out with. It's allowed us to grow in a very challenging market and we're actually excited about how this is going to go in the future as the market hopefully starts to rebound a little bit.

like I said, it comes back having really good people and helping them do what they love to do. That is all it's about.

Carrie Charles (10:45)
That's so exciting. Congratulations on that, by the way.

Leighton Carroll (10:49)
like I said, it comes back having really good people and helping them do what they love to do. That is all it's about.

Carrie Charles (10:56)
And we're going to talk about that in a minute. I'd like to know first, from your view, where is the wireless industry today? And what do you think the outlook is for 2025?

Leighton Carroll (11:10)
Yeah, you know, it's interesting. You know, and I have to explain this to investors at times, and I explain it. But what happened in wireless is we had COVID, right?

Well, what happens with COVID? You know, carriers had deployed the spectrum and the assets that they have in the field based on the usage.

And how customers and customers are using the service. Well, when COVID hit suddenly city centers were not being utilized. People weren't going to stadiums. People wrote, you know, the carriers, particularly in '21 and '22 rotated into investing in other places. Add in C-band finally hit and you had Verizon first, then you certainly had AT&T behind. And then you put on top of that, you have T-Mobile acquiring Sprint and an integration.

Well, there is a huge amount of work that happened in a relatively tight time window and wireless carriers, as much as I would love them to be, they're not made of money, right? They have to manage their balance sheet. They have to manage how they spend their money. And by the way, they don't just do wireless infrastructure. They also do fiber. They also do other things. You have the core of the network. You have the upgrades for technology that are just natural in our industry. So you had this huge bump.

So, in a respect, it was somewhat natural, although I would like that I wish it wasn't as pronounced as it was, that wireless carriers pause there and in the way that I think but whether or not this is true or not I think everyone in telecom knows BEAD is happening, right? And BEAD funding, and how that is going to affect fiber, matters. Well, guys like AT&T and Verizon, they're not stupid, right? So what are they doing? They know BEAD is coming. And if you've been in this industry enough,

you don't want to be trying to deploy additional fiber assets in the middle of a white hot market where there's all this funding going in to getting fiber assets deployed in different places. Why? Resource availability, supply chain issues, lead times, your costs are going to go up. So by rotating into fiber now, it's actually pretty smart, right? Wireless carriers have continued to invest, but not so much in the wireless side, in part because they already invested a great

deal previously and in part because they need to get in front of this fiber boom that is certainly starting and is going to happen certainly into '25 and '26. What happens though, wireless end users continue to use more and more data. So now as these fiber assets have been deployed, it is my expectation that wireless carriers will continue to

invest in wireless because they've taken kind of a pause. It was purposeful. I think '25 will be better than '26. It's not going to be 'COVID years' investing where you have C-band on top and the Sprint integration on top.

But it's going to be better and then I actually expect '26 will be a little better than '25. So I think we're on a gradual upcycle, but not a pronounced upcycle. And it's actually good for us the way I think about it. And I do tell us to investors, if our business was able to grow in a down market, when the tide actually starts to go in our direction, when interest rates actually start to help us instead of hurt the industry, I think we're going to do fine as a business. But I actually think

'25 and '26 will be better years than '24. Not crazy years, but we're going to see the industry start to come back to more of its normal basis for investment.

Carrie Charles (15:03)
So, Leighton, I want to go back and ask you, what is the secret about growing a business in a down market? Boots on the ground, how'd you do it?

Leighton Carroll (15:21)
You know, for us, this goes back to when I first got to the business. We were trying to do some things within our infrastructure business that I think were going to be very challenging for us given our scale and our capabilities and where we were.

We looked at the market, first of all, we looked at where we thought the market would be spending over the next couple years, right? It's not about what spending is right now, right? And we have to do R&D, release new products. There's a whole process for that. There was prioritization funnel, the whole thing. How do we see the market playing out over the next couple years? Two to three. How do we best position ourselves there? And then where can we define where we can get true competitive advantage with competitive differentiation and you know, importantly for me running a business, I want intellectual property, right? Patents that support this where we really have built something unique, but it's really just ours and there's reasons why it's successful.

Part of this is, we knew that in-building wireless, it was going to start to come back coming out of COVID. That has certainly slowly started to happen. Private wireless is starting to happen. Now the jury's still out about how big that will be. You hear everything from 'It's going to be a gabillion dollars' to 'We don't know.' We play in that space and we have some innovative products. In fact, look, I'll show you this real quick. I never get tired of this. So, okay, that's a frisbee.

Amazing. This antenna is from 600 megahertz to 4.2 gigahertz, which covers the majority of spectrum needed in North America and certainly other parts of the world. This isn't what makes it unique. That is what makes it unique. This sucker is hotel room card key thin, and it works amazingly. We have sold thousands of those, by the way, patented.

Carrie Charles (17:16)
Oh my goodness.

Leighton Carroll (17:23)
When the aesthetics matter to a building owner, right? If you're doing a warehouse application, no one cares, right? You can have salad bowls wherever you want, but Hudson Yards, Class-A office space, major casino properties, high-end retail, they care. And as soon as you put that in someone's hands, and by the way, it really works well and at a really good price point, that's a door opener, right?

We sell thousands of those, but then we have this broad portfolio product behind it. What else can we help you with? That's part of how we've done it. Another key product is our multi-beam product. We saw an opportunity. Multi-beams have been around forever. And a multi-beam is basically, it's called higher order sectorization. I know I'm being geeky.

The legacy products panels from some of our competitors, they had beam stability problems. I know I'm doing the RF thing now. But that meant that carriers who buy it, because that would be a reasonable price point, really couldn't use the full capability as the antennas were designed.

There's another legacy product in the way I would explain it like if you're in Cowboys Stadium and hopefully something's not falling from the roof and you look up, you're going to see the Jumbotron, right? But if you look around on the outside, you'll see these globe looking things and those glows have been around forever. It's an older technology, but it works really well, but it had a few problems. They're crazy heavy. They're crazy expensive and they're actually fairly difficult to manufacture, right? We patented a handle based multi-beam that works effectively as well as those globe-looking things. And it was really easy. They weighed half as much and when we launched the first one it cost a quarter of the price. And it doesn't take a sales genius to put that in front of a carrier or a 3PO and say, this works basically just as well.

and it costs way less and you're going to save a whole bunch of money. We had a 3PO. They did an application. It was a stadium application, an arena application, and they were designing with that Legacy Globe looking thing. And they used our product instead. literally came back and they shared this with us. The engineers who did this were so excited because they looked like heroes. There was a 1 % performance difference between the products and they saved $700,000.

That's real money.

Carrie Charles (20:01)
Yes.

Leighton Carroll (20:02)
Okay. So when you have something that works, these multi beams matter, right? So Galtronics really didn't sell a lot into Europe.

I've got this amazing picture with 80,000 plus people for a Harry Styles concert in a field in Europe covered by two of our products. The carrier liked it so much they put their logo on our antennas so people could see who had the great coverage. We've done papal visits. You don't go to Europe and say, I'm Leighton and I'm a nice guy, I'd like to sell you some antennas.

You have to pick a use case that matters. Have real competitive differentiation. By the way, multi beams are patented. We've patented both the core capability of what we have and we actually have done defensive patents to build the moat around the castle, so to speak. But that has allowed us to grow with that product and we're approved at AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Rogers, Bell, Telus. We sold to Vodafone, Telecom Italia. We sold to the Mexican carriers, which we never used to do.

That product matters and carriers love it because it actually works, saves them money and it helps them deploy Spectrum more efficiently, which is really what carriers matter, what matters to wireless carriers these days. As well as infrastructure, built 3POs, arenas, they want things done to work well, but it needs to be done cost effectively. we've kind of skinned that cat and that is one of the products that's really allowed us to grow.

Carrie Charles (21:42)
Leighton, I remember when, years ago, when I took over as CEO of Broadstaff, and you were one of my first phone calls. I had an intention of interviewing CEOs that I respect, and I remember you sat with me and just poured wisdom into me. And I respect you so much as a leader. So I wanna talk about your leadership and your views on leadership, but looking first at your ability to turn around a company. And I know you've done, I guess, a few of these. So how do you get teams rowing in the same direction, again, with that passion that you talk about? And any key principles that you adhere to when you are driving change?

Leighton Carroll (22:36)
Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I'm actually, I'm going to start by talking about what I did doing integrations for AT&T because that helped me learn how to do this.

And so the very first integration I did was called Dobson Cellular. It was the last large Cellular One property in the United States. I remember going up to Atlanta from the cruise ship business and everyone thought I was on cruise ships. No, was in an office working my butt off. And my boss said, need you to come up to Atlanta. So I go up to Atlanta and I'm sitting in his office and he says, "Hey, we're acquiring Dobson." I'm like, Bill, that's great. It's going to fill in the middle of the country. That's a great pickup for us. "Oh, I need you to run the integration." And I'm like, OK. The roaming cellular business is an international business, so I work for the EVP of International and Roaming. And I said, you mean for the roaming portion of the integration. And he goes, "No, no. Stan, Pete and I," -- Stan Sigman, Pete Ritcher, who were the CEO and CFO at the time and my boss had been talking -- "We need you to run the whole thing." And I went, dear lord and I was thinking how on earth am I gonna manage this because it was across all business functions. The net effect of it was I created a structure in a framework, right? So

we had a sheet and I asked this of everybody who worked on the program, this huge cross-functional team. There got to be hundreds if not thousands of people who worked on it. I basically said I want every man, woman and child before they start working on this program, I want them to read this.

And what it did was, it said, are the key -- and you can't have like 17 things you're doing -- Like here are the three to five things we are trying to do, right? Here are the philosophies with how we're doing it. Here is how we will communicate what the cadence is, when statuses will be in. Here who are the, excuse me, here who are all the leaders for each function, right? Supply chain, customer operations, customer service, finance, HR, legal, whatever. And we had leaders for each of those businesses, all communication for your vertical, if it needs to go, goes to these people. Here's when we do these meetings. Here's how we status it: red, yellow, green. Here's how the communication should happen and if issues happen, please channel it this way and then it's all brought together. So, the core team running the integration was actually a small team. So there are in the core people working cross-functionally. There are probably six of us, maybe eight. And then you had these functional leaders, but everybody understood, here's what we want to do. Here's the philosophies, here's the cadence, here's the guardrails.

And by doing that, guess what? People are people. People make mistakes. But if you're making a mistake within an understood framework...

and you can get visibility to it quickly, you're able to course correct much, much quicker and the errors are not as egregious. This is how I've thought of it. So I would do that on all of the mergers and bring that forward and it mattered. And particularly if you can imagine if you're an acquired employee, right? lot of these employees, what happens when you're in an acquisition, your company's being acquired, what's the first question you ask?

Well, what's going to happen to me? I'm going to lose my job. Right? We did an acquisition called Allied Wireless. And we rolled out, and we had done all these pre-meetings with the leaders of the acquired business. And we would talk about, we're going to treat people professionally. We're going to communicate open and honestly. We're going to tell you what's going to happen to you. when, if you're, not everybody makes it in an acquisition like that. Well, we're going to tell you what's going to happen to you with enough notice, we're going to ask you please to help us take care of your customers, our fellow employees, and we will treat you like an adult. And we would say that over and over and over again. And we made a point, we want to retain talent. It was actually something I was super proud of. We want to retain talent in this business. And so I got up on stage with Amy, my HR partner, who was amazing. And we did the town hall.

And people in the audience listen to the whole thing. And what's the first thing they do? They go out of that town hall and they go ask their teammates, and in particular their leader. And their leader said, no, they've actually been saying exactly that same thing for a while. And then they would ask the AT&T leader for whatever functional area they were working with. And they would hear the same thing.

And okay, now that's three times, still not enough. Keep communicating, keep communicating, keep communicating. And that consistency and consistency with a level of transparency matters.

Right? So these, these experiences that I had running these businesses and helping do these integrations and helping people. I had 1500+ people who had to transition from the Alltell culture and the way of doing things to the AT&T culture. And I would do every morning, twice a morning, because we people in multiple time zones, Saturday morning meetings before the stores opened.

What's coming, what are the new products, what are we doing, sales and marketing? And then we would do an open Q&A and allow people to ask questions. And the first time they started, people were what? They were nervous. And when we got that first question, like, it was from a store manager in, I want to say it was rural Illinois. And I was just like, thank you so much for asking this question. Here's what we know. And by the way, we didn't always have the answer, right? We get a question, I'm like, that's a really good question. We need to get that answer to you. We will get it out this week and we'll cover it on next week's Saturday morning call. Cycle, cycle, cycle. I'm kind of laying out how I got -- So you go into a company where you're doing a turnaround, there are stages. When first, you're probably going into something that's on fire, right? So your initial phase is about firefighting.

But how you do it also matters. If you're firefighting and throwing punches and punishing people for making mistakes, you're sending the wrong message, right? No, no, no, no. Let's get the issues on the table. We will learn from this as we go. Right now, we have to put the fires out. So you go through putting out the fire and then you start to set your basis, right?

How are we using our data? How are we communicating? Are issues getting raised in a transparent way so that people are not going, my gosh, I'm going to get killed if I bring something up? No, let's get it on the table because we're all here to solve problems and do better. And then...

where are we going? This comes back to that framework. Here's the vision of where we are going for Baylin. Here is the vision for where we are going for Galtronics. How do we get there? And then try to eliminate wasteful work, help people have access to the tools and capabilities they need. And then, you know, the thing I feel like I do is working with teams and engineers to help commercialize technology. Okay, that is amazing, but we're probably going to sell two of those and it's going to take us a long time. How do we find ways where we can take what we have, narrow our focus, deliver, commercialize the technology and commercialize it in a way that matters to our customers so we can grow.

So even though it's a different kind of vibe doing a turn around and running a commercial business from running an integration, a lot of those philosophies, how you treat people, the transparency of leadership, the transparency of communication, and importantly, the use of your data, control of your data matter. And once people see, "Oh, I get it now. And this is cool. We're building something." You know, kind of the gravy for me is when I see that sales teams from different Galtronics units are starting to talk smack because both teams are growing and, you know, that's cool because they're excited right. And, you know, when you do turnarounds, you know, that wasn't where everything was necessarily. Now, people are like this is so cool and, you know, they have pride in what they do. They like the people they work with because everyone's rowing in the same direction.

Carrie Charles (31:30)
Wow. And you know, Leighton, every time I talk to you, I mean, just so much wisdom and so much gold in what you just said. But every time I talk to you, you never take credit, ever. I mean, it's just, I think it's beautiful because, like I said, it is spoken like a true leader. And I just have so much respect for you.

Leighton Carroll (31:53)
I tell people, look, if you want to know what I do for a living, I talk on the phone and I read email all day. That's all I do. My job is to help make other people better and to help us effectively commercialize what we're great at. That means making decisions and choosing what not to do, choosing where to invest, choosing how we get there. But we have great people in this business and to see them excited about what they're working on and to take pride in that, that's the gravy.

Carrie Charles (32:28)
I so agree. What are the ingredients of an exceptional company culture?

Leighton Carroll (32:35)
Well, look, it's funny. It does start at the top. If you're the CEO of a business, if you're the director of a team in a major corporation, culture matters. And you said it, right? How you treat people, how you work, how you deal with issues, how you lead by example, and how you solve problems with people. All of those things matter. I'm not a micromanager. I can't be everywhere, nor do I want to be, right? I want people to learn, make mistakes. Years ago, and this again is an AT&T story, and God bless that EVP who I mentioned, his name's Bill Hague, because he jerked and knocked me.

He said, "Leighton, you've got to stop." I'm like, stop what? He goes, Leighton, I know sometimes that you're going to get the work done faster and with higher quality because of your experience, but you've got to develop your team. And you're not doing that enough. And I was fairly young in my career. And he was right. He should have jerked and knocked me. And I remember we were working. So years ago, we built cell tower on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. OK?

It was a purposeful roaming overbuild that AT&T was doing. And we had this big map of all of these oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico to choose where it was. And I looked at it and I kind of knew what the right answers were. But for me, purposefully, what I did was I sat, there were four guys in my office and we had the map up on the board and I said listen I'm gonna frame this out: We have to do this where we can build this you know at these price points we need to carry this much traffic and it has to offload from this other network by this amount. I want you guys to look at this, I've got to take a call. I didn't have to take a call. I've got to go take a call, so I'm gonna leave for probably about 30 minutes or so and I will come back. And I want to know where you guys land. And for me, it was so freaking cool because by framing it, giving people the agreement, this allowed those guys to learn, to debate. And when I walked in, they chose this, not all of the sites, but most of the sites that I would have selected. And they told me why they had chosen this other site. And I said, good, that's the plan, let's go.

That's cool. But that gets people to grow. And so if you, as a leader, if you can do that along the way where they start to understand and it's framed and they've learned and grown, that's how you build a business. That's how you get durability in your business. And that's how you end up in a situation where not everything's dependent on you, but it also sets a culture. And this is key for me, collaboration. You're talking about the data and it's a,

respectful conversation. So for me, having a culture where we problem solve together.

issues are on the table and everyone knows where we're going and it's an environment where people get satisfaction. Work matters for everyone, right? We spend so much time working with people as opposed to being at home with your family. These are two of the most important dynamics we have. Having a culture where it's comfortable, it's not abrasive, but by the it's still hard and I'm still going to hold people accountable and push. This isn't all just happy, happy.

hugs and kisses, but it's done in a way where people are treated like adults and they get to learn and grow while we're accomplishing things. That's how we go.

Carrie Charles (36:36)
Leighton, you have what I consider an insane work ethic. And you literally do whatever it takes. Every time I talk to you, you are in a different country, a different city. I don't care what time it is. It could be a 3 AM phone call. Describe a typical week and what drives you.

Leighton Carroll (36:46)
So first of all, I don't think there's a typical week. You know, there's some some weeks when I'm like I'm in the office here and it's just stacked. It's just meetings, meetings, meetings. It's go, go, go.

You know, there are other weeks where I go out and one of the things I do for all three of our businesses is I go meet with customers. I go support the individual teams. We work on problems together. Other weeks, you know, I'll go, do strategy and planning sessions or we'll go do a product roadmap session. You know, I don't know that there's a typical week. Now, the hard work part,

You know, I kind of grew up with that ethos, I think. I mean, I'm a public city school kid and, you know, incorrectly, I might add, in my younger days, I used to think that the difference between networking and not working was one letter, right? Like, I purposely didn't care, right? I just wanted to work and accomplish and my ethos was I'm going to let what I accomplish in the work I do

guide my career. And by the way, that's not a bad way to think of it, but people matter. And as you get older, you get less dumb. And hopefully I've gotten less dumb on my journey.

and you know, one of the things, particularly if you like people and clearly I do, and I like building people. like growing people. And by the way, I like talking to other people just broadly. You know, I'll get, do sessions with people completely out of my industry, asking me questions sometimes. And I'm like, no, can't, you know, what, can I pay back? like, I don't care. Right. I just consider a good business karma. Right. so for me.

understanding people, growing with people, and being able to give back is so rewarding. And then when you couple that with just a desire to perform, a desire to achieve, and truly a desire to see other people achieve, yeah, I work hard, but then I can compartmentalize, then I can decompress. And by the way, and you'll appreciate this knowing you, one of the other things that you have to do, you have to take care of yourself.

I aspire, and that's the right word, to be in the gym five days a week. I do not make it most weeks because my schedule doesn't permit it. But with that aspiration, I work out multiple times a week, stay in reasonable shape and because it matters because that that pays off in so many other aspects of your life and by the way that also helps with your endurance to be able to deal with the grind and all the things you got to do when you run a business.

Carrie Charles (39:47)
Boy, I couldn't agree more, Leighton. This has been incredible. I so enjoy talking to you. I appreciate you coming on the show. What is the Galtronics website?

Leighton Carroll (39:58)
So it's galtronics.com. make it simple. Easy.

Carrie Charles (40:02)
Make it simple. Leighton, thank you so much. I'm sure I'll be talking to you very soon.