Hi, and welcome to Power of the Network. I'm your host, Tim Locker, Vice President of Broadband here at CBM. CBM, we're celebrating our 65-year anniversary this year, and 60 of those years we've worked for Preform Line Products, PLP. So we wanted to highlight what a great relationship we have there. And today we've got a special guest, Mr. Max Bohan, National Sales Manager for PLP on the utility side of the house. It's a great opportunity for me to get to know Max a little bit better and we're happy to bring you our conversation. Max, thanks again for joining us today. know, CBM and PLP have had a working relationship for over 60 years now. you know, I just can't thank you enough to come in here and let us highlight that. You know, we truly value that relationship and PLP is obviously one of the best manufacturers that we work with. So thanks again for joining us. You know, you've got such a strong engineering background. What was it that made you jump into sales with the engineering background? Yeah, it kind of just happened on its own. I wasn't even really sure. So coming out of high school, I thought I wanted to go to college. I thought I wanted to do engineering, but I wasn't really sure. So I kind of went for it and got into engineering in college. And when it was time to graduate and pay the student loans. I didn't know Jack about power. didn't know anything about PLP. I knew when you turned on the light switch, the light came on. But there's so much that happens upstream of that. getting on with PLP just kind of happened. then within that, I didn't really mean to get into sales, but I started out as a subject matter expert. Started traveling with some of the sales guys. I was like, man, these guys have the coolest job in the company. I need to do that. And so just as time went on, roles opened up, I applied for them and here I am. Cool. That's cool. you I noticed you got out of college, you immediately went back and got a master's in business. I did. And then after that you went back and got a master's in engineering. Yeah, tried it again. Yeah, yeah. So some of that goes back to what PLP is and what they're good at and who they are. They have a kick butt college reimbursement program. So that was definitely a big driving factor behind the MBA and behind the engineering degree, the master's in engineering. But yeah, was young in my career at PLP. think I had two years in. Outside of work and taking care of the apartment, I didn't have a lot of responsibilities at the time. And I wanted to do something productive. And I was starting to get into the sales side of what we were doing at PLP. So the MBA made sense for a variety of reasons. Yeah. Oh, that's great. I mean, obviously you're a pretty smart dude to have two masters, engineering. What are you doing now for self-growth? Do you still continue to work on yourself? Yeah, well, our HR department told me I'm not allowed to go back to college for another degree, so that's out. You're done. That's out. I'm done. I'm tapped out. No doctorate? Yeah, no doctorate. No, none of that. But yeah, continuous education, I mean, is super important, something I believe in. There's some younger people at the company that I encourage to get their MBA or continue learning and however that best suits them. But for me, our industry is so innovative. It's constantly evolving, new projects are being built. mean, that's one way you can learn. In our field, there's a professional engineering license that a lot of people do, is continuous education from that perspective. So there's a lot of options out there. For me personally at this point, yeah, it's just doing my best to keep up with industry standards, new ways that T-Lines are being built, like new innovative technology in the conductor itself affects PLP and the products we make. So a lot of it is learning that stuff. Okay, that makes sense. So you've been with PLP now what, 12 years? Yeah, 12 years, yep, started in 2013. rose up through the ranks pretty quickly. What do you think attributes to that? think a lot of it is just coming in and doing a solid job, doing things the right way, even when your manager isn't looking over your shoulder. I think the timing of how I've done that and how PLP has grown has opened up lot of doors, but doors I had to be qualified for. And think the main way you do that is just putting in the work and doing things the right way. That's what I've tried to do. Yeah. And like you said, timing can either help you or hurt you too. That helps. It helps a lot. On that path. Absolutely. What sports did you play growing up? Growing up, I played everything. Actually, pretty much everything except for golf and swimming and a couple of those types of things. But I played football, basketball, baseball growing up. Played a little bit of hockey, played a little bit of lacrosse. But yeah, even through the high school level, I tried to stay active in sports and all my buddies were playing baseball and basketball and football. So, so I did too. Are you young enough that you are still in the era of all the extra club activities or did that start? Yeah, yeah. mean, so I was in high school from 2004 to 2008. It was towards the end of the, can play multiple sports types of times. Now it's so specialized. competing at a high level is tough to do outside of one or two sports unless you're just a freak athlete. Which I wasn't, I'm still not. But yeah, football, basketball, and baseball through high school and then football in college, in case. Okay. What do you think of the whole sports atmosphere now for young kids? Is it too much or is it good? Yeah, I think it's too specialized. I think it's too specialized early on at a young age. I'll see clips online of these youth baseball teams and they're decked out in their shiny uniforms and stuff. And it's like, you know, these guys, all they do year round is play baseball or if it's basketball, that's all they do year round. And it's, I think there's different things you can learn from different sports. You know, the team dynamic and getting along with people is one of the early fundamental type things that I think is most useful in sports. So yeah, I mean, my only thing is that it's too specialized, but. with how competitive the sporting world is now, I don't know how you'd get away from that. Yeah. You know, we've learned, so I've got two kids. My son just graduated. He's 23. Growing up, you know, he played most all sports, but baseball was what he truly liked. you know, he did clubs and all that. But by the time he was a senior, was wore out. was done playing baseball. It's like, you know, did we, you know, was all that money and time and effort really worth it? Or, you know, I'm sure there's some... things you learn through that. we've taken a different approach with our daughter. We have about a 10 year difference. And she likes volleyball and tennis. So she'll play basketball, but she weeded out softball. So we're taking a little different approach, not pushing her as hard, but see where she ends up. Yeah, like I remember summer baseball is a big thing, obviously, right? For boys in high school, it's a fall sport, or sorry, it's a spring sport. But there's a fall season too. So, you you play the spring ball because that's when the season is. They want to see you in fall ball if you're not playing football or doing something else. And then summer rolls around and you're still playing baseball. You remember any coaches that stick out to you that you learned something specific from? Yeah, absolutely. Our baseball coach was a legendary baseball coach in central Ohio. Actually, really sad story. died of cancer years ago. But yeah, he was an awesome coach. He was notorious for being like a no BS kind of guy. He'd tell it to you straight. There was no sugar coating. know, a lot of times there was hurt feelings and tears, but you knew where you stood with him. And if you wanted to get on the field, you had to put in the work and play better. You something I wanted to talk to you about, I didn't realize until here recently, but you spent a couple of years in the sales role, you know, covering the utility broadband market. I'm kind of in that same position here at CBM now. I guess tell me what you've learned about that market. What are some of the bigger challenges you've seen there? I guess just see if there's some similarities in what we see. PLP is set up similar to CBM from the standpoint that our core business is split. somewhat between power and communications. And just like you guys, we've always had our power salespeople and our communication salespeople. And in the ever-changing world today, especially in the way of rural co-ops and power utility companies using more more fiber, we struggled with that go-between, with that person playing on both sides of the fence. And so, yeah, about 10 years ago PLP developed a role. for just that, for a utility broadband person who was specifically dedicated to help the power guys sell more fiber, sell more hardware, do all things associated with all of the rural fiber building that really has been going on longer than 10 years, but 10 years is when we put that role in place. It was actually first developed by Dan. It was a role that I had and reported to Dan LeVec, who's been on this podcast before. But yeah, no, it's a super important role. Similarly to what you're doing. mean, you're going around with some of your power of CBM guys and helping them sell anything, whether it's the hardware that actually supports the cable, the closures that splice it. I don't know how much OPGW work you specifically do, but the role at PLP helps out with that as well. yeah. You know, my history, I've done some of that in the past, not a ton. Not a ton. I was a splicer for about 10 years. We would get into a little bit of OPGW. So I've done it, but primarily it wasn't my focus. A lot of what we got into at the time was it was IRU fiber that we had networked through. So we would get in and out of a lot of those cases, but not necessarily have to create a bunch of new ones just every once in a while. I've gotten into quite a few here recently in this new role, dealing with like Evergy and some of the other power companies that we serve and doing trainings and different stuff for folks like that. But the OPGW is not my specialty, I guess. Sure, sure. But yeah, that role for me was my first outside focused role. Prior to that, I was an inside technical support kind of guy. Which was great because I learned how PLP worked, I learned how the product should work. Yeah, I spent a solid three years in the office basically getting up to speed. Then after that I was ready to take on more. At that point, I told you I was doing a little bit of traveling with the outside sales guys with people like Dan. I was like, man, if I could get an outside focused role, I think that best suits me. So with the fiber, the utility broadband role, Yeah, being out of the office a lot, traveling around, doing sales calls, going to trade shows, hands-on demonstrations, right? That type of stuff. it was awesome. You had the whole country. Yeah, the whole country. Yep, Yeah, I did a lot of different things, been to a lot of different places. I remember one of my first trips was to the absolute middle of nowhere, Tennessee, just outside of, probably an hour or two outside of Nashville, We were working with a co-op who was new to fiber, new to our splice cases. And I was told that I was going to go out and do a hands-on demonstration. So I brought my samples, brought some of my tools. And with the way our splice cases work, we basically show how you prep the cable, show how it's routed. We do everything up to the splice tray, right? Because at that point, you get your splicer out and you do a couple of things that PLP typically doesn't instruct on. But I walk into the central office at this co-op and they got this fiber cable coming out of the ceiling and I'm looking around, it looks like a surgery table they got set up to splice this thing. And I'm like, holy crap, I think we're doing a live, like this is real. And this guy looks at me, he's like, have you done this before? And I'm like, yeah, I've done it before, but never live, never a real application. And it was funny because he just kind of looks at me and he's like, all right, hope we know what we're doing. And we ended up splicing it. He put the OTDR on it. It was a 144 count splice. And all the test reports from the OTDR came back with super low losses. it was like, poof, thank God that worked out. yeah. The splicing part of it is just something that you frankly just learn on the job. When I started, my first splicing job was with a contractor. And this was way back, I think I was 20 maybe. So it's been 30 years ago. But I worked for this contractor and he just taught me how to do it, you know? Hand-eye coordination, like, you know, like it's just physical work. And you just learn how to do it. The struggle is the same thing is also a detriment. You learn, you know, how you learn is how you know. And so if you learn the wrong way, or you create bad habits, it can be a challenge. In terms of selling closures, the splicers are always the toughest crowd because they learned on this piece of equipment and that's what they're going to do. So they're very adamant about sticking to what they know because they don't like change. And that's probably one of the biggest challenges in selling closures is just getting through that layer of... they're, you know, someone's afraid to change what they're doing. Breaking the mold, showing them the new technology, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. To some extent, that's the same on the power side. There's linemen and crews that get stuck in their ways and change is hard. Yeah. Even if it's for the better, you know, there's a little bit of a learning curve and a lot of times that's met with resistance. What's your technique for getting around that resistance? I think if you can go in, depending on what the product is and what the application is, I think if you can go in and show them why it works better, there's a sales spin to everything. But if you can objectively show them why it's better, either from an engineering standpoint or from an installation standpoint, or objectively show what the value is, that helps a lot. It's fun when you finally win, I guess, if you will. It's been years ago, but it took me nine years to get them transferred from one closure line over to PLP. And I don't know if that says I'm really committed, dedicated, whatever. if I'm just not a good closer. It could go either way. nine years. what actually tipped the scales, we took them to the factory. We took them down to Rogers and they saw everything. And on the way back, they're like, yeah, all right, we got to make the switch. And the first closure the guy does, he calls me up. He's like, why didn't we do this so long ago? And it is gratifying when you get a win like that and you help somebody out. What's different about CBM? First and foremost, it's our ESOP. Employee owners have more control and more ability to make decisions that are right for our customers and right for our company and right for our manufacturers. We've got the flexibility to put people where they need to be and use our experts wisely. If you need help with a project or need representation from an excellent sales force here in the Midwest, look no further than CBM. dot com. What do think PLP does best overall? So you were just talking about our manufacturing plants. think having domestic manufacturing and product that's made in the US in a big way really, really helps. It helps obviously from a lead time perspective. Getting the stuff from the plant to the customer doesn't have to pass customs. mean, that saves a lot of time and predictability for delivery. We're serious about the stuff we make. We're serious about the quality and the designs. We're not just making everything or importing everything. I mean, that helps with the reliability and I guess the predictability of using our products in the field. know darn well how it's going to perform. know how long it's going to be up there. The performance of the line, whether it's a conductor or a fiber optic cable, ADSS or OPGW. I mean, yeah, you know exactly what you're going to get with our products. I would say from my history is the customer support with PLP is incredible. I've just seen time and time again where it may not even be a PLP issue, but maybe a customer installation problem or a contractor messed something up, but PLP has stood behind everything. on so many occasions that I've seen, it just stands out so different than most manufacturers. Yeah, mean, so far I've been a life-route PLP. don't have a lot of perspective outside of the PLP world, but being a sales guy helps to have product that you believe in that can stand on its own legs. Yeah, it certainly does, right? It makes our job easier. Yeah, that's certainly how I've always been. They're always coming out with new stuff, but I'm usually a little reluctant until I get that confidence. The last thing I want to do is sell somebody a piece of junk. Or promise them all these things and then whatever you're selling can't come through. That's not a good feeling. Yeah, exactly. How do you set those expectations? I know PLPs always continue to put out new stuff, a little slower and a little more targeted. Is that fair? We try to be, think some of the, yeah, if you're calling the product development slow, I think it's probably slow from the perspective that we want to be darn sure about what we're making before we even release it. So, you know, we have our world-class testing laboratory in Cleveland. I mean, stuff's designed, prototype tested, retested, tested again a lot of times before it's ready to go. Yeah. If we looked at the process in depth, could it be streamlined and a little bit more efficient? Sure, probably. But like you said, think a lot of it is we want to be darn sure about what we're putting out there before we ask our reps to go out and sell it. Yeah, that's fair for sure. Let's circle back a little bit to the education piece a little bit. You said it's important you're working with some of your younger folks They're taking advantage of that benefit and going back to school. What if you don't do that? What if you stay stagnant? What's going to happen? So yeah, it's not for everyone. I don't walk around the office and say, you need to do that and you need to try this. But going back to the mentorship thing, if there's a younger employee that asked me about my experience or going back to school, I certainly try to encourage them to do that. if they feel that's right for them, to a certain extent, only they know really if it's something that they can do or want to do or think it may benefit them. And I can try to give them some tips and stuff and encourage them for sure, but it's their decision ultimately if they do it or not. But PLP is a great company from their perspective that they pay for the lion's share of the program. It's not unheard of, but there's a lot of companies that wouldn't do that. Yeah, I went back. I didn't go right out of high school. I just went right into the workforce. so I went back here. have a benefit as well that helps pay for college for employee and the kids. So I took advantage of that and got my degree. Took me eight years, you know, doing one class at a time, online classes. And I'll be honest, you know, there was definitely certain level of pride, know pride when I when I finished, you know level of accomplishment so and it's been good, you know, one of the things that we do too that That we send a lot of our folks through is the CPM our program And it's it's it's like a it's a three-year course, you know, it's one week a year but it's almost like a condensed master's class on you know business specific to a rep firm and I was taking my college courses at the same time. So was interesting to me to see how much actually overlapped into the CPMR class that I was also getting from school. So that was interesting. Yeah. So we talked a little bit about being stagnant or whatever. The best part about our industry, both on the power and communication side, is it's not very stagnant. mean, there's a lot of innovation. There's a lot of... new projects going on, there's a lot of new products being developed for those new projects. So, you know, as it relates to PLP, our business has grown exponentially just over the last five to six years. Yeah. Both legacy product wise and getting into new market verticals, you know, like inspecting the overhead lines with drones or EV charging foundations. at PLP, think they give younger employees especially plenty of options to go left, right, center, new products, legacy products. There's so many different opportunities available that you're only stagnant if you want to be stagnant. There's so many different directions you can go if you show that you have at minimum just the drive and desire to learn more, they give you that opportunity. You're talking about all the different options, when young people coming into the workforce, my son's a great example. just graduated college, know, he's working construction. He worked for a guy through high school and college and doesn't necessarily want to stay in construction the rest of his life, but there's so many overwhelming choices. How do you narrow that down? And then I guess what type of person or characteristics will make you successful in this industry? Yeah, as it relates to PLP, and I guess I'm a believer of this just throughout all industries, know, all companies in the US. I think if you have the desire to learn and the ability to learn, I think there's a lot of things that you could do just with those two things. Yeah. You know, coming in, wanting to be there, wanting to learn about what the company does, the value they bring. I mean, I think that's really all you need. Kind of goes back to being a kid when they talk about being coachable, right? Yep. You've got to be coachable and you got to want to do it. I know plenty of people who can learn but don't want to learn. They just don't want to put in the effort. They don't really care. They're there to get a paycheck and that's it. Fine. You're going to have that job. You may not move up, but okay, sure. Yeah, I mean, I think it's all about just what you want to do and how hard you want to work and where you want to get. There's some companies that may want you, like we were talking about, to come in with some sort of degree or prerequisite and find you got to work around that. to some extent, the people that want to be there and want to learn and want to grow will. I think it's a little, at least from my experience, I always knew that I was going to be in sales. My dad was a ditch witch salesman growing up. He sold trenches for 20 years. And I always knew that I wanted to be in sales, but when I was 20, 22, 23, it was a challenge. Nobody would take a risk on a young kid. They want the old guy with the experience. So what advice do you have for a young person that knows that that's what they need to do? How do you get into that and break loose of that old stereotype? I guess I could relate this to my own personal experience. Again, I didn't know that I wanted to work for PLP. I didn't know that I wanted to be in sales. I actually had a really disastrous co-op in college because I was doing my engineering classes and neither of my parents were engineers. had a couple of cousins who were engineers, but I didn't really know what their working experience was and I didn't know what I wanted to do after I left college. So was like, man, I should probably do one of these co-ops so I can get real world experience and figure some of these things out. Because I was, I was nervous for a while in college about what I was going to do after. so I went to work over the summer for this aerospace company. And it wasn't a great co-op. I did basic data entry and coming back to case, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do still, but I knew what I didn't want to do. So the co-op helped from that perspective. And then like I said, just happenstance, I happened to get on with a great company out of college and kind of figured it out as I went. But yeah, for a young person, I guess, who's not sure what they want to do, just do your best to try to get on with a solid company, learn what they do, learn how they bring value to whatever industry it is, and then just go from there. And if it is a good company, they'll give you an opportunity to do that. You do your best, good things will happen, right? Yeah. And I guess figuring out what a good company is or who you want to work for, I guess that's where you use your network to do that. And if you don't have a network, start with your parents, start with family and friends, people you trust, people you know are going to give you good tips and good advice, and try to find a company or a tip that way and then work it from there. Yeah. And I think too, when so many people say, follow your passions, We had Nancy Combs on our last episode and she talked about, do what you love, it's going to work out. But it's hard to do, I love to fish. I'm not good enough to go fish for a living, right? there is a little bit of There's a balance there, but maybe I sell fish and stuff, right? I think the challenging part that I struggled with figuring out was the what doesn't necessarily is not the means like. So I always knew I wanted to be a salesperson. What I sold probably didn't matter that much. know what I mean? So I think sometimes it just takes a little while to figure that piece out. I was never passionate about fiber optics when I was... 16 years old. didn't even know what it was. But I did know that I was going to be a salesman someday. I think maybe realizing the role versus the product or the who, what, where, I think can make a little difference. I think that's most people. Growing up as a kid, if you had told me that I was going to be selling hardware for Powerlines when I grew up, I wouldn't be like, Man, what a dream job. Yeah, holy cow. I've always wanted to do that, right? That sounds great. It's not like being an astronaut or whatever, a professional golfer, whatever. You know, it's not super sexy like that. But I think that's most people. I mean, if you look on LinkedIn at a lot of people in our industry that do what we do, whether they're at the distributor level or maybe less so at the utility level, but you look at a lot of these profiles and... It's pretty frequent that people go to college or have a background that has absolutely nothing to do with what they're doing now. Yep. Yep, for sure. That's lot of those people kind of getting into it and figuring it out. So for that young person coming out of school looking to get a career, what kinds of things are they looking for in a company? So like where would PLP stand out to somebody new coming into the industry? know, I think that for a new person outside of the industry, a little bit of it is going to be an educated guess. You don't know what's behind the curtain until you're behind the curtain, right? But yeah, going back to this young person coming out of college, if they have an aunt and uncle, some sort of family member that works in the industry or a similar industry, you can get good advice about Oh yeah, I've heard of PLP, that's a great company. Here are some of the things they do, right? You can try to get information from others and I guess do a guesstimate of is this company going to be a solid company or not a solid company, right? We talked a little bit about career management and upward mobility. Sure, that's something you want, but you don't want to work for a company that brings little to no value in a given industry. You want to work for somebody that makes solid stuff. My biased opinion with all the domestic manufacturing that we have here at PLP is, if you're working for somebody who makes products, I think you want at least some of that to be done in the US. You want to know that you're going to have a retirement plan, right? You want to know that you're going to have good managers and good supervisors and good leadership. Again, I think that's something that you can't... You're not going to know that 100 % going in, right? But there's different things you can do to get an idea of what that probably looks like before you jump in and say, well, here it goes. We're going to try this. And I think that's the other thing, too. You just got to try. You got to do something, right? And I think probably people worry too much about, it's not the perfect right thing. I think you just have to do something and then that's going to lead into something else, Yep. And hopefully, yeah, you make the right educated choice, you go to work for a good company. If you're doing engineering and you don't like working on solid works all day, there's probably other things you can do. You can go work in quality, you can maybe go to the plant if you like to do production. You can work in HR if you want, right? Like you just, you get in, you prove yourself, you learn some things, and then you can make it your own. I think that's a fair statement for most good companies. We've had plenty of opportunities to do tours and take customers there and so on. And the one thing that always sticks out is just the longevity of the people there. I think the last time we were there, was one of the gentlemen that was retiring with like 47 years or something like that. I mean, those stories are abundant at PLP and I think that speaks volumes for. for the company for sure. the plant's been there since 1969. There's plenty of employees that have been there decades. I don't want to guess what the average tenure is, it's probably longer than most other manufacturers. We treat our people well. They're not just operators running machines. They're owning their work center. They're part of the quality checks when products run through the plant. We don't have our thumb in them saying, you shall make a thousand pieces an hour or else. We want them manufacturing and working efficiently, but we also depend on them to know how the machine works and what's coming out on the other side. Quality control. Absolutely. When you're walking through, everybody in there you can talk to and they can explain the different parts of what they're doing. I'm always impressed on how quickly it changes. one center to another or just putting in the new robot equipment and all those things. It's never the same every time I go back. Yep. We try to innovate. We have Kaizen events to streamline processes and do things better, of course. But yeah, mean, the plant's air conditioned, which doesn't sound like a crazy thing, but in Northwest Arkansas, in the middle of summer, you want that plant to be air conditioned. Yeah, that's an important detail. That's right. What's different too about PLP is the plant personnel get the same retirement benefits. in 401k packages that headquarters and any other PLP employee gets, which is a little bit different from how a lot of others do it. So yeah, we take care of our people, whether they're in Arkansas or in Albemarle, North Carolina at the plant level, whether they're at corporate in finance or purchasing or manufacturing or whoever, the company has a good culture and a way of taking care of everybody under the PLP umbrella. Well, I can't thank you enough for coming in. It's been a good opportunity for me to get to spend a little more time with you. Yeah, man, absolutely. We definitely need to go play some golf. Let's do it. We'll go fishing, too. We'll do golf in the AM, fishing in the PM. We can make that happen. Have a boat, we'll travel, for sure. All right, good. Absolutely. Thanks again, Max, for joining us today on the show. I know you're a busy guy and we really appreciate you coming in to be with us. We appreciate our relationship with PLP. Once again, if you need help with a project or you're looking for an awesome sales force here in the Midwest to help you, look no further than CBM. You can find us right here at cbmrep.com. Thanks again for joining us. Like, comment, subscribe, all those good podcast terms. And thanks for joining us. Until next time. We'll see you next time.
