Monday Manufacturing Motivation – with Kevin Dickey

Curt Anderson  00:02

Well Hey Nicole Donnelly. Man, happy Monday to to you. How are you today?

Nicole Donnelly  00:07

Happy Monday. I’m doing good. It’s a beautiful spring day. I spent my weekend planting flowers. So I’m just like, up to my ears and flowers everywhere. It’s great. Happy Monday. How are you hurt?

Curt Anderson  00:18

What a great problem. Yeah, yeah, we’ve come to have they’re like tons of flowers. So now you know just in case anybody didn’t notice we are missing somebody on stage today. Our dear friend Damon Pustaka is out traveling with his wonderful amazing wife Damon, if you’re out there, boy, we love your brother. We miss you. But man, we’ve got you know, got a powerhouse on stage here. When the call taken Damon’s place on the call. We have a super incredibly exciting conversation. Are you ready? Are you are you sitting down? You’re not You’re standing or two. Do you want to hang on? Do you want? Should you hang on to your computer for this one?

Nicole Donnelly  00:54

On this one?

Curt Anderson  00:56

Okay, you ready? So we’re gonna introduce my dear friend Kevin. Dickey, Kevin, happy Monday. How are you my friend?

Kevin Dickey  01:03

Very good. Kurt, thank you so much for inviting me to talk with you today.

Curt Anderson  01:07

Absolutely. This is such an honor such a privilege. Kevin comes from the great state of Ohio and the Buckeye State. And so Kevin here, he’s the president of current safe. And boy for a manufacturer out there. This is a great, juicy, powerful conversation that we’re going to dig into today. This is a topic that we haven’t covered before, Nicole. So I’m just really excited here. But before we dig into that, I’m going to get to know Kevin a little bit. So Kevin, my first question that I want to kick things off on this wonderful, beautiful spring, Monday afternoon in our corner of the world. When you were a little boy growing up in the great state of Ohio, the Buckeye State when you were a little boy growing up Kevin Dickey, who was your hero growing up who was your hero as a little boy growing up?

Kevin Dickey  01:56

Well, I think it’s fairly obvious. My father. He was a entrepreneur and develop never graduated high school and develop a multimillion dollar car electrical contracting business. And very good Christian man, very wonderful philanthropist. And yes, I still, he’s 94 today and we still get a chance to win the day. He still comes in the office every day at 94.

Curt Anderson  02:25

He comes in the office every day,

Kevin Dickey  02:27

every day keeps on going.

Nicole Donnelly  02:31

phasing

Curt Anderson  02:32

in is a Joe do I have that? Correct? Yes, Joe. Joe. That’s okay. So hey, I first off big shout out to our dear friend Joe. So Joe, if you catch this on replay, we are sending our respects our admiration to you, Joe for just being a fearless, relentless entrepreneur. What an inspiration he is what a great role model for you, Kevin. And so let’s dig into that a little bit further. So dad started electric that was he the founder?

Kevin Dickey  02:58

Yes, he was the founder. He started in 1957. You know, in the basement of our home and bought a service truck and bought the tools and equipment. He was an electrician. And he thought, Well, I think I can try this on my own. And by golly, he sure did it. He did a great job. That’s nice.

Curt Anderson  03:18

5794 years old still shows up at the office every day. So let’s let’s take a nap for a minute. Nicole since like, you know, you’re a fourth generation entrepreneur. I come from a family of entrepreneurs. And just you know, this is just such a great, juicy story. So Kevin, just you know, I can’t do the math. Well, you know, that’s a lot of yours. Right there. Right. 60 some years. So how many? Talk a little bit about you know, like dad’s philosophy Dad, what do you credit from, you know, being kind of, you know, involved and son, you’re a part of the business. We’re gonna dig into that. But what do you credit dad success, his longevity?

Kevin Dickey  03:53

Well, he doesn’t dwell on the negative, I will say that he is very positive. You could have the rain coming down the roof leaking, the gas line broke, and you’d be going well, we’re gonna get those fixed and take off and make a lot more and not this life than just stand around and worry. And he had a few philosophies that I believed in one was when you wake up in the morning, don’t lay there and worry. Roll out of bed, brush your teeth, wash your face. And I believe that is probably one of the number one things that I taken from him was Don’t Don’t lay there. If you wake up, just get up and get moving and get on with your day. And things will happen.

Curt Anderson  04:35

The cause who’s that reminds you Oh, you know, like how about Nikolas dad her Tate his tagline was just make it happen. Guys Happy Monday. If you’re just joining us, Hey, we got Diane buyer. Diane, Happy Monday to you. You’re out there. drop us a note in the comments. Let us know that you’re out there. You definitely absolutely want to connect with Kevin Dickey on LinkedIn. Check out current safe, so let’s keep this rolling. So Kevin, let’s hear about your story. So dad, Joe, just relax. In this entrepreneur, multimillion dollar business, Christian man, just a wonderful role model for you kind of paved the path. Did you get involved in a family business as a young man? What did that look like?

Kevin Dickey  05:10

Well, Curt I we started off as when we were old enough to put material away. We were driving truck at 16 years old and being told to go as fast as we could to save money to get them

Curt Anderson  05:24

those scrappy right there to go.

Kevin Dickey  05:27

Yeah, so So we, you know, I was in the business, I was very involved in the business till I was around 45, I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur of my own and found a niche within our electrical contracting world that I believe could be very beneficial to our customers that other electrical contractors never provided. And so we’ve put together put together a business and I went to my family and said, I’ve got an idea. And I went through it. You know, my wasn’t much of a marketing guy, Kurt. So my name was gonna be Dickies, home, electrical, preventative maintenance.

Curt Anderson  06:14

And while you must be a good businessman, because you change it to something, really, and I’d say what a perfect name that you came up with. But in so you have a we’re gonna dig into the story on how you know, Nicole, every entrepreneur has a great story, whether it’s an aha moment, I’m trying to solve my own problem. And Kevin, if I’m not mistaken, I think you have a really powerful experience that you’re going to share. But before we hit that story of 2005, when your business current sales kind of came to fruition, let’s talk about okay, you know, family, you’ve got kids, you know, wife, kids, you’ve got obligations, and you have this wonderful business, you know, very safe, you know, I’m saying, I guess pun intended a little bit there, right? I’m playing it safe, but you have a great business that, you know, with with dad, Joe, that you could kind of just kept things going, I’d like you to talk a little bit before we get into your aha moment. And that that entrepreneurial leap, what was like, what were some takeaways in your 20s and 30s, of like, as entrepreneurship kind of watching dad kind of like forming your own model, and you know, your own path for entrepreneurship? What did that look like in your stages at the electrical business?

Kevin Dickey  07:19

Well, fortunately, I was able to see every aspect of the electrical contracting business growing up. I mean, I started out as floor sweeper, truck driver, purchasing agent, material handler, went into the trade, then became a project manager ran some large jobs estimator for years. And I watched, so I was actually taught by my father, I had the best teacher in the world to teach me and, yes, fathers and sons, they might have been a little loud once in a while to learn. But he stuck with us. And when I saw the business, and I saw what it actually took to run the business, and what it took every day of your life to get up and go hard. It intrigued me, it was part of who I am, apparently, and I wanted to take a shot at at following in his footsteps and creating something and developing it into a successful business.

Curt Anderson  08:19

That is so good. So I’m sure there’s tons of stories to unpack in that timeframe. So let’s lead up to 2005. Can you share? Was there an event? Was there an occurrence that something happened that just kind of triggered? You’re like, Hey, I’m gonna get this going.

Kevin Dickey  08:36

Kurt, it was, it wasn’t really amazing. So I had built this whole presentation working, of course, with some of the experience I had, I had a performer and everything ready to present. Again, I went to my family business, and I sat with them. And they’re like, Well, nobody’s ever really done this. This could be dangerous. This could be scary. You don’t know if it’s gonna work. We don’t know. And we would like to not do it. thank my wife at the time, she was probably fairly happy because we were safe and secure. Like you said, I call it under the petticoat for some of the older. Oh,

Nicole Donnelly  09:08

I love that.

Kevin Dickey  09:11

Look, we’ll see. Ya. Yeah, but what one night and it was a residential electrical testing business is what I wanted to start with. And was it two nights later in the middle of the night? I have five kids under the age of 18. And believe it or not, I had an electrical fire in my own home. And was quite scary. It was wow, it was a wow moment. And as we were putting a fire out calling the fire department and everything. We got everything put out maybe it was an hour or two later. And my wife said to me, Honey, do you think that’s a sign that we should go into that business? And the next day I went and bought a van and I went and told them I’m going to try it on my own and fortunately movements very sick. cessful since that moment, oh, my gosh.

Curt Anderson  10:04

All right, let’s just let’s save that for a minute. Nicole, I just like, let that sink in. What are the odds? You go to your family on whatever day of the week it was in two days later. And so Kevin, I don’t know how deep you want to go, can you share? Like, what what? Like, did you find the cause? Or like, you know, like, what did your family go through? Did you were you were you displaced from your home for a while, like, what was that experience, like, from a personal standpoint, going through a house fire?

Kevin Dickey  10:30

It was actually, so I bought an older farmhouse. And I brought in electricians and we rewire the whole basement first and second floor. The third floor had been remodeled about eight years previous. So we didn’t touch it. Oh, wouldn’t you know, it was the electric that was in the home, that wasn’t tested. And that went right along with what my concept was, what you don’t see can hurt you. And if you don’t check everything, that one piece can really devastate you and your family. And in put you out, we were able to stay in the house that night, it was on the third floor. And we were we were all okay, and that but everyone was up and outside within minutes at three o’clock in the morning. And that’s when it happened three o’clock in the morning to us.

Curt Anderson  11:20

Thank God, you know, first off, God bless you that everybody was safe. Number one, number two, you know, home was safe. And you’re you know, it was, you know, a minor, you know, I was a minor it wasn’t three in the morning. But, you know, it could have been catastrophic. Now, Kevin, now that it’s been like, 18 years later, can I I’m going to share some point, do you really take things to an extreme to get your business started? Didn’t you?

Kevin Dickey  11:46

When I say that you really don’t want to call the fire department if you’re the only electrical contractor in town and you?

Curt Anderson  11:52

That’s right. It just works for everybody out there. If you’re, you know, like you’re thinking, Man, I’d like to get my entrepreneurial journey going like, you know, Kevin took it to a little bit of an extreme, maybe you can find like a more different path right in the call of like getting things started. But I just when you shared that story with me. I just think that is a such, you know, is that a God moment and aha moment, just like in is your wife said to you, honey, I think this is like a little bit of an obvious sign here that somebody’s nudging you. So the next day, you’ve got and get a van, what was that transition like? And then I just wanna hear about the transition, talking about that leap of faith five kids under 18, you know, newer home, and then I’m going to dig into like, what is currency? But what was that transition like in those early days of currency for you? Well, first

Kevin Dickey  12:38

of all, it’s always exciting when you’re starting a new business, right? You’re gonna try something, you’re gonna risk it, it’s exciting, but there’s a lot of butterflies in your stomach, and you’re scared as can be. Everything you do is so worrisome. You’re Oh, am I doing the right thing and I made this, am I wasting a lot of my time on something I shouldn’t be right. So that those were the obvious feelings and emotions to just the excitement to try it on your own. But an interesting story was my father thought that I was going out to be a competitor. So he wouldn’t be me for about four months if I could finish when we I went to a trade show a Home Show, just your basic home and garden shows you’ve all been to them right with doors and windows and and I put up a booth and I had an infrared camera and the people were coming around and I had a big TV screen and I looked down the aisle and my father was sitting with a plumber friend of ours. And he came by after the crowd left and said Son, don’t give up you have something great here and the three addition was both family through our business and for my personal family. The excitement and the risk the risk involved.

Curt Anderson  13:57

Man, I tell you, that is such a powerful moment. And eight we’ve got some friends here Karen stopping by so Karen Happy Monday to you again, Diane’s here we’ve got hate. We’ve got Bonnie here, Nicole. You Sharon Hey, what a crazy aha moment. So again, guys, drop us a note. Let us know that you’re out there. You definitely do yourself a favor connect with Kevin Dickey here on LinkedIn. So Kevin, let’s take a deep dive current save so how’d you get the new name the what was the previous name Dickies data that didn’t veterans

Kevin Dickey  14:31

started up. So I did hire a marketing friend of ours. And if I could when I was working with a friend of mine getting all of my truck ready and I hadn’t had the name yet. And I told my friend there’s a guy coming over with the name of a company please don’t react. I don’t want him to think it’s good or bad. I just we’re gonna just be you know, playing. And when we sat down at the table with a meet, talk to me about it and flipped it over and he said currency, home electrical hazard. And I looked at him and when I love it. My friends said, Kevin, you just said not to do that. But yeah, that’s how I got my name. i Wow, really,

Nicole Donnelly  15:11

it’s like a series of fortunate events right there. All of it. Everything just seemed to just all fall into place. It’s pretty.

Kevin Dickey  15:19

Thank you. I think. I believe we’re blessed. I mean, last week, we tried to live right. And if you do good things,

Nicole Donnelly  15:30

things happen if you do good things, such a true statement. Oh, I love that. Very cool.

Curt Anderson  15:36

So let’s dig into so Kevin current sales. So for folks out there what you know, and again, like our jam, we’re speaking to manufacturers, we have a lot of marketers that we talked to. So you know, as you just shared, hey, it hits your IT can hit your home. Now you have a great business model where you’re reaching electrical dealers. So just let’s take a deep dive in what is current safe, preventative predictive, like all this juicy stuff that you provide how you make the world a better place? Let’s go there. I want to hear it all.

Kevin Dickey  16:05

Great. Well, residentially, we call it electrical hazard detection. So we’re going to the homes and we’re detecting electrical hazards, that we take photos, and we use specialized testing equipment for homes. But that grew over the years. And a few years ago, maybe five, six years ago, we decided to create a commercial and industrial version of this. And I think that’s probably more where we’re at today to talk about what we found were there are some compliancy issues that people have to follow manufacturers have to follow through the electrical industry. So we’ve developed a business in a box, we provide to an electrical contractor, all the marketing pieces, your pricing systems, your software, everything you need to get training and all the training involved. If you’re an electrical contractor, we would provide you the business in a box, and then we would train you so you can go out and start this very niche, unique service and offer it to your customers where your competitors cannot offer it to the customers, they they cannot do it, or they’re not proficient at it. So we have a network of about 16 Total dealerships across the United States right now. And we’re growing every day, we were fortunate enough to just open we’re opening one next week in Florida, and

Nicole Donnelly  17:33

congratulations.

Kevin Dickey  17:37

So our object is to make sure that all the electrical contractors are providing the best top notch preventive predictive maintenance, to keep people from failing electrical fires, reduce downtime, and all the things that go with having your power go out on you unexpectedly.

Curt Anderson  17:56

That’s go ahead and go.

Nicole Donnelly  17:58

I was gonna say that’s so huge, especially in manufacturing facilities where every minute of downtime impacts the bottom line, you know, it’s just so critical that they can keep their operations running and eliminate that downtime as much as possible. So that’s cool. It’s awesome.

Curt Anderson  18:12

Yeah, let’s, let’s I want to hit a I want to unpack a couple things there. Kevin. So from an entrepreneurial standpoint, okay. When you first started that first trade show, and dad came up to you and said, Hey, man, keep it going. Kevin, proud of you. This is awesome. Like what you’ve done, you know, with your network of 16. Dealers congratulate huge congratulations on the new one in Florida. When did scalability come into play? When did you go from like, you’re in Northeast Ohio? When did you go from like, Hey, I’m really going to kind of hit the ball park from my local backyard. When did you start thinking bigger? And when did you start scaling the business? What did that look like?

Kevin Dickey  18:46

Sure. Interesting enough, I didn’t know what I was gonna get into, right? It was a total risk, you know, roll the dice. I say I keep bringing more dice out of my drawer and rolling them by something else to work. But I’ll tell you when I knew was when I went on a morning show, a TV morning show on the local station. You’re at home and we had three segments 10 minute segments. And on the second segment, I forgot to take my phone out of my pocket and my phone started ringing segment. And what I found were people are interested in being safe. You know, you primarily are worried about fire hazards, shock hazards, and having clean, dependable power. With those three things is what I’ve built my business on. I want to make sure that everyone is safe from a risk of fire. Everyone is safe from any shock hazards that they don’t know about. And this is in commercial, industrial residential everywhere. And and then in the industrial world and in the manufacturing world. Clean dependable power is very important with some of the electronics we have today in our manufacturing equipment. And so if we don’t assure clean power, we can have glitches in our system. We’re chasing down ghosts that we don’t we think it’s something else. But it could just be a loose connection in one of your pieces of equipment, or something failing that you were unaware of.

Curt Anderson  20:19

Awesome. Okay. So as you started as you started growing and kind of getting beyond that, Northeast Ohio, how did it like as far as like recruiting new dealers? Like you’re in my recollection, you’re in Houston, I believe you’re in Maryland, you’ve got all sorts of folks in Ohio, Indiana, Midwest, I think Kansas. So you’ve got your you’re covering a bunch of different states? How did you kind of start building that network? Well, once

Kevin Dickey  20:41

I, once I saw the success going with my self and my own business, yeah, I worked with another friend of ours who had a company in a different field that had done similar. So I, I did some research, I actually looked into using a franchise company to help me prepare the documents. But as far as selling them, and reaching out and finding them, I have a great staff that manages my business, I think, you know, Sharon, Vice President basically runs our company for us as what I like the you know, I say, while I’m out chasing new New Dealers, she’s making sure everything’s getting done. So we go out, we meet with contractors, and we, you know, see who would fit really well with our service, there are some things you got, you’d need to have within your business and some business acumen to be able to do this properly. So we kind of go out, talk to contractors, see what’s a good fit. If they are, we’re able to sign them up, get them trained. And now they own that market, there’s a market where it’s exclusive for them, and they can just start going out and start educating all the manufacturers, the health care facilities, the higher education, everyone who would worry about an electrical fire failure or downtime. And we we offer maintenance agreements that we put on with the company, when we come in, and we physically do them. This isn’t a maintenance agreement. That’s paper only, like, pay us this much and sign that paper and we’ll maintain it. This is a physical test of your equipment to make sure you don’t go down. Right.

Curt Anderson  22:23

I love this. So Kevin, let’s let’s go here. Let’s go safety. 101. Okay, like, like treat us treat. I won’t speak for Nicole, but like, I’m a third grader, right? It’s perfect. Nicole, I’m insulting the third grader because they’re much smarter than I am. But Kevin, let’s take a little deep dive into electrical safety 101. You know, let’s let’s speak for our commercial folks. I know you work with like, you guys target data centers health care. today. We’re, you know, we’re reaching out to manufacturers, but let’s go into that electrical safety one on one, if you could.

Kevin Dickey  22:53

Sure. And I will say that the the, okay. So electrical safety when it comes to industrial and commercial facilities, they have to follow some specific guidelines that many are totally aware of, they may know of some of the things that they need to follow to be in compliance. But with the ever changing regulations, that’s one of our finer points where we educate ourselves and keep our clients in all of our dealers and our customers up on the latest coats. Recently, there was a change in the NFPA 70 II. And what this is a National Fire Protection Association is this. And actually, most people know the National Fire Protection Association is the lead writer in the electrical code that we have to follow. Okay. Now, what’s funny is Kurt is as an electrical contractor, I don’t have to follow this book necessarily. But your manufacturers all have to follow this book. Oh, no kidding. Yes. No,

Curt Anderson  24:01

that’s okay. That lets you know, I think that’s worth repeating. Sure. Did you go did you hear that correctly? Let’s let’s say that one more time.

Kevin Dickey  24:10

So this is the national standard on how to keep your facility safe electrically. And this is used by OSHA if they come into your facility to refer to to find you against. So OSHA is not all a bunch of electricians, so they lean on NFPA to write their standards to follow. Yeah, again, as an electrical contractor, we follow the OSHA standards 1926. So none of that means anything to anyone. But as a manufacturer, you know, you should be following 1910 OSHA 1910 What we did, as a contractor said, why don’t we work for all these manufacturers, and they’re our friends and we want to continue to work with them. Why wouldn’t we reach searched what they needed to do, and make sure they at least were educated on what they should do. And I found out there are six key things that they need to do that comes from this book. And so we go out and we help our customers understand what they are. Some of them are easy, some of them are hard. Some of them are very inexpensive, and a couple of them are a little expensive. So to be in compliance, so we go out, put a plan together, make sure they have we can put maybe a two or three year plan together, so they’ll be in compliance fit within their budgets. And then the real benefit is, not only are they in compliance, but especially in manufacturing, there’s no you don’t have to worry about downtime from an electrical failure. We all know what it could cost the manufacturer per hour to be down, right. And so we’ve learned how to give them the six keys to compliancy is what we call it.

Nicole Donnelly  26:04

That’s so awesome. It’s great marketing. And it seems like you’ve really been able to combine this amazing product with training really, like you’re really a teaching, helping making sure that they understand the risks and everything rather than just, you know, giving them a product, you know, you’re helping them through and keeping them up to date on everything they need to be thinking about, which is so awesome. I’m sure your customers and your partners love you for all that you’re taking good care of.

Kevin Dickey  26:31

One thing is, is we all should be working together in this world. And I do believe that the customers appreciate that we are keeping them out of trouble. And for that we get long term relationships, and we help each other out whenever needed. So yes, we providing something that most companies would never their electrical contractor would not probably know what the six keys are, or their because they as I’ve been an electrical contractor, we used to focus on ourselves, just ourselves. And we took the business model to not just focus on ourselves, but let’s give a little extra to our customers. They deserve it.

Nicole Donnelly  27:13

That’s great marketing. I love it. You’re making me happy.

Curt Anderson  27:17

advocating the and I think my work, you know, working with you, Kevin and what you’ve educated me on and I’ve had the honor and privilege of meeting some of your dealers is we talked about how to be proactive instead of reactive because when it’s three in the morning, it’s very you’re very reactive. Right? You know, you’re in a crisis for a manufacturer, you know, my machine is down, goodness gracious. You know, orders need to get out the door. What do I do? But you’ve taught me proactive, preventative, and not only preventative, predictive, predictive, come back to the six keys. I want to come back to those in one minute. But could you hit how like being proactive? Being preventative? And that the predictive part? Right, I say that right? Proactive, preventative and predictive. That’s what I wanted to say.

Kevin Dickey  28:03

Correct? Well, most importantly, is they put a plan together. So you need to put a plan together and devise the amount of times we need to do it. Is it once a year, would it be twice a year? Would it be more and it has a lot to do with the manufacturer, or whoever is we’re we’re talking with, we want to put a plan together so that we’re opening their equipment, and we’re testing it. And this is the tricky part. If there’s no electricity flowing, it’s very difficult to find an electrical problem that’s happening. So what our business entails is actually opening up the equipment and testing the inside of the equipment while they’re under the load. Just like in a hospital. How do you know if the surgery is going to go down unless they’re basically running all the surgery equipment and you’ve got the what’s really happening on their electrical system. Manufacturing much of it has to be done live. So we’ve heard in the past where people will shut their equipment off and just tighten everything up. We have found that that does not work. It’s a small band aid trying to put on our people are trained to come into your facilities and go through your electrical equipment. We use infrared thermographic imaging, we have ultrasonic testing equipment that can hear arcing before you and I can hear it before our years, kind of like the dog whistle electrical arcing ultrasonic sounds. So we’re we’re really proud that we try to catch a problem before it even gets close to becoming an issue. And so that’s predictive, preventative and proactive ways of performing maintenance on your Women, man,

Curt Anderson  30:01

I’m Nicole. I’m like thinking of like the canary in the coal mine, right? It’s like just getting that little warning. And that’s a great point. And it’s so logical and like, I hate to say like your son like Captain Obvious, but the thing is, like, it’s, you know, how many people are gonna, like, hey, let’s test this or do this, but everything’s off, you know? And boy, if you’re on the operating table, you’d really like them to, you know, have them tested this when everything’s on not when everything’s off? I that’s a really powerful example right there, right?

Kevin Dickey  30:30

Yes, yeah. football stadiums. We were in one recently, while the game was on. And the difference between when there was no game to the game, we were able to identify many items that weren’t going to put them out, eventually, they were going to have an outage when they were running full system. So you have to, you have to look at it. Like, certain companies have very critical areas, many of your manufacturers use air, they have air compressors, or pneumatics and different things. And when you really comes down to what’s critical, that’s a pretty critical piece of equipment. So we want to make sure that that doesn’t fail, where the lunchroom lighting might not be that critical, right? mirfield, so we talk with our customers to identify where is their most critical need, and to assure that we’ve covered them stop them from having a failure and down to their critical equipment.

Curt Anderson  31:33

Fantastic. So let, Kevin, let’s come back to the six points if we could, can you give us I don’t know, if you want to run through, it’ll take it as deep as you want to, let’s kind of again, we’re kind of in that eek. Electrical Safety 101. Let’s, let’s hit on those those points that you want to cover here today?

Kevin Dickey  31:49

Sure. So what the first one really is that all of the manufacturers, all the businesses we work with, have a certain number of people or a certain employee that needs to have this 70 e safety training, it’s a specific course, it’s, it’s you’ve had, there’s all kinds of training out there for motion that, but this 70 is a specific training course. And they need a badge and a certification that they understand it in their facility. So we actually have a train the trainer program, where our dealers are certified to now train there, their customers, which saves so much hassle, we’re able to come into their facility, have the trainings there where we can actually talk to them directly about the safety within their building instead of just general things. So we’ll go out. And we’ll provide safety training for large companies to small companies. And we can either do it at our facilities, or we do it at their facility for them. So everyone has to have somebody in their organization generally in the maintenance or even equipment operators, anyone who turns on power and turns it off even a breaker on a control panel. So that’s one. And again, that’s not hard. That’s a four hour class, we can we can provide that for you and give you all the certifications you need. Well, another one would be to have a safety plan. Well, every company today has a safety plan. Most companies have a safety director, they’ve developed a safety plan. The key we’re looking for is did the safety plan. Is it very old? And does it does it meet these requirements? So again, it could be just a change in a few paragraphs within your safety plan. And now you’re you’re safe if some something happened.

Curt Anderson  33:41

So Kevin, I have to interject The question is, is your safety plan? Current? Sorry, I couldn’t help myself I couldn’t. So Okay.

Kevin Dickey  33:58

On my house curve, because we have, so

Curt Anderson  34:04

we need to have the current plan and current safe has got to be current. So just a lot of current going on there. Alright, so number one, internal champion. Number two, that safety plan, boy, it needs to be up to date, it needs to be current about number three.

Kevin Dickey  34:19

Number three would be that the employees in there that are ever working on any electrical devices, some people will have a maintenance guy or someone who knows what they’re doing or doubt. And now they need to have the proper personal protective equipment in their facility. So they have to have their different types of hot gloves and certain insulated tools and things so we’ll go through with our customers and see what they have in their maintenance departments. And then assure them of what they need to have on on in their workshop to for safety, their luck. tag outs, all of their safety equipment. So that’s another thing that every company should have a box or an area where they have all of their electrical safety equipment. And so we help them identify what their facility needs, because not every facility has the same voltages or things flowing through them. So we identify what they need, and we’ll make sure that they have everything they need there, and they can’t get in trouble for not having it there.

Curt Anderson  35:29

I love that Nicole, we talk a lot of manufacturers on providing that checklist, if you will. And that sounds like what you’re providing cabinets. And again, it’s kind of that one on one. And for manufacturer, it’s just so tough. We’re like, you know, one minute, they’re dealing with HR issues. And next minute, they’re trying to be their own finance manager or CFO, next minute, or they’re trying to do a little bit of marketing, a little bit of sales, and then trying to you know, safety. So they’re like they’re flipping on different hats all day, every day. And what I love what I’m hearing, you know, you have their back, your, you know, it’s like that real insurance policy of protecting their greatest asset. And again, not just for manufacturers, you provide us for residential, we’ve talked data centers, health care, you know, whatever type of a commercial facility could be retail, that, you know, you’re helping folks stay in business and prevent these real catastrophic dangerous, even a minor thing can turn into something pretty, pretty devastating. Right,

Kevin Dickey  36:22

Curt? Today, we find that when we do have a customer who calls us who maybe didn’t have a program, and they call us they had an emergency failure, we have found that today trying to get parts could take months. Oh, yeah. And let’s say you have a transformer feeding a piece of equipment. Do you know if that’s a transformer that’s very common? Or will it be one that could take you honestly 12 months to get today with our lead times in our industries today, we’re saying, please do yourself a favor and make sure we maintain this extend the life of your equipment is what we’re trying to do. Electrical equipment is only believe it or not rated for 35 years of use, if it’s not been maintained. So well, you we know buildings, 5080 100 years old, your failure rate of those are almost 80 to 90% is what they say the failure rate will happen and unless they’re maintained, so we can keep extending the life of your equipment. And we we always say we’d like to bring it back to the day you purchased it, the day it was installed. And then we can breathe for a while. And then a year later, and we’ll take another look at it if that’s good enough.

Curt Anderson  37:41

You know, this isn’t a great point. So even like, say, in older cities, you know, like we’re we’re at, you know, a lot of older industrial buildings that are still going strong. Now, instead of like, you know, hey, a whole, you know, multi 1000 and 100,000 million dollar, you know, revamp, and these are band aids like you are preventively coming in fixing and like, you know, you’re actually saving them money by being proactive as opposed to like a whole revamp.

Kevin Dickey  38:06

That’s a great point. I mean, we we truly know that the older the facility, the more risk there is a failure. And the least, if it hasn’t been maintained, the risks are very high. Right? And so yes, we, we feel that the best approach we can do for our customers is to come in and just make sure it’s going to be good. And we have many times went to a customer, they said I believe we’re going to just have to replace all of this at some point. And yes, that’s tempting to sell them a replacement, but you’re in our business, you will look at him and you say, Well, the truth is, if you let us go ahead and look at him and open them up and do some testing on him, we can verify it, but the majority of the time, you don’t have to replace it just because you feel you should or you know we get people and I think all that’s all we’re probably but no we can we Greece, we while we tighten we we do all the things you need to do in

Curt Anderson  39:05

the foot, you know, like, you know, we take our vehicles and for every, you know, X number of miles for an oil change or a tune up or what have you. But you know, I think what you’re bringing to the market is that same mindset, or you know, like, boy, I could drive this thing. You know, my wife has a friend, she’s driving a car and you know, it’s like 200, some 1000 miles and she has no intention of stopping, right? Like, Well, the thing is, you know, like if you if you keep maintaining it, man, let that thing run as long as you want and that’s that’s basically what you’re bringing to your customers.

Kevin Dickey  39:31

Great analogy curb your right. You know, if you keep that car oil changes regularly, that engine lasts for a long, long, long time. But if you don’t don’t change that oil regularly, yeah. Yeah. Good analogy.

Curt Anderson  39:43

Yeah, you blame the car. So is there any on the sixth? Is there any other that we want to hit?

Kevin Dickey  39:49

Yeah, let’s get to a couple real quick one is the electrical preventative maintenance piece. So so far, having your people trained, making sure your safety plan is in place? properly, making sure they have the proper PPE. Those are very reasonable things to do. They’re very, they don’t take long to do, they’re not hugely expensive. And so we want to make sure you try to knock those ones off right away, let’s get those ones checked off, we actually give our customers a sheet of the six keys. And they can put the date of when they plan to have it done, what they so that we can project in case, God forbid, there was a failure or Someone got hurt OSHA came into their facility, these are the six things OSHA knows about. I mean, we’re going to make sure that you’ve got a plan in place to have them. But ongoing preventative maintenance is required not only by the NFPA, and the seven e program, but it’s by the manufacturer. So when you read the manufacturer’s guides on this equipment, you will see that they add they have to be regularly maintained, or they void warranties. So on top of will we have you, as a facility owner, have to maintain your electrical system, at least annually, okay. And that’s when we come in, and we open your equipment, we take infrared photographs, we put together a beautiful report for you to see exactly where your issues are, we’re going to give you a heads up on some of the pictures just real quick, we do infrared, we’re able to identify anomalies and things. We give them a beautiful report, and then we’ll help them sometimes they have people on staff that can get the repairs done. Sometimes they asked us to give them an idea and fix some of the problems they have. But ongoing prevented me and it’s what I like to say about that. And really in healthcare, we’re worried about patient safety, right. And that’s one of the big things in school systems are worried about the student’s safety. But in manufacturing, you’re worried about failure, downtime, longtime firing facility, all the employees having to stand around and wait to come back. Those add up really quick. And the only way to really benefit yourself, like this is a regulation, but it’s an actual benefit to you. It’s not just hey, you have to do it. And that’s the way it is, right? Truly, this is a direct benefit to you. And it’s so electrical preventive maintenance is something we’re really able to help companies fit something into their budget, schedule the equipment, so it fits all in their budget, that seems to be the number one thing that we can help them fit it into their budget and still get it done. So electrical maintenance. And then there’s another thing that many people aren’t aware of today, they have heard of it, get a lot of guys that say I’ve heard of the standards. But there’s a thing called an arc flash study different statements, you can use a ways to explain what it is I like to just call it an arc flash study. And I think the actual term is an arc flash hazard risk assessment. And this is a very involved documentation program for your electrical equipment to where we actually determine if there was an arc in your piece of equipment. How long would it last? And how big would it be? So we are able to identify in your electrical system to reduce the potential that God forbid someone was working in a piece of equipment in the short it out how big of a blast would it be. And today, we’ve seen these videos of electricians getting the big fireballs. That’s what this arc flash study is about. So we have to open every piece of equipment and take down all of the information, the fuse sizes, the breaker side of the wire sizes, the length of the wire, there’s a whole engineering study that needs to be done. And so this is a very particular project that we work with customers on to complete this for them. And you really know if you have it in your facility, if you look at one of these gray boxes in your facility, and you see a label on there, and it says arc flash on it, then your facility has already had that completed. It’s a one time deal. Every five years you have to reevaluate and make any changes to it. So you have the labels. Great. We’re glad that you have don’t have the labels. You definitely need to give us a call. But a little plug. One of our benefits is we’re electrician. We are not someone who has just bought a camera or is just wandering around, okay. We see it and we get calls to open covers for people who have a camera, but tell me would you rather have someone And who looks at electrical all day long and knows every little, every little point of failure and what the code says about the grounding and the size of wire to do your preventative maintenance, so we are electricians, we perform our preventative maintenance, and we can do is combine the preventative maintenance work with the arc flash study and save you about 40% of the overall cost of doing that as separate run where our electricians are all trained to make sure these six keys we can be as proficient and help our customers at the lowest cost possible to make sure they’re in compliance.

Curt Anderson  45:40

This is fantastic. I’m going to pull up a couple of comments here from our dear friend Diane Diane’s down in Philly area appreciate the conversation today. So very important. I remember as a child my father’s place of employment burnt down so right here Diane’s uh, you know, her family was victimized, victimized by you know, you know, a fire and that night, the whole place of employment lost their jobs, families had to relocate a total game changer. And then she shares this very timely just last week, and the neighbor lost her home at 3am devastation fortunate I got to save second, my mother caught electrical fire with air dryer last week, breaker never shut down. So I mean, it’s just you just never know when these events are going to take place. And, you know, by taking that step forward, and just that preventative, and just being proactive. And just predictive is just such powerful results here, Kevin, I’ve got so number one internal champion made if they made if they need the internal champion number two, safety plan number three PPE, we covered electrical preventative maintenance, we talked about the arc flash study do we have? Did I miss one? Or do we have one?

Kevin Dickey  46:46

No, I missed one. So what happens is with the art, most companies are unaware that they must have an electrical one line diagram, I’m sure that means a lot to everyone. But what that will do is actually give you a document of the flow of the electric through your facility. And what the real reason why you need that is if there is an emergency, and someone needs to identify where how do you shut down power at this one area, right. And so without this, you could just be running around shutting things off while someone’s getting hurt. And that money. Yes. So you have to have accurate up to date one line diagrams of your electrical system. And some of the older buildings, you can know that the maintenance guy says, Oh, I got him, they’re in a rolls back. They’re all ripped and taped up. And we’re not even sure if they’re accurate. Well, and so one line diagrams, but the real, real important thing that people don’t know is they have to be posted out so that you don’t have to run in and find them in a drawer. So whenever electric room, you should post your one line diagrams, in case there’s an emergency. And that’s part of your compliancy. Well, we can help you with the one line diagrams. And when you get an arc flash study, it automatically comes with a one line diagram. So we’re able to combine these six different keys together to make sure our customers are coming. But not make them purchase them as separate all separate deals, we can combine them and save them a lot of money and a lot of time, and basically one person to go for for their safety. Yeah, and

Nicole Donnelly  48:31

I’m just thinking about like the maintenance teams at these facilities. I’ve worked with these guys in the past, and they are so busy wearing so many hats, trying to do so many things. And we all know that there’s problem with labor right now getting people to, you know, take some of these jobs. And a lot of times they’re short staffed. And so I just love how you’re just supporting that need that they have, by providing this extra support that frankly, they just honestly don’t have the time to focus on it because they’re trying to do so many other things, you know, so

Kevin Dickey  49:00

what’s true, and if it’s a shame, when we see the accident do happen, and because of that, you know, we’ll get to that we’ll get to that. Right, we’ll get to

Curt Anderson  49:11

1. And I think it’s a segue with that Nicole another great point, you know, the baby boomers, you know, retiring that, you know, like maintenance Marie, or maintenance, Mary kind of had all that information, you know, like, oh, yeah, do is go to Mary and Mary knew everything. Well guess what Mary has had, you know, a well deserved retirement on the horizon. And when Mary leaves, he brings a lot of that information with her. And so, you know, I think like what you’re doing, and the thing is like, Nicole, I’d said something over the weekend, you know, something I haven’t done in like six months or a year. And I’m like, Wait, how did I do that again? So like, you know, if this isn’t front of mind, and like you said, maintenance Mary and maintenance Marie or whoever’s in charge of that they’ve got 1000 Different things that they’re, you know, I guess another pun intended fires that they’re putting out all day every day. So then unfortunately, when the real one comes about, you know, and again, when you We’re in that little crisis mode. It’s hard to like, you know, it’s hard to be like clear head, you know, like, Okay, now what do I do? Did we have a fire drill does like, in that’s what you’re doing, Kevin, as you’re coming in, now we can be in a place of calm. And now we can tackle this situation. Number one, you’re preventing these things from happening. Number two, if it happens, we now have a plan of how to attack this.

Kevin Dickey  50:23

That’s exactly right for and, you know, our customers have been very happy with us about it. They, they, at first, they might think for real, do we really have to do this? And then we show him the supporting documentation, we show him the fines that people have gotten in the past. And we’ve shown him of the people that have been injured on in these places. And to the point where yes, you do have to do it. So we we make sure we try to work with them, because it’s part of our government requirements. And we have to do that. So

Curt Anderson  50:55

well. Well, Kevin, at dude, I know I’ve kept you over our time. We this is such a great conversation. I know I could keep you all day. You are busy man saving companies saving building saving lives. And I just I’ll tell you, what an inspirational story. How about First off another big shout out to Joe 94 years old going into work every day. Boy, if I could be a fraction of this person that Joe is I consider myself a big success. And Kevin, for you taking that leap of faith on a really trying period in for your wife to you know, just kind of had the wherewithal to step back and say, hey, you know what I think this is, you know, talk about turning you know, I you know, Nicole, I call it, how do you turn your messy things into your blessings, right. And I think a 3am fire certainly was a little bit of a messy thing. That became a great blessing to the Dickey family. So, Kevin, how about anybody out there? Let’s give Kevin a big round of applause for just a phenomenal conversation today. As we wind down, where can folks find you, I know your website’s current safe.com worlds? Where can people find you?

Kevin Dickey  52:02

Current safe.com is a great place to go on there, you’ll see that we have a residential site, when you come on, you can either learn more about residential, or you can learn more about commercial and industrial. And then that when you go to those sites, you’ll be able to go to the dealer locator and see we’re located in it. And you can contact them directly there. And you can always contact our corporate offices. And maybe we can help you to make sure you have clean, dependable power. No one gets shocked, and you don’t have a risk of fire in your facility. Boy,

Curt Anderson  52:34

I tell you what an admirable cause that you’ve taken on. And one thing that Nicole and I love talking about with entrepreneurship is the word saga. And we had a gentleman on our program back in November. And this gentleman he studied 1000s and 1000s of businesses, and they found a common denominator with the businesses that are successful are the companies that really took on a cause or a saga, if you will, and Nicole’s grandfather, Nicole, what was the name your grandfather’s business?

Nicole Donnelly  53:02

It was the saga in? Yep, he owned a motel right across from Disneyland. And so when I heard this interview of this gentleman on Kurt show, it was like this magic moment for me. I was like, Oh my goodness. I remember my grandfather’s motel he had like this knight in shining armor mascot. It was pretty cool to saga. And so I think yeah, you definitely are carrying a wonderful saga and legacy from your father. And I think one of the things I loved you sharing is that every day he’d wake up and he would focus on the positive. Yes, I think that’s a wonderful, wonderful man. wonderful way to live. I love that you can see it come across in your smile on your face that you’ve just kind of adopted that. So it’s

Kevin Dickey  53:44

inspirational. Yeah, very inspirational. But also you guys are and what you’ve done to help us and some of the things we’ve done together. Kurt Nicole, what you’re doing for the manufacturer industry is very honorable and wonderful. And I so glad to have time to speak with you today. And hopefully help the manufacturers like you’re doing to stay out of trouble. Keep up with the current trends and appreciate you

Curt Anderson  54:10

well thank you right back atcha my friend so guys, thank you for joining us today and hopefully if you if you miss anything go back and hit replay or hopefully you’re catching this on replay down the road. You want to learn more about your how to protect your business, your assets, Contact Kevin his team at current safe. So guys, we’re gonna chime off. We have a great program coming up this Friday. Nicole, you’re going to be back on stage. We have a little ecommerce success story at a manufacturer as a matter of fact, I’m going to talk to them about current safe but Kevin Hang on. One second. We’re going to time off. God bless everybody. Thank you have an amazing, incredible dynamic week. And just boy just like Joe Dickie be positive and just like our friend Kevin, just go out and be someone’s inspiration. Man. This was just so inspiring. So thank you guys. Have a great day. Great The rest of your week and we’ll see you soon

Nicole Donnelly  55:02

thank you thanks Curt