The following transcript has been edited for length and readability. Listen to the entire discussion here on The Broadband Bunch. The Broadband Bunch is sponsored by ETI Software.
In this episode, we speak with Sean Vanslyke, CEO and Head Coach at GoSemo electric cooperative. Electric Coops have a rich tradition of service and were vital in the electrification of the nation, Sean shares how they are continuing to serve while tackling the digital divide. We talk about:
Craig Corbin:
Welcome to another edition of The Broadband Bunch, alongside my colleague, Kaleigh Cox, vice president of business development and content operations with DxTEL. I’m Craig Corbin. Thanks so much for joining us.
Regional electric cooperatives have a long and rich tradition of service to the communities they serve and were vital in the electrification of the nation. One such co-op was formed by a group of farmers in Southeast Missouri, a cooperative now known as SEMO Electric. In 2017, their mission would expand to include a $52 million fiber to the home broadband project, GoSEMO Fiber, an effort that undoubtedly making lives better with HDTV, telephony, and internet. Our guest today leads that hugely successful and dynamic GoSEMO team. He’s a man who leads by example with the heart of a servant. It is a pleasure to introduce the CEO of GoSEMO, Sean Vanslyke. Sean, welcome to The Broadband Bunch.
Sean Vanslyke:
Well, thank you for having me. I’m excited that we get to share our story and I’m excited to see that broadband continues to grow across the United States to help people, help make their lives better.
Craig Corbin:
Absolutely. Kaleigh, I know that we refer to Sean as the CEO, but I love the way that you’ve got it described in your LinkedIn profile, “CEO and head coach, building up people, leaders, and teams because I love to see people do things they never thought was possible.” That’s fantastic.
Sean Vanslyke:
Well, I appreciate you saying that because in my lifetime, and I’ve had a lot of mentors and special people in my life that have pushed me into places that I never thought that I could go and now I get to return that. There will be a tear in my eye on days that I see people do things that they never thought they could do, and it’s just so exciting to see that. Part of what we’re doing here at the co-op is doing just that to help other people, and in turn, we help ourselves.
Craig Corbin:
Kaleigh, quickly, we have very much enjoyed the fact that this is a second visit with members of the GoSEMO staff. I know that you and I have talked a couple of times about what a great experience it was visiting with Lloyd and Becky. Your thoughts before we launch into today’s conversation?
Kaleigh Cox:
I just want to say anyone could put that as a LinkedIn headline, but my experience has been that Sean lives it. I’ve gotten to work with several, and at least work with or meet several members of his team. They really do love working for him and love serving their community. They take it very seriously. They’re very passionate about it. So, it is no surprise to me that their passion has spilled over into two episodes. We are honored that they would give us that time, and excited for the conversation today.
Craig Corbin:
To set the table, for those that might not be familiar with your story prior to becoming part of the team there at SEMO, how did all that go together?
Sean Vanslyke:
It’s been a long and winding road. My wife and I have been married for over 33 years. We moved 13 different times. We’ve been around, but everything comes back to trying to build relationships throughout my career and throughout our career, if you will. It’s just amazing. I’ve been blessed to be in the newspaper business. I was 22 years old as a publisher of a newspaper and then ended up in the utility business during deregulation in Illinois. I grew up in Southwest Missouri, but I had a chance to come back to Southeast Missouri with the cooperative. Now, here almost 10 years, it’s been dynamic. It’s been fun. The team here wanted to grow. They wanted to expand their reach and fly if you will, and that’s exactly what we’ve done for the last almost 10 years now. It’s just been an outstanding opportunity.
Kaleigh Cox:
I know that the growth and expansion in 10 years has been really incredible. If you would, Sean, take us back to day one in your role as CEO there at SEMO. What was it like coming into SEMO, and what were some of those initial priorities that you set for yourself and your team when you showed up?
Sean Vanslyke:
What’s interesting, my first three or four days on the job were actually in Jefferson City at the State Capitol of Missouri. I left our home at that time in Peoria, Illinois, and I drove four or five hours to get to Jefferson City, but I think 9:00 in the morning to meet a board member that I had not seen since I accepted the job, if you will, over the phone. I got there. So then day four, so I show up in Sikeston and we have an all-employee meeting. I get to meet everybody. My first thing to them, I said, “In my environment, business casual meant on Fridays that I didn’t wear a tie.” And so, I five-gallon bucket that I use a lot as a pot, if you will, and haul things around. I said, “This is my biggest today. Do I wear this tie?”
I didn’t have it on. I said, “What questions do you have for me? Where do you want to see us go?” I got two questions that day. One of them was, “Can we take company equipment home and work at home? Can we take a bucket truck home and trim trees? Or can we do this?” And I said, “No, absolutely not.” I said, “Because if you get hurt or something happens to that equipment, I don’t want you to jeopardize the job that you’re coming to work every day to take care of your family.” The second question I got was, “Can we wear jeans on Friday?” I said, “Sure, that’s fine with me. That’s the least of my worries.” But what struck me as odd is they didn’t come in from Illinois or come in from Missouri.
It’s usually if the St. Louis Cardinals hired a new manager, it’d be, “Can we beat the Cubs or can we win the Super Bowl?” And that’s the two questions. And then, finally, we went through and we added up all the service hours the people had, and it was some amazing number that we had with 40-some people in there multiplied by the numbers of years that they served. It was incredible. But I finally said, “What do you guys really want?” Somebody raised their hand and it was Becky Ivester of all people, but she raised her hand and said, “Sean, we just want to go out and wear our shirts and have pride in our co-op again. We just want to be visible in the community and make a difference.” That’s where this journey started back almost 10 years ago now.
Kaleigh Cox:
I love that answer from Becky. I think you’ve certainly taken them to that point over the last 10 years. I know we’ve talked before, and one thing that you saw that is very common across companies in any industry is that there were some silos within the staff. People were focused on doing their job well, but there wasn’t necessarily a lot of overlap between departments. You had a really interesting solution to that with Camp SEMO. Walk us through that a little bit.
Sean Vanslyke:
When I first got here, it was evident that we needed to build pride inside the house before I even worked on the outhouse. So I would say for the first two or three, four years, we really worked on internal culture. We had two department leaders, for example, that worked here for, I think, 22 years together, but they had never had lunch together. They were leading the back of the house and the front of the house, if you will, but they just never were pushed to go out and get to know each other and break bread in that relationship and that context. For me, that’s really important that people get to know each other. I don’t need them to go to dinner at night and I don’t need them to have family events together, but during the day, you got to know what makes people tick.
And so, when we look at the front of the house and the back of the house, we had to pull people together. So, we came up with the idea with Camp SEMO. It’s a two-day intensive camp if you will. We started with our own employees. You start at 7:30 in the morning with safety, then 8:00, you go to the member services, then you go to billing, and then you go to the county, and then you go dispatch and metering, and then you just keep walking through that. And then lunchtime, we have lunch with vegetation management tree trimming, and then they go out for three hours on a one-man truck. We bring them back. We fly up to them in the air about 50 feet in the bucket truck if they want to go. They don’t have to that up in the air. Some people don’t like that.
Then the next day, they come in and we put them on the construction crew. They go out and get a shovel in their hand and put a pole in the ground with alignment. Since we’ve started the fiber now, the afternoon on the second day is all about fiber. We do a home installation. We do a drop. This Team SEMO, this Camp SEMO thing has grown so much. The Team SEMO wants to go through it again, but now we have our partners and our vendors coming. Even NRECA or National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, send people now. They have a contest where they send people to Camp SEMO. We’ve had our insurance people, our bankers. We’ve had almost over a hundred people come through Camp SEMO now.
But what’s great about it, it’s the people that are teaching it. I’m not teaching. I help facilitate and I help take people around and take pictures and spend time, but it’s really our frontline. It’s really all of our people, our frontline people who are teaching Camp SEMO. When they’re teaching, they’re learning because they’re asking questions of our attendees and people say, “How come you do it that way?” or “Why do you do this?” We come out better at the end of the day because we’re learning about ourselves as much as we are about them.
Craig Corbin:
What a phenomenal endorsement, Sean, of what is being accomplished with the Camp SEMO concept. The fact that you have expanded beyond just an internal operation to include those from outside the organization, it’s tremendous. I’m always curious about the responses that you get from attendees after they have gone through the camp compared to what their expectations might have been prior to. Share with that, if you would.
Sean Vanslyke:
Yeah. I’ll give you two answers to that. One is when we first started when we’d hire a new staff member, and again, we call them co-workers or they’re part of Team SEMO now, but they had come in and we say, “Let’s get you into Camp SEMO.” Because one of the first things that we do is that they have a CEO orientation with me, but then as soon as they can, they attend our first board meeting and then we would push them right into Camp SEMO. Feedback came back to me and said, “Sean, we don’t even know what we’re doing yet. We barely know where the restrooms are, or we barely know where to park. We’re going out here and learning all this stuff.” So now we wait for about six to nine months before we put a new employee through that two-day intense camp if you will.
Sean Vanslyke:
But the people who come in and, Kaleigh, I said Kaleigh would be a great candidate for us to bring her in here at some point, because when they leave, they say, “I really get it now. I really understand what it means to look somebody in the eye and say, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t give you a fiber until two more years from now,’ or ‘We can’t hook your electricity up until we get some flood plain thing from the county,’ or just explain to some of our charges that we do or how the process works.” When people go back to NRECA or they go back to Federate Insurance or go back to CFC or bank, they truly understand what it means to see somebody, the member at the end of the line that we’re really trying to serve because cooperatives, unlike investor-owned utilities, cooperatives really are here to serve the member because they actually own us, and that’s a hard concept for a lot of people to understand, but we exist to serve our members and now our subscribers.
Craig Corbin:
And that’s the beauty of it though, that everyone does truly have the heart of a servant and that is such a big part of your success. I’m also curious about how Camp SEMO has evolved into further outreach with the Fiber Fly-ins, if you would talk about that.
Sean Vanslyke:
Fiber Fly-ins started because when we started looking at fiber back in ’14, ’15, ’16, and finally we had a board member said, “Hey, Sean, if we don’t do this, who’s going to do it?” So we really pushed the hammer down and we started working on fiber, but what we did is we commonly confer the vehicle that I drive. They call it The Bus. I load people in there and we take off. In fact, we just went to another cooperative today. You guys don’t even know that, but that’s where I’ve been. We left. It’s about an hour north of us. We went up there and spent about three hours with them today. I just got back and I drove. So, the leaders in the vehicle can talk and discuss, and I get to listen to the question, what’s going on, or just ask some questions to help stimulate conversation.
But when we started, we got to go visit six or seven cooperatives. When we would go there, some are really open to us and shared a little bit, and some were less than open, but they are willing to share with us. But our team, when we got back and we started getting this business, we said, “We need to pay it forward.” And so, we started inviting co-ops in for what we call the Fiber Fly-in. We did one or two, and we did three or four. And then before COVID started, at one point we had nine different cooperatives here. We’ve had a group from Mississippi come up. For a better lack of word, a Greyhound bus pulled up in front of our lot. 19 people got off that bus, and since we’ve had almost 35 cooperatives go through camp or through the Fiber Fly-in. During COVID, we actually did it online on Zoom. I would say we did three or four or five. I know we did three co-ops at one time. I’ve just lost track of how many cooperatives we have done.
I tell my staff, “I wished we would have had a wedding journal or wedding book, if you will, so when people attend, and they write down there…” I’m not going to call it a funeral journal, but a wedding journal, where people write down who came because we know, but we don’t know. As a matter of fact, our team has headed out to Oklahoma. They’re going out to Oklahoma Electric Cooperative next week, Lloyd and Becky and Jake and Amanda and Brittany, all different groups. So the leadership team, they’re going to Oklahoma. They’re going to spend two days out there. They’re four times our size. They started after we did, but they’ve grown so fast. We’re going to go see what best practices they can give to us now. While we talked to them before they got started, we’re going to go out there and see that.
We have another cooperative coming here in a few weeks. They’re coming here to spend two days with us from Arkansas. So this give and take and sharing, it’s just phenomenal what we can do together if we all let our egos down a little bit and just share things.
Kaleigh Cox:
Sean, I think you and your team have been one of the more… How would I put it? … intentional about going out and making those connections and learning from other companies and what they’re doing. How has that experience shaped the experience you now offer with Fiber Fly-ins. What is your team learned from being a guest and how has that shaped being a host?
Sean Vanslyke:
I think it makes us better. As people come to us, I think we hear some of the same questions over and over and over, but then when we go see other people now, we have our questions. They’re just so much deeper in the sense that, “Okay. We know how to do the basics, but now we want to learn how to do this, or we want to learn how to do it a little bit better.” I think the questions that we get and I think the people who come and visit us now, we give them that up-to-date information, where maybe in the past it would just been, “Here’s what we do.” Now, we say, “Here’s why we do it, and here’s how we’ll help you move even faster.” We’ve had people take all of our sign-up forms, our registration. We just let them take it.
We show them all our internal documents, how we track average revenue per user. We show them our take rates. We just share all that with them, with the understanding that they keep it confidential and they can share it with other people, but not share the members. So they can share the process, they can share the outline, but we just ask them to keep our numbers confidential, just like we would keep somebody else’s stuff confidential. But we’re just an open book about it. We put so much out on Facebook and in our monthly magazine that we put out. We just try to be open, because we really don’t have a… There are no hidden agendas here. This is just about making people’s lives better outside of the co-op and inside the co-op as employees.
Craig Corbin:
You’re listening to The Broadband Bunch, presented by Utopia Fiber, building a more connected nation, by DxTEL, creators of the Harper Broadband Marketing Library, and by your zero-touch automation experts, ETI Software Solutions. Our guest today, Sean Vanslyke, CEO and head coach building up people.
I am impressed with the tremendous approach that you have taken in the decade-plus there at SEMO with the evolution of staff within the organization, the evolution of the relationship of SEMO and the community, the relationship with SEMO and your peers within the cooperative world. I’m curious about from your perspective, given at where we are today and the tremendous need on bridging the digital divide, and that’s something that is so vitally important, especially in the more rural areas of our nation, the role that cooperative just like SEMO can play in being very well-positioned to be the provider that makes the difference and giving connectivity to people, to businesses that can make a difference in long-term survival commercially for areas. Your thoughts about that?
Sean Vanslyke:
I appreciate the word you say about me specifically, but in a humble fashion, I just want us to continue to be humble because we can go from good to bad quick just with one ice storm or one tornado, or just some bad weather. In the world that we live in, the utility business, it’s 24/7, 365. The pressure to keep the lights on all the time, the pressure to keep the fiber flowing, is difficult. I have an outstanding board that supports us, outstanding group of people here that I work with. We don’t always get along. We don’t always see eye to eye, but we all want the same focus and that’s to take care of our members, because ultimately if we take care of our members and subscribers, we’re going to achieve our individual goals of taking care of our families, and that most people go to work for that purpose.
Now, what we’re seeing by putting fiber in, we’re having people come to us, perhaps like they did back in 1938 and 1940, when you hooked them up with electricity for the first time, “Oh, I can read at 9:00 at night in the dark.” Well, now, people that the spinning wheel of death is going away and they can actually go buy something on Amazon. They can watch Netflix. They can talk to their grandchildren in Seattle, or they can do whatever they need to do with the World Wide Web now because they have access to that.
My family, we just got access to broadband probably about three months ago. Other than that, we’ve been working off a hotspot since we lived here, since we’ve been here almost for 10 years. So, I know personally how it changes our family life. There’s no more arguing about who’s using the hotspot and we can’t do this and we can’t do that. It changes people’s lives. How many people are working at home now with COVID and the hybrid approach now that I think will go forward for a few years until the pendulum swings back and people say, “You know what, we all need to come back to the office for a while so we can build our culture again,” but it’s been a joyous ride. It’s just been fun to see what we can do and what we can offer.
Kaleigh Cox:
Sean, I have been following you on LinkedIn for a while, and since… I guess it started with COVID. When that hit, you started doing these Friday Feature videos on LinkedIn, and they’re fantastic. So anyone listening, please go find Sean on LinkedIn and enjoy those. But when I asked you about them one time, you actually shared an interesting little fun fact with me, which was that you remembered the first YouTube video you’d ever seen. Will you tell us a little bit about that and how that shaped doing these Friday Feature videos years later?
Sean Vanslyke:
Back in 2007, I worked somewhere else, but we were going through deregulation. We had a negative video posted about us. It was at the State Capitol and they were just banging on our organization. I said, “We have to do something here.” It was on YouTube. It was one of the very first YouTube videos I ever watched. From that day forward, and this had been 2007, I have been a big proponent of using YouTube videos. My team back then, we started using flip. Back in the day, we had to flip a camera that we would have to use, and maybe a regular camera at one point, but really the flip camera came about. We started using that and posting YouTube videos.
What I’ve learned over time is if I work with people for a little while and they get comfortable, now with iPhones, everybody can do a selfie video, or they can do a video, as long as we know our boundaries, where we need to stay within the navigational buoys if you will, the song, one of a Jimmy Buffett song, or somebody song, but stay within those buoys, stay within our guidelines, which is phenomenal to watch what the team can do with an iPhone now, and how fast we can get a video up to share somebody’s story or to tell a story to help people see what’s going on. And then it’s not so much about us. We really try to highlight the members. We’re really proud right now. We’ve been doing a member spotlight every Friday now, and that’s been going for over six months now. Every Friday on our Facebook page, we have a member spotlight now. It’s encouraging people to go eat at the restaurant or buy tires or whatever that might be because we’ve reached a point, it’s not about SEMO and GoSEMO fiber, it’s about our members and our subscribers.
Craig Corbin:
I’ve been so impressed with watching what you’re doing with The Friday Feature. I love the first line of the description of that. It’s a weekly booster of positivity to keep negativity out of your head. That is such an important message, and especially given what everyone has gone through the last year and a half, but thank you so much for doing something that’s very simple by concept, but obviously, it takes a lot of time and effort. Obviously, it’s appreciated because you’re making such an impact on so many lives. Keep up that effort.
As we begin to wind down our visit today, we cannot let you go without our standard pair of questions. The first we call it the back to the future question. We pop you in the DeLorean and let you go back X number years and whisper something in your own ear that might change the timeline, the transitions that were made during the last decade at SEMO. But if you were able to do that, what would you tell yourself?
Sean Vanslyke:
I think that people have to… It’s hard for us as leaders to have a vision, because maybe we can see it in our minds, but it’s really hard for people to see what you see. You have to spend a lot of time out there educating people and sharing the story. While I’m glad that our staff went and saw their cooperatives, I wish that I would have loaded our board up on a bus. What I saw with the co-ops that have come since we’ve started, that’s exactly what they did, is they’re bringing their board members to these Fiber Fly-ins. So when they go to their boards and say, “Boy, we got to borrow this much money,” or “We need to hire these people,” or “We need to do this,” they have seen it here at SEMO, so they’re not spooked by it, if you will.
We’re working on something where we’re going to try to take our board somewhere in the next 12 months, if you will, to look at a larger organization and show our board maybe where we’re going. I’m not sure that we need to do that at this point, but that’s one thing that I really encourage other CEOs or other managers or whatever to… We included our board. They’re heavily invested, but we just didn’t want to spend the money, if you will, to load them up and take them somewhere or not. That’s the thing that I would do. And then the last year with… And I have to sneak this in on you guys, my wife gets credit for writing that Friday Feature about the booster because we were talking about COVID. We got shots. Now, you’re going to get a booster shot, probably, right?
She came up with that months ago. But I think back to 2020, it was a revealing year for all of us to stop if you will, and really focus on what was important. What I got out of the last year and whispering in my ear is, “Sean, you have a great family, you need to appreciate them and spend as much time with them.” But on the other side of that coin, it whispered in my ear, “Sean, you need to make sure your staff is spending time with their families.” Because we’ve been pushing so hard for the last four years, five years. We have been pushing so hard. So right now, it’s important to me that people take some time off and get away for a little bit and just clear their minds. I think if they do that, they’ll come back and we’ll even get stronger than what we were.
Craig Corbin:
It is truly sage advice and something that everyone should take to heart. So, we’ve asked you to look back. Now, let’s ask you to look forward. If you could pull out the crystal ball, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be with regard to things specific to growth or the future at SEMO, but even industry-wide, what do you see coming down the line in the world of broadband and connectivity?
Sean Vanslyke:
That’s a great question because we just had this conversation two days ago with our senior manager of finance if you will. She’s just, says, 35 years old. I said in 25 years, “What are you going to be working on like we’re working on fiber right now?” That’s the question that we’re having. Who could come and disrupt our business? We don’t know that, but we really believe that fiber right now, we have the capacity to go up to 10 gig and maybe 40 gig at their homes. I just see people, these electric cars are coming in. Electric cars are going to talk to the electric meter. The electric meter is going to talk to the broadband. Everything is going to be interconnected.
The rural areas are going to be five to eight years behind probably the East and the West Coast, but eventually, it will get here, and it’s going to get here faster now because we have broadband. Because in the past, without broadband, we weren’t seeing what was going on with Tesla. We weren’t seeing what was going on with Microsoft or whatever company you want to talk about, Google or Amazon, because the only way I could shop on Amazon was to use my phone at home or go find a public Wi-Fi spot. Now, in three or four years, we have changed that. That dynamic has completely changed. And so, our people here compete. And so, I look forward to this area here because we have water and we have land and we have interstates. I’m going to beg and ask for Amazon or Lowe’s or Walmart, or one of these big organizations to come and put a major hub right here in our backyard to help our employees.
We’re going to start working on economic growth in our area because now we have the electricity and we’ve got the broadband, people around us, the water share with the Mississippi River. We have the land. We just need to bring employment up. I think this area is really prime for growth right here. I think a lot of rural areas that are doing broadband. If they have some of those assets around them, now is the time to start leveraging them for five or 10 years from now.
Craig Corbin:
Sean, there is absolutely no doubt that given your leadership, GoSEMO will be a big part of the success for the region that you’ve just shared. Kaleigh, the goal of what we do here on The Broadband Bunch is to educate and inspire. I’m not sure that we’ve had any guest that has been as inspirational as Sean. Your thoughts as we begin to wind down our visit?
Kaleigh Cox:
Yeah, it does not surprise me in the slightest that this was such a successful conversation and so inspirational, because every conversation I ever have with Sean feels that way and seeing him on LinkedIn feels that way. I think it’s just his personality. He’s a natural encourager. I think we forget sometimes that the best leaders are those who are servant-hearted, and Sean is always a good reminder of that to me as I’m early in my career and I’m trying to grow. It’s good to remember that the most important traits are lifting up those around us. So I just appreciate your example, Sean, and I appreciate your time being here today.
Sean Vanslyke:
I appreciate you guys, and I appreciate what we’re trying to do around the country with rural cooperatives because I think there’s a lot of young people out there now looking for jobs. If they can find a rural electric cooperative that’s growing and wanting to change, they need to jump on the bandwagon and be part of it.
Craig Corbin:
If we can get more folks to take your approach, A, the world would be a better place, and we would get to that goal of connecting the unconnected, the underserved a lot more quickly. But to echo Kaleigh, thanks so much, Sean, for, A, what you do, how you do it, and for sharing your story at GoSEMO with us and our audience here today. It’s been a blast. I knew it was going to be, and I know we’ll certainly look forward to a reason to circling back with you at some point down the line and visiting again.
Sean Vanslyke:
I certainly appreciate it. My last two words would be, “Be Intentional”, so I appreciate your time.
Craig Corbin:
On behalf of Sean and Kaleigh, I’m Craig. Thanks so much for letting us be a part of your day. Our thanks again to our presenting sponsors, Utopia Fiber, DxTEL, and ETI Software Solutions. We’ll see you next time right here on The Broadband Bunch. So long, everyone.
