Todd Reed: [00:00:00] Welcome to Keeping the Lights On. I'm your host, Todd Reid, and on this podcast I connect with the owners and pros who design, build, and maintain our electrical communications and industrial world to explore the best ways forward. Today I'm chatting with Steve Garino, L C I E S N A source Market Specialist at Cooper Lightings Training and Development Center.

Steve began his lighting career in 1999 with Cooper Lighting first as a senior pricing analyst, then as an area pricing manager for the Northeast region. Today, Steve is a, specializes in the fields of G U V Industrial and exterior sight lighting. Steve is lighting certified lc by the N C Q L P, which is the National Association on Qualifications for Lighting Profess.

And is a member of the Eliminating Engineer Society, I E S N A, and a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In this episode, Steve shares his story of how he and his team at the source adapted to the changes required to survive and thrive during the pandemic years. [00:01:00] He shares the struggles and successes experienced over the past two and a half years.

Let's get into the.

So we start out each episode by celebrating the foods that fuel our crews, and it's, you know, it's something that's common everywhere. So, Steve, if I were to visit, or you had some other clients visit you in, uh, Georgia, what's a common go-to spot for meals, uh, for you?

Steve Guarracino: Just so everyone's kind of aware of where I'm coming from. I'm, I'm, I'm live in Peachtree City, Georgia. That's where Cooper Lighting is headquartered, so it's a kind of a nice bedroom community south of Atlanta. So we're not, we're not in the heart of Atlanta, but we have easy access to it. But, You know, over the years that I've, I've lived here since 92 and, the community has changed, in, in a lot of positive ways.

And, and there's a, more privately owned restaurants down here. You know, we went through those years of, you know, a lot of chain, you know, like typical chain restaurants you can find anywhere. Uh, but we have some, some nice independent restaurants and, and one that I like to go to, there's a little town close to here called Son.

In [00:02:00] the restaurant, there's Bistro Hillary, and it's, it's a place that, that we, as a company frequent and my family frequents. it's a really, really good place. It's got an interesting menu. It's a French bistro. and, and one of my favorite things on their appetizer menu is, Fried deviled eggs. Uh, so obviously it's not a deep fried egg.

The whole fried or the whole deviled egg isn't fried. They, they fry the egg white and then they pipe the filling on top of that and it's just, they're, they're just amazing

Todd Reed: Do you have like a favorite, like main course and a dessert there that, or you just fill up on those eggs?

Steve Guarracino: Well, you know, it, everything I've had there is, is is really good. I've, I've had their, their, their filet is, excellent. Uh, their brunch is really good as well. you know, the whole. Restaurant itself is kind of an interesting story because the husband and wife are, are both restaurateurs and, interestingly enough, they, they both owned a restaurant in Sonno, just essentially right around the corner from themselves.

So, the wife owned Bistro Hillary, she's, Hillary and the husband owned an Italian restaurant. You know, during the pandemic, we had the typical struggles that, that [00:03:00] any, area had. And, during that time, his restaurant didn't make it.

Uh, but it's interesting to see how they, a, a adapted to that, change and that challenge where his restaurant didn't make it. So they made the tough decision to, to, to close that down.

But what they did, they looked at the most popular dishes from that restaurant menu and then brought them to Bistro Hillary. So when you think about Bistro Hillary, it, it exudes French Bistro, but they have a sub segment of that menu that is Italian food. And, you know, based on my last name, people probably figured out I'm Italian.

So I appreciate the fact that, that I can get a nice lasagna even at a French bistro. So, they were sort of a microcosm of what, what happened during the pandemic and what a lot of businesses went through.

Todd Reed: I think I recall you saying at one point that, uh, your favorite meal though didn't make the cut.

Steve Guarracino: I'm still a little, uh, still a little heated about it. Uh, I, I love chicken piccata and, and they had an excellent chicken piccata that unfortunately didn't make the cut. I guess I should have gone there and eaten it more and, and maybe raised his profile in the popularity and maybe it would've made the cut.

Todd Reed: I think that's, [00:04:00] Interesting how they did that to accommodate the change, keep their customers. Maybe not you happy, but sounds like this stuff was on and all that's, that's, but it's been interesting to see how how companies did transition, adapted, survive, and came out of these crazy times.

So what is the, kinda, what challenges did you all face there specifically where you are, you know, due to the pandemic?

Steve Guarracino: department that I work in, at Cooper Lighting is the facility we call the Source. And it's, it's our main onsite training and education facility and, That's really what the source is all about. It's, training and education of, anybody really in the, in the lighting food chain.

You know, anywhere from a distributor or contractor to a lighting designer to an end user, architects, building owner. It could be really any of those folks that would traditionally travel here to Peachtree City and learn about Cooper Lighting, what we have to offer are, are differentiated products both from the luminaire side and controls and connected lighting.

Uh, they might come for a purely educational class, that's really what the source does. We, we kind of serve two purposes here. Whenever someone asks [00:05:00] me what, you know, what, what does the source do? And, you know, what's your focus? It, it really kind of is, is in two buckets. One is the purely educational side.

we do these kind of tuition-based classes where it can be something as simple as a lighting fundamentals. A lighting 1 0 1 will people come for three days. And those kind of classes are really less about our company and, and what we have to offer it. They're, they're truly purely educational classes, but we also serve more of a sales role as.

Where our, local agent, our local sales rep, the Cooper rep, uh, will bring a group of customers in here, like a, as I said, a contractor, a distributor, a group like that. And then they are gonna hear more about our products and solutions. But traditionally, pre pandemic, We were always an in-person training facility.

Uh, we had really no online presence And then, coming into the pandemic, it was, it's really quite amazing. How quickly things changed and how quickly we, we were forced to adapt. I mean, we're, we're sitting there in February of 2020 coming out of our sales conference where we had, you know, 600 people in a, in a hotel conference center here in Peachtree City.

And, you know, we were doing our normal thing and then all of a sudden March hits [00:06:00] and we're not allowed to have customers in here anymore. Nobody's traveling, nobody's coming here anymore. And we as a group are sitting there looking at each other going, okay, well what does that mean for us? quite a frightening set of scenarios, so obviously a huge challenge specifically, you know, beyond the, you know, just what every company was going through.

but for our group specifically, we were basically looking at each other saying, you know, what? What is it we are going to do? So very quickly we had to go from zero online content to 100% online virtual with no in-person training. And, and it's amazing what what the team was able to accomplish. within about 10 days, we went from zero online presence to 100% online.

we, know, work with an l m S system. Uh, a lot of the listeners may be familiar with, uh, a company called Blue Volt. That's who we, we partnered with to host our content. Uh, and it kind of started there. We, we basically took what we do on a daily basis and, and turned it into online presentations.

Live instructor-led online presentations. So we went from doing no [00:07:00] classes online to doing four days a week, three classes a day, all online, uh, like I said, and we were able to stand that up and create that in about, in about a 10 day period. And that included sending calendar links out, getting people, you know, to register for classes.

And, you know, because we had, obviously there was a lot of people at home at that point, right? This is during the height of the shutdown when, when everyone was at home and, and they're looking for ways to, you know, how do I stay productive and how do I. Locked into the market, what's going on? And quite frankly, how do I stay relevant, right?

How do I show my company that, that I'm not just sitting at home and, and not doing anything?

Uh, and I, and I will tell you in that, within the first 30 days of us standing that up, we had 6,000 people taking our online classes.

Todd Reed: What were some of the challenges that you faced converting over to kinda that hybrid?

Steve Guarracino: So I, I can speak, you know, both personally and, you know, sort of professionally. So for, for me, on a personal level, and, and, and anybody, you know, who's traveled to the source? You know, I, I've been doing this, about eight years.

And, I have a high degree of passion and [00:08:00] energy when, when I do presentations. So losing that personal connection where I had people in front of me was a huge challenge, because I really had to change the. I present material, I really kind of feed off the, that energy from the group and the, and the people in front of us that struggle of doing that via teams and, and still getting that message across in an effective way was, a huge personal challenge in a more general sense.

we had zero experience doing online. nor did we have the internal resources to do that. So we really, as a team had to figure that out on our own, how to do this and, and how to do it in a really, really quick manner. And then you also have the challenges of, we're all at home now.

We're not, together as a team anymore. And just Joe's general challenges. So you can imagine us trying to stand this, up, all doing it remotely and then, you know, just the struggles of Bandwidth. And when I mean bandwidth, I'm talking about literal bandwidth. You know, is your wifi good enough to have your camera on and the audio be clear?

And, you know, as you're doing this stuff, because we really wanted to [00:09:00] focus on it being a live experience and not just posting recordings there, there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with, you know, recording a presentation and posting it out there for people to access it at any point in time.

There's, there's a lot of value in that. But we didn't wanna lose that, for lack of a better term, that personal connection. We, we wanted it very purposefully to be a live instructor at class, you're already isolated, you're already at home just hitting a play button. You're still just watching a recording and listening to a recording.

Todd Reed: Can you talk to me a little bit about how you did adapt and change for the energy level? I'm curious how you, what you did.

Steve Guarracino: and you can see it already as I'm doing this right? I, it's tough for me to just sit in one spot you see the name on the screen. I talk with my hands. me, being able to focus and, be on camera and stays still, uh, honestly, was, was as tough as anything for.

I, I feel like that even, even through online, able to project that energy in a way, you know, a, a lot of it for me is just [00:10:00] changing the level of my voice, changing the volume of my voice, doing those types of things, you know, to sort of emphasize things, you know, getting closer to the camera, pulling back, you know, e you know, I'm, I'm by no means in TV production, but those little things you can do to sort of.

You know, hey, this is an important point. I, this is something you really want to be locked in on. I, I try to do those things and try to bring what I did in a classroom to, to an online presentation. And, and frankly, it's, it's still a challenge.

Todd Reed: So has the, did the change allow you to move into new areas of training that you weren't doing?

Steve Guarracino: Yeah. A a, absolutely. And, and again, I, it's, it's been really interesting for me to kind of see how we've changed it and adapt. You know, I obviously, I've mentioned the, the online presentations, right? Those live instructor classes, which basically what we did is we took what we were already doing in an in-person scenario and basically transitioned it to online, One thing that we didn't have was any sort of, E-learning. Um, and that's something that we have really created a large library of, e-learning classes. So these are classes that are not instructor led, [00:11:00] but what it allowed us to do was, Get our product message out there. You know, as we launch new products, we create an e-learning module and essentially what those modules are, quick five to 10 minute walkthroughs of the product.

So it's just what you'd think it would be. You click on it, you register, and then what you find is, you get to learn about a product or solution, not just on the luminaire side, also on the controls and connected lighting side in this general features and benefits, hey, what the product is capable of doing, what it, what it can do, what applications that, that it might be best.

And it really helped us stay engaged with the market so the market could understand, hey, what products is Cooper launching? Right? Because you have a situation where now you're not getting maybe that contact with the agent, you're not getting that contact with the Cooper sales rep in your market. It, it was a way for us to really stay engaged with the market.

So again, we went from having zero of that sort of content to today we have somewhere in the neighborhood of, of two to 300 of these modules, and we're constantly adding to that library. And what's nice about that is that. You don't have to register and take it at a certain day, at a certain time. those modules are accessible [00:12:00] 24 hours a day, and that's the other thing I like about the e-learning side, whether it's the live instructor led or the modules. It generates a certificate. So it's, again, it's another way for you to demonstrate to your company, Hey, this is what I'm doing to continue to educate myself. You know, I work for a, big company, and, and that's a goal that I think a lot of people have, at a corporate level is, Hey, how are you continuing to train yourself and educate yourself?

How, how are you taking control of that on your own? And being able to show, Hey, these are the 10 classes that I took. These are the, the 20 CEUs that I took. Those types of things. And being able to prove that with a certificate that you've downloaded and demonstrate, you know, whether it's this, you know, showing it to your company or if you have a, a, a lot of annoying letters after your name, like a lot of us do in our industry, right?

Lcs and lead and all that. You have to stay current and you have to demonstrate that you are taking those continuing education and that that's another service that, that those online type classes provide.

Todd Reed: A lot of your training is for sales side of the lighting world, right? We have a lot of, but we have a lot of listeners that are end users or owners, plant [00:13:00] managers, retail designers. Can you maybe cater to that audience as well, and if so, what might they experience either there in person or online?

Steve Guarracino: Yeah, so that's obviously a critical thing, right? it's, it's great To have a group of contractors, distributors, or our sales agents or those partners and, and letting 'em know, you know, how we go to market and how we differentiate. You know, that's, that's a huge, positive advantage for us.

But when you have those unique opportunities to have actually a, an end user, come to your facility, that's a unique opportunity. and, and, and when it comes along, it's something that you definitely wanna be able to take advantage of. And that's what's great about having the facility, the source itself.

When you come to the source, you're able to see the down lighting room, the industrial room, the outdoor room, the commercial lighting products room, our controls room. You can actually see the products and solutions that are gonna be implemented in your space. Uh, and, and that's what I find with end users.

The big benefit to them is that, I've been in a lighting industry for, you know, going on 23 years now. Uh, but when you have an end user that needs to understand lighting, but also the products that they might be choosing from, it gives them that unique opportunity to. [00:14:00] See them in person, touch and feel and understand how that product is gonna be implemented we can have those discussions around, Hey, you might think this is the right product for this application.

I'll, I'll give a, a perfect example of this. We had, uh, a big L t l carrier, uh, that, that came to visit our, our facility and, uh, you know, the typical kind of freight forwarder, right? Uh, and they were looking at some high bay products, right? So those typical kind of industrial products that live at those higher mounting heights, those higher limit package.

And they had their mindset on one specific product. and in the application, a as I talked to them and just learn more about what their specific application was, what we've quickly realized is, and, and that typical application, right, you've got dock doors on one end, right? Truck pulls up, there's another dock door on the other end.

You move freight from one side to the other. It's a 24 7 operation, and those dock doors are, are open constantly. Uh, and in that scenario, there's a lot of things in the. There's dirt, there's dust, there's bugs, right? That's just what happens. Um, and when you have a product in that environment that has just a lens that creates an optical [00:15:00] distribution, there's that chance that stuff's gonna get behind that lens.

And the product they were looking at utilizing, I quickly told them, Hey, I don't think that's the one you want to use. We have another product that performs just as well optic. But you're not gonna have that challenge with the lens. without coming and seeing that product, they might have maybe not picked the best solution for their particular environment.

And that's what's great about having the facility. And, and again, as I said in that example where you have an end user that. Maybe he doesn't understand all the nuances of the product. Being able to see it and then talk through those scenarios really helps us make a better solution for that customer, make that that the best recommendation for their particular application.

Todd Reed: as we were talking earlier, we, you talked about a project with a, a grocery store chain, and it got me thinking You just talked about. one of my prior interviews, I spoke with someone about, bringing all the people from a project, from the owner to the designer, to the contractor Um, maybe the plant floor manager, right. Or somebody so they can all, cause they all view things from a different perspective, [00:16:00] so I think this is a perfect example of being able to do that in an environment where they can share ideas and.

Steve Guarracino: Yeah, I mean the, the example you gave is, is one that, that happened here where we had a grocery store chain and, and it was just that, it was really the perfect storm where you had the end user, the owner, the installing contractor, you had the distributor, you had the lighting designer, everyone in that value chain involved.

And, and as you said, you have a situation where you think, oh, the lighting designer's making all the decisions. Well, not necessarily, right? That building owner has a, a, a lot of stake in this decision and they might decide, you know, Hey, maybe this isn't the road that I want to g get on. And then again, you have that contractor involved that might say, Hey, look, I, I get what you guys are going for here, but understand that if we go this route, it's gonna take me twice as long to install this solution that it might take to install that solution.

So maybe we need to think about something else. So having all those stakeholders in the room at the same time, Really is probably, in my opinion, the most [00:17:00] powerful thing, uh, from a sales perspective that you can have, because you're gonna end up at the end of the day with the best solution because you're, you're, you're hearing from all those stakeholders, you know, again, from the, from the, the owner down to the distributor, down to the contractor, down to the lighting designer.

All those people have, you know, important input in, in those decision.

Todd Reed: Well, it sounds like you've had a pretty. Will transition to this hybrid model. Some good numbers there and it continues to get better. But let's, uh, I'm gonna give you a chance to dream a little bit. so where would you like to see the source in a few years? and, and how would the world of lighting be changed because of that?

Steve Guarracino: I, I really like where we were. Where, where we are and, and where we're going. we have seen just to kind of share some, some data with you, just to sort of see that evolution, what happened. So pre pandemic, so think, you know, before, online, before any of that, our typical participation through the source was somewhere between 12 and 14,000 people a year.

2020 when we were basically all online. that number actually grew to 18,000. Participants, right? That [00:18:00] that took our online classes, which again, very front loaded in Q1 of 2020 because everyone was forced to be at home and that sort of thing. So we had this even ramp up of participation. Now coming outta the pandemic, now we're kind of in 2021.

Now we're in this mix of still doing the online thing, but now we're getting people back in. So kind of August of 2021 is when we started getting people back in the. So our, our numbers kind of changed and sort of fell off obviously people get the burnout. Everyone was frankly getting tired of doing the online classes. Been there, done that. We kind of saw that typical drop off. So in 2021, uh, we were around all in about 7,000 was kind of our all in between online and in. In 2022, we saw that number jump up because again, we're starting to get more people back in the source.

So our number was around 10,000. coming into 2023, we're starting to see the numbers grow again, because from a future state standpoint, I think where we are is that we're doing a much better job of engaging. On the online right, the, the popularity of the [00:19:00] in-person, because we, we lost that for so many years that right now there's a huge demand for that.

Cause people, they want to come back, they want to get back here because of the benefit that part of it has never gone away. But what we have definitely seen on the online side was that natural ebb and flow. Right. 2020. It just was a hockey. Then people sort of, they're like, okay, enough with this online stuff, enough with the Zoom calls, the team calls, we saw that sort of drop and level off.

We are starting to see that ramp up again because, you know, we're, we're doing something again that we've never done before, which is gauging engaging on a social media side from a marketing side, you know, using those different platforms. All the ones you think of, you know, LinkedIn, you know, those type of platforms to.

Get that message out and, and this just happened yesterday. You know, we, you know, we were seeing numbers, you know, we were getting, between, you know, 15 and 30 people on a call, which is still good, but yesterday we did a class and there were 150 people on that call. So we, we, you know, despite the fact that, there, there's that natural sort of falloff, it shows you the power of what social media and [00:20:00] marketing can bring and that awareness, you know, we want to continue to grow.

That base of users that are in that online. Because one of the things that we, we have definitely seen a benefit from the market is having this online and ability to train people virtually is a powerful tool. we know what's going on with the challenges of the economy, but there's still a lot of hiring going on, especially in our industry.

And then that's something that I know has been a big challenge for organizations, right? Bringing new people on, how do I get them? How do I get them, uh, to a point where they have at least some basic knowledge of what's going on. I maybe I don't have the time or the budget to send them to a facility, to like the source.

How do I get them trained up? And that's one of the big asks that we've gotten kind of going forward, is how do we do that in a virtual world? And one of these things that we've created of these things called training tracks, where we take. Group of presentations, right? Whether it's online, whether it's the e-learning modules or some other content, and package that up and say, okay, here's our recommendation.

Your new hires for this [00:21:00] particular job should take these 10 courses. we can actually send that out as a registration packet where each person is assigned this training track and. that business owner, whether it's agent, whether it's some other partner that's requested this, can then track that progress on a daily, weekly, monthly basis and say, Hey, are they doing these, classes that we've assigned to them?

again, I'll gonna give you a, a good use case. One of our agents actually in, in your area, uh, was one of the first agents to ask for these kind of training tracks cuz they had a lot of new hires. And basically what they did is they in. Uh, their employees to take these classes. So they asked for the training track, but they also didn't just say, Hey, we're expecting you to do this on your own time.

They incentivize their, their people with, with, with a monetary. Uh, prize. So for every class they took, I, I can't remember what the number is, you know, call it five or $10, but it doesn't matter. Just even that little bit is enough, for, for just taking some classes.

And, and, and they've gotten some incredible engagement for that. And that's really where I see, I kind of see things going because despite the fact that [00:22:00] there's a high demand for the in-person, again, the virtual side is not going away, nor do I want it to go away because frankly it. It's a way for us to engage with a lot more people than we have in the past.

Again, just to share some numbers, those e-learning modules that we, that we put out on the on our blue volt site, we average a thousand completions per month on those e-learning modules. So that's a great way to, for us to continue to kind of market our products again and, and engage with people so they understand what it is that we're launching and, and what, what are the new things that we have out.

Todd Reed: I'm curious, do you have any of those kind of learning tracks for the contractor side, uh, and or the owner side

Steve Guarracino: Yeah. I mean, that's the, that's the great thing about what we can do here because we have a dedicated staff, 100% dedicated, dedicated to the training side, the education side, so we can really customize anything for anybody. anything that you just described, whether it's contractor, distributor, whether it's an end user, we can customize an in-person agenda or create a training track based on what their, particular needs are.

That that's, that's, you know, the kind of the [00:23:00] short answer there. We can really do anything you need.

Todd Reed: There's some other things that you guys are working on that are kind of out of traditional, like classes and presentations. Like what are some of the resources that are available from the source

Steve Guarracino: one of the things that we've, we've done here recently, and this, really launched actually pre pandemic. we have some great augmented reality tools and, and we have this app called the Lighting Architect app. it's an iOS Android app, but it's also now web-based app. And it's been a really kind of cool evolution to see, this, this tool, this, this Light Architect app, where it started was, was we, we wanted to engage more with the design community.

one of the segments we wanted to engage with were younger people coming into our industry, as we move from traditional lamp based sources to the digital source and l e d, and then you get into connected lighting and wireless and all this kind of, The dynamics of our industry have changed.

we're seeing a lot of newer, younger people come into our industry and they engage in a completely different way. One of the things we wanna do is create a technology that would engage with those, with those people.

And that's really what the Light Architect app is. It, it started off as a design app. So [00:24:00] basically what you could do is take your, your iPhone or your Android device, use the camera in there. It's, it's augmenting the reality that you're seeing through your camera. And then you could drop a fixture in there and see what it. Change the mounting height. You can run a quick lighting calculation and see what the foot candle looks like, the foot candle iso plot looks like in that space. But from a designer's perspective, uh, you could actually see what the fixture looked like in that space in real time.

but when we first launched it, it was limited to this indoor tool and we had just a few fixtures and brands that were in there. So when we launched it was sort of this cool tool that. Drop a fixture in. but from a practical use, was like, okay, it's neat, but I, I don't really see myself using this on a daily basis.

Then the pandemic hits We have a team that organically developed. This was developed in-house. We didn't contract this out. This was done in Cooper Lighting. We, we did, we had a team that did this. They made some great enhancements to it, and one of those enhancements was the satellite view, which basically allowed you to do an outdoor design using Google Earth, just like you would do with a G I 32 or some other design software where you would put an address, find where the poles are, you could drop your poles, [00:25:00] your fixtures in there, configure that, and do a lighting layout in real time in a matter of minutes.

Weeks of waiting for someone to do that for you. So there's this really powerful tool to enable people to do design and to make fixture recommendations, in real time o on your smart device. We've also created a web app that does that same thing on the satellite view, but nobody knew about it. So we did all these enhancements to it and we've basically had to go back and relaunch this technology because people think that the Light Architect app is what it was four years ago, which was just this cool technology where I can drop a fixture in and see what it looks like.

We've done these powerful upgrades and through the source, and that's again, sort of dovetailing into what we've been talking about all day. We've used the source, both the in-person and the online to reengage with that technology to get the word out about the enhancements in what we've done. And as a result, we've seen usage of that skyrocket.

Uh, and from a customer benefit standpoint, it's not only cool technology, but it absolutely helps close orders. You know, we have seen our customers,[00:26:00] you know, real use cases, tell us that, you know, they're using this app to close hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of. So it's not just a cool technology, it is a practical tool, but it just shows you the power of, education and training and, and getting your messaging out about what you have to offer.

And, you know, so just as an example on a, on a, on a daily agenda, when a group comes here, we're gonna expose 'em to that technology. But we also do, uh, an online class about the Light ar, light Art Architect app, and we have an e-learning module on the Light Architect app. So you can really learn about it in all kind of three phases, and it helps us continue to educate people about what the changes are.

Go back to the online stuff, There's an enhancement done to that, that technology. We've, we've added some new feature. We're immediately gonna go back and update that online module to make sure that it's got, it shows that latest and greatest enhancement. So anybody taking that class? For new is gonna see what the latest and greatest is.

But people that have already taken it, they're still gonna benefit from going back and taking that class again because there's new content, new updates to those products and solutions happening all the time. So we try to be very diligent about going back [00:27:00] and updating the content that we already have.

Which kind of goes back to that challenge thing, right? Because all this content now is it's living information. We have to constantly go back and update it, which is something we never had to do before, right? We had to be very cognizant about. The stuff that we've already published, going back and changing it and updating it to reflect the latest and greatest, uh, offering that we have.

Todd Reed: So the, uh, majority of the people will be, uh, hearing this and, you know, we're not showing video yet of our conversation, but I'll just say Steve is getting more passionate. His hands are moving more, he's getting more, uh, bouncy in his chair, which I appreciate. Uh, I, I like that. So, so we're gonna end the conversation this way, and it ties to that.

So I always like to focus on the why of what we do. what motivates you to do this day in and day out, keeps you excited and passionate about coming in day day.

Steve Guarracino: Yeah. And again, I, I, I hope that the, the passion and energy comes, comes through. I, I, I feel like it, it does. Uh, and, and as you said, Todd, as, as the conversation goes on, I just get, I get more amped up about, uh, uh, about our industry. [00:28:00] That's something that I've always carried through. Uh, I've been in this industry a long time.

As I said, I've been in the industry 23 years. I, I've had various roles within the company. one of the major reasons I've, I've stayed in the industry and, and continue to be very passionate, enthusiastic about it, is the technology change that that happened. we've both lived through the same thing, which is, hey, when we started it was lamp based, right?

It's metal boxes. You put a lamp and a ballast in there. and you know, you can only be excited about that for so long. With l e d all that changed, and I mentioned the, the change in the industry of, of getting younger, younger people in our industry, that that is a huge positive. uh, that helps feed my, my energy enthusiasm.

I, I can definitely see that average age change, in the, in the groups of people that are coming here, I'm seeing a lot of younger, young, younger folks in here, which is, which is great,, but, but that helps me stay, you know, really locked in, you know, knowing that, you know, we have this, this new blood coming into our industry and it's gonna continue to grow and evolve and, and that really helps fuel.

Todd Reed: Well, I'll tell you, this has been a, a really cool story about how some, a company and [00:29:00] person has transitioned and adapted during that, during the challenging times of the last couple years, and I'm sure there's a million stories like that. But I sure appreciate you coming on and sharing that. Uh, being open about what you've done, what's worked, what hasn't worked.

So, uh, thank you so much for being here. It's, uh, been great having you on the.

Steve Guarracino: Thanks for the opportunity, Todd. I, I really appreciate it. And then, uh, you know, it's a great platform and, and, and you know, again, just another example of how we can get our message out. So thank you for the opportunity.

Todd Reed: Well, that was my conversation with Steve Guino, source market specialist at Cooper Lighting. You can connect with Steve and what they're working on by heading to the links in the show notes, including how to sign up for their online training, as well as how to get involved in their in-person training.

What stood out to me about my conversation with Steve was the similarities between Cooper, a very large company and his favorite local restaurant, a small family owned business, in that they both needed to change and adapt to survive. And three things seemed similar to me. One tough decisions needed to be made on new priorities quickly with [00:30:00] incomplete data.

Two, once those decisions were made, they learned new skills and moved forward learning from mistakes as they went. And three, they continue evolving as they moved, as they move out of crisis mode, and now have a better offering than they had before. If you enjoyed this episode, you can help us grow this show by leaving a five star rating in your favorite podcast player.

So thanks for listening to this episode of Keeping the Lights On. We'll see you next time.