A brief Story of my career

Most of my life personally or work/career wise happened not by design or my strategic plan in the details

I planned on being a power engineer at the electric utility company and becoming an engineering manager over a team of power engineering building transmission lines and substations. I trained for that in a work study program in college with Gulf States Utilities over 2 years.. Because of a hobby called amateur radio and practicing Morse code transmission on my lunch hour in Lake Charles Louisiana, my future boss when I graduated saw me doing that. On graduation, he ‘stole’ me from the transmission engineering manager to run a microwave radio and tower replacement project that covered 250 substations and 400 miles of coastline areas of Texas and Louisiana. That started my decades long career into Telecommunications. Practicing Morse code and working harder than anyone else around me, constant learning, being a solution to every problem that I encountered is what landed me that opportunity.

I planned on starting and retiring from the power company (great benefits, retirement, 401K etc). The merger started in 1992 and was to close in early 1994. I exited due to culture differences in companies in mid 1993 and landed at a consulting company and started rebuilding microwave systems for pipelines. Not in my original plan.

As a result of doing this work, I started a consulting company intending to work for Oil and Gas companies in Telecom and Scada. After a couple of years of work, in 1997 I was invited to do a project for an electric co-op in East Texas. That grew to a multi-state consulting project list with dozens of Co-ops over the next 22 years and a couple of overseas projects. Again – not in my original plan. But very beneficial to me in work and personally.

In 2014 I was offered a position at the electric co-op that started the journey in 1997. In 2019 I was offered a position to be CTO of 11 co-op G&T. at the beginning of the pandemic, I again entered the consulting market solo. none of this was primary to my plan.

While at the co-op between 2015 and 2019, I hired these guys known as Skyhelm to help me with Telecom projects. One of these guys was Ryan Jenkins.

The unplanned path from practicing Morse code at age 19 to now being part of the startup known as ElektraFi was not part of my original primary plan.

The simple things you do and enjoy can result in a lifetime of good fortune.

I see now the most important thing I focused on during this journey was working hard, continuous improvement, and being a person with a solutions vision for any problem presented.

I say this to illustrate that my detailed plans often do not work out the way I envisioned. Find a path that feels right and you can enjoy and the work will lead you where you need to go with a good positive focus.

Spring 1983 —- as communications engineer,
Hargrove oversees the engineering
efforts and construction efforts begun
last year to upgrade the microwave
network to specifications effective in
1985. By the end of 1984, his work will
help increase the system’s capacity to
2880 channels and provide two separate
parallel communication routes to each
division for more dependable service.