Attending Industry Events Increases Professional Growth, w/ Brandon Peters

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Hello, here's another special episode of Automation Ladies.

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We're recording here, not live, but recording at Automate 2024, mccormick Place in Chicago.

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This is the last day.

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On the Thursday we're having a Starbucks and a sandwich here before we hit the keynote and we're catching up with Brandon Peters, the CEO of Shockwave Automation and, very excitingly, one of our speakers at the coming up conference, ot Skatecon, that we have going in Houston, texas, july 25th through 26th, hosted at the Phoenix Contact Customer Technology Center.

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And if you're listening to this and you don't yet know about OT Skatecon, you can see all the details at automationladiesio slash OTSkateCon.

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So yeah, good morning, brandon.

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How are you Yourself?

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It's day three, so I'm all talked out.

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I'm kind of glad that you'll be doing most of the talking, hopefully, in this episode, although every time I say I won't talk I still do.

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So we'll start.

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This is going to be a little special, short episode, similar to what we did at A3 Forum earlier this year with Kathy and Lauren, where I just sat down in a corner of the hotel.

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We are actually sitting outside of a closed Starbucks in a FedEx office, here on a couch at least not on the floor, in a corner somewhere.

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Hopefully it'll stay relatively quiet until we hit the keynote.

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But this will be a little special episode.

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I really wanted to catch up with Brandon A to hear his story, but we'll keep it brief and then get his perspective on what he saw at Automate.

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Is this your first time coming to Automate, brandon?

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You betcha.

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Okay, very cool.

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So we get a first-timer's perspective.

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So I guess I'll start out with our usual first question.

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Brandon, if you could introduce yourself a bit to our audience and tell us what you do and how the heck you came to be doing it?

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Yeah, so I'm Brandon Peters, CEO of Shockwave Automation, so I guess I started back doing automation back in 2015, 2016.

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Kind of uprooted my family to move to northern Alberta to get some work experience with a, I guess, fellow networking peer.

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That's kind of just.

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What were you doing before that?

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What I was doing before that was instrumentation technology and mechatronics.

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Okay, so that's kind of how I got into the technology side of things Through college.

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I always, instead of going out and partying, I was just mostly hanging out with the professors after building labs and doing everything, because I mean, at the time, instrumentation is my instrumentation technology, it it's a little bit different in Canada.

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It's not.

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It's not an actual like engineering degree, it's more of like an apprenticeship style.

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Apprenticeship style, yeah, exactly so.

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Um, we had a young family at the time when I was going through school, so my wife was expecting our second and so everybody else who was in college partying, doing whatever.

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I was pretty much stuck to focusing on family life, saving money and, you know, just really trying to make the most of it.

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So I feel like that kind of, I guess, maybe catapulted my path to where I am now.

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So, yeah, and when did you go out on your own as Shockwave Automation?

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Yeah, so we started back in October, I guess 2023.

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I've been doing various projects from mining, oil and gas, been subcontracting with some other integrators just to fill the gap with some of my spare time and, yeah, no, it's been probably one of the best decisions I've ever made.

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Everybody's always like, oh, why do you do these conventions, why do you do these shows?

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And everybody's always like, oh, why do you do these conventions, why do you do these shows?

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And one of the things that I always struggled to get was that buy-in and that support for doing these type of conventions.

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From other people.

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What's that, Fran?

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You said you didn't get buy-in from other people.

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Yeah, usually everybody's like oh well, what's our return on investment for you?

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Going to automate or going to oh, when you were employed.

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So your employers.

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So what was kind of what's our rate of return of investment on you going to these shows?

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And sometimes it's really hard to prove that right, Especially when.

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If you're not sales.

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Yeah, exactly, and when the people, when those other people aren't with you, your employers, your higher-ups aren't with you and they don't see that community that you're building and that network brand that you're essentially building for the company and yourself, sometimes it's hard to really, I guess, quantify that, except for, maybe, your social following, but that doesn't really prove to generate any revenue, usually for people, which is what most people are typically trying to gain from these types of shows, right?

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So, whether you actually have a lead or there's no leads, I still feel like it's extremely beneficial just getting out there, having people know your presence in the industry and putting a face to your name.

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Would you say that also, it brings a little bit of credibility, or more credibility, when you go to customers right, you can talk about things you saw, people you met, upcoming, you know new trends, new technologies.

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Absolutely Like.

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I think that it's nice for, especially when you're active on social media and you have, I guess, a bigger following and your clients are seeing you actively involved in, like you said, developing technologies, I feel like there's a little bit more, I guess, trust with the integrators that they work with when they see that, because they know that they're always after the best interests and going after the latest things that are coming.

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Obviously, you want to stay focused in your niche or focused in the industry that you're providing the solution for, but it's still nice to see what every other industry is doing in that aspect.

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I know for us.

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So we did an interview a couple of days ago at Harding with someone that's really actively involved in the standard setting for single pair Ethernet and like.

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Those types of connections I think are great for when you do have, you know, a need or you end up working with that technology kind of knowing some people that have been developing it.

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I think it gives a sense of you also always always have a huge bench to call on, right, even if you're not a large company.

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So has that I guess that emphasis changed since you went out on your own?

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Now that you can choose to do this, do you think that you would send your employees to shows when you get bigger?

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Yeah, 100%, absolutely.

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It's definitely something you need as an engagement level and people's buy-in in your brand and I keep going back to your brand because that's essentially the biggest thing that's going just work your people, work your people.

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But if there's nothing that they get in return from it and there's no cultural aspect to the environment, people are just going to end up leaving and that success that you've built with those people eventually is going to deteriorate and you're going to have to start from scratch and you can just get into the cyclical cycle of not.

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It'll be like a downturn, self-explosion, essentially.

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I totally agree with you, but how do you know that?

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How do I?

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Well, I've been through it a couple of times, but I mean, it's one of those things it's more exhausting to fight for people to stay with you than it is to give them the things that they need to be successful and enjoy what they're doing.

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Because, like I said, if you're not keeping people engaged, you're not involving people with your advancements, people lose interest, they lose track and they themselves get in this cycle of I don't want to be here.

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They start looking for something new, and then you've got five big projects on the go and then everybody leaves.

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Yeah, and I think sometimes smaller companies as well they lose sight of the fact that they do have to try to provide education and career advancement opportunities to their people.

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Not to say that people don't care, but oftentimes you're just so in the grind right, and I've experienced this myself.

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I was really good at what I was doing and I got to know it well and I got to train other people at it, and so, even though I wanted to change or advance, I wanted to move into another department.

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The company didn't want me to because I was so good at what I already did, which is good for some types of people.

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But for people that are actually ambitious and like to learn, that basically will eventually make that person leave because they're no longer growing.

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We actually met somebody at the manufacturing happy hour party, in which we also met your wife she's awesome, by the way that made it here to automate, but she said that she had to fight pretty hard for her employer to understand that there's value in coming to something like this and she's not sure that if she'll be able to make it next year because Detroit's a little further from where she is, but I can tell that you know, for her that's definitely a negative of her employment situation is that she feels a little bit hampered and the fact that they don't see the value of her growing her knowledge and her network.

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But I think that's a conversation a lot of people are having now or thoughts right, how do we accommodate people that have this drive to have a personal brand or have their own connections and learn things independently, outside of the training that's offered by the company?

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But all in all, I mean I'm only seeing the companies that allow that, that have more visible people out.

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There are growing and then there are some.

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Yeah, the feast or famine for integrators is certainly real, and so having a network to call on for subcontract work when you're slow, or being able to put your people on somebody's project for a little while.

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I know James Dean at Appalachian Automation.

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He's been very successful.

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He's grown the company.

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He has a lot of steady work coming up but a big contract.

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But for a couple months he was like hey, my guys are free, and if he didn't have that network, I don't know that that would be going so well in terms of having to float everybody's payroll while having a big project coming up.

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Yeah, definitely be a huge overhead expense, and that's the other thing.

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Like you said, the integration it's a cutthroat industry.

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Whether you're on the E&I side, engineering side, it's usually typically raised to the bottom a lot of the time.

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But then you get into these situations and these rescue situations.

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You come in into a client site and you see what they've been given or what's been integrated and then you're spending the next six months trying to clean it up too.

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But it's definitely definitely good to have a good path forward and plan in place and having that network to call on, like you said, because I mean it's sometimes you can go four years with having steady work and then you have six months of downtime that you need to cover on overhead costs or you're starting to pay your people full time without having any billable work, like it's definitely something that you need to always stay on top of and kind of have coming down the pipe.

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Speaking of networking, I know I was also going to ask you, if we have time, what cool things you've seen here at Automate, but you are one of the speakers at our upcoming conference and the reason that Allie came up with this conference and maybe she'll clarify she really wants to enable this networking and a part of it was we attended a training at TraceRoute in Dallas.

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It was a two-day training class, but the way that Josh structured it, it was so valuable, not just for the training but also for the networking with the other people that were coming to be trained on this very specific topic.

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So OT Skatecon is lots more topics, but the idea really is to have people that work on those different areas of OT and IT technologies with practical experience to be able to come give some tips and tricks, some training, some information, some resources.

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And then really, I think a huge part of the resource is the speaker right Access to meeting, networking with and getting a community with the speakers as well as other attendees.

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And, inadvertently, I think, we started a little mini community of the speakers with our little VIP speaker chat on WhatsApp, which came up this morning.

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It has amazed me how you guys started networking and sharing ideas and asking each other for help on projects or tips, the resource sharing, I mean, that stuff is real.

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Can you speak a little bit about that?

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And are you excited about OT Skate at Con?

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And, if so, what excites you the most?

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I think Courtney kind of said it the best.

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She said it's our dysfunctional family reunion and I think that really hits a home run to describing the group and everybody in it, and I think you'd get that.

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Anywhere you go in the automation industry and the people that you meet, I feel like everybody's on the same level as everybody in that group chat.

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No, definitely looking forward to the OT Skatecon and, like you said, bringing out everybody as practical experience together to present on multiple topics.

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I feel like everybody's going to get a heck of a lot more out of two days than you would, I guess, walking a trade show floor or, I guess, doing a LinkedIn learning content.

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I mean, you're going to get more from that one-on-one interaction with the people and, yeah, I feel like you're going to see a lot more lessons learned and a lot more, I guess, candid feedback on what's actually happening in industry and the best practice.

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People are doing software.

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People are using hardware components to fill in solution gaps, so I think it'll be really good to see those people all in one spot.

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And it's a group of people.

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Yeah, it's a group of people and we can check each other.

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Yeah, and we do yeah.

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So yeah, that's the other thing I'm a little bit worried about.

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Everybody's going to fact check my presentations probably right Check my presentations probably right, we're going to fact check each other.

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It'll be good.

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Yeah, we can veto things.

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We can vote, it'll be a democracy.

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At least we won't be tearing down your panel design in public on a LinkedIn post.

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That's all good.

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That's always good, every once in a while especially if it's somebody that you never kind of batted heads with or went up against in the long run, against the project, and they won the bid and you lost it.

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So it was good to throw a couple of jabs in there when you did I'm just kidding, not me.

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So you came up with ot skater con.

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This is your idea.

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What drove you to kind of it was.

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It was definitely, highly.

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Basically, I came up with it in the middle of trace root con, trace root trace route, so the middle of josh's training.

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I was like this is amazing and I need to make this, you know, something that isn't just about networking, and I guess I went too far.

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But the other thing that I learned, you know, is that I don't know how Josh did it, but he talked for two days straight and one of the things I knew immediately was that I can't do that and so and I can't, I can't even keep attention more than 30 minutes on one topic anyway, and so that's kind of how I came up with and that is how Allie came up with the 23, now turned into, I believe, 26 different topics, 30 minute sessions.

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Maybe 25 minute sessions at this point Because, yeah, I think all of us, especially in this industry, have attended some training classes that weren't exactly designed to keep your imagination, keep your attention.

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Either you know, training material can be dry, and then there's certain people that you know that really can inspire and keep your attention while training, and then others I've talked to people recently about.

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There's a lot of training opportunity out there, but not everybody is cut out to be a trainer.

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To be really effective, it takes both the product knowledge, the application knowledge and the ability to talk to people, keep their attention, keep them entertained.

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As much as I would love to pretend otherwise, I think most of us nowadays the attention spans are getting shorter, the younger kids more so, but even us adults there's just way too much to pay attention to at all times, so much going on in our businesses, in our lives.

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So I find that when I learn technical information, if I can recall it with a then personal connection, tie it to a story, something that I felt at the same time as I was learning.

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That really helps with the retention.

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And when you go to a two-day training, you get a lot of information dumped at you all at once and then you may not be able to go and implement it practically for a while and typically that information kind of recedes over time if you don't use it right.

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Which is why we thought, hey, let's make these short topics and then give you lots of resources so that when this comes up later, if it comes up in your work or a colleague asks you right, you can kind of recall some of the information but then also recall where you should go to get that and get more details and who to call if you have a question.

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Right, and what I love about so far, the speaker lineup and we've met a couple people, both in Nashville last week and here at Automate, that are dying to come and, you know, be a part of it and speak.

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So we'll probably be announcing a couple more speakers before we close the doors in the next few weeks.

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But these are people that are really passionate about sharing their knowledge.

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So something that you mentioned earlier too about companies, they kind of sometimes want to keep things close to the vest.

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Obviously, a lot of us can't talk too many specifics about certain projects, but I think we can really all share with each other, especially things like lessons learned, right?

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So vendors have tons of great information to share about the technology they're making, how it should work, how it works under ideal conditions.

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You come to great shows like this at Automate and somebody has spent all weekend putting a demo together and making sure that it works and it does the thing that it's supposed to do, and they still don't always work, which is why most of us, I think, are sometimes skeptical if demos are real or if they've been kind of programmed to look real, because real-life situations generally don't go as smoothly as the installation manual tells you it will, and especially if it's an integrated system of lots of things right.

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So I have just the greatest respect for everybody that's coming to speak at ot skater con because they're willing to share, you know, the real life examples, things they've learned from their failures, right, tips and tricks like lessons learned, and those are things that I think our industry could do a better job of in general sharing not just the successes but how we're working through things so that we can all have more success.

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So we are actually heading to the keynote here on the third day, intrinsic is speaking about AI.

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They're an NVIDIA partner and I'm pretty excited to keep learning more about that stuff because it is starting to creep into practical applications, just like some of the tech that's single-pair Ethernet we've talked about.

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It's not a new technology, it's five years old, but it's finally getting to a point where people trust it.

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They know where it belongs.

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They're looking for common standards and I think a lot of the AI applications we're seeing now are.

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You know.

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People are asking how does it work?

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What does it do?

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How can I use it?

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In this conference and then maybe two or three conferences down the road.

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It'll all be about which one's right for me, which one fits my application.

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So I'm not necessarily looking at AI to hype it right now for any practical use, although it does have practical use cases that have been tested over a decade.

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But a lot of the new stuff we want to follow to see when and where does it make sense to actually give it a shot, or to see if our customers are, if they come asking.

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We want to know what the heck is up right.

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Gotcha come asking.

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We want to know what the heck is up right, gotcha, and on some of the things that are coming down the pipe, I feel like they're pretty constructive tools for not only companies but the employees to utilize.

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Um, we're looking at ways to tie in to the production side of things so that the operations they got conversion, that's that they want to calculate, or if they've got different production throughputs that they want to kind of model out or I guess, just do some basic math on the fly for for their day-to-day activities in their plant or their manufacturing facility.

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I feel like it'll really tie into the ics level pretty tightly.

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And then I guess, just on the cyber security side of things, with I, I feel like we'll start to see a lot more proprietary, standalone artificial intelligence deployments of not necessarily the touch, the web interface, but it's more of a company repository of integrators to kind of dive into.

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And I feel like it's going to open the doors for a lot of different opportunities that we never had access to before Stuff like model, predictive control and process modeling.

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Typically you'd see these softwares that are hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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But now, with the AI technologies and data modeling sets that you can build with.

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You can build your own solutions for a quarter of the price, right, so it's definitely something that's very interesting.

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It's something that I'll be working with a couple people out of California and Canada on Talk a little bit more on that at a different time, but there's definitely some cool, very cool data modeling, predictive control stuff that's coming down the pipe, so pretty excited about that.

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That'll be really interesting.

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I'll be talking a bit more.

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I had a great conversation with a person in the AI side from NVIDIA yesterday, alvin, who's a senior AI engineer there, and we talked a lot about like robotics applications and vision applications and things like that, which you know I've always found interesting but now touch a lot more of the process side, and even those are applications that are less visible to the common world.

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I guess Robots look cool and everybody's been talking about them and seeing them, but process mixing and all these other things process automation this is stuff that the public doesn't think about as much.

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There's no flashy Elon Musk conferences about AI in that, but we did talk a bit about you know they're really wanting to come in as a community player, provide microservices and structures that systems integrators can take to build proprietary applications or things that you know they know that their customers will need.

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So I think it's also pretty exciting as the world evolves.

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The distributor, systems integrator, oem those lines have been blurring for a long time and for many, I think, systems integrators, with the availability of something like AI, you can really almost turn into an OEM of sorts right, having some standard processes or products that you've built that you can sell to multiple customers and customize and integrate, and that can maybe help some of these companies have a better way to weather the ups and downs.

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But then really, this network networking and having a strong network of people that are involved in the industry, that are learning, like you are, I think it really just multiplies your effectiveness, your value in the industry, because it's not just you now and what you know, but it's everybody that you know that is willing to share and work with you.

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So with that, I think we have to get going.

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We will do another episode with some of the more of the OT SkateCon speakers and probably one where we actually discuss.

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I'd love to pull some few people together and talk about what the heck are you doing with AI, if anything From a practical actually on the ground?

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We are doing this perspective right.

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The vendors talk so much about the future promise and we think that's great and we'll go to a keynote now and see all kinds of stuff.

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But then there's also kind of like, well, the proof is in the pudding, right.

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What are you guys doing?

00:22:27.541 --> 00:22:29.686
So thank you so much for joining us, brandon.

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Check out automationladiesio slash ot skate con.

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We will be putting guest profiles up for all of the speakers there as well, so Brandon will have a profile with links to his business and any other kind of resources that he wants to put out there.

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Make sure to follow him on LinkedIn.

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That's also where he's probably most active.

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So thank you, guys.

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Cheers from Automate.

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And if you're not here and you didn't get a chance to see all the stuff, there will be more conferences coming up later this year, but Automate 2025 will be in.