BeadedStream: Erik Williams on Niche Markets, Team Building, and Manufacturing's Future!
Live with Alaska MEP
Join us for an insightful live interview with Erik Williams, COO of beadedstream.
Live Summary
Join Sami Jo Lewis from the Alaska MEP and eCommerce Evangelist for Manufacturers Curt Anderson - Founder of B2Btail as Erik Williams, the COO of beadedstream. He shares insights into why they chose to focus on its specific market niche and the unique challenges and opportunities it presents. Discover the secrets behind BeadedStream's exceptional team, as Erik discusses recruitment strategies and employee retention tactics that have set the company apart.
Gain exclusive insights into the company's vision, goals, and the exciting developments on the horizon. Don't miss this opportunity to learn from a visionary leader and discover the keys to success in the world of manufacturing. Tune in for a dynamic conversation that promises inspiration for entrepreneurs and industry enthusiasts alike!
Key Highlights
• Environmental data collection and monitoring. 0:04
• Recruitment and retention practices in manufacturing. 8:20
• Utilizing universities for recruitment and resources. 13:59
• Leveraging local manufacturing networks in Alaska. 14:51
• Temperature sensors for various industries and applications. 15:45
• Entrepreneurship, supply chain, and talent acquisition. 23:25
• Manufacturing and networking in Alaska. 24:25
Transcription
Sami Jo Lewis 00:04
Hi everybody. Happy Thursday. We're so excited. We have such a great interviewing today. So we're super excited to dive in and we hope you guys are all staying safe and warm. And all this crazy snow and weather we're having. Of course we've got our great friend Curt who's just living up in 60 degree weather in New York. How are you doing?
Curt Anderson 00:24
Well, you know, Sami Jo, like two weeks behind you. So you know, though I'm enjoying it today. I'm going to feel your pain in a matter of days. So, by Thanksgiving, we'll be sure to same weather. So Happy Thursday as as we would say Happy Friday Eve, you know, but we have a super exciting guest here today. So, EriK, happy Thursday. How are you?
Erik Williams 00:43
I'm doing great. Yeah, this I just heard that it's being called no school November than at home and it's been pretty wild. But a ton of fun playing with all this stuff that we just got cheap.
Curt Anderson 00:58
It's almost it's almost like COVID all over again. So but we have to you have a fascinating business model and just we're excited to dig in. I know people catching this live or watching this on replay are just gonna absolutely love this Sami Jo wants you let's dive into low intro. Erik. Let's kick things off. Give a little intro to yourself. And then and then Sam, it will kick it off with a lineup of questions that we have. Sure.
Erik Williams 01:21
Yeah. My name is Erik Williams was born and raised here in Alaska. Went to school here at UAA and graduated with mechanical engineering that I did a few years down in Denver. doing project management project controls consulting, got to work with a lot of big name companies. And then we were having kids so we came back up to Alaska which is the best place place to raise them and started working at beadedstream. Yeah, so my role here at BT stream is the chief operating officer so I'm responsible for all the product goes that goes out as well as all the people that helped build it.
Curt Anderson 02:01
Alright, Sammy, Jo, take it away, my friend. Perfect. No, thank
Sami Jo Lewis 02:05
you so much for joining us, Erik. And I cannot agree more Alaska is just the best place to raise kids. So super fun. I'm also Alaska born and raised. So I love that you ended up back here in Alaska. So um, tell us a little bit about beadedstream, how you got involved in that and how it kind of got started. And for those that don't know what betta stream is or what you do on the dailies and kind of dive in, excuse me for that.
Erik Williams 02:26
Yeah, sure. So our goal here at betta stream is to make it really easy to collect environmental data. So we do that by manufacturing cables, sensor cables. So this is temperature cable each one of these nodes is a temperature sensor. And we also manufacture needle loggers, satellite data loggers, so the customer will place their sensors where they need them. All they do is they plug in the cables and away they go with transmitting data. So some of the applications that we do, they're all across the board from monitoring wind turbine so they go up. This one specifically is for ice road. So if you've ever heard of Ice Road Truckers every year they have to build these ice roads up on the North Slope so that they can actually build all the infrastructure for oil and gas there. So we do a lot of the monitoring of those icy roads to make sure that they're safe and compliant to go out on and yeah, the history of beat extreme actually started up on the North Slope, doing kind of that same sort of thing. It started almost 20 years ago by our CEO, Brian Shoemaker. He was one of the geotechnical engineers that was kneeling down in the ground with thermistor cables, taking resistance measurements, and doing the conversions while his customer was standing right above them saying okay, what's the temperature? What's the temperature and they have to do all this offset calibration charts. You know, Brian sweat is dripping. There's got to be a better way to do this. So yeah, he helped sort of bring those temperature sensors into the digital age, and inventors the digital temperature cable that I just showed there. So the whole idea is, instead of having many different strands going down to each sensor, it's all on just one wire. So we can do up to 125 of these temperature cables on up to half a mile long of cable. fast forward through the years after he invented the temperature cable. We invented the satellite data logger because customers were like, We love having these cables but we still have to go out to them and they would love to just sit on their couches and see the data on their screens. And so that's where that sort of
Curt Anderson 04:56
So, Eric, how did this how did this come really come on your radar?
Erik Williams 05:02
Actually, I helped start the robotics club over at UAE and beat in Sweden was the first donor to that club. So they came in and presented. They're pretty much those kind of my goal to join them ever since college just seeing that it's like wow, this is so cool. There's a small company manufacturing in Alaska, and they're willing to support the community here. So it was really exciting.
Curt Anderson 05:29
Wow. So that's really that's multiple things right there. You know, like, you know, Sami Jo, we love talking about manufacturing and like Maine Alaska. And so this company just really resonated you as as a college student it just struck a chord in from the robotics club. You're like, Man, I want to work at this place, dude. Like, how did you how did you create that path of like, what a premonition to like, eventually, like, you know, walk us through that, like, how did that happen?
Erik Williams 05:54
Yeah, definitely. It's pretty funny. It all comes back to that Robotics Club because one of my friends that was a part of the club ended up working at BT at stream, and we were just chatting while I was down in Denver, and I was saying I wanted to go back up to Alaska. And he's like, Hey, maybe I can get you a job at Butte stream. So that's kind of where everything's awesome. Wow,
Curt Anderson 06:21
what a three gratulations it's like, you know, how many college kids actually end up at the top, you know, the place of employment that their dream? Their dream is? So how cool is that? So, see me Joe. Let's keep it rollin. What's what's next question?
Sami Jo Lewis 06:37
Yeah, so it sounds so I wanted to dive into like Why did no beat extreme decide to serve this particular market and sound like obviously, for those that might not know we kind of know like the restraints with the North Slope and like the need kind of the can you dive into why bhp really close the market and then also like, what kind of let it like it sounds like you know you are the results from you saw what they're doing, but like, why are you super passionate about what you're doing? Made? You want to also go out and surface market? Yeah,
Erik Williams 07:05
definitely art. So our products are designed specifically for the Arctic, which is one of the toughest places in the world, especially for our cables which go underneath the ground. So every year the permafrost grows and the rest of the ground freezes. And when it does that, it expands. And so when it expands, it typically rips like everything apart. And so we had to design a cable that has Kevlar in it and that smooth enough so that it doesn't also get ripped apart. Part of the the allure of it is engineering challenges, as well as also seeing that this arctic environment wasn't really being designed for by other engineering companies. Or myself. Oh, yeah. Go ahead. Please. Yeah, my name is Marta, because this is this is our home. And these are the industries that help provide all the economic activity that for Alaska, and actually for the world to so i want to see it be a bit more sustainable place and I love I love being able to do the manufacturing up here where you can actually meet the customers and they can kind of pick up the gear and look at what we're doing.
Curt Anderson 08:20
Better. So cool. So let's, let's go here for a little bit. So you mentioned the the visionary, the, you know, the brainchild of this wonderful company in 20 years ago, so I don't know Erik and Sami Jo, where you guys were 40 years ago, but Erik, can you share like do you know, how did his entrepreneurial journey start, like you said, like, we there was a problem that he had and so you know, we do these interviews all the time and time and time again, it's an entrepreneur that like they had a problem, they want to fix it for themselves. Somebody else like now all sudden their hobby turns into a business. And it's just such an inspirational story. So, you know, for folks out there that might be like, Hey, I'm solving a problem. I wouldn't mind kick started my entrepreneurial journey, dude, like Churchill would share what you know, and how Brian got this thing going? Yeah,
Erik Williams 09:06
definitely. I wasn't there. I was only 10 at a time and from what I've heard, it was exactly that he has his own problems online. And so he was still doing geotechnical engineering. But on the side after work, he was soldering together the instruments and the sensors to try and figure out a better way to do things. So it really started off in his own kitchen table with all this like scraps of gear, and then after a certain point you know, you start selling it to other people, they get interested in it and then it sort of becomes its own business. So yeah, we've beat it stream itself has lived in a lot of different places that we've had. We've grown but we're happily here on King Street now.
Curt Anderson 09:51
Great, great. We might get Brian on the shoulders it really dive into like his back, but thank you for sharing what what you know, and again, it's like so many entrepreneurs are like, Hey, here's a challenge. I'm gonna solve it and what resiliency for Brian and that bring it up, you know, to you know, connect with the college in now. You know what? multiple things that get involved with your local college because you attract wonderful talent, like they're so Sami Jo let's keep it rolling. What do you have next for us?
Sami Jo Lewis 10:18
Well, I feel like that's such a great segue into our next topic of discussions. We have EriK and he's working for betta stream and he was super excited. He connected with them in college, and we know that something that you guys do particularly well is recruitment and retention. And that's something that I feel like a lot of people especially right now have been like struggling with like last couple years is like getting the employees like driving them in and then keeping them happy so that there's change so can you talk to us a little bit about the YouTube streams like recruitment and retention practices and what keeps you you know, staying and excited to be there?
Erik Williams 10:54
Yeah, certainly. I think we have as we just certainly have these like core salaried people that are, we're retaining really, really well, but actually, it's kind of the opposite. For these technicians that we hire. We go out to the university and we'd say, Hey, would you like a part time job while you're in school, you can practice learning some of the engineering and understanding the manufacturing. And as they go through school, we sort of have them for a few years and then they now have the skills that they can go off and join Tesla, SpaceX, IBM, all of these big companies out there in the world. So we actually encourage their growth and we say you don't have to stay here forever. But the university is an amazing supply of super talented. So yeah, it's, it's very exciting to happen there.
Curt Anderson 11:47
Erik, we picked that up a couple of times, but I'd like to take it another step further. I just set up a meeting with a group of manufacturers the other day, and all of them are just really complaining heavy. About You know, retaining employees recruiting, getting good talent, and it sounds like you know, not necessarily that you guys have discovered a silver bullet, but you're living proof, the Revive stub just, you know, let's take it a little deeper on like, how are you building those relationships? And any suggestions or recommendations that you would add to other manufacturers and how they could have similar success, guys?
Erik Williams 12:21
Yeah, I think a big part of the success is hiring really, really talented people. And instead of focusing on we're just building these widgets, we're actually building the system itself and it goes right back to that one right there. We want to make it easy, and we don't just want to make it easy for our customers to deploy the systems. We also want to make it easy for ourselves to build them. So for instance, we're building out a line here that's going to bring automation more manufacturing to Anchorage. And building a sort of automation line is very difficult to technical, but it makes our lives a lot easier. I think, ultimately, for people to stay at a job they need to feel challenged, at least the people that I work with. So you need to continually say this is the thing that's going to be next for you. And these are the challenges that that you're going to have.
Curt Anderson 13:21
I love that. You know people say that time and time again, if they don't feel challenged, they don't feel accepted. They don't know like, you know, seek safety, you know, feeling safe in the workplace is critical. So I absolutely love that. He's like, how do you challenge in he also made another great point about automation. And sometimes when people hear automation, they're like, hey, you know, taking jobs, not really it's creating more jobs. It's creating more opportunity. In more sophisticated, more technical, educated jobs. And so just wonderful opportunities for young folks to get into manufacturing. So man, I love the direction you're going here. Sammy, Joe, what's next on our plate for today?
Sami Jo Lewis 13:58
Yeah, no, absolutely. And utilizing the university I think is definitely a key that I feel like a lot of people and they're looking for different, you know, ways that hey, we're looking for people, we're wanting to recruit people that they should really take advantage of because I mean, those students are very excited to keep learning and they're at the peak where it's almost kind of like, I mean, I remember being culture you can almost mold them and like Teach them the way that you want it. You know, they're not out there and done it and they want to do it their way that they're hungry and excited to learn and they're looking for summer opportunities or winter jobs just to get job throughout the semester. That's kind of really opened some doors for them. So I really glad that you brought that up, Eric, thank you for sharing. All right, so next one dive in. I know we're super honored and so happy to have been having relationship with you via the last scan up. Can you talk about some resources you have used or maybe if you haven't made it give some examples, others out there that it may be a benefit. So
Erik Williams 14:51
yeah, definitely. I think the most useful thing has been the network itself. So for instance, we've worked with Arc manufacturing services, Sam Sheppard there to help produce some of our molds and we love one of the difficult things about Alaska is the majority of it is actually out of the state. But if you can have someone local who can manufacture something in like a week turnaround, it's amazing and it cuts out all the shipping costs and then you also have people who can go to and who can come to you to understand your problems more deeply. There was also another networking event that it was for an industry that's totally adjacent to what we're doing it was like a nuclear thing, but it was just so fun. To understand, like, all the manufacturing that we have up here and all of these capabilities. So yeah, we're gonna hopefully be working with trajet on a project soon as well. Oh,
Curt Anderson 15:45
amazing. That's fantastic. And dear friend Samsung has been on a program we've done a livestream with them and I actually I took a tour of this facility before so you know, I, I love how you're talking about the infrastructure supply chain of taking advantage of local manufacturers in Alaska. Let's let's take that a little bit deeper. Eric, you know, like, when you guys have a challenge problem, like what are some of the first things that you turn to or go to as far as like finding a bodies supplier like, like Samsung?
Erik Williams 16:17
Yeah. It's, it's pretty difficult for a lot of things, especially like in the electronics industry that we're in because there really is is nothing up here. There's literally zero electronic manufacturers that can make a pain CPA. But what we've found is that there's all this other stuff too. There's a ton of people that do have experience with these industries. And so it's more about bringing experience into the equation.
Curt Anderson 16:51
If you mentioned PCB, so are you manufacturing your own circuit boards in house?
Erik Williams 16:56
We are doing all of that down in Seattle. They are robots that do the pick and place machines. There's there's over 365 parts. And yeah, yeah, and so we get the boards manufacturer down in Seattle. The classes done somewhere in the Midwest, the boards or the shelves in the Midwest and everything comes here for final assembly and everything together and do the testing. We wish we wish we could do more of that here
Curt Anderson 17:25
Yeah, that's the thing is like you know, like you know, so many American manufacturers are you know, the thing is I love the consciousness we're before you know like again like I'm much older than you guys but you know like the big you know, like, push was like a we need to go to you know, overseas, we need to find cheaper countries we need to find cheaper labor alternatives. Now, there's a huge, huge push, you know, there's a renaissance in appreciation of American manufacturing, like, hey, let's do what we can do here first, as opposed to looking overseas. And so I love what you're doing, Erik because I, I didn't hear any any parts coming from abroad, where you're like, hey, we're doing this in Seattle. We're doing this in the Midwest. We're getting this from the Midwest. We're doing this with Sam and Arctic. So like, you guys are consciously doing what you can to keep it here in the States. So kudos to for that one. Before we move forward Sami Jo we have a little bit of time, I'd love to dig into I like this. This product is new to me. Can you share with folks like who is your customer? Who are you using? Let's go through like a little bit like a marketing and sales process. And by the way, guys, you're catching this. Check out their website. Their website is fantastic. It is a great website, video, tons of information, but Erik just a little bit who is using your product? Who is your target that you're going after?
Erik Williams 18:37
Sure. One thing that's pretty cool about temperature is it's really useful in all sorts of different applications. So we find ourselves in many, many, many different industries. One of the cool ones is we're actually in a hydroelectric dam that's in British Columbia. We're going all through the dam instrumenting it so that they can see if there's water that's flowing through the dam to know if there's a leak that's in it. Another one is wind turbines that are built on permafrost if that permafrost starts melting that wind turbine just kind of fall over with a light breeze. And so they need to actively and passively cool that ground and keep it frozen. But how do you know how to do that or when to do that? If you don't monitor the temperature for it. Another one is ground freezing. So the a lot of the projects that they do are they have those tunnel boring machines that go underneath the ground. They have to actually freeze the ground in places so that it doesn't fall down on him. And so they'll use our cables down in these freezing loops to freeze the ground and make sure that they're not making too much energy freezing too much. Because it takes a ton of energy to do that. I could go on and on about those applications.
Curt Anderson 19:58
Please do please. Yeah, give us a couple more. That'd be great.
Erik Williams 20:03
There's a really, really cool project. We work with a uranium mine up in northern Canada. Yeah, we also are doing ground freezing, but they're going super super deep in the ground. So we actually put our cables into this stainless steel conduit that's a quarter mile long and we have to go out to the raceway and Palmer in order to load it and it's it's absolutely just wild the scale of this and so yeah, they they're also freezing the ground to sort of make it more structural as well. And we've been involved in so many different countries. Antarctica, Greenland. We have buoys that are in San Francisco Bay. Who is in lakes all across Alaska. Yeah, it's pretty wild. There's even like a net zero home that someone was built in Florida and they wanted to dump the heat into the ground passively. Still, they were using our temperature sensors to help know when to turn on and off that system. But
Curt Anderson 21:09
I love that same job one line that we always love to use, the riches are in the niches and man what a wonderful niche that this effort so kudos to you guys. I know Sammy Jo was started coming in time want you to take us home with our last
Sami Jo Lewis 21:24
question I just had. I also want to dive into so you guys are just like so spread out and you guys touched so many different areas. And your guys are like a smaller like we talked about you know, manufacturing local company in Alaska. How big is the team at Viva St. Everyone's kind of gauge?
Erik Williams 21:41
Yeah, it's it's always training. We're always growing and people are moving on to better things in their lives. So I'd say we're about 35 people right now. 45
Curt Anderson 21:50
Yeah, we will we will we will say better things are moving to different. What's better than being in St. So
Sami Jo Lewis 22:01
no, no, and that is amazing. So I just wanted to like really paint a picture for those that are listening. That's you know, this is a local last company and like, look at all the different areas as we're touching. So that is fantastic. So the last question I love to end up with is what are you most excited about with the future of data stream?
Erik Williams 22:20
So, we've been collecting data this past couple of decades, sort of building this repository. And providing this for customers. One thing that we're seeing is the customers want more out of the data that they have. So we're actually working with a couple of oil companies right now who are interested in Hey, how can we take this data that we've been gathering over the years and actually forecast into the future to see what's happening? So we've developed a small machine learning team that takes that data and we're doing a 30 day forecast so that they can see when the conditions they need are going to hit so that they can do the activities that they need to do. So I'm really interested in that because at the end of the day, that data to tell you some sort of insight, and so we're now helping customers get to deeper and deeper insights from the exact same sensors and data loggers that they were using before and that's also helping drive our hardware sales as well
Curt Anderson 23:25
What an impressive business and so, you know, multiple takeaways for us. So first off, I want to thank give a huge thank you I know you're super busy for taking the time to join us insurance thing going on, but we talked today let's recap a few things made in Alaska. Oh good is that the supply chain? You guys are working relentlessly to keep things here in the States and just you know, you really hit that hard. Working really relentlessly with your local university. You know, like, you know, whether it's a local community college I don't care how rural you are, where you're located, connect with that local university to find that great talent and to take your coffee to the next level, relentless entrepreneurship, you know, just having that vision and just, you know, in having the courage be like, boy, not only is there a problem that I figured out, and I can solve, I think there might be other people that might have this problem, and maybe they'll pay me to do so. So, I mean, we've covered a lot of juicy stuff here today and this is just a wonderful steamy job takeaways, what were some highlights for you? What do you think?
Sami Jo Lewis 24:24
I'm just super excited about the future via stream and like, you guys are growing like you just said, You guys are always constantly growing and that is amazing to hear from an Alaskan manufacturer that I know that I mean, the last few years it's been really crazy and there's obviously been so many lows, but the fact that you're going to be here and be live and be like, Oh, we're just constantly growing our team is like changing getting bigger. We're diving into all these things. I think that is just super exciting. And I'm sure a lot of people love hearing that. You know if they're out there being like I really have you know, like Kurt was saying, you know, I have a problem. So I'll be like, Can I do it? Like, it's just proof that you absolutely can be friends in the networking opportunities that we've helped facilitate. And it's really cool because I think that like you said, you don't connect with some people and some people are in completely different industries but just eye opening like there is manufacturers in Alaska, and they're making really, really cool things. So thank you so much for taking the time to be on here and share this with us. I really appreciate it.
Erik Williams 25:20
Yeah, thank you both so much. Nice to meet you, Curt. I hope you get some more snow there.
Curt Anderson 25:27
I'll be touching up to and so before we let you go Erik, where can people get a hold of you? We've got beaten stream.com Are you guys on social or like what would be the best way to learn more about what these how you guys are making the world a better place? How can people find you? Yeah, I
Erik Williams 25:42
would say LinkedIn is probably the biggest one for us. We are posting probably weekly. Interesting things you can do with temperature data. A little bit more about the Machine Learning stuff. So yeah,
Curt Anderson 25:56
awesome. Guys. Connect with Eric ok LinkedIn can also website Yeah, please
Erik Williams 26:02
come visit us. We're here to come tour our facility.
Curt Anderson 26:06
How you know what, Erik next time I'm there, dude, I'm taking you up on that first shirt. So well, I just want to give a huge huge thank you for anybody touching this our program today. Erik, thank you for just you know, sharing just what an inspiration you are. This is just absolutely wonderful. Sami Jo, take us home. Well you
Sami Jo Lewis 26:29
thank you so much. It's been great being able to connect with you again and catch up Erik. As always, thank you so much, Curt and please stay tuned. We'll be sharing this on our social media and stay tuned. We do these every other Thursday. So in two weeks, you can catch another great interview again. Happy Thursday everyone. Thank you