Jordan didn’t start in “dust control.” He started investigating fires and failures—then moved into product safety testing at UL—before joining SonicAire 15 years ago to help prevent combustible dust problems before they start. In this episode of OnAire, Jordan shares how SonicAire grew from a small team into a culture-first company built to help customers protect people, improve safety, and keep production moving.
If you’re asking questions like:
- “Can a fan really help with dust in a grain elevator?”
- “How do we grow without losing our culture?”
- “What does real safety leadership look like?”
…this episode is for you.
Episode Transcript:
All right, everybody. Yes, this is kind of weird; I’m in the wrong chair. But welcome back to another episode of OnAire. I’m Taylor.
And I’m Jordan.
And you might be wondering–I was a little bit when I walked in here–why we’ve changed chairs. But today we have a super special episode where we’re going to be talking about Jordan.
Do I need to leave the room so you can say all the things?
He’s in the green room, don’t look. It’s a secret; he’s in the green room getting his hair done and all that stuff. We’ve got to get the makeup out. But no, Jordan is our president and owner of the company, which is a new little bit of a title change. But we’ll get into that more and more as we go along. So, welcome back.
Thanks. Yeah, it’s good to be here. Thanks for having me on the show today.
I know, it’s going to be a little uncomfortable. I got to turn a different way. Got a different leg across and all that. But yeah, we’re going to talk about your story a little bit. When we kicked this off, we talked about when I got here. And it was about time, now that you own the place, too, we got to figure out who you are, what you do and what you don’t do.
I know. I feel like I’ve been here forever. Staple.
So, let’s hear it. When you came out of the womb, your first word was dust, and you were super excited about all things engineering, right?
That’s it. No, no, not far off. Not too far off. It was a different kind of dust back then. You and I have talked about our paths and how they’ve crossed and come back together and stuff, and how we both grew up in Reidsville, North Carolina. All roads lead to Reidsville. I grew up there in a small farming community, you could say. And so, my dad had a real affinity for agriculture and machines. He would restore antique tractors and our shed in the backyard. And so, I grew up with grease under my fingernails, handing him wrenches from the time I could read numbers. That’s where the mechanics piece, the mechanical engineering piece started. All things machines, all things with an engine, tires, made smoke, loud noises. That was the kind of dirt I was into back then. And that’s kind of how the engineering piece I think got started.
And it wasn’t just any tractors. They were antiques.
Absolutely. The old stuff. The really old stuff. You couldn’t always find parts. You had to make parts and grind and weld and cut and do what you can to get it running again and then turn it into, really, a showpiece almost.
Yeah. And I mean, he was a part of those associations. And so, you grew up around all that. Just a bunch of men that were super into figuring it out.
Antique tractor club. Yeah. And what they called hit and miss engines. The closest thing to a hit and miss engine you’ll see today is like on an oil well or something like that. There’s a lot of them still out there running today. But yeah, these guys were my heroes. Like, my dad and his friends, they were all blue collar guys. They could fix anything. It didn’t matter what it was. If it’s broken, they didn’t call for help. They didn’t call a plumber. They didn’t call an electrician. They didn’t call a welder. They figured out how to do these things with their hands and they just did it and made it happen. And so, those were my heroes. I wanted to learn what they knew and what their experience was and how to make it happen.
Yeah. Definitely a different generation. I can barely turn the lights on without going to ChatGPT anymore. You know, we all have our struggles and, you know, some of it is we’ve got to ask ChatGPT for help.
Yeah. Should we talk about hanging doors again?
Well, you know, I probably should have used ChatGPT more for that. The cold weather has now adjusted some of them and so I have to go back and make a few more tweaks, but that’s neither here nor there. But I mean, to some extent, if we zoom in, zoom out a lot through this conversation, that was a little bit of your first experience with dust, because your dad was on the tobacco side of things.
Yeah, that’s right. So, my grandfather and my dad both worked in a cigarette factory. And they were fixers and sheet metal fabricators. And there were days my dad would come home absolutely covered in tobacco dust. And so, it was common in our house that you would smell it, you would be around it, you would see it. He would come home and there were days he would say, oh, we had a shoe clogged up today or whatever. And he would just come head to toe covered in tobacco dust. And so, at that point, I had no idea what that even meant hardly. I knew that was a product that went into a cigarette, but that’s about as far as it went for me at that time growing up.
Yeah. When we talk about Reidsville being a farming community, it’s true and false where it was farming, but it was mostly farming tobacco. You know, we were one of those little hubs who had quite a few factories in the towns. A lot of the housing communities are built around these factories. You can just tell that this is what happened way back when. And then even today, it’s still one of the number one exports, if you will, for our town is getting all these tobacco leaves up. I think probably every kid, at least my age or older, spent at least one summer where they went and picked tobacco leaves at some point.
They pulled tobacco. You pick cotton, you pull tobacco.
Yeah, that’s true. It’s true. But anyways, so you have this mindset of fixing things and that carries through middle, high school and the end of college.
Yeah. Had phenomenal high school teachers and like the vocational track, Mr. Atkins taught me all the things about ag mechanics and electricity and welding and all of those aspects. Mr. Wheeler taught me the auto mechanics piece of it. And so again, it was still leading down that mechanical road. And thinking about the next steps for that. I did okay in high school, made pretty decent grades there. And so, it was like, okay, if I’m going to go down the college path, it’s got to be something around machines or something like that. Where can I go? What degree starts with the word mechanic, mechanical something, machinery, something around that. And so, yeah, next thing you know, I’m at NC State working on an engineering degree.
But before you got there, you were a pretty renowned FFAer.
Oh yeah. Yeah. I had my days in the FFA. That was a lot of fun. I was on a part of a land judging team where you would go out and dig in the dirt and you would tell about the soil qualities and things like that. I was on an ag mechanics team where we went and competed at some competitions about machine design and things like that. And then also did the truck driving competition.
I was going to say you’re like a pro truck-backer-upper.
Yeah. That was a lot of fun. And my wife gives me crap about it all the time now. She’s like, why do you have this stupid trophy? I’m like, to prove to you that I can drive a truck.
Yeah. I can back up my truck, and I don’t even need the camera.
That’s right. That’s right. Just some mirrors. Don’t even have to look around over my shoulder. Yeah. Won like a regional championship thing. I went to the state competition, which was a lot of fun.
Hey, not everybody can say that.
That’s true. My little trophy on the shelf.
So, you pick mechanical engineering, head off to NC State. What was education like? Was it…
Hard.
I mean, I wasn’t going to come out and say it.
No, it was tough, man. It was a tough road. And so, to be honest, I have to probably credit my wife for getting through that. So, I met her there my freshman year. And I had this fallback plan of welding. If the engineering thing didn’t work. And so, my freshman year, things started to get a lot tougher. And when I met her, she said, “What are you studying? I said, “Oh, mechanical engineering.” She goes, “Oh, my dad’s an engineer. My brother’s an engineer. My uncle’s an engineer. My grandpa was basically an engineer.” And I went, “Oh, crap. If I want to hang out with this girl, I guess I’ve got to be an engineer.” Like, I am not going to be able to flunk out of engineering school and be able to stick it out with this girl. And so, I just had to stick it out and keep going, keep showing up to class. And eventually they gave me a diploma five years later.
Did you have a favorite class or anything?
No, no, none of it.
I think that’s the consensus among engineers.
Yeah, but what’s kind of funny though, is I went into engineering thinking machines and mechanical and all that stuff.
Yeah, everybody gets let down.
Yeah. And I was going to work for Caterpillar or John Deere or Ford or Volvo trucks, which is in Greensboro down the road. That was the plan. And then you get there and you start learning the equations and what it takes to do machine design. And you go, I don’t really like this anymore.
Yeah. Where’s the engine at?
Yeah. I like putting the nuts and bolts together, but figuring out the stress in a screw, I don’t know, this isn’t as fun anymore. And what’s funny is, I hated the airflow piece of it. I’m like, nope, not HVAC. That’s a segment of mechanical engineering, and that’s the segment I want to stay far, far away from. No interest in that. But what I found is that, the way my brain works, the systems and the processes involved in those calculations and those equations, I actually understood what was going on in those systems a lot better. And I had to repeat some of those courses. I just learned it and picked up those thermodynamics pieces.
Well, I remember you have a pretty good interaction with one of your professors, which tied into your background a little bit about, you know, trying to explain how a pump worked theoretically versus like, I grew up on a farm. I know how pump works.
Yeah. She was not very familiar with pumps, but she was teaching fluid dynamics, and I had a question. She had, the inlet pressure to the pump was positive. And I’m like, shouldn’t it be like a suction pressure, like a negative? And asking her questions about that and trying to relate that to a real world problem was just not connecting with her.
Yeah. That was my frustration in school was, you know, professors or students who couldn’t put a nut on a bolt kind of thing.
Yeah, make it make sense.
Yeah. Like, let’s make it a real world tangible problem here.
We might’ve had the same fluids teacher. Anyways, besides that. So they let you leave, if you will.
Yeah, they gave me a piece of paper and showed me the door.
Yeah, and said, “Thanks for your tuition. We’ll talk to you later.”
Yeah. “Thank you. I’m going to work.”
And then what happened? Where’d you go?
So, fortunately, while I was in school, I found a part time job working for a company that did forensic engineering. And funny enough, it was Brad, our founder here that connected me to a guy for an opportunity that fell through, but he said, “Hey, I know another guy that works for this company and they hire a lot of college students occasionally, and you might want to go talk to them.” And so, I went, and it opened a door. I didn’t get hired right away. I think that was in the spring. They didn’t hire me. They didn’t hire anyone. And I bumped into him again on campus in the fall. And I said, “Hey, Jonathan, what’s going on? Are you guys still thinking about hiring somebody?” But yeah, the forensic engineering piece was amazing. It was a lot of fun working as a, you know, they call their college students technicians and working part time with them. We did land surveys for an accident scene, a crash site to understand the skid marks and the lines on the road, and the conditions at the time of the accident, what really happened, and try to piece it back together and go from the point of impact and back two seconds before impact. And then 10 seconds before impact. To go, okay, driver A was here and they should have seen driver B whose vehicle was here, and they should have hit the brakes or whatever, or they should have heard the train horn as the train was coming to the intersection or things like that. And that was a big piece of it. We did fire scene investigations, which was pretty great. Uh, leading me kind of in the fire science field. But showing up to a fire scene and trying to figure out where the hotspot is and looking at the material science and understanding at what temperature different materials either melt or combust. And so, then you can understand where the hotspots are inside the building, inside the facility and, and figuring out the likely area that started the fire.
Wow.
So, really neat from a science standpoint, kind of heavy at times.
I can imagine.
Because, you know, it was expensive to bring in a team like that. And so, the only time teams get involved is when someone gets injured or dies, unfortunately. And so, kind of heavy going into some of that stuff.
So y’all would be the ones like in the Law and Order type shows when they bring in the expert.
That’s right. Expert witness. And so, our founder actually worked on the Challenger space shuttle crash, which was remarkable.
Oh, no way.
Yeah. He was one of the founding members of the first Air Force crash investigation team. He was a professor at NC State and Florida State. But yeah, an incredible expert witness, great guy to give testimony. He was renowned for taking the complicated and making it simple so that a jury could understand it.
That’s definitely one of the challenges in all aspects of life, but engineering especially. Because, like we were talking about, just when you start to think about the theoretical side of how these things work together, trying to explain that to people that are going to make a pretty serious judgment call in a court case or something is definitely a skill to have. So that’s very impressive and a cool background. But you were talking about the fire side of it. I know next steps, but when you ended up leaving there, where did you head off?
Yeah. So, that was a great opportunity and a lot of fun. It was exciting. It was kind of like Mythbusters. You know, one side saying something happened this way and the other side saying, no, it didn’t. It happened more like this, and we have to try to prove it. And so, we’d create full size example scale models sometimes and even build a small replica building and set it on fire and then put it out to show the fire pattern and things like that. But I did that for a couple of years after college, stayed there. We got heavily involved in hurricane damage evaluations and hurricane assessments. And so, we spent a lot of time in Florida just doing building assessments, trying to understand and help document and report to the insurance companies. “Well, it looks like this building was not in great shape before the hurricane or what was caused. Damage was caused by the hurricane, helping them figure that out. And so, as all our resources spent a lot of time in Florida, the work kind of dried up back at home. And so, we came back home and things got slow. And so, I had to look for another opportunity, and I found out Underwriters Laboratories was just down the road. Taylor’s favorite organization.
I knew something was wrong with you.
Yeah. So, got on board there with Underwriters Laboratories. And so, my experience in product testing through the forensic engineering really helped me get in the door there at UL. And so, worked in the PPE department.
Well, that’s exciting.
Yeah. And also the PFD department was our sister team. And so, we got to test life jackets, and they’d pay you 20 bucks to go jump in the pool and test the life jacket.
And sometimes your baby.
And the baby. My son Bradley, he was a newborn, and they pay big dollars for newborns. If you will put your baby in a life jacket face down in a pool, they pay you big money for that. And he was a champ. He was great. A lot of kids come out kicking and screaming and parents don’t want to subject their kids to it. But it’s all in the name of science. And money.
And a hundred bucks.
And a hundred bucks. Bought a new stroller for that kid with his payment.
Yeah. Shout out to you, Bradley. You made it. You’re okay.
Yeah, strong swimmer these days. Really strong swimmer. But yeah, PPE, which was predominantly firefighting equipment. So, anything a firefighter might use, there’s a standard from the NFPA on how that equipment needs to be built and tested and certified so that firefighters know that they have good stuff when they go out and risk their lives.
Which is very important.
Absolutely. So, I spent a lot of my time focusing on the rescue equipment that they use. So, ropes, carabiners, descent control devices, things like that. And rescue packs. So, if a firefighter in New York has to bail out the side of a building, he can throw a hook around the window seal and jump out and have a pack on with a couple hundred feet of rope and know that he can safely and smoothly descend down to the ground if he has to bail out kind of thing.
So, I mean, was there anything that stood out as far as something cool you got to test? I UL a hard time, but it is interesting because, like, we get to see a lot of industry, they get to see a lot of stuff. I mean, just all different types of products. Is there anything cool that stood out?
Most of the firefighting equipment was pretty consistent. You know, it’s stuff that’s been around for years. There’s new innovations in the materials they’re using and the waterproof layers. Well, I say waterproof, it’s a moisture barrier. So, a typical firefighting structural jacket is based out of three layers. So, there’s an outer shell that’s pretty cut resistant and abrasion resistance, really tough. Inside that is a moisture barrier. And that moisture barrier is what not only keeps them dry from all the water, but its primary focus is to keep bodily fluids off of them. So, if they’re working a rescue scene or helping a victim, it keeps those bodily fluids from penetrating and getting to them, it keeps them safe. And then there’s a thermal layer underneath that to keep the heat away from the firefighting. There’s always advancements in that technology and the material science behind that. But one of the other areas I worked in quite a bit was chainsaw chaps. And that was pretty neat. So, there’s a whole mechanism and a rig and the chainsaw runs and it drops down. And most people think the chainsaw chap is just tough and it keeps the blade from digging in. But what the chap does, it’s made of very loose fibers. And it actually comes apart and all the fibers get sucked up into the chainsaw and it stops the chain to keep it from cutting any further. And so, we ran all kinds of tests on different chainsaw chap material and things like that. It was pretty fascinating.
They should have just partnered up with some of these horror film things and just put you in the testing gear, run into a fire building with a chainsaw and you come out the other side and they say approved or not. They also get the film done.
Test them all at once.
Yeah. Hmm. Very cool. So, you’re at UL for a little bit, did the testing. And then, I mean, we’re getting close to pulling into SonicAire. What happened there?
Yeah, that’s a great question. How’d it go so wrong? No, so Brad calls me and says, “Hey, I’m going to a trade show in New Orleans, and I need some help. It’s just me. Can you take a few days off work to go?” I’m like, “I don’t know anything about fans. I told you I hated the airflow side of engineering.” I’m kind of on this fire science track now kind of thing, I guess, and product testing. But sure, whatever. I’ve never been in sales. The equipment’s three phase power. I don’t even understand why there’s three phases or why you need that or what that even means. And so, okay, sure. Whatever, Brad, I’ll take a couple of days off where we go to new Orleans. And I just enjoyed meeting the people there at the trade show. And we met Cintas there who’s been a phenomenal partner of ours and got to engage with them. And then the next thing you know, a few months later, they start engaging with SonicAire, who was called Integrated Environmental Solutions at the time, because Brad had visions of doing more than just fans. But then, you know, eventually we realized that the fans are where it’s at. But Cintas picked up their engagement as well as a couple other larger customers. And Brad finally called me a few months later and says, “Hey, I need some help. I need another engineer. We got to really put some effort into this thing and build some depth on the bench.” And so that was 15 years ago. And here we are.
And it was a team of?
Three. Three of us full time who are all three still around. And we had a few part time piecemeal guys who were flipping fans and getting them out the door. That was it.
Wow. And this was, I mean, just part of SonicAire history. This was still the 1.0.
It was, yeah.
And you started coming in as an engineer. Brad’s an engineer, does not like engineering. Likes having big ideas and like pushing them through. So, kind of, what did you start with project-wise, and how did you start progressing on the equipment?
That’s kind of funny because my title was Vice President of Sales and Engineering, which I’d never done sales before. And like I said, didn’t, didn’t know anything about sales, had no experience in that, but okay, I can answer the phone when it rings. Whatever. But I did have a little experience with CAD. And so, we at that point didn’t even have CAD drawings of our fans.
Yeah, Brad was doing stuff in like PowerPoint, Vizio…
Right. Crayons markers, Crayola in his office. And so, I came in and started getting everything in CAD files and CAD designs, and we started working on different products and things like that and started failing. That was right when we started branching out of textiles and started trying some new stuff. Wood products was kind of our next step. Well, paper was going well. And then getting outside of that, wood products was kind of a natural progression. And up until that point, we thought all dust was created equal. And like, the fans work great in textiles and papers. So why won’t they work great in wood? They absolutely should. Especially the worst kind of wood, OSB. Sticky, fibrous, with adhesive in the dust. Huge failure out of the gate. Just not effective with the original 1.0 fan. And so, we at that point went, okay, we’ve had to do some innovation before. We’ve got to innovate our way out of this. And so that’s where we had to get bigger, better, faster, stronger.
Yeah. More power.
That’s right. Louder fan.
Yeah. Throw a bigger engine on it. So, wood was the catalyst for moving forward with what became the bread and butter for, I mean, even till today.
Yeah, absolutely. The 2 horsepower, first generation.
Yeah. So, moving into that 2.0 type situation, was the team past three people at that point? Like still growing, or you hit this issue and then…
Yeah, we were probably at that point picking up a couple of full time employees to start assembling fans. And, and we had one guy welding, we had a welder at that time, which we don’t even have a welder now. We outsource all that. But at that point we had a welder in house. He was making some of our mounting equipment and some of our assemblies and some of our original R&D stuff on the two horsepower fan. We’d order parts and fabricate them there in house.
Yeah. So, that was a big change, too, because originally we were shipping these things in, making some modifications and then we go, “Uh, we’re not doing that no more.”
Yeah. We had very limited quality control at that point. Thank you for those of you who bought a 1.0 back in the day and have stayed with us. We greatly appreciate you helping us, giving us feedback and allowing us to work through some of those early challenges.
Hey, some of those are still out there. Yeah. We get calls every day and I’m like, “Oh, I gotta pull up a drawing that’s 20, 25 years old at this point to figure out what you’re talking about.”
Yeah, and they still come in, we service them, send them back out and they’re still going.
Yeah. I mean, you like to poke fun at kind of where we come from, but I mean, at the end of the day, it’s always been a quality product.
Absolutely.
Trying to get better at it. So, SonicAire’s growing. New products going into new markets, hit the paper scene, the wood scene. And what other kind of hurdles or challenges came up along the way?
So, I would say at that point, you know…Brad calls it the fun phase. We’re in the fun phase. The company was doing good. It was growing pretty rapidly. We were taking on the Cintas project and things like that. It got bigger. We started putting equipment in all of their facilities. And so, it started growing pretty rapidly. And that was fun. We were growing fast. We were bringing on new people. But then, at a point, it became what Brad also calls “whitewater” very quickly.
I’ve heard that a few times.
Yes. And things got rocky. So, we needed systems in place. We needed better alignment with our teams. And then that’s where the culture thing became more evident. At first it was just, do you know somebody that can do this that doesn’t have an amazing job already? Let’s let’s see if they can come over here and put a fan together or whatever the case may be.
Yeah. Because it’s almost counterintuitive. Everybody’s having a good time. I mean, there’s pretty low staff, so profits are probably goo,d and we’re just having a good time. But then all of a sudden you kind of get hit with, if we’re going to grow, we have to put some boundaries around how we operate because we can’t track all this stuff, or we’re outgrowing our capacity. So, you start bringing in people. But then, like you’re saying, yeah, you have to put those things in place. And you hit on the culture piece. Because, if you don’t know already, that’s a huge part of our story and why we’re able to do the things that we do is because we put culture first in all things. So, when did that start to, maybe materialize is the word? Because I think we started with the realization that it wasn’t there.
Right. Yeah. I came on board in 2010, and so, five or six years then into that story, we needed better processes. We needed better alignment. And we started to uncover…and you don’t have to Google search SonicAire too long on YouTube. You can find stories about this. But we did a culture survey and found out we were toxic. And it was kind of like, not good.
It’s not a good word for a culture.
Yeah. And you can’t grow it at that point. Your business is going to crumble. It just is. It’s not sustainable. It doesn’t matter how much money you’re making. It doesn’t matter how great the product is. If you have a culture like that, people just won’t stay. You’ll have crazy amounts of turnover if you can even get people to come back and come work at a place like that. And so, we had to do something about it. So fortunately, Brad kind of dug in and found some different resources. So, we, we started using EOS. We implemented the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And that really helped transform us and get some structure in place and get better alignment and then make sure we had the right people to go where we wanted to go and move together as one organization. And then retaking that culture survey, and then the next time we took it, we had moved from toxic to healthy, which was a huge jump. And then from healthy to flourishing, we’ve been able to stay in the flourishing zone for several years now. But it was quite a transformation making sure we had the right people on the bus in the right seats and it’s still an everyday job, right? To stay in that zone.
Yeah. It doesn’t go away. And I mean, we hit into EOS, but it was constant from all of these business books that we check out. They’re all talking about, you can put all the processes in place you want, but if you don’t have the right people in the right seat, it’s going to deteriorate. So yeah, we head into EOS, and that’s kind of when your role changed a little bit, I think for, not the first time, but one of the more significant changes where you went into more of the integrator role and, like, running the day-to-day-operation. So, what was that like, and how did things change from there?
Yeah. So, Integrator, Chief Operating Officer, that was about 2019 when that kind of took place. And still, you know, training wheels on, trying to figure out this whole new system, new seats on the bus, who’s sitting where, how’s this going to work with the team we’ve got? And just when we were kind of sort of figuring that out, then COVID happened in 2020. And so, then once that happened, is when Brad started slowing down a little bit. So, he went to working only two or three days a week and kind of letting me have more and more control of the day-to-day, which really played into his strengths as well. It gave him the freedom not to have his hands on everything and him to be the visionary that he is and be creative and look out over the horizon and let me worry about kind of the day-to-day and what’s going on here.
Yeah. It definitely freed Brad up to take all those crazy ideas and come knock on the door in the engineering pod and say, have you guys ever…?
We used to have a folder around here, called it “Brad’s Big Ideas.”
Yeah. It wasn’t a trash can, Brad. We promise it wasn’t.
It had a big heart on the folder.
So, I mean, turbulence from multiple fronts, trying to get a handle on culture, but then also COVID, and then we came back and, I mean, what’s changed since then?
Well, we’ve continued to grow, which has been a remarkable blessing, to think that no one has all the fans they need yet. So, there’s still an opportunity for us to continue to serve customers and make sure they have what they need. But we ultimately realized that there’s a service element that we were missing. So, one of our guys was at a large customer’s facility and saw multiple fans just kind of sitting around, and they needed some love. They needed some help. And it was not a good look for us and not a good look for their team either to have broken equipment sitting on the floor. And so that was the beginning of, “Hey, why don’t you send those back to our factory?” We’ll figure out a way. We don’t even know what or how or how much to charge you at this point, but just pay us a couple hundred bucks, send them back, and we’ll figure it out, and we’ll fix them and get them back to you so they can be working again. And so, then that has evolved into a team that now can actually install fans as well. Not just fix what’s broken, but we can be proactive as well. Because every fan that goes out the door has to be installed by somebody. And so, why not have the best people in the world that are the most experienced in the world with SonicAire fans to actually do the work?
Yeah. It definitely makes a big difference. Because we went through all these different stages of factory services and field services and commissioning programs to where we are today, where, you know, we’ll do everything from help you out from afar to do the whole darn project ourselves. And then come back and check in on them with the PM program. So it has definitely been kind of a another growth and like a spout for SonicAire to just continue to provide that level of service for our customers. And it’s really been cool to see that even as a change since I’ve gotten here, because some of those things were just taken off. And, you know, I came in on the coattails of a lot of the culture change, too, and got to see how that progressed and changed. And here we are today in 2026, crazy as it sounds. And now you’ve had another change, right? So, you progressed and acquired the business, purchased the business, now the owner and president. So, what’s that like?
I’m slumping down in my chair under the weight of it all right now.
That’s why we put him in that one over there.
Yeah. No, it’s great. It’s an honor. I wouldn’t have done it without the team. I mean, if we go back several years, I wouldn’t have been interested in it. With the team we have today and the alignment and the culture, it was kind of a no brainer. It was like, okay, we’ve got the right people on the bus. We’re ready to go into the next chapter or the next season. You know, my day-to-day job hasn’t changed a ton yet at this point. So, I still love what I’m doing. I love getting to help the team, see the team succeed and see our customers win as a result.
Yeah. Well, that’s really cool. So, I mean, you’re driving this thing. Where are we going? What’s next?
I think it’s more of the same. I mean, that sounds kind of boring maybe. But I mean, I see such an opportunity. We’re doing such good work. Every piece of content we put out that features our customers. Or we, you know, recently had a customer come here and sit in this room and be on the podcast with us. And it’s so exciting to get to hear their stories and how much this equipment is impacting them and their people on a day-to-day basis. And it really changes lives. It’s crazy. And then the impact we’re having here in these four walls on people’s lives and what we get to do. And, you know, one of the meetings I was leading last week, we just stopped and talked about how grateful we are for this place. And now it’s changing lives in the weirdest ways possible that you could ever imagine. But people are being impacted by the work we do here. And that’s really exciting. And so, it’s more about that than it is, you know, what fan blade we’re going to put on the fan next or that sort of thing.
Very important, but not the most important thing.
Yeah, it all fits together.
No, that’s great. Just thinking through it, you know, it’s been super exciting to be a part of watching all this take fold. You know, I’m super grateful to have been able to see this transition. Brad, we’re super thankful for everything that you poured into it and how we got this thing off the ground. And Jordan, we’re super excited for you leading it now. And we’re all behind you and super supportive and, you know, it makes sense how we’re going about this. And, just to echo what you’re talking about how, never in a million years would I have thought like, man, I think one of the most exciting things I could do in a career is work at a dust factory. But like you’re talking about, because of how we’re able to change lives, you know, for our customers and keep them safe and healthy. I was just in a plant in kind of the upper Midwest area, and you know, just seeing the difference of the fan running for a couple hours, and just like how clear it is in there and you feel comfortable breathing and whatnot, versus when they’re off, but then coming back here and the camaraderie and the teamwork and how we take that even beyond out into our community and being a part of that. I need to go tell myself way back when, like, “Hey, you need to learn about dust now.” So, if you look back over all of it, when you were growing up, tinkering on tractors, what would you kind of tell yourself about how you’re going to get here?
Well, it’s been this weird little progression. I mean, it’s been the kind of the perfect path that I’ve been led down. And so it was machines, to then that first forensic engineering experience and there it was showing up after the fire or explosion. I actually got to go to the West Pharmaceuticals plant after they had their combustible dust explosion and see that facility, and that one definitely stuck out in my mind, just the wreckage and the destruction there from their dust explosion. And then go from getting there after the fire to being there during the fire with the firefighting equipment to now being on the front side of it, trying to prevent the fires and explosions from combustible dust is kind of a wild progression. And I would probably just say hang on, and care for people. You know, just, just be on the lookout for the people piece of it as much or more so. When you go into engineering, you’re thinking design, I’m going to come out and design things. I’m going to draw things in CAD. I’m going to figure out how systems work and create something new to go in this system or whatever. But recently we were having a conversation about engineers that go into sales. Very few engineers come out of school going, I want to go into sales. You come out of engineering school going, I want to be an engineer and I want to do these things. But sometimes, that is just a piece of your puzzle and a piece of the elements that can help you do greater things even outside of engineering.
Yeah. I’m a firm believer engineers are just professional problem solvers. I mean, your brain is wired to make those kinds of connections and connect dots where you’ve got to find out how they connect. And so, I mean, that’s been the coolest part about being here is that we’re so interwoven to what our customers are doing, how we can take care of them where you get to kind of zoom back from like this weird brainiac engineering brain type stuff and really connect with people and how they’re going about their daily life. So, it’s been super exciting, and I’m excited for where we’re going, even if we’re doing the same thing.
I love it. Yeah. I was thinking this weekend, I was like, you know, I’ve never been in a band, I’m not musically talented at all. But I think about it now as…just had this vision of standing on stage. But like, the team that’s around me now, like everybody’s playing in sync. Yeah. You know, we’re all playing different instruments, but everybody’s playing together. We’re all on the same song, on the same sheet of music, so to speak. And we’re all doing something pretty great together.
That’s awesome. Well, I think that about does it.
That’s all I got.
You’ll hear more from him and we’re going to not going to stop doing this. And so, we’ll keep making fun of Reidsville and all the other fun fan things that we do around here. So yeah, super thankful for you telling us a little bit more about your story and how we got here and where we’re going and all that fun stuff in between. So, we’re going to sign off. So, thanks for listening again. We are grateful for you soaking in this content as fun and exciting as dust may be. We’re here to help you learn about combustible dust and how to solve it. So, thanks again. Check us out on all the social media platforms. There’s going to be links everywhere. Kevin and Betsie do a great job of taking care of us with that. But check us out. Always ask for more information if you need it, and we’re going to get out of here. So, I’m Taylor.
I’m Jordan.
See ya. Thanks.