How a Non-Competitive Cooperative has Thrived in the Competitive Fiber Industry

Many know that electrical cooperatives were founded on the principles that for profits were saying it’s too expensive to go to rural areas, like where my grandparents lived in southwest Oklahoma.

They said it was too far to go five miles outside of town, and they we’re just not going to do it. So, the cooperatives got together, and everybody pitched in money. It’s member owned, so we do what is right for the member. It doesn’t matter if it’s Dan or David, we try to get your lights on as quickly as possible. Any kind of capital credits that we get back or anything like that, we distribute it back to our members, which is pretty unique.

We have a totally different approach on delivering electricity. It’s about service. It’s about support. It’s about reliability. There are so many factors that go into it.

Back in the 1930s, when electric co-ops were born, and there’s about 900 or so in the country right now. OEC, in Norman, is the largest one in the state of Oklahoma. We have close to 50,000 members, and then about 65,000 meters. One member could have two or three meters for a shop or some commercial enterprise.

Dan Shuart: As president, what is your role other than just being president? How do you see your responsibilities?

David Goodspeed

David Goodspeed: It’s a big challenge, because when OEC fiber was formed back in 2017, I kept talking about the experience

I’ve been an electric member of OEC for well over 25 years now so, I was kind of used to it.

We’ve got board members in different districts; it’s a very unique kind of setup. It kind of feels traditional. It feels real in a world that doesn’t feel real anymore.

What makes it so unique about what OEC fiber does versus OEC is that OEC Fiber is in a competitive market that has just exploded. When we started in 2017, the market was what the market was. COVID changed everything. So, we were trying to balance two industries, one competitive and one non-competitive.

In Oklahoma, back in 2009, they did what they call “allocated territory.” We used to compete for electric loads. You could choose whether you wanted us or another provider, and we would bill you. There was heavy, heavy competition.

The state came in in 2009 and said, no more. We’re just going do allocated territory, so, what you got is what you got. Whenever you move into a home, fortunately, or unfortunately, you just don’t have a choice in your electric provider. If it’s us, or if it’s OG&E, PSO, or, you know, maybe a sitting municipality or something like that, you don’t have that choice.

OEC fiber really was born from this idea that we’re going to serve our electric members, but at the same time, we are competing against the big boys and big girls in the industry.

So, I have competitive business and a non-competitive electric utility that I’m balancing.

I had an employee come to me the other day, and she said to me, ‘I don’t know how you survived. It’s so crazy. How do you balance it?’

My role is, the best analogy I can give you is, this. We’ve all seen, or most of us have seen, We Were Soldiers. In the movie Mel Gibson is standing there and everybody’s just shooting all around. He screams out to one of his privates, ‘Broken Arrow, Broken Arrow.’

Sometimes I just feel like the bullets are just flying around. I’m just standing there in the middle just watching it pass by me and trying to understand if I pull this lever what’s going to happen.

Being in the competitive space with a non-competitive electric utility is very interesting.

Dan Shuart: Tell me about the innovation that is happening in the industry. Is there innovation happening from your baseline delivery to the fiber optic capability, or is it pretty much a standard stuff, and the innovation comes more on the business side?

David Goodspeed: Yeah. You know, we’ve been struggling with that. I think quite a bit, because a lot of the partners that we use are trying to find that added revenue, that extra value.

I was trying to explain it the other day, and I said, having worked for Apple, I realized that they make the best device, whether that’s a MacBook Pro or the iPad or the iPhone. But it is up to us to figure out what we are going to do with the device. It is up to us to figure out how we harness this tool that we’ve got. I think fiber to a home or business just allows that.

We’ve had members that have upload and download speeds of 10/3 and we are still connecting those people to 100 symmetrical and just giving them the ability to stream Netflix.

Some people say you don’t want to be the dumb pipe. But sometimes I kind of view it as maybe you do want to be the dumb pipe. Because, you know, Apple, one of the best stories I’ve got from my tenure there is that I opened an Excel spreadsheet one day, and I’m trying to follow along, and I said, ‘I can’t seem to understand what you guys are talking about.’ I feel kind of dumb, right? And I said, ‘I’m in Notes.’ And they said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, we use Excel.’

Okay, so even in that way, if we’re just that delivery vehicle, and we do it at such a great price, we’ve made it affordable and accessible, easy to work with and the customer service and experience that we give, it’s up to those creators and those designers to kind of harness it from there.

Dan Shuart: People don’t really think about hardwired bandwidth anymore. It’s all Wi-Fi and mobile. But they forget that you must have the infrastructure or none of those other things are going to happen. They forget about the cable that’s connected, the fiber optic that brings all of that together. I like to use the analogy with clients of flat screen TVs. No one says, ‘flat screen.’ They’ve just got a TV.

David Goodspeed: Yeah, or you’re just waiting for the big trash day, to get rid of it, or if you still have it, congratulations. You probably could sell it on eBay for a few 100 bucks.

[Among his various roles at the University of Oklahoma from 2008 through 2017, David was the General Manager of the OU IT Store and the Campus Store Engagement Manager, where he developed and executed OU’s digital initiatives, helping to bring technology throughout the university.]

Dan Shuart: Let’s go back in time a little bit. You ran the OU store. You sold products to students as well as supplied the 8,000 plus employees. You’re always coming up with new approaches. Tell me how your brain works from an innovation standpoint? I think this is good for other leaders in your position to know. How do you sell innovation, if you’re selling it to a board, or whoever you’re reporting to, or even your customers. What was your approach?

David Goodspeed: To me, you’ve just got to be fearless. I remember when we had the stores down on campus, and we brought in the first 3D printer. That was 2011-2012, If I recall correctly. We printed the first chess piece, ran across the street, showed it to all these people, showed it to you probably, our boss at the time, everybody else. They said, ‘Well, do it again!’ I said, ‘I don’t know what we’re doing!’

I fast forward to today, and my daughter is a student at OU. She said, ‘You know what I think is so crazy about going to school right now?’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ She said, ‘Every class I take, there’s a 3D printer in my class.’

I think about how we had to sell the dream. We had to sell that idea. I think that’s the point. Whether it’s a 3D printer in a university environment or if it’s trying to explain to somebody that ‘fiber to the x’ or ‘fiber to whatever’ is the way to go.

It’s really getting the buy-in and learning to understand how you have to read the room. You’ve got to know when to push and when to pull and when to be so strong in your convictions that you can let it go, I think at the same time.

I probably understood this when I was at OU, I just never could quantify it or put it into context. Experience is the new commodity. I can sell you anything. But if I can’t give you the experience that you expect and deserve, then you’re going to complain about that.

I was on Facebook, and there was this group of people that buy a certain brand of boot. They were talking about how they went to a store, and they said the experience was horrible. But I could go to this other store that was more expensive, but they are so nice to me. Everybody was arguing about the price, and ‘Why do you think you’re so entitled?’ and ‘blah, blah, blah.’

I just made a comment. I said, ‘because experience is what you went in there for.’

The experience is what you want to sell.

I can run fiber to your house, just like any other competitor can. But if I noticed that your equipment in the home is offline, and I’m calling you? I could call you right now and say, ‘Hey, Dan, we’ve got a problem at your house.’ You’re like, ‘I didn’t even know my network was down.’ That experience is what people want. Trying to try to explain that to people is very difficult.

My first day at OEC, my boss is just a brilliant man. He is so much fun; he’s funny and entertaining. I told him I said, ‘It’s going to be the experience.’ He said, ‘No, it’s not the experience.’ He’s an engineer, by trade.

Dan Shuart: It is hard to convince an engineer.

David Goodspeed: Right, but now he talks about it, because I think, I know, he understands the value of the experience that we deliver. So, it’s trying to get people to that moment, and then stepping back and saying, ‘Oh, you’re right. It was your idea or whatever.’

Dan Shuart: I remember that. 3D printing or whatever the innovation was at the time. ‘Fearless,’ I thought was a good word. Because you would go to the [OU] president and say, ‘I’m going to show this to you.’ He had his own world. He was not a technology guy. And then you would show him [or others]. You’d say, ‘Hey, come in and take a look at this.’ You’d actually bring them in to experience what it was you’re talking about.

David Goodspeed: We’ve seen all the innovations with 3D printing, right? I think of whenever I heard somebody say, ‘I 3D printed a home.’ I was like, okay, that is way out of what I thought. The driving force was saying, there’s something here. My brain just doesn’t work in that way, as a creator, where I can sit down and look at it.

Remember Jordan Wayne? He used to work for me. He works for me now at OEC Fiber. Brilliant mind, too. He just sees it differently, whenever you put the tool in front of him. I’ll say, ‘Hey, let’s talk about this experience and that experience,’ and he just takes it to that next level.

That’s where we were, especially at that time at OU. We had Google Glass and Oculus Rift. You may remember when we were doing digital signage on the floor. You stepped on it and certain things happen. We were using Xbox.

Dan Shuart: And you had new people, from other universities, coming in and looking at your layout?

David Goodspeed: Yeah, they tried to replicate it. They always said, ‘How did you do this?’ And it’s hard to replace.

I think what we did as a whole, too, was make people think of IT differently. Rather than being ‘turn it off,’ ‘turn it on,’ ‘do you have a blinking light.’

Dan Shuart: KTLO, to keep the lights on.

David Goodspeed: Exactly, yeah. I think that was the challenge, right? It was something that was innovative and different, and it was hard to understand. We’re talking 2012. I remember, we had probably close to 15 or 20 3D printers that were running. You remember when we 3D printed the football stadium?

Dan Shuart: Oh, yeah!

David Goodspeed: I went to athletics, and I said, ‘Can I have the plans for the football stadium?’ They said, ‘No!’

But I looked at the students that worked for me: an architect, a nursing major, a political science major.

So, I bought them a camera. They went over and took some photos and 3D printed it.

Dan Shuart: I think that is an important point. Pulling on resources that you normally may not consider to pull on or maybe that’s not their space.

David Goodspeed: Right.

Dan Shuart: Identifying those people.

David Goodspeed: The nursing student was a nursing student, but his passion lied and other things that were fun. They were just college kids. So, they were always exploring, and they always kept it fun, very entertaining and challenging.

When you go 3D print 400 OU football stadiums with no plans?

And then he said to me, ‘how many are we going to make?’ And I said, ‘till we run out of electricity.’ Now I’m working for an electric utility. So, joke’s on me, right?

Dan Shuart: It comes around.

David Goodspeed: It comes around. It comes around.

Dan Shuart: What’s your way of keeping up with the breakthroughs in your industry? Does [artificial intelligence] AI come up in your industry at all?

David Goodspeed: I have used it to answer some emails!

Because, you know, I’m 52, and I hit some mental roadblocks. But even trying to understand that, and where does that go? It’s kind of scary, right?

Dan Shuart: Right.

David Goodspeed: Keeping up is hard, because we offer fiber to the home and fiber to the business. We offer a phone service. Then we also offer a TV service.

The TV industry as a whole is just crazy. From traditional cable to streaming to “cord cutters.” Man, talk about a crazy industry.

Somebody’s always asking me, ‘…so what blogs do you get and everything?’

I had to turn them all off. I really did. I had to turn them off, because I was getting caught up in so much of the ‘do this, do this, do this.’

There’s a blog I used to get about cord cutting, and they were just kind of contradicting themselves every day with articles. And I thought, well, this is ‘Clickbait 101’ right here.

What I do personally is simple. I just talk to the team that works for me. I talk to the installers. I talk to the people that are answering the phone.

When we do an install at a new home or a new business, I send them a thank you card. I say, if you have any problems let me know; if you loved it, let me know. You can reach out to me.

So, I find out if I installed at your house, you call me, and you’re like, ‘hey, man. I can’t seem to get good solid connection in the back of my house,’ or whatever. We went out and found a tool that we use to help.

Dan Shuart: So that leads to new ways?

David Goodspeed: Yeah. So, the way we do an install is way different than we were doing it back whenever we started in 2019.

We harness the tools that other people have made. There’s a company we use called RouteThis. It uses Google Maps and uses the mapping of the home. So, whenever we do an install, we do it in an optimal place. We use the technology to guide us around the house.

We’d walk your entire house. If there’s a poor signal strength, we’ll put an extender there. We’ll do some different things. We’ll make sure we’re not on the 2.4 or 5 gigahertz network, or whatever. We’re doing that now. But we weren’t doing that in 2019.

Now, we’ve got 36,000 customers almost. The way we’ve evolved. It’s kind of like when you buy a car, and they say, ‘we’re going to take you to the service department.’ Why are you taking me there? I don’t ever want to go those see those guys and gals!

The idea that we’ve always had is that when you take our services that you never have to hear from us again. I wanted it to be like when you go home and you flip on the lights, it just works. You don’t have to think about it. I think that’s what we we’ve done. We’ve just taken out the confusion.

When we came to the market, it was very simple: two speed packages, two base prices. That was it. No hidden fees. We made it so simple that it disrupted the market so much. I started seeing all the competitors starting to talk like us, act like us, feel like us, and everything else.

We are always trying to look ahead. We can play the ‘speed and feed’ game, we can ‘race to zero,’ and we can do all that other stuff. But what I felt at the time was that it was service and support.

The fact that I send a notecard. Some gentleman called me one day, and he said, ‘You sent me this card over a year ago, and I’ve got a problem.’ He said, ‘I just found it. I’ve been looking for it,’ and I thought, holy cow! And it just says, ‘thank you for taking our service. You have any problems, questions, complaints? Let me know.’

Dan Shuart: It’s amazing when the leadership has not been in contact with their clients, their customers. They outsource that to people on their staff, and they don’t actually do it themselves.

That’s a really interesting idea, going yourself to the customers, finding out yourself about the customers, having that kind of engagement.

David Goodspeed: I’ve been in a lot of people’s homes.

In the beginning, we had so many people that just wanted our services so much. Our electric footprint in Norman, we span over seven counties. It’s very dense; it’s very suburban; it’s very rural; it’s all over the place. When we announced we were going to do fiber, everybody just kind of lit up.

They kind of knew what it was, but they kind of didn’t. They knew it was a new technology. They’d heard about Google Fiber.

I remember when were at OU. I remember when Google Fiber was announcing they were coming, and everybody was excited. I remember vividly that day.

It’s been just an interesting way of approaching it in a different way. For some people right now, what’s changing is five years ago we were getting people connected, right? They had 10/3 or something like that on their speed. Now, they have 100/100 or they’re getting a Gig/Gig. Symmetrical. No data gaps. It’s unheard of, right?

So, you ‘disrupted the industry.’ Well, now the competitors, and others, are saying, ‘we’ve got to go multi-gig.’ You’ve got to have 3G, you’ve got to have 5G in your house. And they equate that to speed. Right?

And, so, I’m sitting there, kind of like my Mel Gibson moment. As I’m sitting there, and I’m hearing all this, I’m hearing from marketing and the network team. They’re arguing. Construction’s like ‘tap values,’ ‘we got to go back.’ You’re just getting hit all over.

I said, ‘Wait a second, timeout.’

Two years ago, Dan had nothing, and now he’s got 100/100. So, we’re going to turn around as a trusted adviser on the electric side. Now, we fully believe on the fiber side. So, are we really going to say, ‘well, that’s not good enough, Dan, you need to have three or five gigs’?

I’ve asked our partners, and I’ve asked the team, what will the home of the future look like? Is it going to demand that much speed? Because, I can’t do it today. I mean, I could do it, but it would cost a ton of money. For what? Because people would just buy because? Because your phone’s not going to get 5G.

So, they’re going to do speed test, and you’ll come over to my house.

Dan Shuart: And everyone can do speed tests, you know, they know how to do that.

David Goodspeed: And nobody does them anymore, especially with us. I have not heard anybody say, I did the speed test. It’s usually just like, ‘my network’s down,’, or, ‘I’m having a problem’, or something like that. Nobody’s going to come over to your house, and you have 5G. ‘Here, let me show you something.’ When you pull up your phone, and you hit it, it’s like so what?

That’s what I’m struggling with, is where is the home of the future going to be in 10, 15, 20, 25 years?

Dan Shuart: The name of our podcast is High Beam. Because that’s a service we provide, which is looking at your industry 10 years down the road. Where it’s going to be beyond five years. What’s happening down the road? What are you going to have to be prepared for? It’s going to be disruptive. I thought you’d be there because that’s kind of how you think.

David Goodspeed: I’m getting there. I’ve been thinking about it probably the last six months to a year. When we started in 2017, I’m coming up on six years now. I really took everything as five-year chunks, because I think in this industry, especially, trying to guess 10, 15, 20, 25 years I mean, it’s not…

Dan Shuart: But you can still speculate.

David Goodspeed: You can still speculate.

Dan Shuart: You said, ‘the home in 10 years.’ I really liked that. That’s really good, out-of-the-box, really forward thinking, because it’s going to be different.

David Goodspeed: Way different. I remember saying to one of my team members. I said, ‘Are we going to have robots around the house? What will the demand be? I used to have a Roomba, but I had a dog. So, connect the dots there.

We’ve got that in our world. We’ve got all these other devices, but I’m looking across the table here at different headsets, and I’m like, ‘Okay, so what is that going to be like?

Dan Shuart: Like VR [virtual reality] and AR [augmented reality]?

David Goodspeed: You and I can understand it. We think it’s cool. But we’re both wearing glasses, and we’re like, we’re in our glory years now.

But my 20-year-old daughter. She’s adapting to this new world, and I don’t even think it’s going to be ready for her. I think it’s like my grandchildren that will be the beneficiaries of me connecting these homes. Somebody in Verden, Oklahoma, which is, 45 minutes west of Norman. 300 people in the town, 300 homes, has the opportunity to do something different that I probably won’t live long enough to see it. But I’ve just got to figure out how do I keep delivering that exceptional experience, that uptime, the redundancy that we have, and the failover to everything. That we can keep the world connected. That’s a challenge.

Dan Shuart: I do want to ask you a question though. And it’s probably a stupid question. So, are you still a Van Halen fan?

Dan Goodspeed: Oh, man! If you’re old enough to remember where Elvis was when he died. I remember where I was when Eddie Van Halen died.

When Eddie passed away, man, my musical tastes changed.

Dan Shuart: Oh, really?

David Goodspeed: I think that’s what this industry is doing at the same time. This is a good way to kind of wrap [this interview] up. Your tendency to want to gravitate towards it or not gravitate towards isn’t changing. I think that’s that vehicle for the innovation, that vehicle for the future.

My mom right now is probably in a lift going to the doctor. She orders all her groceries; she pays all her bills online. Again, my mom’s 82 years old.

Dan Shuart: That’s impressive.

David Goodspeed: Guess who’s never ordered groceries to their house? This guy. And my mom does it every week. She’s found a way to live in a new digital world, which is just mind boggling to me. I mean, she calls me, she’s like, ‘I need help with this, and this,’ and I’m like, ‘I don’t know how to. I don’t order anything from Target.’

It’s a challenge. I think that’s the unique and fun part about all of this is trying to figure out how to keep delivering a great service like that.