Turning Hard Lessons Into Life-Saving Training | Brian Hall

Brian Hall: And I think about this all the time. Hard work will take you a long way. I’m not somebody that has a lot of formal education and those sorts of things. Determination can take you a lot of places. And I think that’s a message that a lot of people need to hear, right?

Don’t stop. Keep plugging on. Sometimes things will seem impossible when you get low, but just gotta keep persevering and keep working hard, and if you do that, good things will happen. That’s really the way that I’ve always approached my life, is just work hard and keep learning as much as you can and you can go a long way.

Anderson Williams: Welcome to Everyday Heroes, a podcast from Shore Capital Partners that highlights the people who are building our companies from the inside every day, often out of the spotlight.

With this series, we wanna pull those heroes out of the shadows. We want to hear their stories, we want to share their stories. We want to understand what drives them, why they do what they do, how they might inspire and support others to become everyday heroes too.

In this episode, I talk with Brian Hall of Guidant Power. Brian’s Everyday Hero journey has taken him from wiring houses as a young man with his dad to managing electrical safety at a nuclear power plant, to being the lead electrical instructor at Guidant Power. From music to electrical safety, Brian’s is a story of finding your passion and identifying what you’re good at so that you not only love your work, but you make an impact on the work and lives of others.

Brian Hall: My name is Brian Hall. I am the lead electrical instructor for Guidant Power. I am based out of Cleveland, Ohio. We are on the Great Lakes, which is a great thing and so one of the things that we like to do is boats. My wife and I enjoy getting out on Lake Erie and fishing, and we have some islands here that we like to go over to and on the weekends and enjoy.

Big music lover have been, uh, playing the guitar since I was, I don’t know, 15 years old or so, have been in bands here and there. Don’t do that much anymore. I’m 60 years old, so I like to be in bed by 10 o’clock at night, not two in the morning hauling amplifiers out of a bar somewhere. So I quit doing that a long time ago, but I still play the guitar and love music.

I’ve seen hundreds of concerts and um, I’ve been married for 38 years. That’s a fantastic thing.

Anderson Williams: What kind of music do you play or did you play? Has it changed?

Brian Hall: You know, that’s interesting. So primarily started playing just your basic classic rock things. But you know, the more you learn about music and get exposed to different things, certainly have found an appreciation for different types of blues music if they’re playing a guitar, I’m usually interested.

Anderson Williams: As we think about your work and your career, most of us, because of people like you, don’t give a lot of thought to the electricity we consume and the electricity that’s surrounding us at any given time because you do your job well. Tell us a little bit more about what you do and what that looks like, just so the listeners and I better understand what a regular day might look like for you, Brian.

Brian Hall: Certainly electricity is powerful, right? Can you imagine your life without it? You know, I mean it, it runs anything and everything. Even to the point now we’re relying on it for our vehicles, but it’s a powerful thing from the other side of that, in terms of it can hurt us, right? For sure. There are things that electricity can produce, such as what’s called an arc flash. We’ll call that a violent release of electrical energy that can burn you severely.

Obviously, we can get shocked and get electrocuted, and so people who have to work on this equipment, you know, if you work in a factory where you work on a utility line. These sorts of things. You gotta work on this electrical equipment to keep your factory going.

And people are exposed at times to these hazards of arc flash as well as electrocution. And so what I do is teach people how to be safe when they’re performing that work.

Anderson Williams: So gimme a sense of what the training or the work or the business side of that looks like in terms of how you get invited in to do that work.

Brian Hall: Let’s just start with the basics. So OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, has rules about electrical safety training. OSHA is a branch of government, and OSHA’s purpose is to ensure that we Americans have a place of work to go to that is safe. And so the way that OSHA ensures that Americans have a place of work to go to that is safe is simplifying things, but they write rules.

And so OSHA has rules that revolve around electrical safety. And one of the rules is to ensure that employees that work on or near this hazard receive formal electrical safety training. So that’s really the genesis of it. Employers have to find people like me that have the expertise and understand the OSHA requirements for the training, and again, how to keep people safe when they’re working in around this equipment.

In most cases, they don’t have that expertise themselves, and so they go out and find contractors like Guidant Power to come in and provide that training. And so that’s generally how things get started.

Anderson Williams: One of the things that you mentioned and your Everyday Hero nomination described you as a champion of quote, making sure people go home.

That is a really powerful statement. And will you just sort of say more about the importance of the education that you’re providing and in its absence, obviously the danger that’s at least potentially there.

Brian Hall: Well, when I was a young electrician, and that’s really my background, been working around electricity my entire life, I really never had a job where I didn’t work around electricity.

My father owned an electrical contracting company when I was growing up, and this is really how I got started in the electrical trade and had worked my way into a working in large industrial plants. And what I would tell you is I was shocked once on 480 volts, nearly took my life. I was standing on top of a crane, 80 feet up in the air, nearly got knocked off the crane and fell.

And if had I fallen, I probably wouldn’t be here today. And this is really what motivates me. So if I could teach people not to do what I did, right? Had I had this formal electrical safety training when I was a young person, and that would’ve never happened had I known the rules and had the personal protective equipment to put on and all of these things, that probably wouldn’t have happened.

And so if I can a impress on people how important this is to follow your electrical safety rules, right? Put on your insulating gloves and your arc flash gear and follow your safety rules. It’s so important. This can hurt you, right? And it did to me. And it can happen to you. And here’s how this can be prevented. Here’s how you can go home, right? And so that’s really the idea here.

Anderson Williams: And you said your dad was an electrician as well, so you kind of grew up in the business.

Brian Hall: That’s correct, yeah. From the time I was, I don’t know, maybe 12 years old, I could wire a house. Uh, my dad was that kind of guy. He had a strong work ethic, and he had still that in us.

And so we would go to work with dad and wire houses and buildings in the summer and after school every day. And, and, you know, looking back on it, I mean, what’s better than that? Right? You get to go to work with your father every day. And sometimes when you’re a kid, you don’t look at it that way. But now I’m, I’m awfully grateful.

Anderson Williams: Yeah, that’s an amazing thing.

So you specifically have evolved from that young person doing work with your dad into a career in electricity, but really evolved into being a teacher and a trainer. And can you talk about that evolution of moving from doing the work to teaching the work? And how did you make that transition?

And maybe what is it about teaching the work that you’ve really found that you really love to do?

Brian Hall: Well, how I ended up teaching is interesting. So I ended up working in a nuclear power plant. So when I got outta high school, I tried going to college, but I figured out pretty quickly that was not for me. I wanted to get out in the world and make my own way and I, I knew I could do that being an electrician, and I loved the work anyway.

I knew I needed formal education, so I went to technical school and I got out of technical school and I started working for a company called Alcoa. Then I had the opportunity to go to the Chrysler Corporation, and when I worked at Chrysler, as well as Alcoa, I was an electrician on the shop floor. Went out every day with a volt meter doing the same sort of thing, keeping an industrial plant running from the electrical side of things.

A few years later, Chrysler closed the plant down, and so I put my resume out there and somebody called me from the Perry Nuclear Power Plant and I was offered a job to be a part of the electrical maintenance supervision at the Perry Nuclear Power Station, which was incredibly interesting and a great opportunity.

And so I did that for a number of years. Then Perry Nuclear Power Plant offered me the opportunity to go into the training department. So if you work in the nuclear industry, you go to a lot of training. It is required by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. There was a pretty significant nuclear accident here in America called Three Mile Island.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with that or not, but when Congress did their investigation of the Three Mile Island accident, what they determined was that the people at the Three Mile Island facility weren’t well trained, and so the Nuclear Regulatory Commission instituted a very structured training program in that industry.

And so I was offered the opportunity to be the electrical maintenance instructor at Perry. When you’re working in a nuclear power plant and you’re going to teach, you gotta know what you’re talking about. So I spent a lot of time researching OSHA standards and there’s another standard called NFPA 70 E. And really learning all of these standards and how to apply them and, and really got a good foundation on the electrical safety side of not only the rules and regulations, but more importantly, how do you apply those? That really is the key.

So when I got up in front of my class, I could. Say, here’s the rule, ladies and gentlemen, but here’s how we use this out in the plant to keep ourselves safe. And so that was really how it started. It really wasn’t by design, it was just kind of a collateral duty of being an electrical instructor at the Perry Nuclear Power Plant.

Anderson Williams: Well, I can’t imagine the stakes are any higher than the electrical safety and a nuclear power plant. That just, all of that sounds scary to me.

Brian Hall: Yeah. So I always tell people that, you know, they follow their rules there very closely, electrical safety rules in a nuclear power station. If you’re an electrician working in a nuclear power plant and you’re working in an electrical panel and you poke your screwdriver in the wrong spot, this is one of the ways we can create arc flashes.

Now, two things happen when we create arc flashes. One is people get hurt if they’re not protected. But the other side of that. Is equipment gets damaged and in some cases catastrophically if that equipment is responsible for keeping cool water flowing over the core of the reactor or some other safety system in the plant, you can challenge public safety by not using good, safe electrical work practices and understanding how they work.

And so I just decided I would do this a little bit on the side. I had a lot of vacation time built up and you could carry it over. And so I had a lot of time off and I, I just thought I’ll just go out and try to help some people in and around Cleveland really understand electrical safety. And so I built a little website and started a company called BCH Electrical Safety and just started providing electrical safety training to my clients in and around Cleveland.

And that’s really how I got started doing this.

Anderson Williams: After using up all of his vacation time and with increasing opportunity with his clients for more business and more types of electrical services, Brian took the leap to walk away from his nuclear power plant to build his own business and focus on his growing partnership with a company called Rozel, which was co-founded by Jeff Kershner. Rozel was the founding company of Guidant Power.

I talked with Jeff who shared how he originally met Brian and why he’s an Everyday Hero at Guidant Power.

Jeff Kershner: Well, Brian actually found us in 2017. He found our website and he called us and asked if we had any interest in maybe partnering with him. So we, we were a standalone unit and he only offered electrical safety training. And we thought basically immediately after we met Brian that he was a perfect fit for us.

Anderson Williams: And what was it about it that made him a perfect fit? What, what were you reacting to?

Jeff Kershner: I was first exposed to a professional trainer in the electrical safety space in probably 2008, and this individual, I swear, would go to sleep reading OSHA standards and electrical safety code.

And he had a true passion for training people and just learning why we needed to enforce safety. And I never thought I would meet another person like him until Brian Hall reached out to us in 2017 and Brian is exactly the same way. He has a passion for learning. He has a passion for training, and he has a very unique ability to convey that information to others so that they learn it, they absorb it, and they want to use what they’ve been taught.

Anderson Williams: That’s amazing. And tell me a little bit about how that works and what makes him an Everyday Hero as he applies that learning, training, teaching skill or, or whatever that is that he has.

Jeff Kershner: Well, most of the people that Brian trains are electrical workers in factories or other environments that require lots of electrical support.

And you can imagine as you do your same job every day or asked to do similar tasks every single day, you get a little complacent, good or bad. You get in this rhythm of doing things over and over, and you may forget to do certain things related to safety.

It’s also common to get stuck in your ways, right? You want to just continue to do things the way you’ve been doing them. So whenever someone comes in and says, you may have been doing things one way, but now you should do them another. From a safety standpoint, it takes the right person to really convey that information properly so that there’s not pushback, but instead people actually start doing what has been taught and performing the safe work methods moving forward.

Anderson Williams: And how does he do it? To, what do you ascribe his ability to break through that kind of resistance or complacency or whatever it might be?

Jeff Kershner: Brian comes from a long background of doing electrical work so he can relate to just about anyone in that space. So he is an authority for all different types of electrical work, and whenever someone says, well, you know, I come from this background, well, he’s very relatable. He’s a very personable person, and he’s just very easy to get along with.

Anytime he goes on vacation, we’ll hear that he made best friends with somebody that he met five minutes earlier, and he’s just got that personality to where you want to be around Brian all the time.

I think just Brian in general, Brian will never turn down hard work. He’ll never turn down, staying up late to make sure that a customer is supplied. He’ll schedule trainings at two o’clock in the morning, four o’clock in the morning, two o’clock in the afternoon, whatever it takes. Whereas in the past, whenever I was doing the training, I was certainly say, oh man, at two o’clock training, you know, how can we change this?

And Brian is just, uh, whatever the customer needs to make sure that the employees are trained properly.

Anderson Williams: It is clear that what Brian does is important and even lifesaving. It’s also clear that he’s really good at it. But to be honest, as someone who teaches and trains for a living myself, it sounds like a really tough topic to make compelling and to help people learn.

So I ask Brian how you take something like OSHA standards and compliance training and make it something meaningful so people actually learn it and then go live it.

Brian Hall: I think there’s a couple of things. One is I’ve done it, if that makes any sense. So I’ve been an electrician my whole life. I’ve worked in shops performing electrical work and doing all the things that most of my students are currently doing, right?

So instantly we’re able to form something of a bond and we share stories back and forth about being shocked and these sorts of things. And I think this is one of the things that helps me is that I have done the work before, and I really understand what these folks are up against. And again, I’ve walked in their shoes, if so to speak.

The other side of that, I think truthfully is the passion that I bring to it. I really want to help people understand this can hurt you, right? And it is really important that you follow your electrical safety rules. It is a job. We’ve gotta get it done and all of those things, but let’s go home. Right, and so I think that’s really the two things.

One, certainly is I’ve done the work before and maybe the other thing is this, is that I’m able to explain it to people in a language that they understand. I basically teach people the way that I would want to be taught if I was an electrician on the shop floor. Again, here’s the rule. Yeah, I got that, but how does it apply to this particular work? What does this really mean? And so I kind of come at it from a little bit different angle.

You have to bring the human element into it and there is a lot of rules and regulations that you talk to, and a lot of times is a very dry subject for sure. But you do have to bring the human element into it and give examples of people getting hurt, I guess, and your own personal experiences, and people will share their experiences with you and really bring it down to a human level.

Anderson Williams: Your Everyday Hero nomination said

“Brian conducts hundreds of electrical safety trainings annually, reaching thousands of workers across diverse industries. His exceptional instruction and expertise make him a trusted advisor to his customers who frequently seek his guidance on facility electrical issues, PPE, recommendations and safety best practices. His post course reviews are almost always five stars across the board. And note that his passionate teaching and deep knowledge create top of the line training experience.”

Those are pretty powerful words to say that you’re doing exactly what you wanted to be doing.

Brian Hall: Yeah, flattering to say the least. But I love what I do and I think that comes across in my training.

Anderson Williams: What continues to motivate you, Brian?

Brian Hall: The feedback that I receive that really motivates me. So I, I do travel a lot away from home, at least a few days a week in most cases. And that can be difficult.

But what motivates me is when somebody comes up to me after the training is over, or they provide us with some feedback and say, Hey Brian, that was just great training and I really appreciate you being here, and I’m gonna look at things differently than I have in the past, and I’m gonna put my arc flash gear on now. And I, you know, I, I really understand how important that is.

And that’s what really motivates me. Hopefully, you know, we’ve changed some people’s mind about working on this equipment and again, how important it is to protect themselves and and follow their electrical safety rules. And when somebody expresses that to me, that’s very gratifying.

Anderson Williams: Before I wrapped up the conversation, I couldn’t resist coming back to something Brian mentioned at the beginning, I had to ask him if he saw any connection between his passion for music and his approach and success at training.

Brian Hall: That’s an interesting question. So if you think about music, or playing music. Lemme say it that way. It’s really the three things.

So certainly you gotta understand music, right? How it works. The notes on the guitar, there is theory, right? And then the other side of that is a lot of people can play the notes, but there’s only so many people that can play the notes that are pleasing to your ear, right? Or become whatever artist it is you like, right? Be able to take that theory and turn it into music, right? Or art.

And I guess that’s kind of the way I look at my electrical safety training, right? Again, there are these standards and, and so there is this theory, if you will. And so how do we take that and turn it into something that people understand and can use and sometimes enjoy, right?

Anderson Williams: Brian Hall is an Everyday Hero whose superpower is his expertise. He has turned a lifetime of knowledge into life-saving learning, and in the process has become a champion of making sure people go home.

If you enjoyed this episode, check out our other Everyday Heroes at www.shorecp.university/podcasts there you’ll also find episodes from our Microcap Moments as well as Bigger. Stronger. Faster. series each highlighting the people and stories that make the lower middle market space unique.

This podcast was produced by Shore Capital Partners and recorded in the Andrew Malone Podcast Studio with story and narration by Anderson Williams, recording and editing by Austin Johnson. Editing by Reel Audiobooks. Sound design, mixing and mastering by Mark Galup of Reel Audiobooks.

Special thanks to Brian Hall and Jeff Kershner.

This podcast is the Property of Shore Capital Partners, LLC. None of the content herein is investment advice, an offer of investment advisory services, nor a recommendation or offer relating to any security. See the terms of use page on the Shore Capital website for other important information.