Welcome to the Tower Genius podcast, Cell Sites 101. Today’s episode is Tower Genius: Who we are and what we do.
Welcome to the Tower Genius podcast, episode one.
We have Steve Kazella here with us, one of the founding partners in the company. Steve Kazella:
You’re Kevin Donahue. I’m Steve Kazella.
Kevin Donohue:
I said, I have you with us here. I didn’t say I have myself with me here.
But now that we’ve established who we are with each other, maybe we can explain. We’ve Steve Kazella:
We’ve only been working together for 20 years, Kevin, come on.
Kevin Donohue:
Yeah, Steve and I have been in the wireless industry pretty much since its inception. I go back all the way to 88, held various management executive positions with various major vendors and cellular carries themselves. Steve, I watched a little bit about your background.
Steve Kazella:
Well, Kevin actually brought me into the business back in 2000. He recruited me out of Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Previously, I had worked in Budapest, Hungary as an international partner for Habitat for Humanity International, establishing the organization there and working with families to help them out with their housing situation. That’s where I actually did my first site acquisition, prior to meeting Kevin. We had to acquire property from the city government to put up 10 houses in a town called Bogács in Hungary, Northern Budapest. Kevin walked into my Enterprise Rent-A-Car branch wearing a New York Mets hat, and I politely told him that a better, better team and ended up renting him a car, which he probably regrets to this day, because he ended up hiring me about a month later and threw me a bunch of sites to go lease for what we were doing, sprint T-Mobile and Verizon work in lower Hudson Valley. And that was pretty much it, kind of learned by doing it on the street, from the master here, from Kevin and the rest is history.
We’ve been working on and off together in those early days. And then I guess we saw an opportunity, Kevin, what around 2008 or so to help cell tower landlords that were… There was really a void of information in the marketplace, and people were looking for help, and they had lots of questions, and we threw up a quick website, which got some traction and the rest is history. I think the New York times found us in 2010 and then the business kind of took off from there. It was more than I expected actually. And so we’ve been helping property owners exclusively since 2008 and really just advocating for them and kicking the carriers rear ends from here to San Francisco. Pretty much. Kevin Donohue:
Yeah, we always want to have a win-win deal, right. But one of the reasons we also formed the company was because we saw some heavy handed tactics, that some of the carriers were utilizing at the time, in certain markets, now it wasn’t across the board, but we knew eventually it would kind of spread out and we did see that start to take place. So we wanted to level the playing field for everybody. But, Steve cutting your teeth in the Hudson Valley, New York, New Jersey, metropolitan area, toughest land use in the country. So that’s what you did in a year, most people from a zoning and permitting issues and even being able to acquire certain types of property, was probably the equivalent of 10 years in most of the country in gaining experience. Because that was also at a time where most people were … communities didn’t have laws that were set up for, they’re using old utility ordinances, which really didn’t apply, got involved in helping doing a lot of those and where they were copied. But it was still kind of a wild time in the industry, but, you know …
Steve Kazella:
And a fun time, it was a good time. It really was.
Kevin Donohue:
[inaudible 00:04:56] Working with the communities was always… Once in a while you’d run across one that was just trying to be difficult, but some of them were really just good people that didn’t know what to do. And they had some of their citizen yelling at Adam that they wanted cell service. The other half were yelling that they thought it was some sort of a problem. And part of our job is… One of the things that I learned is the carriers we were doing, when I worked for them, they were doing a terrible job of really explaining and alleviating people’s fears. And once we started to do that and sit down with them and kind of hold their hands a little bit, we found that the relationships… you were no longer, the big bad carrier coming in.
We had a face and they knew that we were trying to do right by them. So I think that really paid off. And that’s really what we’re doing here in this business too. We’re trying to guide landlords, get them… maximize their revenues, but not doing it in such a way where they’re going to be forced… the carriers forced or the tower company is forced to leave the property, five, six, seven years down the road because of the financials. And so there’re a ways of growing and that’s one of the things that we’ll have different podcasts about, different portions of the industry, different tactics that you can utilize to really maximize the investment on your property and make sure that it’s going to be there for a long period of time. So, why don’t you go over Steve, because you see, you have it right behind you, the various services that we offer. Steve Kazella:
Yeah. So I still have to get used to this setup here. So, but basically we offer coaching and transactional coaching and consulting services exclusively for, property owners and landlords that have either a ground lease with a tower company or a rooftop carrier cell site lease, with one of the carriers. The bulk of the work that we do on the tower side, American Tower, Crown Castle, SBA Communications, Vertical Bridge. Those are the main big dogs that we come across. Any type of lease renewal questions that you have about the values. A lot of landlords are getting rent reduction letters, optimization letters, which is basically trying to lower your rent and squeeze you until you expire.
There are right now, there’s a lot of consolidation going on with the T-Mobile Sprint merger. People have a lot of questions about those. So we offer reviewed consultation services and transactional coaching services. And about 90% of our clients can benefit from those types of services. Also with the new sites, we see a lot of dish sites being put up, Dish has become a carrier as a result of the T-Mobile Sprint merger. And they’ve really got a huge catch up game to play. They need to add about 30,000 sites in the next six, seven years. So they’re starting to get traction and get they’re act together. And so if you’ve been approached, a lot of times they’ll need extra ground space on the existing American Tower or Crown Castle site or what have you. And you’re wondering what it’s worth? Well talk to us (888) 313-9750.
Our phone number’s plastered everywhere, on every piece of content we have floating out on the internet. Also, there are landlords that are looking to sell their rental streams. They’ve been approached, you get bombarded monthly with various offers and you have questions. How do you know what it’s really worth, the truth is you don’t, because it’s not like pulling comps in commercial real estate. So if you have questions about the value of what is that rental stream worth, what’s the benefits, what’s the pluses/minuses of selling it, versus not selling it, is my site going away because of 5G, is it going to be impacted by technology changes? What about Elon Musk satellites? You have questions. Well, if my tower’s going to become obsolete, then why are these guys trying to buy my lease?
So you have real questions. Those are questions that we get all the time. And we’re prepared to talk to you about those and look at your site and individual site by site basis. Because there is no cookie cutter solution here. So basically anything on the landlord side, that is a question, your attorney most likely is not going to know the answer to it. You need someone that’s seen this thing, over and over, has come across these questions, I will throw it out here real quick, we’ve probably got a couple thousand blog posts that we’ve answered in the last 10 years, on various websites, content, that we’ve put out and we are going to be revisiting some of those questions, because they are repeated over and over. And so those are things that we will look at in these upcoming series of podcasts and blogs. Kevin Donohue:
Changed over time due to industry conditions. So what a solid answer eight years ago could be very different today, especially with 5g.
Steve Kazella:
Things are changing for sure. And some places they are significantly, some aren’t, it really depends on the location.
Kevin Donohue:
We’re not trying replace anybody’s attorneys. We work very well with attorneys, a large percentage of our business is actually law firms, that reach out to us for our expertise, because those firms know that they’re a little out of their depth, when it comes not just to the monetary side of things and what these are worth, but also how the technical aspects in the actual verbiage of various provisions could have a major negative impact on their clients, if they don’t have an expert looking at it. So we work very well with your council. We have no problem with our work being looked at or reviewed, and we usually team up very, very well with your local council. And so you have little synergy there, with some folks that you know, and you trust and maybe helped you through a lot of things in life. Just working with us and our expertise and you’ll learn to trust us and understand that we have your best interest in mind.
Steve Kazella:
All right. Okay. I think it’s probably a good place to end. So if you have any questions, you can give us a call at (888) 313-9750, you’ll speak with one of our receptionists and schedule a call. We do a $99 30 minute discovery call. It’s not a free call. It is $99 and we do that for a reason and our time is valuable, as is yours. So we hope to talk to you again, it’s (888) 313-9750. You can also send us a contact form on the website towergenius.com. And if you are looking to get a tower on your property, it’s another topic we’ll cover in another video, but we get about 200 contacts a month, of people looking for a sales site. There is a sales form, the website for that is go.TowerGenius.com, go.TowerGenius.com and fill in your name and email address. And it’ll bring you over to the information page.
Kevin Donohue:
And please, if you like the series of videos, please, join the channel, make sure that you’re not missing out, hit the notification button. So when Steve comes up with some brilliant thing to say and record, you’re getting it right away.
Steve Kazella:
Yeah, let’s say like and subscribe. Okay. But anyway, thank you for your time and for giving us your attention.
Kevin Donohue:
Yeah. Thank you very much. Have a good evening.