My entry into cell sites was a job at KCI Technologies in 1995. The firm needed a structural engineer who would climb towers, and I needed a job. Most engineers were content with desk work. Few were willing to take on the physical demands of tower mapping. I was happy to jump at the opportunity and KCI got an engineer willing to climb.

This job was my first brick on a road that led to creating an engineering firm that in 25 years would employ more than a thousand people.

During that quarter century my leadership style was defined by me setting up others for the win. Usually, I began as point man taking all the briars and arrows that a point man takes. After clearing the initial path, I would choose a successor and move them up to achieve their own win, while I retreated into the background.

My earliest memory of setting others up for the win goes back to my school days. In 1980 after our starting JV quarterback had been called up to varsity, I became the first string QB for the final four games of the season. Not having the necessary athleticism to be a quarterback, I had no choice but to set up my team for the win and then get out of their way.

In 1995, the first cellular tower I climbed was a ROHN SSV, which was 150-feet tall, the equivalent of a 15-story building. Back then tower inspections were like the Wild West, with very little in the way of safety protocol for the climbers.

Every 40 feet of the climb I stopped and measured parts and pieces of the tower which I radioed to the groundman who took down the measurements on a yellow legal pad. After a few hours, I returned to the office with a notebook of handwritten figures, which I then needed to translate into a computer model of the tower.

This process was a haphazard mess and why my first employer needed an engineer who would climb. Such engineers were exceedingly rare and very expensive. For the cell tower industry to win, there needed to be a better way to map towers.

There was no practical way for a non-engineer to know what to measure on the tower. Worse, as everyone’s measuring process differed, it was extremely difficult for an office-bound structural engineer to translate the jumbled notes of a weathered tower hand, who was not trained in engineering (or the software used to construct models of the towers).

Immediately, I envisioned a way to set up my team for the win.

My plan was to create a standardized mapping process that would be both accurate and repeatable for towers ranging from 20 to 2,000 feet in height.

At my next tower climb I sent my ground man away for two hours.  Sitting there with an engineering pad, clip board, binoculars, straight edge and a mechanical pencil, I methodically created the standardized method for mapping a tower—one that would eventually be used industry-wide.

Even today you will see field notes that follow the pattern I created—the result of a leader setting up his team for the win (even though I hadn’t met my thousands of future telecom teammates).

I have no idea how many tower hands, tower engineers or tower companies succeeded – in part – because of that standardized mapping process.

And whenever I meet tower-hands or engineers using my method, they have no idea that I was the trail blazer, the creator; nor do they care. I set them up for the win, and I am satisfied to be in their wake.