In this Episode, Andy talks with OptConnect CEO Chris Baird, and National Sales Justin Nichols. Learn more about OptConnect Here: OptConnect ========== Andy: For those of you listening that this might be the first time you've heard about OptConnect, I encourage you to go listen to Episode #73 that Justin and I recorded probably a year and a half ago. Something like that year and a half ago, two years ago, and that'll be kind of like level one cellular connectivity intro, how it works, the benefits, all those sorts of things. What I want to do today is kind of hear from both Justin and Chris on where things, where their business has evolved since kind of. Entering the irrigation market. Justin: Yeah, that's awesome. Uh, you know, we entered the irrigation market about three years ago and we knew that we had a very good value prop based on, you know, other markets that were very active in, in our market leaders. And, and over the last two and a half, three years, you know, we've really started to scale in the irrigation market. I think today we have about. Four out of five of the large, you know, national distributors set up to be able to supply OpConnect hardware and services and about a dozen, uh, regional distributors as well. So if you haven't heard of us, chances are it is locally available at your, you know, landscape irrigation supply house. Uh, also just recently during smart irrigation month. We launched our brand new Ascend Dura device. And what's really cool about the Ascend Dura is it basically functions like a wifi hotspot on your phone. And so for the last couple of years, you know, we've really, uh, tried to penetrate the central control market. Uh, and now we have a new tool in our tool belt that allows us to connect to wifi only type of controllers. So you're. Your Hydra wise, your beehives, your ratios and any other type of wifi only type of gateway, uh, to be able to provide the same type of high level managed service to be able to troubleshoot. Now, not only the cellular side of that, but also the wifi side of that. So you can now bring your own wifi solution, plug and play and let us. Hit the easy button for you. Andy: Okay. Wow. So there's a whole bunch happening there and some of this I wasn't quite aware of. So why don't we step back? Because I had always thought of OpConnect as, as cellular, but you just said a bunch of wifi. So how does cellular and wifi come together? Justin: Yeah. So basically the wifi allows you to connect locally to a piece of equipment, just like you would in your house. Uh, and so we're able to make a local network connection via wifi. to that wifi only irrigation controller that allows the user to connect with a cellular device when otherwise they would have no means or way of connecting that external device. So we collect connect locally via the wifi network. But then all the communication is done on the cellular side. So when you're trying to do remote management, uh, Monitoring of a site like this, that's using a wifi only controller, whether it's light commercial, your own personal property, a vacation rental. We're able to manage that now remotely over the cellular network. And because of our managed service value prop, we can actually troubleshoot. Both types of those connections with the wifi. Andy: So can we like get a tangible example? Let's name a controller just to give this some context. Could we say like a Hunter Hydrawise controller? Would that make sense to talk about that? And just to try to, you know, have it more tangible. Justin: Yeah, absolutely. So you have a Hunter Hydrawise controller. Uh, you know, has 48 plus zones. If I remember correctly, they can go on a lot of light commercial properties. The cost is a little bit less expensive than that commercial unit, but you're relying on that property owner or that site's wifi connection. Perhaps they won't let you on their network. Perhaps the wifi signal isn't strong enough. We're able to