Up and Running in 24 Hours: Teddy Hazelwood on Smyrna Ready Mix’s Revolutionary Acquisition Strategy | Building Materials Series

Anthony Codispoti : Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today’s guest is Teddy Hazelwood. He serves as the Chief Information Officer at Smyrna Ready Mix Concrete, a leading provider of ready-mix concrete and construction materials. Founded in 1999 and based in Smyrna, Tennessee, they operate plant quarries and terminals across 22 states, always focusing on delivering top quality products with unmatched service. Now as the CIO, Teddy drives the technology strategies that have enabled SRM to become a standout producer in the industry. He joined the company in October 2017 as Director of Information Systems and stepped into his current role in February 2020. Teddy brings over 30 years of experience leading technology teams in distribution, manufacturing and logistics.

And in his role at Smyrna Ready Mix, Teddy earned honors as an Enterprise Finalist in the 2024 and 2025 Tennessee Orbea Awards, recognizing exceptional leadership in IT. Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, AdVac Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at adbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, the Chief Information Officer of Smyrna Ready Mix Concrete, Teddy Hazelwood. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today. Thank you. Glad to be here. All right. So Teddy, when did you first realize that you had an aptitude for tech?

Teddy Hazelwood : When I was a junior in high school, no, that was back in the 80s. So there wasn’t a lot of personal computers, smartphones, definitely wasn’t around. So there wasn’t a lot of technology.

Most computing training you got was on green screens and things like that. Being part of an organization, office, education, association of America, I got selected to go to a computer competition. And in the regionals and states here in Tennessee, we got to bring our own equipment.

So it was the green screen, Tandy, TRS 80s or whatever, you know, that we had in the classroom. And when I, one regional and then one first place in state, I got to go to national competition. But at national, everything was on personal computers, in which we didn’t have any at my high school. So they sent me to Murray, Ohio, lawnmower manufacturing company there, two or three days a week to get some training on personal computers.

And I went to nationals, but and I ended up coming in like 17th, I think it was in the nation. And that led me, you know, that kind of led me to the ideal that, hey, you know, maybe I have a knack for computers. Then my senior year in high school, I got to do the only computer aided drafting class, because when we had one PC, finally, the high school got a computer my senior year.

And I got to build it, set it up and set up CAD and everything in it. I didn’t see the handwriting on the roll or I went to college for computers, right? I got my degree in electrical mechanical engineering. So all the way through college, I worked my way in the computer science department and working in a data center. So I got a lot of experience through work and through hobbying in computers, but got my degree in something else when I graduated from college. That’s when my career really kicked off in computers.

Anthony Codispoti : So when you were doing this computer competition back in high school, what was the actual competition? Were you building a computer? Were you showing how you could use it?

Teddy Hazelwood : No, it was all office based. So back then it was just, you know, playing with spreadsheets. So it was, you know, setting up formulas and, you know, they’d give you a project to do. And it was everyone who could design it the fastest and give good clean, legible results in a good format. They didn’t give you a format to turn it out. They wanted you to come up with a format and everything. But it was so it was kind of speed, but it was also on aesthetics too of how you did it. So.

Anthony Codispoti : And what was the difference back then between a personal computer and a green screen?

Teddy Hazelwood : A lot. Green screen was more, it was more, you know, loaded up, you’re playing off of disks, you didn’t have a hard drive or anything like that. You weren’t really, you had an application. But it wasn’t rigid. When we got to the personal computer, then you had applications like back then it was Lotus 123 by IBM. And that so it was a total different structure you had to learn. Whereas setting it up on a green screen was more, I guess, command line base, and you would write it kind of in code and then you would present it in a spreadsheet fashion.

Anthony Codispoti : Fast as it. And so would it actually display on the green screen in a spreadsheet or would it be a print out?

Teddy Hazelwood : Call emerge just like a spreadsheet. Okay.

Anthony Codispoti : So, you know, you mentioned that you’ve got a lot of your training sort of on the job. You know, that’s where you did a lot of your learning. What was maybe the most impactful job along the way before Smirna? And why for you?

Teddy Hazelwood : Border books. I was started off as a network analyst at borders and worked my way up prior to the company closing in 2011. Worked my way up to being the manager overall of the logistics of distribution IT.

We were an international company. So it got me opportunities to travel foreign countries, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, different places like that, to learn different cultures, but also to drive different technologies and changes and see the actual evolution of computing of the early 90s all the way through the 2000s and and how it progressed, you know, from year to year and and how that progression actually sped up and how it became more rapid. You know, used to a generation of computers was, you know, four to five years.

You in technology was somewhere between seven to 10 years, you could still work off of it. That’s that’s going down to a lot of times in months, especially when you start talking about applications and different things like that. If you are too slow in implementing whatever you’re implementing today, if you’re too slow at it, it has already been replaced by something new and better. So it really helped me develop an adaptability to change and how to implement change and different things on a regular basis in a moving environment. You can’t never take your systems down. Just have to implement it while you’re on the go. So that was probably my most influential time.

Anthony Codispoti : If you zoom out, kind of look at the timeline of the time that you’ve been involved with technology going all the way back to green screen to today. What would you pick out as sort of like the biggest inflection point in tech, you know, green screen to PC, PC to, you know, mainframe, I don’t know. Yeah.

Teddy Hazelwood : Well, I mean, you know, PCs came out in the in the 80s, the late 80s, and getting them on every desktop. So just watching that progression. And I remember when, wow, 64k, that’s a lot. You know, your dial-up mode, and you went from 24k to 56 compressed, and it was like, wow, this is so much faster. But now we’re talking gig speeds.

I mean, you know, and it so that whole transgression is one thing. But then you just take that compute power and everybody’s got a computer in their hand now with a smartphone, right? I mean, so it’s how all that technology is condensed into such a small and more efficient platform that as long as your eyes can see it, you can get compute almost as small as you want it these days. And data the same way. I mean, you know, on just a very small microchip, you can get terabytes of data now where, you know, you used to, you had these huge desk or real real tapes and different things and very, very minimal storage capacity. And now it’s like the sky’s the limit. If you can, if you want to do it or if you imagine it, the technology’s there to support it.

Anthony Codispoti : How did the opportunity at Smyrna first become available to you? How did that come about?

Teddy Hazelwood : Well, I’ve known the owner for almost 30 years. We went to church together for a long time. He was a finisher in concrete. He and I are the same age. And he started off finishing concrete. And Nashville went through a big boom in the late 90s. Titans was coming to town. Predators indoor stadium was being built downtown Nashville. So a lot of construction jobs from the commercial standpoint was causing a congestion in the availability of time slots. And it got to where he was waiting on concrete so much, he decided to open up his own plant.

These conversations started in like 98. And so I helped him on, you know, going through the whole zoning process and meeting with different committees and different things during the voting process. And then when we finally got everything zoned, I helped him open up the first plant. I wired the network in, the phone system, and different things like that set up the PCs for him.

Anthony Codispoti : So you were helping him on the tech side, but you were also helping with like committee meetings and zoning and things that are sort of outside of what I would, you know, figure a tech guy to kind of…

Teddy Hazelwood : Yeah, and it was mainly a friendship thing. And we had talked about, you know, I was four kids at home. I was used to insurance and the benefits. He was self-employed.

So he was already used to not having those things. So it was a sacrifice that at that time I made a bad decision and didn’t take him up on it and stay with him. But hindsight, 2020, I got to learn a lot of technology that in 2017, when I did come to work for him, that I was able to bring and actually help the company out. So it worked out in the long run. We get over all.

Anthony Codispoti : What was the first big project that you got to tackle when you came in full time? Oh, wow. It was the…

Teddy Hazelwood : We were supported, or SRM was supported at that time by a third party MSP. And they didn’t realize it, but shortly after they hired me, that was in October, by December, that company was closing. And I think they saw the handwriting on the wall.

They didn’t realize it was going to be that fast. So I had to come in and learn a lot and do a lot of self-discovery of what they were already doing. Now, grantee, back then, we were a smaller company. We had about 50 locations, about 58 plants.

Some of our locations have a couple of plants on them. We were only in the concrete business. We weren’t in quarries. We weren’t in cement distribution or making our own trucks or any of the other things that we’re doing now. So we were a lot smaller scale. So coming in and learning it was a lot easier than it would be the size we are now. But yeah, just had to come into my own discovery of what was going on, learned the softwares off the bat because there wasn’t very much of a transition between me and the MSP that was important in the past.

Anthony Codispoti : So get us up to speed, kind of paint a picture of the products, the services that Smirna provides today. Who uses them, what for?

Teddy Hazelwood : Yeah, our main bread and our courses are concrete. That’s what Mike got in business for. And I like to describe it that we’re reversed upper mobility or whatever you call it. Because we start off with the finished product and then we add it to all the things that it takes to make that finished product. So we started off in the ready mix. Now we’re in the quarry business. So we mine our own sand and rock in a lot of the regions that we’re in.

We have strategic partnerships too with other quarry companies in areas where we can’t supply our own rock or sand. And then we started getting in cement distribution. We’re the number one cement importer in the country as far as distributing our own. We sell to competitors as well in both of those sides of the business. And we’ve got strategic cement distribution terminals in eight locations right now. And that’s a rapid growing side of our business.

On those locations, we have product stores, which are basically your concrete finishing centric hardware stores where you can get the tools that it takes to finish concrete, hammers, trials, that type of stuff. And then a few years ago, we bought a manufacturing facility in aville, Indiana, where we manufacture our own trucks, hauling its head, mixer, company, HMC. So we make our own trucks now as well. And as of recent, our most recent acquisition is in sunny California. We bought a company called JoNell Engineering.

And it specializes in the construction industry as far as an ERP system or order management system, as well as batch controls that it takes inside block plants, making blocks, which is another side of the business we’re in as well, is making blocks and septic tanks and culverts and anything you can make out of concrete. And so we purchased JoNell. So I guess from that standpoint, you could say we’re an international company now because they actually have international customers. But SRM as a whole is US centric.

Anthony Codispoti : So a few things to unpack there. Did I hear you say that you’re the largest importer?

Teddy Hazelwood : Yes, of cement, Portland cement.

Anthony Codispoti : And where does it get imported from? It sounds like with the quarries that you’re mining everything that you need, but that’s not the case.

Teddy Hazelwood : We import from EJA, the UAE. A lot of it’s coming from the Mediterranean.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay. And that’s because we can’t get it here or it’s a different quality there or there’s some advantage.

Teddy Hazelwood : Kind of both. There are cement manufacturing plants in the US. They’re typically owned by a Wholesome or CMAX, someone that you know is in the cement industry. We buy from the foreign country because A, pricing, the trade, it’s a lot easier. There’s a good quality coming out of that part of the world too of cement. We get some of the best cement in the world from there.

Anthony Codispoti : And help a layperson understand the difference between cement and concrete?

Teddy Hazelwood : Cement is the ingredient. It’s the powder. It has silica and some other things in it scientifically that when it reacts with water, it heats up and it solidifies. And that’s the bonding agent. Concrete is a mixture of cement, which is your cementitious products. Now that can be a mixture of cement and what we call slag, which is metal shavings or ash, which comes from a coal fire. Or you can just have straight cement and then you have your aggregates, which is your sand and rock. And you mix those components together with water and that gives you your concrete.

Anthony Codispoti : And so why are there different formulations of concrete?

Teddy Hazelwood : Strength. Like when we’re doing a high rise in New York, then it has to have the sway without cracking for the tall skyscrapers that you do. Bridges, again, you’re talking about expanding and contracting long spans across water. One of our big projects is the Gordy Howe Bridge in Michigan, connecting Michigan to Canada over the lake there.

And so you have, again, the sway factors of it being expanded, the traffic coming across it, and just different things like that. So a typical sidewalk could probably handle a 2,500 PSI because it’s just foot traffic. Your driveway at home is maybe a 3,000 or 3,500. Then when you start getting into roads or parking lots where large trucks are going to be parking and driving, to keep down on that crack, you need a higher strength. Same way with buildings. The higher you go up with the building, the higher the strength of the concrete has to be to support that.

Anthony Codispoti : And so what’s the key ingredient to make concrete stronger?

Teddy Hazelwood : It’s the mixture of the amount of cement you use in it versus the rock and the sand ratio that you put in there. And then there’s chemicals that you add. There’s a whole science behind it. I’m not going to pretend I know the science.

I’m a computer guy, right? But there’s a whole science behind that and how to determine your strength. The water factor is called slump. That’s how wet the concrete is when it shows up.

The wetter the concrete, the lower it’s going, it has the potential to lower that strength and create issues and stuff. So again, we’re getting into the science of it that I won’t pretend to know a whole lot about, but I know enough to support it.

Anthony Codispoti : Fair enough. I just want to highlight here for a moment and talk a little bit more about how vertically integrated it sounds like you guys are. I mean, to the point of, I mean, quarries, that’s a big step and that makes a lot of sense. You guys manufacture your own trucks. And if I understood the acquisition out in California, it sounds like some kind of a software company that supports what you guys do. Is that correct?

Teddy Hazelwood : We have used JoNail for years. They have a whole suite of softwares that manages order management where you can take concrete orders, aggregate orders, product store orders or block orders. And then they have phone app tools. One of them is Clutch Mobile where you can go in and you can monitor your day, track your day of how the orders are going and different things like that. As well as e-ticketing where instead of printing out a paper ticket, it shows up on a tablet in a truck and they can get signed on glass technology from the customer or the foreman that’s on the job. So there’s a lot of technology there that they do from that standpoint. Then they have another side of the business that is in the control. So it’s the actual PLC panel that goes inside the plan itself that controls all the conveyors and the weighing up of all these admixtures and the ingredients that we just discussed in going into the truck and actually making the concrete.

Anthony Codispoti : So what could possibly be next in terms of integrating vertically?

Teddy Hazelwood : Well, it’s hard to say. It’s hard to say.

Anthony Codispoti : It sounds like you guys have got all the bases covered.

Teddy Hazelwood : Well, yeah, as a CIO and as my computer department, I’ve got a good team and everything. So we get to support everything that the Hollingsheads have ventured into. So we’ve got all that and then we’ve got a hospitality side that’s the Smyrna Airport, it’s Hollingshead Aviation. And then a couple of golf courses here in the local market that we support. They have their own construction company where they build houses. We have an air conditioning company where we install HVAC systems. We have here locally, we have our own explosive company that goes out to the mines and does the drilling and sets the explosive charges for the quarries. And we support that as well.

Anthony Codispoti : So we need to be such a huge size and scale like you guys are. It increasingly makes more financial sense to either acquire these capabilities or to develop them internally. Just if nothing else, to support your own ventures, but then obviously things that you can offer to competitors too, right?

Teddy Hazelwood : It is. I mean, our internal mission is to be the largest construction manufacturer in the country. And now we’re in 23 states and we’re marching toward that 50 mark, right? So but with that, we like to bring the markets up that we’re in as well, because we believe in a healthy competition and everything because there’s always work to be done. Other than water, I think concrete is the number one natural resource of consumption.

Anthony Codispoti : Oh, that’s wild to think about. Amazing. I want to talk about the Tennessee Orbea Awards. I think it was 24 and 25. Can you share, first of all, what those awards mean and how you came to be a part of them?

Teddy Hazelwood : Yeah, you know, I’ve never heard of the Orbea’s or Inspired Network that it’s part of. It’s basically an award of your peers. You’re nominated for it and then other CIOs that are part of the organization get together and vote on who the winner is based off of interviews and that we do through the organization and different things such as that. But it’s a good honor.

I love it. The fact that I was thought of as that, but it’s also a team thing. I didn’t do all this by myself and by no means supporting a company with 570 locations on my own. I’ve got a team of 16, which when I tell a lot of people that they’re like, wow, that’s small and it is. But I expect a lot from my team, just like the company expects a lot from me and when we do from all of our, whether we’re C-suite, whether we’re managers or whether we’re, you know, hourly employees, whatever. There’s not one thing that we don’t expect from our employees that we don’t expect out of ourselves. Our ownership, Mike, Jeff, Ryan, they’re getting into trucks and delivering concrete on a regular basis.

They’ll jump in an 18-wheeler and deliver cement if it’s needed. So even though we’re a large company, we still do our very best to operate it in that small family environment. My guys, you know, they’ll witness me jump in on a server that’s down or switch that’s down or a fire wall that’s down, whatever the case might be. I’m crawling around on floors, installing new equipment on acquisition day. Our acquisitions, you know, are unique the way we do things and the way we grow and it’s an all hands on deck type thing. So getting back to the Orbeez with all that being said, I think it’s just that environment that set me up for the honor is, you know, it’s definitely an award of your peers and, you know, whether it’s my vendors or a fellow C-level tech people that I’ve worked with or came in contact with, they get to see that firsthand and work with that firsthand.

Anthony Codispoti : So, Teddy, as you think about the kind of explosive growth that Smirna has gone through in the last 20 plus years, what special role do you think technology has played in that?

Teddy Hazelwood : It has played a big role considering how, what our strategy is, right? A lot of companies when they acquire a company, it’s like, okay, we bought it, but we’re going to operate on these disparate systems for X number of months. That may be 12 months, maybe, you know, 48 months, maybe six months. Our strategy is we go in, we buy a company regardless how big it is, the next day they’re operating on our system. So, we close on Monday, Tuesday, all sales are on our systems. So that’s a big challenge. I mean, our largest acquisition to date was 94 plants and we brought 94 plants live in a 24-hour period.

And everybody says, how do you do that? Companies when we acquire them, we tell them, this is what we’re going to do, they stand back, they cross their arms and we’ve got to see this because they’re expecting this huge influx of failure about to happen, right? But technology has went a long way in that. And, and I like to, I’m proud of the strategy that we came up with. You know, we use a, what I call a cookie cutter process. We, everybody’s on the same like equipment.

We take our equipment in there, we get it stood up. A lot of times on those big acquisitions, we do get to go in a couple of weeks ahead of time and start installing like our network. We can’t break their network because they’re still working, but we can install our side by side. And, and I have a process where we stand up our network and even with internet that’s isolated to us so that we can create our hub and spoke communication coming back to us. So that when we, a, during cut over week, the company knows we’re buying them, they have access to our system, they can start putting orders in our system, right?

And stuff like that. But it allows us to go in on cut overnight and change all the equipment over to the new network in pretty rapid time. And so with that being said, it allows us to have all sales, all KPIs, all that stuff immediately being measured internally by, by us and by our systems. And then it lets us as, as the supporting groups, whether that’s IT, whether that’s financial accounting, whatever, to do the cleanup on the back end, you know, transferring numbers, transferring accounts and stuff like that. So we take the Ernst on ourselves to do the cleanup on the back end of it for the sake of having all the order management and the processing and, and accounting, processing and billing being on the front end on our systems.

So we can start off from day one, knowing where, you know, we need to get that EBITDA up to and, and all those different things. Because we’re not working into spirit systems. We’re not trying to pull KPIs and numbers from one system and compare it to this system to see how this acquisition is compared, it operates all as one company and they, they just fall right into other plants that are in that region, unless it’s a new state, you know, and then, you know, they start building their own.

Anthony Codispoti : So just the process of getting the data from one company’s software, you know, a lot of times they’re not using the same platforms, right? Just that process of getting the data from one platform to another. I mean, I’m an outsider. This isn’t what I deal with. But I would guess that that typically takes weeks if not months. Like how are you guys accomplishing even just that tiny slice of it so quickly?

Teddy Hazelwood : It takes days and weeks and a lot of times it’s taking spreadsheets and it’s going through them and it’s ours. I mean, but it’s just the dedication from our leadership team. Whether that’s in operations, it’s in financial accounting or with NIT, we all come together and do the due diligence. Our accounts receivable department, you know, they go through all the AR data, the customers, our operations go through all the mixed designs and all the open quotes and POs that are out there that they’re in the middle of and the projects they’re in the middle of. And yeah, it’s a task, but it’s something that we have now done several hundreds of times and whether it’s one plant, and that’s what I meant by a cookie cutter because it doesn’t matter if it’s one plant or it’s 70 plants or it’s 100 plants, the process is the same. And we all know the process and we all come together and make the process work.

Anthony Codispoti : And so has most of the growth taken place through acquisitions or is there any like starting new from the ground up? Both.

Teddy Hazelwood : We do what we call Greenfield or Brownfield. Most of ours are actually Brownfield, even though we call them Greenfield. The difference between those is Brownfield, it means it already existed as a some sort of construction environment at one time. So it’s grandfathered in from a zoning standpoint and we go in and like maybe it was a quarry back in the 80s and it hasn’t been mined maybe in 15, 20, 30 years, but it’s still zoned commercially and everything will go in and we’ll start mining it again.

We’ll bring in new equipment and stuff like that. We call it all Greenfield because if it’s an operational facility, then it’s an acquisition and if it’s not running, then we just consider them all Greenfield instead of trying to get in the weeds of it. So and our mining started off in exactly just that. It was a it was a mine that had just been used, you know, basically for farming type rock and different things like that and was very rarely used. And we went in and we put in a permanent crusher and different things like that.

And so it was kind of that Greenfield type. So it’s a good combination of both, but because of the propensity of how large an acquisition can be, right? Like I said, our largest one to date is 94 locations. It’s hard to Greenfield 94 locations overnight. You know, that’s going to take several years to do 94 locations. So for us to go from 2017 50 locations to now 570 locations, well over 600 plants. Because like I said, a lot of our locations have a B, some of them even have an ABC configuration where they’ll have three plants on one site. So 570 networks, 570 locations. It’s good growth and we’ve enjoyed ever been it up.

Anthony Codispoti : Are there some court guiding principles that you that Smirna sort of embrace as you’re taking on this mammoth growth?

Teddy Hazelwood : Court guiding as far as limitations. Would you say core guiding core like principles?

Anthony Codispoti : Oh, four principles. Yeah, yeah, we do. We have our five standard principles. We always meet with the new employees that’s coming in. We tell them what those five principles are. And it all stems around, you know, safety, quality, customer service, being a go getter and kindness, just, you know, being being nice to one another, treat people the way you want to be treated. The biblical golden rule, right?

And so we feel like if we treat others the way that they want to be treated, the way we want to be treated and we’re kind to one another, then, you know, we’ll maintain that closeness of a family relationship within our environment. I like that.

Anthony Codispoti : How about a tech project that is maybe currently underway that you’re really excited about or something that’s coming that you’re like, oh, boy, like this really gets me out of bed in the morning.

Teddy Hazelwood : My department, my engineers, and we’re always laughing because we had, you know, projects that we wanted to have rolled out at the beginning of the year. And we’ve kind of slow rolled them to make sure we have all the bugs worked out that it’s working the way we want it to work and has an easiness for us so that when we put it out to the user community, they won’t have any issues. So we’ve been using, you know, this one zero trust technology that we’re implementing for about four months now in the IT.

And we’re getting real close probably within the next week or two rolling it out in the company. And then at the same time, one of the things we’ve been architecting is we as part of our business continuity plan, you know, we have a DR site, like most companies, our size, do DR disaster recovery. So what I’m excited about is I’m like, okay, I’ve got all this money invested in this DR, this disaster recovery site so that my production site goes down, they can come back up like, but, you know, it’s just sitting there and aging, you know, keeping it updated and it’s good if ever needed, but it’s not getting utilized. So what I’m excited about is we have implemented our network structure as well as our server structure and everything to allow that to be production one, production two, active, active environments. So I’m leveraging the hardware at both sites. So instead of having to do these monthly tests or quarterly tests of falling

Anthony Codispoti : off, they’re both constantly running, you know, so now, you know, the fellow over is just basically going to be pulled to plug at site one and make sure everything’s running good on site, you know, when all traffic goes to site two that we’re still getting the performance that we want. So I’m really excited about that.

Then we’re probably, you know, within a month, probably be getting that implemented too. So we got a lot of things going on. Totally the other day, we got a lot of balls in the air. We just need to make sure none of them fall. What is the one zero trust tech that you mentioned?

Teddy Hazelwood : It’s a product from Sonicwall called client secure edge. It protects both our hybrid of our hybrid environment, right? Because we got an Azure, Microsoft presence, and then we got our four wall presence. So we’ve had a zero trust around our four wall a lot. We had multi factor acting as our zero trust to our cloud present. This puts a true halo around both of those at the same time of being more of just

Anthony Codispoti : more security, kind of like a more security.

Teddy Hazelwood : That’s right. More security. It’s not only securing who the person is. It’s accessing it. It’s also securing the hardware that’s accessing it. Okay.

Anthony Codispoti : Um, what’s a book or a podcast or a learning resource, a course, a framework, something that’s been really helpful to you in your career path today that you might recommend to listeners who aspire to something similar?

Teddy Hazelwood : Well, it’s it’s an old book. And, and I say that because I’m not a big, I’m not a big reader, you know, just straight off, I’d rather listen to a podcast or something like that. But, but the one thing that stuck out in my mind in, and then the IT world, it really helps out. It was called, if it’s not broke, break it. And basically it goes into change, change management, adapting a mindset of change. Um, because basically in IT, you’ve got to be able to change.

You got to be able to adapt. It’s changing so fast. New technologies are coming in at such a, you know, a high rate and everything.

And you got to stay on top of it. And you can’t allow your systems to become antiquated. There’s there’s too many bad actors out there that’s wanting to take advantage of, uh, of antiquated systems. And the easiest way to, to become vulnerable to that is to allow your, not to stay on top of all the technology that’s out there that will secure you from those bad actors. So it’s called, if it’s not broke, break it. Couldn’t even remember to tell you who the author is right now. But, uh, it, it helped me from a change principles standpoint.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah. And ever resting on your laurels. So always making sure that you’re staying at the cutting edge. Uh, just because it hasn’t broken yet, doesn’t mean that it won’t. So I had that forward vision to kind of be looking for, how do you improve where the potential weaknesses here?

Teddy Hazelwood : There’s always a better way of doing things than the way you’re doing it. And if you ever get in the mindset of thinking, uh, I’ve got this, I know what I’m doing, and this is the only way to do it. Um, then you’re setting yourself up for failure because there’s always an improvement out there that you can do something better and you need to find that.

Anthony Codispoti : Do you see AI being useful to your company yet? If so, how is not in the future?

Teddy Hazelwood : It’s funny you asked that because yeah, we just jumped into AI and we kind of jumped in feet first, you know, head deep. And, uh, but, um, no, we, we were starting to tread the waters of, of chat GPT with an enterprise edition of that to get our departments used to how AI works, what they can use it for, what they can benefit from it and different things such as that. And then throughout May and June, July, we’re going to be, um, developing and rolling out departmental specific, uh, GPT’s that they can take advantage of, as well as develop our own, um, chat bots and, and, uh, AI interfaces. AI has been around for years.

It’s just the development now of large language models and, uh, neural science and different things of, uh, that kind of puts the reasoning into AI, uh, so that it can give you better responses. We all know the days of getting lost in an IVR, right? And you call up, call up on the phone and you got this robotic voice trying to talk to you and it either can understand you or it takes you to the wrong prompt or it thinks that you want to do this and you want to do something else, you know, whatever the case might be. And, but the AI today is so much further advanced than, than what it was. And, uh, but it’s all encompassing of, of the old AI, right?

API is even in, in EDI and some of the other acronyms that we throw around in the tech world fall under artificial intelligence now because it’s, it’s a genetic, right? You’re having an agent in the background that’s, that’s doing the process, uh, what people used to do, uh, whether that’s transferring orders from system to system or whatever the case might be. So it’s acting as a, as an agent of transferring that data, uh, or whether or not it’s just a general way AI or generative AI where you’re asking questions like you used to in a search engine and it, but it’s giving back detailed responses now. You know, it’s not giving you back this list and you pick through the list. It’s carrying on a conversation we do through text or, or even through an avatar. You know, if you wanted to set up an avatar where it will actually sit there and talk to you or what that, uh, response is of what you’re searching for. So, uh, we’re excited about AI, especially now that we own JoNel and everything and, and seeing not only what we can do in our four walls, but you know, as we develop in our four, our four walls and we share it with the developing team of JoNel, but what, uh, possibly could be, you know, uh, in the future for, for their software and stuff.

Anthony Codispoti : yeah, how you commercialize that. Uh, think about one specific use case of AI that you want to use internally at Smyrna and maybe walk us through that.

Teddy Hazelwood : Well, from a text standpoint, we use it quite a bit in my department. I mean, whether it’s analyzing, you know, uh, our switching fabric or, uh, our routing fabric, whatever the case might be, whether it’s later, two, later, three or whichever, um, and looking for anomalies, you know, in our, uh, lag and then RV lands and different things like that.

Anthony Codispoti : Um, so you feel like system mobs and tell it like, Hey, what, what do you see here? Exactly.

Teddy Hazelwood : Exactly. Um, and then, you know, also just, um, programmatic. I mean, you know, I love to sit down and write a, a PowerShell script or a program or something that’ll go out and make our jobs easier. And typically I could develop one in a couple of hours or whatever. I can put the parameters in chat GPT and say, Hey, I want this to do this based off of a flat phone, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and just put everything in there in five seconds. I’ve got, you know, whole PowerShell script.

I go out and test it and see if it does what I want it to do. And, you know, so, and it’s exactly what I would have wrote, but it would, you know, maybe take me, you know, a couple of hours to do it. So it’s saving us some time from that standpoint, um, from as far as a company, you know, we’re, we’re wanting a chat bot, you know, that, uh, our employees, what they got at their fingertips now, but just present it to them in a different wrap, um, you know, what, how much overtime did I have last week?

You know, you had 31 hours, you know, or 20 hours or whatever the case might be. Um, how much vacation days I have left, you know, just make it interactive for our employees and different things like that. The things that they’re, like I said, they already have it in their app that they can get at their fingertips, but it just gives them another wrap. Of how they can get to that information and be presented to them.

Anthony Codispoti : Tell me about it. I’ve been here for a second. Uh, I would like to hear about a serious challenge, either personal or professional that you’ve overcome. What was it? How did you get through it? What did you learn? Yeah.

Teddy Hazelwood : So this goes back to high school. Um, the, uh, when I was in elementary school, I graduated salutatorian. Right. I mean, you know, I was second in my class in my, in my, uh, elementary school. Then when I got to high school, something just kind of transitioned. I kind of lost focus. Um, went through some rough patches at home and different things.

Um, and just had this mentality, uh, being told long enough that, you know, you’ll never amount to nothing that, you know, I started living up to that ideal that I would. And, um, so freshmen saw more junior year. I just kind of, yeah, I did class. I did school.

You know, this is great. You know, I’m going to graduate in a couple of years and then find out what life has in store for me. Well, then I met my wife, my wife now, uh, in my, the last part of my junior year.

Um, right about the time that, you know, we were, we were doing competitions and different things in, um, in OEA and things like that. And my mindset changed. I’m like, okay, I want to offer something better for my family than what, you know, what my parents have been able to offer to me. Um, I had great parents.

My dad taught me a hard work ethic, you know, and what it means to be dedicated to working and providing your family. We just never were, I mean, I tell everybody we were dirt poor because we couldn’t afford the dirt. We always rent it and, uh, and it wasn’t high level rent neither. You know, I’m talking, you know, $35, $45, but rents.

I mean, it was, it was a very poverty coming up. And, um, but then my end of my junior year, I’m like, I go to my goddess counselor and I’m like, I want to go to college. All I got left is my senior year.

And he’s like, uh, there’s not enough time. You know, I’m like, there’s got to be something you can do, you know, cause you go to college, you had to have foreign languages. You had to have so much math. You had so much of this without wasting a year of remedial. And, um, and I’m like, you know, I’ll do whatever I have to do in my senior year. So my senior year was packed with like two or three math classes.

Um, and just you name it. I mean, it was probably one of the roughest senior years anybody heard took cause most people was like, Oh, I’ll go have a day and then, you know, I’m off. I have a day, you know, and because they’ve already done everything except for that fourth year of English or whatever. I was just the opposite. I had to grab everything in my senior year. And, um, so I ended up getting a scholarship. I ended up making it to college and different things. And, um, my high school class actually, uh, voted me most likely to succeed. So, uh, yeah. So one year turned around from not caring, not knowing, you know, what life had in store for me to just changing my mindset. And that’s what it all is. It’s a state of mind. Uh, people come from different walks of life.

But if you set your mind to it that, Hey, I’m going to do something different and I’m going to break the chain and you can accomplish anything your heart side sets out to do.

Anthony Codispoti : What was the trigger for you? Was it meeting your future wife and saying, this is a woman I want to build a life with and a family with.

Teddy Hazelwood : Yep. And we’re still together now 36 years later.

Anthony Codispoti : And the family, do you guys have kids?

Teddy Hazelwood : We have four kids and 15 grandchildren as of right now.

Anthony Codispoti : Oh my goodness. Yeah. Abundance of riches. Yep.

Teddy Hazelwood : Whoever full as the Bible says. I love that.

Anthony Codispoti : Uh, I’d be curious to hear if you’ve got any advice for folks that are listening. You know, you’ve got 30 years of tech leadership. Uh, maybe some folks are listening and they say, Hey, I, I’m interested in tech. I aspire to be in a similar role of leadership in the tech space is to what I’m hearing Teddy talk about. What, what advice would you have for folks? Well, if you’re just getting into tech and

Teddy Hazelwood : I would suggest round, round yourself out, cause tech is, I mean, you know, it’s this huge, huge, huge thing that we’re talking about here and whether that cybersecurity developing, you know, networking systems, uh, even telephony has its own special, special places. But if you’re just starting off round yourself out, know a little bit about it, all of it. Um, and then once you get in it, you’ll find out what area you really want to focus on.

Um, I know this probably don’t sound the same as well. A lot of people say, don’t chase the buddy, but chase your dream. A lot of people say, I want to be in cybersecurity because that’s the highest paying job right now. You may not like cybersecurity.

You know, you may get in it and you may hate it. Then you got a job. You don’t have a career. But if you really want to get in tech, round yourself out, get in it and know it and find out what area you want to specialize in and then go after that. That’ll make you a career.

Anthony Codispoti : Hmm. Powerful. I like that. Um, what’s one thing you wish more people knew about your industry?

Teddy Hazelwood : It’s funny because when you talk about, I’m the CIO of the concrete company, they’re like, Oh, that must be an easy job. How much tech could there be in concrete? How much tech can there be in concrete? You know, but, you know, it’s a, it’s a highly technical world.

I mean, it really is. I mean, and yeah, there are, there are some companies that are in it that operate off of a low tech. Don’t get me wrong, but they’re, they’re not building to scale.

Right. It’s, it’s a localized company with two or two or three plants and, you know, they get by with very low technology. Um, but they’re also at risk, uh, even though they may not realize they’re at risk, but they’re at risk because they don’t have the security around it and everything.

They don’t have the bull’s eye on their back, of course. Um, but now, you know, a lot of, a lot of these bad actors that are in our, our space, um, they don’t necessarily have to have a, you know, a, a large company to go after anymore. You know, they’re going after the, the smaller, smaller fish, you know, and a lot of those with, with multiple payouts adds up to, to a large sum. So, um, but there is a lot of technology in, in making a company this size, just like it would be with any company, um, a success and to keep the wheels turning. Well, you think about it, we’ve got 7,500 employees in our company right now.

Got 570 locations. It’s all driven by technology. You know, and, uh, one, one hour of that down, you’re talking about millions, uh, uh, revin, millions of dollars revenue being compromised or at risk. Uh, we had, we do have placeholders in place. We have manual processes in place to, to help us out and different things. But, um, we, my whole team knows the severity of it. You know, I was plant being down, especially a region or anything like that. And we operate at a very low, uh, uh, failure rate.

So, uh, we, uh, we embrace the, the new nomenclature of fail fast, right? Cause you don’t have a whole lot of time to, to be down in our industry. Um, because it just creates issues. Uh, you know, there’s a thing in concrete called code joints.

You don’t want your technology to be responsible for a code joint. And what that is is where you delivered, you’re working on a large job. You delivered some of it and now it’s starting to, to set up or to cure. And there’s a delay in getting that next truck in.

So where that new concrete goes against the setting up concrete, it has the propensity of creating a code joint there and, and, uh, which isn’t good. And, you know, in the overall project, right?

Anthony Codispoti : That’s it. Yeah. It’s a, exactly. It’s a failure point. So, you know, it, it’s, uh, that’s what I wish everybody knew is that, you know, yeah, we’re not, uh, scientists, you know, from a standpoint of saving lives. We’re not doctors or anything like that.

But, um, you know, we’re, we’re very, uh, we keep the, uh, the country going. We know very few industries was considered, uh, during the COVID, um, pandemic. Very few industries was considered, um, essential, essential.

Exactly. That’s where I was looking for essential in concrete was one of them. So we never missed a day of work and our plants continued to operate throughout the pandemic, uh, offering our goods and services and whether it was setting up, uh, helping set up the pads for the mobile, uh, back shops that were being set up, uh, providing gravel for the, uh, the parking lots or different things like that. Or getting caught up on a lot of roadwork. A lot of states decided to get caught up on roadwork because there wasn’t a lot of traffic. So we were considering essential and, um, that’s just because concrete’s important. Like I said, it’s the number two conserved, uh, natural resource in the world. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti : That still blows my mind. Teddy, let’s say you’re from now, you and I reconnect and you’re celebrating something, what would that be?

Teddy Hazelwood : Hopefully it’s being a, uh, not just a finalist in the Orbeez, but maybe I’m going to be a grandchild. Maybe it’s grandchild number 16. I don’t know. Maybe it’s both. And then maybe, who knows, maybe it’s the, you know, SRM just acquired, you know, another a hundred plants. That would be great.

Anthony Codispoti : I just got one more question for you, Teddy, but before I ask it, I want to do two things. Everyone listening today, I invite you to hit the follow button on your favorite podcast app so you can continue to get more great content like we have with this interview today with Teddy Hazel with the CIO of smear and ready mix concrete. Teddy, I also want to let people know, and I’ll give you a choice here. You’re the best way to get in touch with you personally to follow your story or to follow that of smear and those, what would that be?

Teddy Hazelwood : Well, the fall smear and smear and ready mix.com. The SMY RNA READY mix.com. And we keep it up to date with, you know, what our acquisition, what our growth, what our, everything that we’re doing from a company standpoint. You can find me on LinkedIn, Teddy Hazelwood, only 10 to follow my career path. You can send me a invite there as well so that we can socially get connected in different things. Okay.

Anthony Codispoti : And we’ll include links to all those things you just mentioned in the show notes for folks. So last question for you, Teddy, as you look to the future, what are the exciting changes you feel are coming to your space in the next few years?

Teddy Hazelwood : Well, you just mentioned an AI. I mean, that’s, you know, there’s a lot of buzzwords that come into IT. IT loves buzzwords. You know, we like to throw out, you know, like I said, we’ll go ID, EDI, IVR, AI, all these acronyms that stand for something, right? But if you remember a few years ago, cloud was a big, big thing. And oh, we got to move to the cloud.

CEOs was grabbing it by the horns. We got to move to the cloud. Well, cloud infrastructure, you know, quickly, just a quick description of it is someone else is hosting the data center. There’s not a computer in the cloud. The computer is sitting, the data center is sitting somewhere, whether that’s Microsoft, Oracle, AWS, or some other data center that leases out space in their rack. And, but it got dubbed cloud computing.

And because you accessed it through the internet. AI’s where it’s at today is different than AI yesterday. You know, like I said, we’ve all gotten lost in those chatbots and the IVRs on phones and different things like that, where the technology didn’t really understand you, didn’t take you where you wanted to go. And it led to frustration after frustration.

The AI today is different from that. And it just keeps getting better. And it’s, and it’s getting better. I mean, the AI today is better than when chat GPD first came out, you know, last year, the end of 2023. It’s just light years ahead of where it was even then.

And it’s just progressively getting better and better. So in the next few years, that’s going to change drastically, not just the IT space, but the everyday end user of technology space. We all have Alexa or Google or something in our phones, right? Where we Alexa, turn on the music or turn on the TV or turn on the lights or whatever the case might be. That’s just a touch of how smart our technology is going to be from a voice response. We’re seeing it in cars, you know, where we can talk to the car and tell it, you know, where we want to go and it brings up the locations or, you know, we speak to our phone to call, you know, look up a certain company or whatever the case might be. That’s just the tip of the iceberg to worry. I was going to take us.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s going to be so excited to follow. Teddy, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it. Thank you. It’s fun. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.