Business View Magazine Apr-2023

78 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 4 Joe Lanzoni, engineering sales manager at LEC and a 31-year veteran, chimes in. “We started designing and manufacturing surge protectors in the 70s. Recently, I was on an airplane reading an in-flight magazine and saw Roy Carpenter’s name mentioned in an article about surge protectors. One of his designs has become the standard low voltage surge protector design.” With a wide range of products, including the patented Dissipation Array System (DAS) applicable to a broad spectrum of industries, LEC’s clients include companies like ExxonMobil, UPS, BASF, Valero, and others in heavy industries like oil and gas, petrochemical, utilities, aerospace, and defense. Brian Daugherty, an engineering sales manager at LEC, describes the company’s typical client list. “About two-thirds of our customers come from the petrochemical industry, including refineries, chemical plants, and petroleum storage tanks. We also have a lot of paper and pulp manufacturers who store highly volatile liquors used in turning wood into paper products.” “Other clients come from the broader process plants industry like petro plants that make Vaseline and plastics and chlorine plants.” The company also services clients in the utility industry, including fossil fuel, nuclear, solar farms, data centers, and similar installations. LEC’s target customers are represented by knowledgeable engineers tasked with finding the right solutions. As such, most sales calls with potential customers are more about explaining the solution than making a hard sell, as Daugherty explains. “What’s unique about our business model is that we’re consultants, not salespeople. Our primary focus is to educate the customer to make the best decision for their use case.” “We discuss how lightning interfaces with their facility and how geography and atmospherics factor, giving the customer a good background of what we do and then letting them make the decision.” “This approach is one of the main reasons we’ve been successful considering what we sell is not the general standard, affordable compared to alternatives, or an easy sell.” “Once we’ve educated them, however, they are willing to pay for the system reliability we offer. They understand that we’re not just protecting structures; we’re ensuring their operations continue running.” “For instance, if a refinery trips offline due to a lightning event, you don’t flip a switch and turn it back on. They lose production and must burn off some of the production through flaring, which gets them negative exposure, costs them carbon credits, and results in lost product, all caused