Different Seats, Same Room: Why Diverse C-Level Voices Make Waste Nexus Work

Brian Dolan

Welcome back to the Waste Nexus podcast. I once again don't know what episode this will be. Charlie's back with us.

Charlie Dolan

Hey, I'm here.

Brian Dolan

He was absent for an earlier podcast. I guess he has a job, and this is gonna be a different episode in that we have a bunch of people coming in in short succession for our Waste Nexus event.

If you weren't here this year, which if you're watching this, you weren't here, most likely, and you can sign up for next year already. It's up there on the webpage, so go ahead over to dsqtechnology.com and feel free to do that. Today, we have Matt Gladden with us.

Matt is new to our world. Right? But he knows a bunch of people we know. That's how he arrived here. I wrote down some notes. National Valet Trash started from one contract in 2016. Is that right?

Matt Gladden

Yeah. Okay. That's correct, 10 years.

Brian Dolan

10 years. This year. Yeah, yeah. We, we both can do that, right? Yeah. Right, so anything harder, we're gonna give to Charlie.

Charlie Dolan

We're joined today by Bill Lowther. In from Philadelphia, right? Nice. So Brian and I are short-term transplants to, to Philadelphia with a little time spent at Villanova. Bill, I know you lived there a long time, but happy to have you here. Thanks for coming across the state to Pittsburgh and spending, the next, you know, 24, 48 hours with us.

Bill Lowther

Correct. Looking forward to it. Yeah, great

Brian Dolan

For this mini episode, we have Cassidy Brauns with us coming up from Charlotte.

Cassidy Brauns

Yes, sir.

Brian Dolan

It's nice and cool up here compared to down there, I would imagine.

Cassidy Brauns

Very much so, yeah.

Brian Dolan

CEO of Gatehouse Purchasing, which, as I understand it, is the... Like, if you've heard of a GPO, group purchasing organization type of thing, or a buyer's club type of mentality.

People have heard of different terms for these things, but it's an opportunity for smaller hauling, companies to be able to purchase more like a larger footprint national style company. Is that the right vein?

Cassidy Brauns

Correct. Yes, sir. Yep, we go by plenty of names, group purchasing organization.

We hear co-op, we hear, "Are you a broker?" We hear 10 ways to Sunday. At the end of the day, our goal is really simple. It's to help independent waste haulers, like you said, buy like national waste haulers.

Charlie Dolan

Joined here by Micah Stateson, founder and president at Optimized Waste Removal. I know we've got a couple questions here for him about his history, but currently focused on that multifamily collection, and really want to hear about the background and how you got there, and also, you know, what you're looking towards, you know, getting out of this Waste Nexus event.

Brian Dolan

Well, so I… quick get of the prompts for this of where we want to go, and AI told me you left $100 million plus contracting career type of environment, which I didn't fully dig into.

Micah Stateson

Yeah.

Brian Dolan

So I'll just ask you in person. So tell us about that, going from that to doing apartment trash pickups.

Micah Stateson

Yeah.

Brian Dolan

What's that?

Micah Stateson

Everyone thought I was stupid when I left

Brian Dolan

Why come to Waste Nexus? What is interesting for you about this event?

Micah Stateson

Yeah, no, as we grow and get more clients and expand, we're becoming one of the largest Texas-based valet trash companies. We're expanding broader geographically, but also we want to expand deeper, and a lot of that starts with just, having great partners, learning more about the hauling side of things, and how we can optimize things for our clients across the whole value of their multi-family waste ecosystem.

Brian Dolan

Yep.

Micah Stateson

And there's a lot of areas we need to improve on, and one of the things that if I was to pat myself on the back, is I know how stupid I am, so I ask a lot of questions and I try to learn and, and I do think, Waste Nexus will provide us with a lot of opportunity to grow and, and become more experts in our field, which is good for us and our clients.

Brian Dolan

There's some guys here who are further down the path than you, that I think you'll find interesting to talk to, in the same episode, there'll be another person who, is in that same industry but is further down the path. So, but yeah, I think you'll find some of that.

Micah Stateson

Yeah... who?

Brian Dolan

well, it'll come up.

Micah Stateson

Okay, okay. I don't want to spoil the episode.

Brian Dolan

Yeah, yeah. I don't know where these are editing

Micah Stateson

I know there are some of my competitors.

Brian Dolan

Yeah, I don't know where this is fitting in terms of the order, so it'll, it'll come up. Don't want to ruin it.

Matt Gladden

Well, thanks for asking, thanks for having us. Yeah. so yeah, it is somewhat of a crossover in our industry, right? Trash as a whole. This goes back to driving value to our clients, you know, I'm here to learn about the technology. I've got some bits and pieces of it, so I think I understand the basic part.

Brian Dolan

Yeah, our friend Keith, churned your ear.

Matt Gladden

Through Keith, absolutely.

Matt Gladden

So with us, it's how can we be more of a full service trash company for our clients, and where we can drive value? Instead of just hitting their bottom line, could we help them almost be like a consulting arm? 'Cause we're already boots on the ground on their property every single night.

Brian Dolan

You're seeing things.

Matt Gladden

Right. Can we bring in DSQ technology, help them save money, while helping with all their trash solutions, except for the hauling, 'cause that's not what we do, so.

Brian Dolan

Yeah. I wouldn't want to get into that if I didn't have to, right?

Bill Lowther

Not just 'cause I have extra spare time on my hands necessarily. I'm looking to, you know-

Brian Dolan

We're not retired yet ...

Bill Lowther

visit Pittsburgh and catch a baseball game. But more so I wanted to see what's happening here in your world. Share ideas. To me, that's really what I'm most excited about doing, is just to catch what's happening in a small setting.

Brian Dolan

Right.

Bill Lowther

Small setting of 30 folks. I just had a great conversation with Spencer.

Brian Dolan

He's fantastic.

Bill Lowther

Yeah ... he's based in DFW, and we had a great conversation, you know?

Cassidy Brauns

So I heard a Pirates game is going on and Skenes might be pitching... No, I'm kidding. I'm just kidding. -

Brian Dolan

It's a fair reason.

Cassidy Brauns

Yeah, no, no. You know, what you guys do and, and your LinkedIn content, both of you, has, has generally been, and don't take this the wrong way. There's some, some, some rage bait-y stuff in there, and it's fun, right? Yeah. It's fun. It's interactive and, and I've pushed back to you one time

Brian Dolan

Why, why bother, why bother saying anything... if there's not anybody to answer you or say something?

Cassidy Brauns

Exactly. And you came back to me a couple times and said, "Well, hey, man, like, let's, let's go further," right? And I've found in our brief interactions that you're willing to kind of go push that a little bit further and-

Brian Dolan

And I'm willing to be wrong.

Cassidy Brauns

Yeah. And well, there you go. There you go. And I love that. And so when you said, "Hey, I want 30 innovators in a room," what I think this event is intended to do, and what I hope it's intended to do is, you know, when somebody speaks up, right, they know they're gonna be a little bit, like, skittish, but the minute that they do, like, it's gonna open this can of worms because you guys are both curious, right?

Right. And we're gonna ask some, some hard questions. Our industry's, you know, not right, wrong, or indifferent, but it's old school in a lot of ways. And so when we start talking about waste and innovation together, man, that's exciting for me. Like, we're doing something. We jokingly say our first sales call, "Who the hell are you and what do you do?"

Charlie Dolan

Yeah.

Cassidy Brauns

Right. Because no one knows what we're doing.

Brian Dolan

Yeah. Right. I know that feeling.

Cassidy Brauns

And that's enticing, right? Like, you love that call.

Brian Dolan

What's next in your world? You know, coming up on 20 states- growing to 200,000 doors, that's a nice round numbers. Like...

Matt Gladden

Yeah. So we obviously wanna keep growing. I mean, year over year we've been at about 100% growth every year except for the last two where we're probably over, like, 55% growth. So obviously that slows.. you know?

Brian Dolan

It's hard to attain those big numbers

Matt Gladden

Right. But if you don't grow, you die, right? And, and we're builders, we like to build. We are considering, you know, finally after 10 years, possibly a minority stake financial partner.

Charlie Dolan

Oh, I feel those server emails just warming up.

Matt Gladden

minority... and the reason…

Charlie Dolan

Non-vote

Matt Gladden

well, the good thing is, like, we know a lot of people in our industry, a lot of good owners and stuff. And, what we would like to do is not only just buy doors, we wanna, we want people to come over... right? And have a really good leadership team. A good base of people that are already in those markets, doing those things, have a local presence. So that is something we're exploring, but only a minority because what we've seen in our industry it's a big private equity play, right? And, no offense, every group run differently, but they have to make the numbers look good, and usually that's chopping operating cost. And what that usually leads to is the people that are out there doing the work get paid less money.

Charlie Dolan

Right.

Matt Gladden

And guess what? When it rains in Orlando every single night, guess who's gonna show up? It's not gonna be the person making $12 or $15. It's the person that's making $25 an hour, right?

Brian Dolan

Well, and there's a, there's a subset of the marketplace that will always look for an independently owned thing versus a corporate thing. There's that element that is still... So how do you balance that corporate versus independent on your presentation? Does the customer notice that? That you guys are independent?

Matt Gladden

Well, we're still independent, right? So, I mean, we're still family-run.

Brian Dolan

Do you still... But do you feature that in your presentation?

Matt Gladden

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Brian Dolan

That's pretty cool that it's that big and you can still feature it. That's interesting.

Matt Gladden

Yeah. Until we can't, you know, if we decide to take a partner, but we're still majority owners. I mean.

Brian Dolan

Well, no, I mean, if you have a minority then it's not, doesn't mean that you're not still family-owned and the whole thing.

Matt Gladden

Right.

Brian Dolan

Yeah, that’s interesting

Matt Gladden

So, we’ll still have control is the main thing. So , again, especially operationally, right, is we feel like-

Brian Dolan

Well, it's an operational game.

Matt Gladden

That's all it is, right, at the end of the day. So we feel like we've done a really good job. I mean, I think our churn rate over 10 years is less than 1%, which is pretty unheard of. Do we have issues? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have 180,000 touch points a night.

Brian Dolan

Everybody does.

Matt Gladden

You know what I mean? So it's not like our bulk company that the trash is out there, they compact, they just go get it and take it off. Great, so we have to compete with that, but yeah.

Cassidy Brauns

What am I looking forward to at this event?

Brian Dolan

It's, well, it's an open-ended question. You can take it wherever you want.

Cassidy Brauns

All right, what am I most looking forward to? I think for me, and, and probably you guys at some point too, entrepreneurship's a pretty lonely journey to start, right?

Brian Dolan

That's why, that's why.

Cassidy Brauns

Like, yeah. Like, literally it’s

Brian Dolan

That's why, that's why. We can punch each other.

Cassidy Brauns

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, come on. Yes. I think most people hide that, right? And they do a poor job of hiding that. I think for me it's, like, I care a lot about my family, I care a lot about the people that are in our organization.

I wanna see all of us succeed, but, you know, at the end of the day, what I'd really wanna see, like, independent waste haulers getting represented well, and walking through this journey with other people I trust. You know, I think someone once said, trust is the currency of leadership, and I truly believe that, right?

And it's, it's fun. So, like, what I see next is, you know, again, we're not gonna go to markets without having representation at home, and so what representation means is not only are we reaching the marketplace, but man, like, there's more people in the journey with you.

Charlie Dolan

Right.

Cassidy Brauns

And we're gonna do some dumb stuff, and we're gonna mess up, but, like, there's people in the trenches with me now, as opposed to, like, when I made that first $20,000 mistake, and I was like, "Holy crap, what did I just do? That was real dumb."

Brian Dolan

I have a great line for that you can use-

Cassidy Brauns

Yeah, please

Brian Dolan

which is if someone says, "Oh, no, boss, I made this mistake," what they do- I always laugh and I go, "Do you know how much money I've cost this company?"

Cassidy Brauns

Yes.

Brian Dolan

Like, that number doesn't even count ...

Cassidy Brauns

that's, yeah, that's miniscule.

Brian Dolan

Did you learn from it? Okay. Exactly. Don't do it again.

Cassidy Brauns

Let's go. Exactly.

Charlie Dolan

What's a specific thing that your company's doing, that a national usually isn't paying as close attention to, or, you know, whether that's service-based or otherwise?

Micah Stateson

As incredibly simple as it is, we've brought back handwritten notes.

Brian Dolan

Nice.

Micah Stateson

If they ever left, but that's something we take-

Brian Dolan

They did

Micah Stateson

very, very, very seriously. So whenever we miss a bag of trash, which we do, and that's even part of our sales pitch is, "Hey, we are not perfect. We're human. We hire humans. We're asking them to pick up 400 bags of trash five nights a week. That's 2,000 opportunities to screw up." Right. We're likely gonna screw up at some point.

Brian Dolan

Law of averages.

Micah Stateson

Yeah. Yeah. And so our thing is even if of those 2,000 opportunities, we just miss one bag, if a resident reports that as an issue, our goal is to be on site within three hours from the time you reported it, not when we respond to the email when you sent it. And when we show up, we pick up that one bag of trash, and then our managers leave a handwritten apology note, and our clients love that.

One, drives accountability back to us. I don't wanna spend the money to send a full-time manager to go pick up one bag of trash and leave an apology note, but two, it connects us to the residents. Which is a really tough challenge for us because no matter what, they're gonna go to who they know, and that's the leasing agent that leased them the apartment, or that they talk to regularly. They don't have that relationship with us. So when we do mess up, write that handwritten note, they know we care and we're not just a faceless organization that-

Brian Dolan

It's almost like a good opportunity to mess up every now and then just to get it, that connection.

Micah Stateson

It honestly does-

Brian Dolan

But not to do it, yeah.

Micah Stateson

No, but it does it, a lot of times, it does help us strengthen our relationship with both the resident and the property.

Bill Lowther

Can I ask you guys a question? The technology you have right now, like what do you see happening right now? I mean, I'm kind of an AI junkie, have been since, the first ChatGPT came out.

Brian Dolan

Everything will be

Bill Lowther

coming to me. And I did my first haiku, haiku and, you know, showing my kids how to do that.

Brian Dolan

Right ...

Bill Lowther

And, but no, honestly, I mean, I've got all the LLMs kinda jacked out, the max app. And I'm constantly messing with them. And as an entrepreneur, my brain's constantly going about how to apply this to an everyday task. In your world, like, how's this coming together?

Brian Dolan

He's the more tech side. I'll give you my side as the sort of sales guy side, which is everything becomes much more agentic than user interface.

Because ultimately, there's a system of record somewhere in the background, right? For broad purposes, say it's Salesforce, right? Yeah.

And that system of record in the background, does it have the capability to understand the information that's being given to it, okay?

And then can the interface you're working with, which is more often than not gonna be some sort of AI interface, can it extract that information and present it in such a way that is helpful?

That's how I see a lot of the things going on. Now, there's so many different ways you can tie things into a system of record to get information out.

Charlie Dolan

I think if you just look for, like, historical context, and you think through different ways of technology, you know, you were talking at the beginning about physical reels of paper triggered by a radio, right?

So there's that evolution. There's a desktop evolution. There's client-server architecture. There's mobile stuff that gets deployed. And each of those instances, the work that's getting done, you know, by hand, in a truck, driving around, that's not necessarily changing. It's those abstractions of it in these different systems that are adjusting and sometimes the interfaces.

And so I think what you'll see a lot of this next wave go by is, maybe the mobile stuff's maybe a pretty similar correlation. A lot of the same work has to get done. It's shifting from now I'm going into a website, clicking a bunch of buttons. I got SOPs on how to put this ticket in and order this thing and migrate that information around to, you know, maybe fully voice agent.

Maybe an agent that's doing eighty percent of the work for you, and you're, you're finally able to just focus on the exceptions, which is what decades of software development's tried to do, right? Automate all this mundane stuff so that we can get those human-to-human interactions and get to the decision.

And I think that's likely to occur. I think that the tricky part of that ride is what are the parlor tricks and what are the things that it doesn't do well, but it'll tell you it's doing a great job. And how do you make sure that you insulate yourself from that, so you don't get sort of bit in the butt by it?

Brian Dolan

When is it lying to you?

Charlie Dolan

Right. It's very sycophantic. It's very positive in a way and confident in a way that can mislead you. But at the same time, it's so incredibly powerful. You've seen even in the last couple weeks different math problems being solved by these things, largely through brute force, right?

They're taking an entire data center worth of compute and they're applying it towards millennia problems, and it's getting either really close or actually cracking it, so.

Brian Dolan

Or they're stealing some guy's work.

Charlie Dolan

Or they're stealing some guy's work and, and brute forcing it that way. So you know, it's certainly, gonna change a lot of how, I think, the knowledge work and some of the back office stuff works.

But I think with the intention of those human-to-human touch points and some of the stuff that can't be automated, is obviously gonna remain and be even more valuable.

Brian Dolan

I keep saying that until the computers buy from each other. The job of the computer is to make it so that you and I can talk to each other and decide what we wanna do.

Bill Lowther

Right.

Charlie Dolan

Which the computers can buy from each other now, but then it goes off the rails, and you're not happy with what it bought.

Bill Lowther

Yes. Right.

Brian Dolan

So. you're still there

Charlie Dolan

Yeah. You're still there.

Brian Dolan

until they kill us all.

Charlie Dolan

What’s the worst industry habit you’d change?

Brian Dolan

No one answers this like us

Charlie Dolan

We can edit it out!

Matt Gladden

The one that's hard for me is 'cause I'm a very loyal person. Like loyalty inside the industry. from our clients. Like a lot of times we'll go in, I'm not speaking bad about anything, and I understand there's different ownership groups involved a lot of times. Yeah. But it's-

Brian Dolan

Budgets, budgets sometimes rule

Matt Gladden

and it's, "Hey, if you do a good job at this property, we're gonna give you this portfolio" or "You did a good job on this portfolio, give you this one." And that doesn't always come to fruition.

Brian Dolan

Yeah. I generally don't believe those things. I've been trained to not believe those things.

Matt Gladden

Only worth the paper they're written on a lot of times, unfortunately.

Brian Dolan

Especially when they're verbal.

Matt Gladden

Yeah, exactly.

Cassidy Brauns

I think the status quo remains the status quo until, you know, you get somebody in there

Brian Dolan

You do what we did yesterday because we did it yesterday.

Cassidy Brauns

Yeah. And you know, I think that from a safety perspective, so I used to run a hauling company and I...

Literally the guys would be on the same exact routes doing the same things. But man, I replaced four mailboxes a day. It's like, "Hey, dumb-dumb ," like, "We gotta stop replacing mailboxes, man." Like we gotta stop picking up mailboxes with a grabber.

Brian Dolan

How'd you change it?

Cassidy Brauns

So we went to the resident and changed the, the, you know, the spacing of the carts to the mailbox. Yes. But in tight cul-de-sacs it's like, "Hey, man, maybe we should use a different truck in the cul-de-sac," right?

Are we thinking about things differently? If you're not challenging the status quo, my encouragement would be to do that. Yeah. I think we, both our companies, try to do that, but man, people get stuck in the mud really easily just because, you know, there's still a... It's, it's almost like the gamut of the ages within our industry are just so wide right now. But you still have this older leadership group that, man, just loves it and they live with it.

Brian Dolan

I don't think it's limited to people who are older than us.

Cassidy Brauns

That's fair. I agree ...

Brian Dolan

'cause I have employees and work with customers who are of all different ages, and I'll see people who are 25 who go, "But that's how we do it." And I'm like, "Man, you're too young to say that."

Cassidy Brauns

That's right.

Brian Dolan

But that's part of life.

Brian Dolan

It can't be my LinkedIn.

Charlie Dolan

Yeah. Despite his wife's requests.

Bill Lowther

Low pricing. Low pricing. Just low pricing. Yeah. Just-

Brian Dolan

People don't understand

Bill Lowther

margin ... people don't understand margin.

Charlie Dolan

Is it interesting... And so just to draw that together, that's probably a strong indicator as to why there's so many bankers in the industry. They're bringing that sophistication of, "Look, what are you guys doing?"

Bill Lowther

They're changing that, right ... but that's still crazy to me that, that there's still people out there that don't understand how to properly price stuff. But anyway, that's one thing.

Brian Dolan

No one answers this.

Micah Stateson

Shifting blame.

Charlie Dolan

Shifting blame. I like that. Why?

Micah Stateson

I think it's just so common and so easy to do. Yeah. If we're constantly fighting it internally, it's just take responsibility.

Brian Dolan

Yeah.

Micah Stateson

And it serves us well when we do it.

Brian Dolan

I sent an email. I sent an email.

Micah Stateson

Yeah.

Brian Dolan

I sent an email.

Brian Dolan

What has surprised you about Pittsburgh so far?

Charlie Dolan

Be nice, you know? Yeah. It's a Philly thing.

Bill Lowther

Airport was amazing. Yeah. I got off the airport and first of all, it was spectacular. I came in American Airlines building.

Brian Dolan

For a billion dollars, we can build you a nice one too.

Charlie Dolan

Yeah, yeah.

Bill Lowther

Yeah. I've been to a couple nice airports. Like Detroit was very nice at Delta, but this one's really nice. And secondly, the drive in over the river and the view of the stadium. Yeah, really beautiful coming over the-

Brian Dolan

If you came over through the tunnels into the-

Bill Lowther

Yeah.

Brian Dolan

They call that the Pittsburgh handshake.

Bill Lowther

Yeah. Oh, well. Yeah, I can see.

Brian Dolan

Yeah.

Bill Lowther

Beautiful.

Cassidy Brauns

The food court was solid. Nice Jimmy John's, we had a little Chick-fil-A action there.

Charlie Dolan

Did you get any of the pizza at the, at the airport?

Cassidy Brauns

I heard the pizza's good. Pizza. The pizza line was packed.

Charlie Dolan

Vinnie's Pizza... Represent.

Cassidy Brauns

But it was, it seemed like it was just redone. How long ago?

Charlie Dolan

They launched it, I think it was opened in February something. I don't know.

Cassidy Brauns

Yeah, it's, it's fresh. It's, it's a fresh redo.

Charlie Dolan

It's under a year-ish.

Cassidy Brauns

Yeah, yeah. And I like having a rental car spot in the airport. Charlotte has that too. It's super nice not having to leave. Like Denver, it's 35 minutes away.

Brian Dolan

Did you bother to rent a car?

Cassidy Brauns

I did. I did. I'm gonna see a couple folks.

Charlie Dolan

We're all flying back tomorrow. I'm gonna go get a car right now.

Brian Dolan

Oh, you did some of the meetings. That's right. You have a job. I forgot.

Cassidy Brauns

Somebody's gotta work.

Matt Gladden

I've been here one other time.

Charlie Dolan

Yeah.

Matt Gladden

It was actually for fire retardant trash can legislation, believe it or not.

Charlie Dolan

Wow, interesting. I didn't know we were big on that.

Matt Gladden

Oh, it was a big thing for years, especially when we were halfway, probably five years in, it could have ruined our company. Wow. So we actually-

Charlie Dolan

Well, we need to hear about that next.

Matt Gladden

Yeah, yeah. I we can talk about that some other time I guess, but yeah, I love it here. The weather's great. I'm, I live in Florida, so this is a nice change of pace.

Charlie Dolan

Yeah. Big change. Little, little cooler.

Micah Stateson

So I love Fort Worth.

Brian Dolan

Okay.

Micah Stateson

It doesn't have the hills like Pittsburgh, which I ... Just the feel just seems like a blue collar, feels smaller than it is city, which is like my hometown and-

Brian Dolan

Okay ...

Micah Stateson

yeah, this whole time I was like, "Man, I like this place a lot."

Charlie Dolan

All right.

Micah Stateson

I like that. I'm excited to get to know the city more. Yeah. And there's a lot more Pirates hats than I thought, so seems like the town has a lot of pride in baseball, or I'm just near the Pirates.

Charlie Dolan

lot of pride on all the sports. I mean, we, obviously our office is close to PNC Park, but you know, you'll see Steeler jerseys at church on Sunday kind of thing, so.

Brian Dolan

Is fantasy football lame or legit and why is it lame?

Cassidy Brauns

Can we turn this off before my wife watches this? No, I, really enjoy it. I've enjoyed it more the more intense punishments I've gotten.

Brian Dolan

- You've lost?

Cassidy Brauns

so I think if you're playing without punishments, it's lame.

Brian Dolan

Have you lost?

Cassidy Brauns

So we do a weekly punishment...

Charlie Dolan

Ooh. Oh, everyone hurts.

Cassidy Brauns

which makes it way more fun. So there's a pool of them. The winner, the highest score, gets to pick the lowest scorer's stuff. Okay. And so it’s wash... And we're in a neighborhood league, so it's wash your neighbor's car, or go mow his yard-

Charlie Dolan

Nice.

Cassidy Brauns

or put a lemonade stand, or have a Halloween costume in July. It's really fun stuff.

Micah Stateson

Very legit. Here's why. Sophomore year of high school, I started playing with some friends. We still are in the same league. Same group of guys. We get together once a year. It's our one excuse just to see everybody. We've all moved to different places. Tons of kids.

Brian Dolan

So everybody comes in?

Micah Stateson

All... We all meet at our friend's parent's lake house. And we do our draft that weekend.

Charlie Dolan

Wow. That's awesome.

Micah Stateson

It's just a good way to stay connected with the boys.

Brian Dolan

Are you a past victor of this league or a past loser? Either way?

Micah Stateson

I can't answer that question. Yeah.

Charlie Dolan

It's classified.

Micah Stateson

That's classified.

Brian Dolan

It's also somewhere in Arizona.

Micah Stateson

I think the best I've done is third.

Brian Dolan

Third's good ...

Micah Stateson

I'm the embarrassment of the league.

Brian Dolan

What? Finished third.

Matt Gladden

It's not lame. I'm stuck in adolescence, I guess, I've been playing in fantasy football for, like, 20 years. We still have the same league from, like, 20 years ago.

Brian Dolan

How do you play in fantasy football? What do you...

Matt Gladden

Yeah, drafting. It's kinda like drafting your Hall of Famers we were talking about. Don't we all wanna own a football team? Like, I don't know.

Brian Dolan

I'm a Hockey fan.

Charlie Dolan

Do you end up with the same group of friends, you know... going forward?

Matt Gladden

Yeah. Pretty much.

Charlie Dolan

Good touch point to-

Matt Gladden

So, yeah. And then there's, like, neighborhood friends. Like, when I moved to my neighborhood, they have one. Yeah. Honestly, outside of that, it is fun. I enjoy it. Yeah. But it's a good way to keep up with people that I normally wouldn't talk to... all the time, like buddies from a long time ago. It's a way I can talk junk to them and-

Bill Lowther

Oh, boy. I would say legit now.

Charlie Dolan

Yes.

Matt Gladden

I would say legit.

Brian Dolan

It's fine. No one takes the lame.

Charlie Dolan

I was pressured to ask the question Brian threw in the last bit. Do you play?

Bill Lowther

Not this year. I sat out, you would think because I supposedly have more time on my hands, but no, I stayed out.

Brian Dolan

Is it 'cause you lost last year?

Bill Lowther

No, it was-

Charlie Dolan

AI's made him more busy ...

Bill Lowther

That's true.

Charlie Dolan

That's what I feel like.

Bill Lowther

But there's guys in my office that have multiple leagues going on, and they have like, the, what do they call it? The legacy league or whatever that, where the team remains behind and you don't reboot every year.

Brian Dolan

Oh.

Bill Lowther

So they're really into it. I think it's great.

Brian Dolan

Yeah.

Bill Lowther

Yeah. It's that whole motivation.

Brian Dolan

Yeah. My kids are into it ... Some of my kids are into it. I never got into football after I went. I worked for a couple years in Montana. I had to work on Sundays, so-

Bill Lowther

That's right, you had the Montana number.

Brian Dolan

Right. So I living in Montana, working on Sundays, I stopped watching football, and then I just... We had kids, and I was like- Yeah ... "I don't, I'm not adding this back in.” And so it never became a thing for me.

Charlie Dolan

My in-laws have a league, so we're in a family league over there, and I get squashed.

Brian Dolan

You get squashed- You're not good at it?

Charlie Dolan

I haven't been last yet, but-

Bill Lowther

Where do they do the draft? Do they do it like big traditional draft?

Charlie Dolan

Well, so we were doing the draft, and it's usually somewhat in person if we can, and then there was a massive storm that rolled through and everybody's power went out, but it had already locked in.

I guess you can only delay or reschedule the draft, you know, so many hours in advance, or something like that, so it auto-drafted for everybody. So the league's a little bit shot this year.

Brian Dolan

Oh, that's gonna be an interesting outcome. Yeah,

Charlie Dolan

yeah.

Brian Dolan

No one's gonna claim their victory or loss.

Charlie Dolan

Yeah

Brian Dolan

Well, they'll claim the victory. They won't claim the loss.

Charlie Dolan

That's right. Right?

Brian Dolan

that's great.

Charlie Dolan

And that's a wrap on Waste Nexus 2026. I wanna thank everybody for making the trip out to beautiful Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I think we had a lot of good first.

Brian Dolan

Very beautiful.

Charlie Dolan

a lot of good first experiences, and some repeat experiences for some of the attendees. I wanna thank Brian, Laura, and the rest of the team who puts this together. I know it's a Herculean effort, and it's not easy, or trivial to get, you know, some of these individuals to commit the time, and travel over here. And, and thank each of our attendees for doing that time away from the family, home, work.

Brian Dolan

And our guests from today who managed to make it in early to join the podcast.

Charlie Dolan

That's right. They're doing extra time, right? And you know, just really satisfied with what is now a second annual Waste Nexus, and trying to create that intentional space for people to come together, have, you know, sort of lower stakes, lower stress conversations and be open with one another that's not necessarily sales driven or outcome driven, and talk about the different challenges that we're seeing across the waste industry, different opportunities that we're seeing across the waste industry.

And I think we had the most, you know, wide range of industry participants this year between either waste generators or service providers, or haulers and, you know, independent haulers, large haulers, software companies.

So really awesome to see that. And, keep an eye out for not only more podcasts on this Waste Nexus channel, but Waste Nexus for 2027, which if you go to dsqtechnology.com, there'll be a banner at the bottom and top, where you can apply to that. And again, trying to keep that as a 30 or so person event where we curate the right content and the right opportunities for people to interact and have a memorable experience.

Brian Dolan

That sounds exactly like the plan, and I think that next year we'll do a very similar event, but we always are open to changes, so.

Charlie Dolan

And figure out what's better. Yeah, there's always iterations.

Brian Dolan

Yeah. So... Like, you know, for this year we've got the weather right, so.

Charlie Dolan

We've got the weather right. I think another hit is the trading cards that we gave out. I think we may have, R&D'd that off somebody else's event. But anyway.

Brian Dolan

Yeah, our friend Rand was online promoting that.

Charlie Dolan

Thank you, Rand and Michael Girdley. So, little trading cards with everybody's contact information and a little bit of backstory for, getting to know one another and a little icebreaker in the hotel, maybe beforehand, so.

Brian Dolan

Take your notes on the back.

Charlie Dolan

Take your notes. That's right. Yeah. So...

Brian Dolan

Well, hopefully you apply online. The applications come to me, so, you know, I do accept all forms of bribery, -

Charlie Dolan

Oh, good …

Brian Dolan

in the form in the form of dark chocolate is actually the new thing around here.

Charlie Dolan

Oh, nice. Nice. Nice.

Brian Dolan

The new thing around here. Yeah. So thank you everybody and, thanks for paying attention, and we'll see you on the next episode.

Charlie Dolan

Likewise. Thanks.