Project Engineer Dothan, AL

All right, James, thank you so much for putting yourself out there. Like we say at Veteran Hiring Solutions, people don't follow companies, they follow leaders. So if we could, tell me a little bit about yourself, your Navy career, and what you've been doing at ETI since you transitioned over there.

Okay, so I'm James Beddoe. I've formerly been in the Navy in the nuclear Navy nuclear program. I was a machinist's mate for— it's a 6-year contract. And so I did that tour with them on the Enterprise, and that was a real fun ship. I was there just as it was decommissioning. And then when I got out in 2013, I jumped ship to this company in South Alabama, which was new to me. I'd never been to Alabama. A lot of culture shock, like the accents and everything. It took a little time of adjusting, but since I got down here, there's a company, they do personal protective equipment and it's called OREX. That's the name of the fabric. And the fabric itself is made out of a polymer that dissolves easily in water. They've modified the polymer so that it has to be dissolved in super hot water. And they'll take it to the nuclear plants, they'll wear it during their outage, they'll get all contaminated radiologically speaking. And then they'll send it back to our facility. Our facility, we will do a chemical hydrothermal liquefaction under chemical oxidation and transfer it through filtration and then do thermal oxidation. And so at the very end of the process, we've taken that polymer, we've stripped away the radioactive nuclides, and then we have water vapor and air. For the most part, it's just, you're going to see Yeah. In your waste stream, you're just going to see a little bit of carbon dioxide increase and a little bit of water vapor, and then it's just normal air. So it's a really cool little process. Now, we're not the only country with nuclear plants that wants the polymer. When I got on, that's what I was doing. I was building out mobile or modular systems to send to other countries. And so I've been either doing, improving the operations there or designing other, like, equipment to go to other nuclear plants since then. And that's majority what I've been doing in the years.

This is an engineering role. If you didn't hear James start talking about, about what they do. And one, it's in Dothan, Alabama. So let's get the location out of the way. But 2, you know, we're, we're calling it a project engineer. This is a growth position because you are continuing to grow. You kind of walked through the Oryx product, but what else? I mean, what is this engineer, this project engineer going to be doing? What part of the team are they part of the mission?

So I'd like to put somebody in this position that can manage to do design of the systems, and so that includes everything from the mechanical. We have a mechanical drafter, but I'd like to do somebody that handles the mechanical understanding of like maybe the PID, the electrical diagram, the PLCs, and then even the construction phase because we. To the extent that we can, we do outsource a lot of that construction, but we do have a lot and we do a lot in-house. So we'll be doing a lot of building in-house. But the role would be somebody that's gonna have his hands in pretty much every one of those pies in the process of, from we've gotten a solicitation from a customer that they want a design and we're gonna say, okay, we'll go template your site. They'd be a part of that, and then we'd build out a design from there, and then we'd come up with a plan. Hey, we'll deliver it in ever so many months, and then we'll commission it. And I think there's something important as you talk through this.

We started to talk about the suits, right? These are clothes that you're wearing them, but then we're talking about metal fabrication. So what is the product that's going to these nuclear sites? It's the actual container that the orex. Okay.

So for instance, all the plants in America, they send their suits back to us and we process them in the Dovin area. And then as far as like the international plants, so the ones in China, the ones in— we're trying to do it in the UAE, the ones we're trying to do in the other places, those I'm going to send a system to them to get rid of their— to do the chemical oxidation that's creating that thermal oxidation. So That's gonna be the part. I've got to fabricate it for them because there's a little bit of a difficulty sending radioactive material across international borders. It's expensive. It's not impossible to do, but there's permitting and it's just not the path most people want to go down because of the cost.

Yeah. You're like, I'll just build it for you the nuke way, right?

I'll just build it for you.

I love that. Well, you talked about, so they have to have these These ability to read the schematics, the diagrams, um, the PLC sites, understanding how they all interact. Uh, so you have that hard engineering, and then they're gonna— are they gonna be kind of like quasi-project manager with that, where they're kind of managing the process and overseeing the process from that initial onsite to the build?

Yeah, ideally, yeah, that would be— they— I'd give them— if they can take on the responsibility, I would give them as much as As much leeway as they could to own the project themselves.

You're, you're engineer, right? So the diagrams, the schematics, how everything works. Then you're project manager. But then you also have to understand operationally, how does this get installed? How does it interact? So somebody that comes here can, if they're, they really have that technical acumen and they're willing and they're a communicator, they could learn all this stuff. As they grow with you, right? There's a lot of that. Not that it's a heavy travel role, but you have that ability and that's what's really cool.

Exactly.

Like, if you can't tell, James is a great guy to work with, great partner, and extremely intelligent. So if you're, if you're talking to somebody coming right out of uniform, like that Navy nuke machinist mate, electrician mate, whoever, or somebody that has a technical background in uniform. Right. They don't quite know, right? They haven't sat in the seat. They don't— what would you say to them? Or, hey, these are the capabilities I'm looking for that if you have them, you should apply. Is there any like breakdown? Like, if you don't have this, sorry, it's just, you're not a safe hire, right? Like, how would you talk to them?

No, I don't. I would think that that would be, if you, if like, for instance, if you have a technical background, I don't think there's Anything that's gonna say, oh no, I need this from you, because you're obviously trainable. You're obviously smart enough to do the job. So I, at worst, I might say, okay, let's, I don't really wanna spend 3 weeks teaching you PLCs, so why don't I just have an instructor over in Atlanta say, hey, there's, here's a week-long seminar, go get up to speed.

No.

That's, and then what's even better is that you'll get to teach me some stuff that I don't know too, because I, like, a lot of the stuff I know is now, What is it, 13 years old? 'Cause I didn't know anything what was going on.

Yeah.

I just, I learned it as we were doing it. We, it was nice enough that because the pace where we were at, it was not so hard for me to learn this stuff. And then there's a lot more things I was like, oh man, if I look at the way I code PLCs now compared to what I was doing then, I was like, oh my gosh, so many mistakes. And then we had a, um, we were tracking one of our systems at one of our sites. This is before I built it, right? So there's, there's PLC work going on before I got on and there's no documentation. And there's like, and we're trying to trace this thing down and we're like, we're spending days trying to not reboot the PLC cuz the PLC is so old.

Why not go online? Yeah.

We're like, oh my gosh. And so we're running up, we have a deadline. We gotta get it fixed by this time because we have to have this, this one part working. We're like, oh man. So we have this little plan, like, okay, if the, if it doesn't take This is what we're going to do. And if it does take, we're just going to celebrate. And it took. So we're like, oh. And so we backed everything up, we wrote documentation as best we could, and we moved back to the other priorities that we had. But it was just like, we were prepared to do a lot of work.

I'm thinking if you're a technical person in the military, that story resonates. As you're smiling the whole time talking about it, right? Because it was a challenge, you overcame it, and that's part of the Yeah. It may not feel like it at the moment, but when you're done, it's a great story.

Yeah.

Yeah. Um, and then we, we talked about, I just said it's not a heavy travel job, but there is opportunities to meet with clients, right? It's not like you're going out for weeks on end, but you may go out for a couple days here and there throughout the year, right?

Yep. That's for sure. That's for sure. And the, the other thing I would, and I'd mentioned this earlier, but like we do have other needs that'll come up. periodically. And we have other parts of the company have different campuses, and there's a medical side of this company.

Oh yeah.

That's not the nuclear side. And they, we have a campus in DR and they're, they were, we gotta go pick some stuff down there. And they were trying to send some people down, they didn't get it solved. And I was like, ah man, I really need to, I need somebody that knows how to like act like an engineer, think systems. And then look at the plan holistically and say, hey, this isn't working. Let's solve it. And then the other problem with going to the Dominican Republic is like there's no Home Depot.

Yeah, I've been there.

If you want a part, like if you want a part and you want to replace some stuff, it's a little bit harder to go get a machinist or yeah, things take a little bit longer. So like I want to be extra careful when we go, okay, let's just go inspect first and then come back quick, but take a long time. Take a lot of good pictures, and then and we'll go back with the things.

Yeah, measure touch. Yeah, my grandfather was a carpenter, so measure twice, cut once, right?

Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, maybe maybe four or five. Obviously, but same thing.

Yeah, well obviously, you know, if you're watching this video, you can tell the culture there is great. The guys like to have fun and work hard. I think one last thing I didn't cover is what's the team look like? All right, so you're— if you're coming into this team as a project engineer, who are they interacting with? What do their team look like?

Yeah, right now I've got a chemical engineer and he's been with us as long as he— so the fun story about him was he's from Korea, he's got a PhD in chemical engineering, and he was copying our process and we'd say The owners got wind of it. They're like, hey, somebody's copying this process. And like, what do we do about it? Let's— and I love it. So, and because he realized some things about our fabric that we didn't even know, we're like, oh my gosh, this is awesome. And he's totally violating the patent laws, the international patent laws, but this guy's brilliant. So we got that guy on board. We have a drafter and We, we have some maintenance people that, that are close-knit to what we do in the engineering side as we affect operations. But it's just, it's really just, just, yeah, it's real tight.

That's great. I think I have everything I need, right? If you're the right person, you're gonna obviously gel with James. You're gonna get it. Is there anything you want them to know about you, the company, the role, anything before they make a decision to hit the apply button or not?

It's, it is a little bit of a culture shock getting down here because like I'm from New Jersey and, and I came down here and my wife was like, let's make some kids. And so I'm happy that I moved down here because I like the pace and I like the culture for raising kids. But if you kind of are like a party guy, like maybe it's not really like there's not a whole big It's not a big party scene, so I will say that. However, if you are a party guy, like Panama City and Destin are like an hour and a half drive or 2 hours away. So it's not that like, it's not awful.

But if you're in your boat, whether you're getting out, you're at the part of starting a family and you want to start a career, like this is the best place.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, as soon as I got here and we were like, we settled in and we're like, okay, all right, I'm just going to be here. And the company's growing. So I was like, all right. All 3 of my kids are here and they were all born here. And I was like, we like it. We moved away for a little bit just after COVID. We're like, we'll move by family. And then we're like, you know what? Yeah, I actually like it. I like it. I like it back a little more. So we moved back.

I'm a small guy. I grew up in a village, 320 people. So I believe in small town, small community. That's great. Well, James, thanks again. I knew this would be a great conversation knowing you since you transitioned out of uniform, watching your growth there, watching what ETI is accomplishing. So As soon as we find that right veteran for you, we're going to send them to you. I can't wait to get, get started.

Okay. Awesome. Yeah, I can't wait too.