Pipeliners Podcast host Russel Treat hosts a fascinating, insightful, and educational episode with KC Yost, a third-generation pipeliner who has 100 years of family industry knowledge to draw from.
Listen for insight on how the pipeline industry has changed over time, the technology that has sprouted out from experiments and real-world problem-solving, and the futuristic technology could will provide even more value to the industry.
You will also hear great anecdotes and stories ranging from the Civil War era to modern-day pipelining that help illustrate the origins and history of the industry.
Pipeliners History: Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms
- KC Yost is the Director of Onshore Services for Cronus Technology, Inc. Find and connect with KC on LinkedIn. You can also find great vintage photos from the pipeline industry on his LI profile.
- The NCEES (National Council of Examiners for Engineers and Surveyors) administers the Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) exam tests to demonstrate a minimum level of competency in a particular engineering discipline.
- Hope Natural Gas Company, which is now known as Hope Gas Inc., of Clarksburg, West Virginia, was founded in 1898.
- CNG Transmission Corp. is a former subsidiary of Consolidated Natural Gas Co. and is now part of Dominion Corp.
- Tennessee Gas Pipeline Company is now owned by Kinder Morgan and extends from South Texas and Offshore Louisiana to New York state.
- Transco (Transco Energy Co.) was formerly one of the largest companies in Houston, most well-known for the Transco Tower in the Galleria area of Houston. The company merged with Williams Companies in the mid-1990s, resulting in the tower changing its name to the Williams Tower.
- The Sandia National Laboratories are managed and operated by the National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia. It is one of three National Nuclear Security Administration research and development laboratories.
- An MCC building (motor control center) is an assembly to control electric motors in a central location. MCCs are typically found in large commercial or industrial buildings where there are many electric motors that need to be controlled from a central location.
- William Sherman was a Union general during the U.S. Civil War of the 1800s. General Sherman developed the “Sherman Tie” in the battle against the Confederate Army. This consisted of heating a railway rail until it was malleable, waiting for it to become red hot, and then bending the rail around a tree like a bow tie.
- AROs (Abrasion Resistant Overcoatings) is a type of coating that protects the cathodic protection coating of a pipeline.
- Horizontal Directional Drilling is a minimal impact trenchless method of installing underground pipe, conduit, or cables in a relatively shallow arc or radius along a prescribed underground bore path by using a surface-launched drilling rig.
- Clockspring is a provider of pipeline repair, including structural reinforcement, leak repair, and corrosion prevention for commercial and industrial pipes.
- Houston Pipeliners Association is an industry-based pipeline professional organization that consists of members and member leaders who run the association. The purpose of the organization is the advancement of pipeline engineering and operating practices for the mutual benefit of the members and the industry.
- The PRCI (Pipeline Research Council International) is the preeminent global collaborative research development organization of, by, and for the energy pipeline industry.
Pipeliners History: Full Episode Transcript
Russel Treat: Welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast, episode 58.
This episode of the Pipeliners Podcast is sponsored by EnerSys Corporation, providers of POEMS, the Pipeline Operations Excellence Management System, plus compliance and operations software for the pipeline control center.
Find out more about POEMS at enersyscorp.com/podcast.
[background music]
Announcer: The Pipeliners Podcast, where professionals, Bubba geeks, and industry insiders share their knowledge and experience about technology, projects, and pipeline operations.
Now, your host, Russel Treat.
Russel: Thanks for listening to the Pipeliners Podcast. We appreciate you taking the time. To show that appreciation, we’re giving away a customized YETI tumbler to one listener each episode. This week, our winner is Dale Eaton with Plains All American Pipeline. Congratulations, Dale, your YETI is on its way.
To learn how you can win this signature prize pack, stick around ‘til the end of the episode.
I’ve been looking for some time for somebody who could come and talk to us about construction and construction practices. We are quite fortunate this week. We have with us KC Yost. KC’s got quite the background in history and pipelining, really knows pipeline engineering and construction through his many years of experience. Without further adieu, let’s welcome KC.
KC, welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast.
KC Yost: Good afternoon, Russel. Thank you very much for having me.
Russel: Maybe a good way to start, KC, is you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and your own background.
KC: I’d be happy to, Russel. I am a third-generation pipeliner. I was born and raised in West Virginia, went to West Virginia University, and moved to Houston in the summer of 1976. I’ve actually been an anomaly in the energy industry in that, although I’ve traveled throughout the U.S. and overseas, I’ve had a permanent address in Houston for 42 years.
I’ve had the opportunity to work on projects in 30 some odd states, including Alaska. I’ve also worked in Colombia, Queensland, Australia, and Wood Group sent me to Baghdad just before the U.S. Army pulled out a number of years ago. I’ve had some fun building pipelines around the world and really enjoyed it.
I also have a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Houston and have PE licenses in 29 states.
Russel: Oh my goodness. I just have to ask, did you have to test in every one of those 29 states?
KC: I did not. Fortunately, I took what was called the EIT exam in West Virginia in 1976, which was the first year it was nationally standardized. In 1979, Texas allowed EIT’s to take the P&P exam after three years of experience (applying for a PE license after years of experience).
1979 was the first year that the P&P exam was nationally standardized. Literally, after securing my Texas PE, I was one of the first to register my license with NCEES, National Council of Examiners for Engineers and Surveyors, and put a document file together in their database. The remainder of my licenses were acquired through comity or reciprocity.
Russel: You’re a third-generation pipeliner. I asked you on to talk about the history of pipelining. Where we came from, how did all this stuff start, maybe you could tell us about your family and expand a little bit on this, “I’m a third-generation pipeliner.”
KC: Absolutely. My grandfather was born in 1900. I have two photographs of him at work, one is dated 1919 and the other is dated 1924. To my knowledge, this was his first full-time job, and he worked for that same company for his entire career, starting in 1919 and retiring in 1960.
One of the photos I have shows him sitting on top of a condensate tank as a tractor pulls it through the mud on skids. The other photo shows him sitting on a brand-new stringing truck (stringing trucks are used to take pipe joints out onto the right-of-way). He looks to be proud of that vehicle.
I love looking at those photos and recognizing (in the articles that I post on LinkedIn) that this year marks 100 years that my family has been in the pipeline business. My grandfather was a teamster and worked with horses along the right-of-way. By 1924, Hope Natural Gas Company had him driving a truck.
It was customary back then that, whenever their vehicles broke down, the drivers would work as a mechanic’s helper during the repair.
My grandfather showed an aptitude toward working on the internal combustion engine, and doing anything from changing brakes to whatever needed repair on the vehicles. Because of that, he was asked to become a mechanic at Hope Gas, and he actually retired in ’60 as the company chief mechanic. I’m very, very proud of that.
My father, after coming back from the South Pacific, went to West Virginia University and studied electrical engineering on the GI Bill. He wanted to work for the gas company. However, the only positions available in 1951 were a construction laborer out in the field. Dad found himself doing a lot of shovel work those first few years and worked his way up through gas measurement.
Dad was on the AGA 3 Committee for a number of years in the ‘50s and ‘60s and actually retired as a VP from what was the CNG Transmission Company (now Dominion Energy).
Russel: What was your dad’s name, KC?
KC: Ken Yost.
Russel: I knew Ken.
KC: That’s why I go by the initials KC. Many of the people our age and older in the industry knew my father. Using KC saved the confusion.
Russel: Oh my gosh. That’s so funny. I did not put that together until right now.
[laughter]
Russel: I started out in the measurement side of the business. That’s where I grew up from. I knew Ken because he was very active in AGA and the various measurement committees and such, so yeah, just a very, very great guy.
KC: Thank you for saying that. I’ll pass that on. It is truly a small world. He probably, in the early ’60s, spent as many as three months a year in Houston doing research with Daniel and other companies, trying to come up with a thermal measurement model that would work.
Those pioneers were really remarkable in the work that they were doing back in the ’60s. What we think of as second-hand nature now, it’s part of the evolution of the pipeline industry, isn’t it?
Russel: Yeah, I know. I think there are people right now doing that same kind of work.
A lot of times, we don’t know who they are until 10 years after they’ve done the work because they’re bringing some new technology out in a lab, or in field practice, trying to figure out how to make it work and add value. Some day in the future, that stuff will all be just second nature to everybody, but somebody has got to go first.
KC: Exactly. Dad had done well enough at CNG that I was not in a position to get a job there (with strong policies regarding nepotism) and live in Clarksburg (W. Va.), so when I graduated college, I was given an opportunity to interview with Tennessee Gas Pipeline, probably someone else you know, Roger Gray.
Russel: Sure.
KC: Mr. Gray hired me in 1976. I went through the engineering training program at Tennessee Gas Pipeline and have been in Houston ever since.
Russel: Interesting. Let’s talk a little bit about history of digging, because we came up with several topics that I thought people would be interested in. Where have we come from, and where are we now just in the whole digging side of the pipeline world?
KC: Great question. It’s really interesting to me that, when I do these little short blurbs on LinkedIn, I share these vintage photographs with my father on a fairly regular basis and pick up information in our back and forth discussions. Recall, he was digging a ditch in 1951. He recognizes a lot of what was going on back then. When I pull out a photo and send it to him of some guys with a Dresser Couple line in a ditch, all posing around a sawhorse where they’ve lowered the pipe into the ditch, he starts talking to me about that.
I mention to him about the 6-foot spacing between diggers, or 10-foot spacing, depending on the type of soil, and how they would dig from one guy to the next to meet their daily quota. He chimes in saying something to the effect, “You always dig forward. You never dig backward.” He had that experience!
Literally, back into the ’50s, because of the terrain, because of the challenges that were involved, there was a lot of hand digging on the pipelines, especially in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky. Getting up into the mountains, hand-digging was used quite a bit.
I will say that probably in the late ’30s, ditching machines started showing up on the right-of-way. If you had a really nice, soft top soil, and if you had a flat property, and if you had an area that’s nice and dry, these first ditching machines that were probably 15 horsepower vehicles would come out and actually dig a nice, straight ditch.
You wouldn’t need ditch-diggers going out and doing the work by hand. And now, to think of where we are today coming from that 15 horsepower ditch digger to now, trackhoes, and ditching machines are 450 horsepower each, going through all sorts of tough terrain and handling it.
There are certain areas where the flatter the terrain, the easier it is for them to do the work, but they’ve come a long way in the last 100 years, in just something as simple as digging a ditch and taking care of the ditching.
Russel: Even today, there’s still a lot of handwork, particularly if you’re doing an inspection dig, right?
KC: Yes, absolutely, and many companies have specifications that require hand-digging within two feet of the pipeline. I can understand the concern about getting a trackhoe bucket close to a live line and causing all sorts of problems.
There is technology out there that, actually, I’ve seen videos, I’ve not seen it in-person, where they have a machine that actually acts similar to a chainsaw, that can get closer to the pipe than a trackhoe can, and minimize the amount of hand-digging that’s required.
There are a lot of companies out there that still haven’t bought into allowing that to be done, and hand-digging is the way to go.
Russel: It’s not just the metal. It’s the coating that you’ve got to protect. I’m sitting here and I’m listening to this, and I’m a technologist. I’m a geek and I’m thinking, somebody has got to be thinking about how to use ground penetrating radar to locate the pipe and have the digging equipment controlled by some kind of geofence.
We can’t be that far from that. Technically, that’s got to be possible now. Commercially, is it feasible, is always another part of the question.
KC: Right. In a previous life, I was asked to participate in some Department of Transportation seminars and went to see some of the new technology that’s been developed. Ground-penetrating radar, of course, was originally developed by the DOD to detect landmines. This worked extremely well down to about six inches at the time.
Technology has improved over the years to get down much deeper in non-cohesive soils for the ground-penetrating radar. As I understand it, and I don’t stay up with it all the time, but getting good results in cohesive soils remains a problem for the ground-penetrating radar.
My brother-in-law actually did some research with the Sandia Labs using ultrasound for other applications. I’ve asked him to tinker with the subject on occasion — he’s retired now — with the idea of maybe ultrasound being able to penetrate the ground surface a little bit better than the radar.
The cohesive soils and gumbo clay that we have along the Gulf Coast is a real problem for that type of operation, but I will tell you that identifying pipelines has improved dramatically.
Back in the mid-’70s when I was surveying, we used probe rods, which were basically just long rods that we would push down into the ground and go down until we heard a clank, and we knew we hit a pipeline. Nowadays…
[laughter]
Russel: If you were caught doing that now, they would run you off.
KC: Truly. Back then, plastic lines weren’t as prevalent as they are today. However, probing in gathering fields where there were plastic lines running from low-pressure gas wells over to a certain location was always hazardous. The worst sound that you could hear is, “Thump, thump, tshhh.” [laughs]
You’d know to run and then go tell the operator to shut the well down. Yes, you’re right. Probe rods were damaging coatings and causing all sorts of problems. Holidays are a real issue.
Russel: Of course in that time, that’s all you really had as an alternative. It was either that or a shovel, right?
KC: That’s exactly right. Now, with hydrovacing, it’s amazing what can be done. We just finished a project up in North Texas where a hydrovac team was called out. We were installing an MCC building inside an existing tank farm.
We wanted to place the MCC building at one location. However, the hydrovac guys came out, found a number of pipelines and wires that weren’t on the as-builts. So, we moved the building over. We found more cables and moved it over further. We finally found a spot for the MCC. Hydrovacing is a very safe way of locating existing lines and wires without probing or hand-digging. It’s a much easier process and much more efficient.
Even in rocky areas, in many cases, the soil around the pipe or above the pipe in the trench is loose enough that the hydrovac can pull it out as compared to the rock on either side of the trench. It’s become pretty standard fare now for any HDPE lines that are being placed, especially out in West Texas or at these different gathering fields, to have a tracer wire placed in the ditch. With a tracer wire, you know that line is there. I worked on a project out in Snyder, Texas, 20 some odd years ago trying to build a pipeline across an old gathering field. The field owners had no idea where any of their lines were. It was a very dangerous project, trying to avoid all of those lines that weren’t identified.
Russel: It makes me laugh because I’ve been there, done that, where you look at the drawings and you know that the drawings have no real resemblance of reality. What you really need is an experienced hand that was around when all that stuff went in to walk out there with you and say, “Oh, yeah, there’s a line there.”
Let’s talk about pipe bending. That’s something else that’s come a long way. It’s also something that was not very sophisticated, how it was done 80 years ago versus what we’re doing now.
KC: Or even 150 years ago. My grandfather used to tell me stories in the ’60s (after he had retired) about different tasks out on the pipeline. In one of those discussions, he talked about Sherman bow ties.
If the listeners are students of the Civil War, they’ll recall that when Sherman did his march to the sea, one of the things he would do is tear up railroads. He would heat the rails in fire, and then he would bend those around trees and tree trunks to keep the Confederates from re-using those tracks. Then he moved on.
Russel: I’m thinking of a John Wayne movie.
KC: [laughs] Fair enough. Yes, I believe John Wayne did do a couple of Sherman bow ties in a movie.
[laughter]
KC: That’s how the early pipeliners bent pipe. They literally put the pipe on an open fire, on an open flame, and got the joint red-hot. Then, they wrapped the joint around a tree trunk to whatever angle they needed to have, put it in the ditch, called it good, and walked away.
Over time, we went through a metamorphosis of trying this and trying that for pipe bending. Pneumatics came along. You actually have photos where pneumatic bendors were on the right-of-way. They had a big shoe in the middle and two come-alongs on either end of the pipe. That middle shoe would act as the “tree trunk,” and the pneumatics would bend the heck out of the pipe around that metal shoe. There would be a few wrinkles on the joint, but it worked.
Bending became much more sophisticated and precise over time and started having welders actually heat up the pipe from a two o’clock position going counterclockwise down to about a four o’clock position. They would heat that strip of pipe up until red hot, and then bend it with the come-alongs. This was a great way of bending the pipe to exactly fit the ditch. The problem was what they were creating was, now called, wrinkle bends. Of course, those of us who’ve had some experience with wrinkle bends know that is a great source of stress concentration on pipe. We’ve had a number of failures on these bends. The technology was there at the time. Now we’ve progressed to a point where I’m sure these bending machines that are available now have the same capability as modern track-hoes.
Back when Tennessee Gas Pipeline had me working construction in Eastern Kentucky, I got to run a mandrel there for a little while, watch the pipe being bent, and cold-bending pipe out in the field, one-and-a-half degrees per pipe diameter for this 36-inch line that we were working on. That technology seems to be working out very, very well, and I’m sure there have been significant advances in that past number of years.
I will tell you that on that project back in 1976 we had a very, very smart bending engineer who put things quickly into perspective. He said, “Do you know what it takes to be a good bending engineer?” I said, “No, sir, what’s that?” He said, “A deep wide ditch.”
Russel: [laughs]
KC: As long as the ditch was nice and deep and nice and wide, he had plenty of margin of error.
Russel: Exactly, there’s actually fabricators here in Houston that that’s all they do is just do bends and send them out to the field for fabrication.
KC: Absolutely.
Russel: That’s a much bigger deal in process facilities than it is in ditches. It’s the same problem.
KC: It is. It’s critical.
Russel: Bending done wrong, we can say, “Everybody knows you take metal and bend it, you weaken it.”
KC: Right, it’s critical in this day and time with government regulations that we make sure the pipelines that we install are capable of handling inline inspection tools. The days of using long radius elbows off the shelf in a piggable line have gone by the wayside.
3D bends, 5D bends are the norm for pipelines. Segmentable bends are also the norm. It’s amazing the work that can be done with induction bends nowadays. Really, it’s become quite the science. It’s not near what it was back in the Sherman bow tie days.
Russel: That comment right there, KC, it really applies to almost every aspect of our business. Things that 40 years ago, 20 years ago were fairly simple mechanical things have become complex and for valid reason.
This is a core belief I have. Everything’s easy ‘til you know enough about it. You know enough about it, all things become complex. Something as simple of, “Well, I just heat the pipe, bend it, and I’ve got a bend,” is now, “Well, no, I got to think about how I’m going to pig the line and what I’m doing to the strength of the material when I apply this bend,” and on and on.
I don’t know who, I saw a post, I think it was on LinkedIn, about wood slats on pipelines. Is that a post that you put out?
KC: It is. I actually put that post out this week. It’s amazing the progress that’s been made in coating pipelines as well.
I was having a nice conversation with my father about one of the job assignments he had on an eight-inch line in, I think it was, Gilmer County, West Virginia, back in 1951. He was the guy responsible for the coating of the pipe, this eight-inch pipe. The foreman that was on the job did not have much faith in coating and didn’t think much about it. He was an old-school type guy. Literally, dad would go out on the right-of-way, he said, with a hand wire brush and brush down the joint of pipe.
Dad had a tar that was liquid at room temperature that he would paint onto the joint. He had a fiberglass tape that he would wrap around that joint of pipe, except where it needed to be welded. Then, when the joint was welded, dad would come back in and scrape down that weld area, or that cutback area, with his wire brush. Slap that dope on it, wrap it around, and they would put it in the ditch.
I asked him, “Dad, how long did it take for that dope to cure?” He said, “I don’t know. We weren’t given that much time.” The hoes were already picking up the line and setting it in the ditch as soon as he finished a joint or had coated one of those cutback areas. We’ve moved from that. We, as an industry, grew into different tape wraps, into fusion-bond epoxy coatings, and AROs.
One of the intermediate steps was when the companies recognized that the way that dad’s foreman was doing the work in 1951 is not necessarily the way pipelining needs to be done, because if you have one holiday in a coating, that actually attracts the corrosion and creates more of a problem than not coating the pipe at all.
Over time, the industry developed different methods of trying to protect the pipe coating. This slat idea took half-inch by two-inch wide — I think they were six, eight feet-long, slats — and wrapped them around the pipeline. It actually looks like a barrel. And then they banded the slats down with a metal band to hold the slats in place.
That was the technique that was used when you and I started pipelining in the ’70s and prior to that to handle rocky areas, protect the coating from being damaged, and minimize the number of holidays.
With the development of different fabrics and different types of coatings in the ’80s and those making inroads into the industry and now with the AROs — it’s amazing what coating advancements have been made.
Russel: I expect that technology to be one of the more rapidly advancing technologies in our business. I think there’s a lot more we can do there. This is an area I know very little about. I know that there’s so much going on around various paints and coatings for all kinds of other industries.
You think about the paint we use on cars now versus the paint we used on cars in the ’60s and how resilient to chipping it is. It’s all that stuff continues to improve.
KC: Sure, and it carries over to other applications within the industry. Horizontal Directional Drilling, for example. I’ve had the privilege of being around a number of directional drill projects where we’ve bundled pipe for crossings. We’ve put in as many as six or eight pipelines in one bore and pull them through.
Back in the ’80s when horizontal drilling began, it was just one pipe per drill. When we began bundling lines, there were different gunite-type coatings that could be put on the pipes to protect the coating.
There’s been a metamorphosis in pipe coating protection in HDDs. Some contractors used “donuts,” which were basically spacers that kept pipelines from touching each other during the pullback process, and kept them from damaging the coating.
Russel: I think, too, one of the things that’s different in today’s world versus when we started in the business is, I don’t think that when I started, I thought about how long the systems that were being built or put in place were going to actually be running.
It’s something new and it’s cool, but you don’t think about, “Well, I’m putting this in the ground.” We’ve got a lot of pipe in the ground in the U.S. that’s been operated for 50 years or more. Much of it has held up extremely well, because of what we can do with these various technologies of inspection, and maintenance, and so forth.
We’re running a little bit long, which is great because I could go on talking about this forever, but I wanted to ask a final question. We definitely are going to have to get you back and talk about some of the other aspects of the history of pipelining and from whence we’ve come.
I want to ask this question because now that the podcasts are beginning to get a fair amount of listenership, I’m beginning to get enquiries from people about, “Hey, I’ve got this new technology. I’ve got this new thing. I could use some help.”
We’ve been talking about a lot of technologies just briefly and very much skipping a stone across the lake, not in any depth at all, but how is it that all these technologies come to market? What’s the process?
KC: In the ’60s and ’70s, many of the operating companies here in town, Transco, Tennessee Gas Pipeline, Panhandle Eastern, Texas Eastern, had their own laboratories where they would do their own research. Some of the pigging processes that are done today were researched there. Metallurgy was a priority then, as well.
All of those facilities have closed, so now the industry counts on entrepreneurs to come through with new ideas — a better way of doing things. There’s a product in the market that’s very good and well received in the industry. It’s called Clockspring. It’s a product for repairing thinning wall on pipe.
Clockspring was trying, as I understand, initially to get DOT buy-in on their design. Of course you’d never expect the federal government to endorse a product, but they tried for a while. Clockspring worked hard to find an operating company who was willing to give them a shot to put this product on and see how it performed out in the field.
Once they got their installation success, more and more were installed. DOT, PHMSA, as I understand, will look at products like Clockspring as having good, sound engineering practice and calculations supporting it, and they feel fairly comfortable with that. Obviously, if there is an issue with the product, then continuation becomes a little bit more difficult.
Ultimately, getting out to Houston Pipeliners Association here in town, and making a presentation on what you have is critical to get product recognition. There are pipeliners organizations in San Antonio, Oklahoma City, Atlanta, and Pittsburgh. Getting your name and product in front of the public and making these presentations, getting in front of, you mentioned AGA with my dad, American Gas Association — there are a lot of great industry organizations that you can get in front of.
Ultimately, I suspect none of the operating companies like being the guinea pig, so if we are discussing an obtrusive or inobtrusive product, it will make a big difference on how you make that pitch.
Russel: That’s very well said. There are some industry associations like PRCI and others that do testing. Basically, what the industry has done is, rather that every pipeline operator having its own internal laboratory, they have banded together cooperatively and put money up to back facilities like PRCI.
KC: Yes, I apologize to my friends at PRCI for not mentioning them.
Russel: [laughs] We just had Cliff Johnson on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, so they’re getting equal time. It’s all good.
KC: Sweet.
Russel: I think the point really is that somebody has to go first. Somebody has to apply it. It needs to be done as a laboratory experiment, controlled data capture so that it can be used to put forward to the industry as to why this works better.
Somebody has got to come up with the idea. Somebody has got to prototype it, then they’re going to have to get industry to approve it. Eventually, there’s going to need to be some kind of standards through AGA, or API, or others that support this as a good engineering practice, whatever this is.
I think what a lot of people don’t realize when they get an idea and they build something, they think, “Well, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. People ought to just try it.” It just doesn’t work that way.
KC: No, it doesn’t, but there are great ideas out there, and we never want to discourage people from coming up with new ways to improve how we do things.
Russel: As our conversation illustrates today, even with what I just said, the industry is always looking for better ways to do things that are safer, more effective, save money. They’re always looking, so I wouldn’t want to discourage anybody, but I think it is always helpful to have realistic understanding of what it’s going to take.
KC: Exactly, safety and price. What is your differentiator? Are you making something safer at the same price? Are you keeping something just as safe at a reduced price? At the end of the day, what is your better mousetrap?
Russel: Exactly. KC, this has been awesome. I definitely want to follow this up and have some more of these conversations. I’ve actually learned a lot today. I’ve been looking for somebody who could talk more to construction and construction practice.
This has been awesome, and we want to have you back. Thanks for joining the conversation.
KC: Thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure. It’s been a lot of fun. Thank you again. I look forward to visiting again.
Russel: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the Pipeliners Podcast and our conversation with KC Yost. Just a reminder before you go, you should register to win our Pipeliners Podcast YETI tumbler. Simply visit pipelinepodcastnetwork.com/win to enter yourself in the drawing.
If you would like to support the podcast, please leave a review on Apple Podcast, Google Play, or whatever smart device podcast application you use. You can find instructions at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com.
[background music]
Russel: If you have ideas, questions or topics you’d be interested in, please let us know on the Contact Us page at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com, or reach out to me on LinkedIn.
Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you next week.
Transcription by CastingWords