In an interview with Insights Success, Meade Lewis, CEO and Founder of MiQrotech, shares insights on various attributes to become a successful leader. He also shares his experiences on his journey as an entrepreneur and the challenges and lessons that came out of it. Also, he broadly discusses the company’s core competencies and its establishment in the market.
Below are the highlights of the interview conducted between Meade and Insights Success:
How do you diversify your solutions that appeal to your target audience?
The first step to reaching our target audience is to be able to listen. Listening to your customer is critical to be able to implement the solutions they need and, more importantly, solutions they will pay for. With energy being an old industry, being able to communicate in a confident manner and marketing through more convention means is a priority. Finally, innovation is the key to what separates any firm from their competition; at MiQrotech, innovation is in our blood.
To summarize my business strategy, I would simply use three words: Innovation, tactics, and execution. Innovation is critical for inventing the product, upgrading the product, and continuously staying twelve steps ahead of competitors. Tactics are necessary for planning the order of operations for each and every challenge that emerges. Finally and most importantly, execution is required for getting things done. Without innovation, the company provides nothing unique. Without tactics, there is no strategy and the firm will fail when faced with opposition. Without execution, all of your plans stay as exactly that, plans that are lost in imagination.
Describe some of the vital attributes that every CEO should possess.
A Chief Executive Officer holds dozens of roles but, by far, the most important is the role of leader. Morale, talent acquisition, and product all revolve around the CEO’s ability to lead and the ability to love their employees. By providing your staff with a powerful mission greater than any one individual, by providing these colleagues with a challenge so that they are continuously learning, and by providing those coworkers with a friend to truly listen to them, and you will find a team that will never stop beating the odds.
What were the past experiences, achievements or lessons that shaped your journey?
Steel is forged in flames and, similarly, world changers are forged through hardship and pressure. Through great hardship comes the ability to overcome. While going through hardship, I relied on the leaders around me to help me conquer those obstacles. With their love, support, and challenge, I grew and I excelled. Now, with my Eagle Scout Award, my Good Samaritan Award, my countless awards in business as evidence, I know that none of these things would be possible without the leaders I worked with in the past What were some of the primal challenges and roadblocks that you faced during the initial phase of your journey? The primary obstacle I have had to overcome in my career is agism. I am young. Helping to direct people who are double, even triple, my age has been difficult at times. However, respect is earned and, with that in mind, I had to prove my worth to these individuals. By working longer, harder, and more passionately than anyone else in the room, you will quickly earn the respect and admiration of those that you are working with. Respect doesn’t recognize age.
Where does MiQrotech sees itself in the near future and what are its future goals?
The MiQrotech mission is summarized in a single phrase: “Change energy, change the world”. Using Internet of Things (IoT) technology, merged with Artificial Intelligence (AI), we are predicting oil and gas pipeline leaks before they happen with a projected 96% accuracy. Currently, we are developing a smaller, more powerful sensor array as well as continuously upgrading our AI analytics. Within the next five years, we plan to have drone systems, drilling analytic tools, and tools to make offshore platforms safer. By leading the oil and gas innovation charge, we want to fundamentally change the way that energy is gathered and transferred by greatly reducing the risks involved.
What is your advice for the emerging entrepreneurs?
If I were to give advice to anyone interested in entrepreneurship, it would be to be able to adapt and learn incredibly fast. You are confronted with so much information on a daily basis, dozens of challenges, hundreds of emails, thousands of terms, that learning becomes a massive part of your job. I would also recommend that in the very early stages of planning, that the entrepreneur learns their market. Know the value of the Total Addressable Market (TAM), know your competition, know why you are better, and know why you will capture a significant section of the market. Most of all, keep moving forward.
About the Leader
Prior to MiQrotech, Meade was the Chief Information Technology Officer (CITO) of multiple oil and gas firms where he focused on research and development. Cofounding his own analytics company by the age of 22, he consulted for various government entities before his successful exit. An Eagle Scout with 15 years of coding and innovation experience, Meade Lewis readily accepts the label of “nerd”. Now, Lewis has created the company credited for changing the pipeline monitoring industry as a whole.
