From Light Bulbs To Data Centers

Welcome to Mediascape, Insights from Digital Changemakers, a speaker series and podcast brought to you by USC Annenberg's Digital Media Management Program. Join us as we unlock the secrets to success in an increasingly digital world. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of MediaScape. And we are joined today by a dear friend, a true paragon of Pittsburgh business, and that is Joel Ross.

Joel Ross was president and CEO of Universal Electric Corporation, one of America's most successful family businesses spanning into the fourth generation, growing into a global multinational corporation. Ross earned a bachelor's degree from Graceland University. He has an executive MBA from the University of Pittsburgh's Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence, and a certification from Harvard Business School's Executive Training Program. Joel is on the board of Old Bridge Stainless Steels and Special Metals and the Starline Legacy Group, which is a business venture in shared ownership with his family.

So that's the bio. But now let's get to know the man. Mr. Joel Ross, thank you very much for being with us today.

Thank you very much. It's really a pleasure and a privilege to be here with this audience today. And uh thank you for the invitation to uh have this podcast. Yes, I'd like to talk about uh today the story of my family, and uh it goes back many generations, but we're gonna start really with my grandfather and then my grandmother, who uh are my dad's parents, and uh the story that started a long time ago.

And uh my grandparents, Donald Ross Sr. and Elizabeth Ross, were born in a town called Du Bois in central Pennsylvania, and they met each other there and uh they fell in love, they got married, and then as soon as they got married, they decided they wanted to go to the big city of Pittsburgh instead of where they were at in Dubois. And when they got there, this was in the early 20s, 1920s. A granddad got a job with the electrical utility company in Pittsburgh, which was still just a fledgling business at that time.

Electricity had just been commercialized by people like George Westinghouse and Nikolai Tesla to Titans of the electrical uh development history in Pittsburgh. And uh, so uh he went to work for the utility company in Pittsburgh and learned how to wire up, uh be an electrician and wiring up houses, uh, getting the feel of that. He did that for a few years and then he moved on from there and decided he wanted to branch out on his own as uh an electrician that would go out and find work for himself that way.

So he really started out doing what he was doing for the utility company, which was originally taking electricity into homes that were outside of the city and were not even wired up with any electricity in the house yet. And so he would go in there and uh put in some very basic things, run a wire into the middle of the kitchen, up the wall, and over to the middle of the ceiling, and then drop down a cable from the wire from there, and it had an electrical light bulb socket on the end of that and a little thing to click to turn it on and off.

And he would have a dangling down from the room to light up the room for the first time with an electric light bulb instead of oil lamps and candles and things. So it was from a very uh early beginning for the whole electrical industry that my granddad got his training and then pretty soon branched off doing it on his own. And from there, he had his own system with two of his buddies that he hired, and uh they would go into homes and offer to wire them up with electricity that was becoming available to different towns and villages and places out from the city.

So he would go into the home and talk to the customer there and say, Okay, I'm gonna help get this in here. We're gonna do this basic thing and bring a light into your kitchen and then a second light into one other room in your house was uh how the very beginnings turned out. From there, he would have one guy do the upstairs, another guy doing the downstairs, and he was doing the sales work as well as the wiring to try to get the customers to say, Well, you know, you could put a light switch for that light on the wall instead of clear up uh hanging a up high in the middle of the room.

So he was trying to get them to do that and even add an electrical outlet from which you could plug in and have an electric iron instead of an iron that you had to heat up and I guess in a fire. So it was uh transforming the world, really, into the modern age of electricity. Okay, well, that's just an incredible origin story when we think about where we sit now in May 2026 and thinking all the way back just about a hundred years ago. But now can we fast forward in the story to when because it evolved at first?

It just started off as a some might pe people might call it, you know, a mom and pop sort of an operation. And can you tell us about the invention that really changed the the company into what was going to become UEC? And I think you know the product I'm talking about. Yes.

Uh by then his business had steadily grown. There was a big flood in 1936, actually, that really caused him to grow a lot larger. There was a a massive flood on St. Patrick's Day of 1936, and uh Pittsburgh was underwater, the whole downtown area was under 10 feet of water up to the second floor of the buildings.

So he hired 30 people uh that uh knew a little bit about electrical things there, and he was the guy that ran the show for a section of the city to rewire it up. And then the steel mills and the heavy industry were in Pittsburgh. So the steel mills had all kinds of bigger electrical equipment, too, that needed to be refurbished and uh put back into operation. So he got experience in that going in that direction, pivoting more towards that as uh the years went by.

And as he learned about industrial equipment electrification, he came across overhead cranes that were in these steel mills. All right, they had these great big cranes that were being uh invented and built that could lift up 50 tons, then 75 tons, then even a hundred tons of molten steel that was in these great big huge ladles. I think we can all picture the historical pictures of these big, huge pots pouring out. It looked like lava, but it was molten steel, you know, into the big ingots and billets and things that they used to build the bridges and the steel skyscrapers and buildings and everything from steel that we all use today.

So the overhead cranes had these bare wires that were supplying a lot of voltage, uh 440 volt type uh power to these motors that were on these huge overhead cranes. And Granddad had uh an opportunity to help to sell a new product that a guy had invented and was looking for somebody to sell it and install it and get it working that would provide a safety insulated cover around these bare cables or even angle iron bar that were just stuck up there on insulated holders running these big cranes.

Guys were getting electrocuted on these cranes. And if it didn't kill them, hitting 440 volts on the crane rail, they fell 20 or 30 feet down to the factory floor and either got injured for life or or killed. So uh there was a safety issue that was becoming chronic. And so he went in there and took in this product that he decided to call the span guard crane electrification system that had solid copper conductor bar inside of it with a certain profile shape to it, that we could grip onto it with clamps every so often and string it up there, tight up there, and then uh the cranes could power up uh and use the the uh power off of this system that was protected from any workers, maintenance workers, or just production workers that were uh needing to get up in there.

They could get up in that part of the factory safely. And so he started to sell these to the heavy industry in Pittsburgh and then surrounding uh states and across the nation eventually. That's just amazing. What I'm noticing as a part of a through line in your story is the response to problems, these great business innovations.

And we see this now all across the world, that some of the best businesses are solutions to problems. I just want to put a quick pin in that. So thank you for for making that point, Joel. I also am noticing as you're telling this story, this incredible parallel that's happening between well, you're you're in Pittsburgh, and that steel came from, you know, because steel came from all over, but really very famous uh and and for sure the heartbeat of steel in this in this nation all came through Pittsburgh.

And so how interesting that your family and your grandfather was adapting his business practices for for something that was happening right there in Pittsburgh. Yeah, yeah. It's it's really something. Well, it goes to show any business owner or executive needs to be watching for where is their new opportunity emerging?

And uh that at that time, that was the first industrial revolution going on, really from the late 1800s clear into the night, early 1900s on into today. So you need to be watching for that. Back then it was Pittsburgh. In more recent decades of our company history, it's a very different location and a very different kind of uh industries and technology.

Tell us about Starline. What is it and what was significant about it, and how did that change the trajectory of your okay. Yeah, I'll give you sort of the background that leads up to a product that was our became our flagship product that really helped our company to grow a lot. But uh in the next decades throughout the niggas, we we grew in the industrial market.

We branched out into other markets as well, where there was electrical power distribution needs, machine shops, sewing factories, and uh other kinds of equipment that needed power, and you had a lot of power needs, even lighting fixtures, track lighting. We started making track lighting. Eventually, the 60s and the 60s came along. In the 70s, then there was this uh the next industrial revolution was electronics.

They invented the primitive uh electronic controls and that kind of equipment. Our company moved from there into new opportunities. So we started to sell to other places such as shipyards and uh the military and more modern uh uses. From there, we saw this opportunity where computers were invented and they popped up.

So uh this is all part of the electronics revolution. And from there, computers were first used with these great big IBM memeframes. Remember those being talked about? Those were monstrous things that filled up a whole room with a bunch of cathode tubes that were running instead of electronic microcircuits, which was another industrial revolution change when we when we invented microchips.

So all that was happening, and then the computers started to be shrink in size as technology improved there. And uh so while we were busy wiring up hundreds of sewing machines and garment factory places down in the southern part of the United States mostly, that uh in the meantime computers were modernizing and uh advancing forward as well. By the time the 80s rolled in, the heavy industry had uh declined in America, and uh the roads and the bridges and uh skyscrapers uh had kind of leveled off as far as the amount of opportunity for our company to uh work there.

And then the computers just started burgeoning. So by the 1990s and approaching 2000, then the internet came out. The Internet of Things started to emerge after that. Everything was going on to the internet.

We saw that all kinds of companies needed computers, and then they needed computer centers, they need data rooms, and so then they started to shrink down, and then the public by then had laptop computers, and uh, everybody had computers uh by the 90s, and so we recognized that uh computer data centers were uh just burgeoning at that point. They were going from scattering of uh a lot of unique designs into standardized, very large and very modern high-tech, 100% uptime, no downtime uh kind of facilities that were uh needed.

And we just happened to have uh electrical power distribution system that we were using at that time in the 80s and 90s to get into plugging several hundred sewing machines in a great big sewing room in a sewing factory. All right. And it was like we figured that out. We were doing it for machine shops to plug in, you know, a few dozen machines here or there in a factory.

And then when we saw data centers had to get plugged in, they the data centers were starting to have hundreds of computers. And then it started to become over a thousand computers and thousands of computers that were getting uh installed into these big data centers, and they all needed the main power to run the machines. And so we saw this as a strategic pivot opportunity for us. So that's how we shifted into the data center.

You rode the wave, you saw it coming, and you decided to begin to pivot your business. And of course, now we're talking about manufacturing. So, what started off as your grandfather wiring up individual homes? That's a B2C uh business, of course.

Now suddenly you're thinking, boy, we're going to place some very strategic but large bets and investments that this is the right direction that we're gonna go. What was it? What was it that gave you confidence that you were heading in the right direction? I'm sure there was a lot of conversation, you were lots of numbers, spreadsheets.

How did you know to take it that direction? Well, I think there's several components to that. For one thing, I think our company just had this natural component to our business of innovation. And so we were not afraid to innovate.

We were looking for new ways and technologies and things that we could expand from what we know and do business in into some new applications and areas. Part of it also was uh this was also out of necessity as just uh branching out from business that's already going great. So as I said, the industrial, heavy industrial industries in America have been declining by the end of the next and the garment industry, they all left this the United States altogether, going into Latin America, and then after that, they started to go clear over to Asia.

And as we know today, the garment industry is uh made in somewhere other than the USA mostly. So that there was declining there. We could see our own business as we knew it was under a threat of uh decline along with those industries. We had to find something new, and we knew that.

The light bulb clicked on where we looked and said, well, we know how to wire up 500 sewing machines in a sewing factory. So we we'll do 500 computers the same way. Uh in a in a data center, seemed like big jobs for us, they were. But uh they are dwarfed by the size of data centers and the energy that they consume.

The amount of electricity that needs to be distributed inside the buildings, it's mind-boggling. And so we just grew with that trend, partly out of necessity, so we didn't uh find ourselves uh becoming extinct, but uh rather to grow with the new opportunities. Again, that was another strategic pivot that um was one of the core things that uh I think is uh for our camp company's success and our family's success over all these years. So today we're known by all the big tech titans that are out there.

They use us. Fortune 500 companies that especially that are very heavy with information and the internet interaction. We they're all using our conductor bar systems either in their own great big data centers, or then also now they have uh what they call data center hotels. They're also called co-location data centers, where companies build huge data centers, and then they will rent out basically spaces, a certain amount of spaces that they can fill up with their computers that have all the uh infrastructure that they need in the building that's going to be world-class and 100% uptime, all this backup redundancies and everything.

So we just kept on riding that wave and moving forward with the trends that were growing. That's just amazing. We've talked about many different aspects of leadership, and one of them is being a change leader and how important it is to be adaptable, how important it is to stay calm and be ready to pivot, but then also, right, because we know that change is inevitable and nothing is staying the same. And these days it seems like it's changing faster and faster and faster.

How important it is not just to be an adapter and to and to be a a quick responder to change, but actually to be a driver of change. So I think it's quite amazing, Jewel, listening to you tell this story when, yes, you you're you said your company, right, facing this existential crisis, and you looked at it and you went, Oh my gosh, we have to get ahead of this thing and think about what's coming next. AI is one of the new areas where some people feel like, oh my gosh, we're gonna lose uh whole industries, we're gonna lose jobs across these industries.

And I think it's uh it's both a scary moment, but also a moment of great opportunity for people who say, I'm going to jump in just like you've said, Joel. We're going to drive that change, we're gonna be part of that change, we're gonna see where these new opportunities are. We're not gonna wait, hold on to the old, we're gonna adapt. Your family's story spans multiple generations.

So I I'd love to know what what are the most important mindset, mindset shifts that are required, right? Because it's not just you as the CEO, right? You have an you had an amazing executive team, your brother, your brother-in-law, other other folks within your family who, you know, each of you brought really significant and critical points of view to to how to go go through this. So, so how did you get that mindset shift working within your whole team so that everybody was getting on the same page?

Right? That's that's an exercise in leadership and collaboration. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Well, I think uh being a family-owned business, and that's uh the subset of the business world uh that we're in, I think that uh there was a natural built-in advantage to being a family-owned business.

I'm sorry. Uh family-owned business, there was a natural built-in advantage to a family-owned business to be able to think like a family, where you care about everybody else, and everybody is important, everybody matters. In a family, everybody is loved. We run our business in a way that uh we respect everybody, we treat everybody like they're real humans, they're people.

Uh they're not just resources, they're not just inanimate objects. And so we like to uh do things that help everybody to enjoy being at work. We I would also say uh there's the influence uh of my mother. In our family business, my mom, Vicki Ross, was what we like to call her our chief emotional officer.

And uh it was a really important function because she was always keeping the family together. She had uh a family dinner where we all lived in the area, so we were all invited over almost every Sunday afternoon of the year to come over for a nice uh uh home cooked meal all together around a big table. So, you know, she was doing these kind of things that kept us connected as a family uh in the background and always working together. There was always a sense that we do things together and help each other and support each other and love each other and you know do the right thing, and it really did make a big difference.

So uh we were always kept together. We may have some different decisions on business issues to make, and uh didn't see it the same way, but uh because of the connectedness we felt there in the family, we were able to uh keep us working together, which really helped to keep us streamlined and being more efficient over time. We also had something we called familiness, familiness, and that's uh a word that I think we came up with it on our own. Yeah, I think we coined it.

So maybe not. Famliness is really important because that's how it's the feeling you get and the way that you work and think and approach relationships with each other that can actually be uh used and applied in a large extent in a business environment as well. And it does help the business uh to uh thrive, be more efficient, work together, and be more successful too. So I would encourage uh some of those kind of soft values that my mother was uh able to uh help with.

Uh, if I want to go back another generation, my grandmother, she uh was uh the bean counter. So she uh counted the money and collected it, did the bank deposits whenever it was just her working at the kitchen table while uh my granddad was out uh doing all the work getting his business started a hundred years ago. And so she focused a little bit more on being the back office uh of the startup company, and uh it was an interesting role uh for a different uh strong personality woman in her family over the generations.

So they're not all the same, you know. So my grandma was uh uh really she was a bookkeeper and did all of those kind of things, and then my mom was a lot more about a uh relationships and unity builder and sustainer for all of us. So I think each family and each business person and company needs to determine what their own uh philosophy of running the business and their style that they want to do it in, uh, to to how you want to do it. And it's not all the same, but uh there are some things that uh do tend to help with success in the long run that you can find in uh businesses such as ours.

As we get ready to wrap. Up, uh, I want to ask you about this word legacy, which is the title of uh this upcoming book that you have. Um and can you tell me first of all what does that word mean to you? And then tell me why did you want to write this great book?

And I name uh our book A Legacy is the main title, but with the subtitle in there, it really helps to tell the uh what it's about. 100 years in the life of a successful family business. And so uh with it within that context, I think a legacy in uh one of the definitions that you could certainly come up with uh is that uh within your lifetime, what do you want yourself to be known for or known as? Or how do others maybe refer to you when they're talking about you?

It might be running a bit a person running a business, or it might be somebody with a car collection, or it might be somebody else that uh is really good at uh surfboarding or skiing or whatever. So think about that, and I think that's really for your own individual legacy. That's what you have to define. And that's what I defined and uh how I see it.

But then also remember that after we're gone from this world and in this life, what will be we be remembered for on what we were like for those people in the future looking back on these times? And so that's also an important way to think about what legacy do you want to leave behind for people later on to look back and see, but also for your children and grandchildren and for any of the other younger generations of people that uh you may want to influence. That's also part of your legacy.

And so the question is why uh why did you decide that you wanted to write this book? Well, I think we have a story to tell. And uh the more we worked on it, the more I realized, wow, we really do have a story to tell. Uh it's it's exciting, uh, it's I think it's interesting, and uh uh so much happened.

And there's a lot of lessons we've learned along the way, and I would like to share that with uh other business people, other professionals, and especially with other families who happen to be in business. It might just be you have somebody that started up their own own business and they're the founder, they're the one person running a business. That's okay, that's a start. So uh legacy in that sense needs to be um uh helping people uh to um move forward and uh establish their own legacy, what they're want to be remembered for.

And I wrote this book because this is a story about uh what uh specifically my granddad, who started his business in 1924, down through his children and grandchildren, I'm his grandchild, and then even great-grandchildren. There's a fourth generation that's working in this business as well in the family. And so um that's our story. A lot of people that have their own businesses want to know how to keep it going or how to hand it off to their children.

And then the children have to figure out how to hand it off to not just their own children, but maybe some nieces and nephews who are cousins, then at that point, it does become more complex. And the longer it goes, the more the complexity uh grows as well. So you really need to pay attention to how to intentionally keep the business going successfully and also keep the family going successfully as well, in parallel tracks, so that they will be mutually successful uh as much as uh possible.

Sometimes I think of the word legacy, and I heard somebody define it once as it's what's here when you're not, whether you're have left the the earth or whether you've just left the room. Uh what is still there? What are people being inspired by? What are your insights?

So I really thank you for that. And Joel, I'm thrilled that you had a chance to sit with us today. Thank you for your teachings, thank you for your wisdom and your insights, and um, we hope to see you again soon.