Essentia
Innovating Beyond Legacy Processes

Highly manual processes are vulnerable to errors, and when it comes to telecom, remedying these errors can often be more expensive than a project’s entire original budget.

Examples of common errors include not locating infrastructure within close proximity to power and not locating underground utilities until too late in the project lifecycle. These miscues and miscalculations can happen for a number of reasons. For one, much of today’s small cell infrastructure is built using the existing macro/tower approach rather than creating new technology from the ground up.

Enter Essentia. The company uses purpose-built tools and processes for more efficient, effective, and accurate small cell deployments. For example, while other infrastructure companies send multiple workers to sites to take manual measurements while jotting down notes, Essentia brings state-of-the-art digital field collection tools and Real-Time Kinimatic (RTK) positioning significantly enhanced with proprietary upgrades. This setup allows a single team member to efficiently capture the photos necessary to create 360-degree views of poles while mapping all measurements to a database through custom forms. These measurements are accurate to the inch vertically and offer sub-foot accuracy horizontally.

“Essentia has the trustworthy experts, cutting-edge technology, powerful relationships, and proven processes to exceed the quality and delivery time of current small cell and fiber infrastructure deployments,” says Jarrod Hayes, the co-founder and co-CEO at Essentia.

At its core, Essentia offers its technology platform, eSpeed, which is designed to accelerate data collection, management, and analysis to drive efficiencies end to end across fiber and small cell value chains.

The company defines eSpeed as a set of different technologies — hardware, software, and tools — wrapped around efficient processes through proprietary programming and workflows. First, eSpeed integrates data sources that were long managed by manual processes, ranging from Google Maps to drone-captured field data and customers’ proprietary platforms. Then, it is able to automate the creation of deliverables, including A&E drawings, SCIPs, purchase orders, and more — produced faster, more efficiently, and with greater accuracy. The upshot is reaching real estate complete 60 to 90 days faster for small cell deployments and at least six months faster for fiber infrastructure deployments.

One of the best examples of Essentia’s working excellence was an ambitious fiber project in Northeast Florida. While the project was budgeted for 18 months — and in reality would take most vendors 24 months to complete — Essentia completed it in six months. Going into the project, the Essentia team was not initially made aware of the stringent quality audits they would face. Despite this obstacle, after the first audit, Essentia earned its highest quality score ever. In the time that passed before the second audit, another vendor nosed out this score. But when it came time for Essentia’s next quality audit, Essentia re-established the mark to beat — raising its pass rate by seven percent while improving the quality score by more than double. In doing so, Essentia outperformed hundreds of vendors in thousands of audits working in America’s 60 largest cities.
What differentiates Essentia is its talented telecom team, who meets the company’s values, share their mission, and never simply accept the status quo.

“Essentia is always surveying the entire landscape of telecom infrastructure—as well as applications for its technology in other verticals—seeing how we can innovate a specific process or tool,” Hayes says.

Essentia recently launched a Photo Sim App that harnesses the power of augmented reality to produce instant, photo-accurate pole and node simulations on a smartphone. “We’re also in the finishing stages of another product, a machine learning beta, which will allow us to further automate fiber drawing packages,” says Hayes.

In addition, Essentia recently completed a project in Alaska and is being asked to consider deployments outside of the U.S.

Since the beginning of its journey, Essentia has taken a thoughtful, purposeful approach to building a vibrant workplace culture. The latest validation of this effort occurred in May 2021, when Essentia earned Great Place to Work (GPTW) Certification.
“It’s the only official recognition determined by employees’ real-time reports of their company culture,” says said Sarah Lewis-Kulin, vice president of global recognition at GPTW. “Earning this designation means that Essentia is one of the best companies to work for in the country.”
According to Essentia’s GPTW employee survey, 95% of employees said that the company celebrates people who try new and better ways of doing things, regardless of the outcome.

It’s the Essentia way. And the Inc. 5000 company’s new and better ways are beginning to transcend telecom to meet the needs of other verticals.
“Our novel approach to underground fiber engineering has applications for all industries building underground infrastructure. Additionally, our Aerial Pole Engineering can greatly benefit telecom, CATV, and electric utilities. We are conducting due diligence on each of these potential expansions,” concludes Hayes.