Scott Wages Helps Usher in Unprecedented Growth at Yancey Bros.

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“It’s amazing how hard work, great timing, and just being able to capitalize on the current moment creates this thing that everyone refers to as luck,” Scott Wages says.

Wages is the kind of person you think of when you someone says, “They could charm water out of sand.” He’s engaging, ready with a story, and makes you feel like you’ve been lifelong friends after a few minutes. He is, by his own definition, a pure salesman.

That is both true and only partially true in his role as senior electric power sales engineer at Yancey Bros. Wages’s efforts have resulted in sales—record-setting, business-altering sales. But he’s also fundamentally reshaping his employer’s value proposition, and he’s doing it one new friend at a time.

Wages was lured to Yancey Bros. in 2017 when a friend at the business grew tired of competing with the then-Nixon Power Services director of sales for Georgia. At the time, Wages had been interviewing for VP-level roles. This role would be returning to pure sales; some might even see it as moving backward in their career.

“It was a very hard decision,” Wages says. “Boy, am I glad I made it. It took off like a lightning bolt.”

After two years, Wages had made such headway that the business asked him to figure out their lagging data center business. Wages was upfront that he knew little to nothing, though he’d gotten his undergrad in industrial engineering, and he’d try and figure it out. At the time, the business was ecstatic if the business could land a $1 million to $3 million project. Once Wages moved over to the data center business, his first order was the size of a year’s worth of deals for the department at Yancey Bros.

“That was within six months of me moving into data centers,” the sales leader says, “but it wasn’t just me that enabled that. The organization had made some incredible moves to allow for that kind of growth to happen at the time that it did.”

Yancey Bros. had been willing to invest significant funds into the creation of the packages, the enclosures that surround its generators. The enclosures tend to cost as much as the physical generators themselves, and the investment required to develop Yancey’s own was steep. But eight years ago, the company was creating a maximum of four packages a month. Today, they’re making 50.

“This organization has not only grown its business exponentially so many times over, it not only takes incredible care of its clients, but it’s still growing and can grow quicker.”

Scott Wages

Wages saw another opportunity. The company was creating packaging for only Caterpillar products. If Yancey was able to build a more universal design, they could accomplish builds in a few weeks, instead of the months-long waits companies were experiencing at the time.

“People were waiting a year to get these generators built and then another six months on top of it to get it to a job site,” Wages explains. “Suddenly, we could show up and have it done in three weeks. We literally started changing the industry.”

But first, Wages had to get buy-in outside of his organization. When he’d go to trade shows, he’d watch other hungry salesmen line up by the bar, waiting to pounce on prospective clients, but most wound up striking out. Wages knew there had to be a better way.

He started approaching panel speakers immediately after they got done presenting.

“They were so quick to give me the information of the person I needed to talk to just because they didn’t want to have to talk to me,” Wages says, laughing. “It was awesome. And it worked.”

When Wages would land an opportunity, it wasn’t long before he’d be making heroes of his new friends within their organizations. In Wages, they had found a partner who was able to reduce spending and up their timetable, which allowed them to come in under budget and ahead of schedule. Word got around quickly.

And it’s only getting bigger.

Yancey’s packaging division, the one that is now creating a staggering 50 packages a month, is planning to be at 100 by the end of 2025, and 150 by sometime next year.

“This organization has not only grown its business exponentially so many times over, it not only takes incredible care of its clients, but it’s still growing and can grow quicker. We’re talking about 5x-ing our capacity. Think of the jobs we’re providing. Think of the lives we’re making better.”

There was a time after his college graduation when Wages spent eight months as a lifeguard in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, living the high life and trying to do as little as possible. He was a self-described beach bum—the son of a lifelong Marine father and a Navy nurse mother—who knew the party would eventually have to end. Could he imagine the kind of growth he’d eventually enable for technology he probably wasn’t even aware of at the time?

The answer is, it doesn’t really matter. Wages probably could have done this in just about any line of work, but at Yancey he’s found the ideal fit, the ideal timing, and the ideal team to think big.

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