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I owe Reggie Comfort more than I can express in a single blog post, and I told him exactly that on the show. Back in 2013, when I was a young entrepreneur trying to get Think Power Solutions off the ground, Reggie was in a position of responsibility at CenterPoint Energy. He trusted me enough to introduce me to his colleagues, and that introduction led to a contract that changed the trajectory of my career — and eventually both companies I founded, Think Power and KYRO, have had contracts with CenterPoint. That chain of events started with Reggie Comfort believing in a guy who, as Reggie's mentor once told him, "took the initiative and grabbed the bull by the horns."
So when I sat down with Reggie for this episode of From Boots to Boardroom, it was personal. But what emerged was a conversation that goes far beyond our history together. Reggie's four-decade career at CenterPoint Energy — from intern to director — is a masterclass in learning your trade, bridging organizational silos, navigating corporate politics, and never losing your passion for the wires that power America.
Reggie Comfort was born and raised in a small community about 30 miles north of Texas A&M University — so small, he says, that nobody recognizes the name. Both his parents were school teachers. His mother taught third grade; his father taught high school and eventually became the elementary school principal over a career spanning about 40 years.
One day in 1968, Reggie's father was reading the Houston Chronicle — the paper that arrived daily at the Greyhound bus station. He called young Reggie over to his chair and pointed to the classified ads. Pages and pages of job openings for engineers, all with strong starting salaries. "That's what you need to do," his father said. And then he added a piece of advice that Reggie never forgot: "Whatever you do, don't be a school teacher. Your mother and I make a decent living, but they don't pay well."
It was 1968 — the height of the Apollo program. Reggie had a science teacher who made the class track NASA's activities, cutting out newspaper clippings and discussing them weekly. The idea took root: he wanted to design the instrumentation panels for spaceships. Electrical engineering became the path, and it was set remarkably early.
There was just one obstacle: Reggie liked science but didn't particularly care for math. A middle school math teacher, bless her heart as Reggie put it, didn't know how to teach the subject. But when he got to high school, he had excellent teachers in Algebra 1, Algebra 2, and Analytic Geometry who, as he described it, "turned the light on." That confidence carried him all the way to the University of Houston, which at the time was a major contributor to the NASA program — nearly every professor was working on some NASA project.
The lesson Reggie draws from this, and one he shares whenever he talks to young people, is that it starts early. Direction, encouragement, and good teachers at the right time can change a life. Not everyone is gifted enough to breeze through without studying. "You got guys like me," Reggie said, "that need to work. If I'm going to understand this, I need to go at it. And I need to be ruthless about it."
How did Reggie end up in the utility industry instead of designing panels for NASA? A chance encounter in a college dormitory.
It was a Saturday afternoon near the end of his freshman year. Reggie and his dorm mates were goofing off when a guy a couple of doors down walked in and said he needed to get ready for an interview. An interview? They were barely sophomores. But this computer science major had learned about the university's cooperative education program — internships arranged through partnerships between the school and local industry.
Monday morning, Reggie went straight to the College of Engineering and inquired about the program. An administrator walked him through his options and gave him a list of companies. NASA wasn't on the list at the time. But Houston Lighting & Power — the predecessor to CenterPoint Energy — was. Reggie was interested in generators, so he interviewed, got an offer, and started that summer.
He interned for four terms across four different departments in engineering. Those rotations gave him a foundation that would serve him for the next 40 years. And here's the part that makes me smile every time: I told Reggie on the show that I owe a debt of gratitude to that dormmate, Michael from San Antonio. Because the chain of events that started with Michael mentioning his interview on a random Saturday afternoon eventually led to Reggie being at CenterPoint, Reggie trusting me with an opportunity, and both Think Power and KYRO having contracts with CenterPoint today.
Thank you, Michael — wherever you are.
When Reggie joined Houston Lighting & Power full-time after graduating in 1978, the industry was just beginning to open doors for minorities. "Let's just say they were open to the idea," Reggie said carefully. "Well, not everybody was open to the idea."
His first supervisor wasn't accustomed to working with people of Reggie's background and didn't give him much opportunity to learn and grow. Fortunately, that supervisor left — he was a square peg in a round hole himself, more mechanically inclined in an electrical role. The replacement was transformative.
The new supervisor was brilliant — a master's in electrical engineering, deep field experience, and a genuine understanding of what made the system work both electrically and operationally. His advice to Reggie was simple and powerful: learn everything you can about this business. Take the initiative. Take the bull by the horns. If you see something that needs to happen, go after it. Don't sit back and wait for someone else. Do your job, and the rest will take care of itself.
And then the phrase that became Reggie's operating philosophy: "Own the wires." Own the wires that deliver the product. Take personal responsibility for making sure the system operates within the parameters it was designed for.
Reggie took that literally. He devoured old articles from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and IEEE. He studied his mentor's published papers. He prepared himself to work in the field with line crews and industrial customers, where you had to understand theory well enough to apply it in real-world conditions. "You don't learn everything you need to learn in college," Reggie told me. "You learn it after you get into the industry."
That ownership mentality never left him. Even today, working at TRC Companies in retirement from CenterPoint, Reggie walks his dogs, notices something on a circuit, and calls the hotline to report it. When he was mowing his lawn and spotted an issue, he'd leave a voicemail for the operations team. People at CenterPoint told me about this, and Reggie confirmed it with a laugh. That's what "owning the wires" looks like after 40 years — it's not a job description, it's an identity.
One of the recurring themes across every episode of this podcast is the gap between the people who design things and the people who build and operate them. Reggie lived this tension for decades — and when he finally reached a position of leadership, he did something about it.
The problem was structural. CenterPoint's engineering planning department would design new circuitry based on balanced three-phase load conditions — everything nice and perfect on paper. But then Reggie's operations team had to actually go out and run that system in the real world, where conditions were anything but perfect. Operations would send feedback to planning, but planning was focused on balanced load flow models and didn't always incorporate what the field was telling them.
When Reggie became manager of distribution engineering, he made a simple but powerful change: planners were required to send preliminary plans through operations for review before finalizing them. Operations would provide feedback on real-world issues that didn't show up in the models, and no plan would be issued until everyone had an opportunity to weigh in.
He did the same thing when he managed substation engineering and system protection. The system protection engineers and the substation design engineers were chronically out of sync — protection specs would come in after the relay panels were already built, leading to expensive rework. Reggie required the system protection team to provide their input before design began, not after.
These sound like obvious fixes, but anyone who's worked in a large utility knows how hard it is to change entrenched workflows. I experienced this firsthand — when I was at Think Power, we worked with CenterPoint on exactly these types of issues. The program we put together brought operations and engineering into quarterly lessons-learned sessions and established standards based on feedback from both sides. The results were real: costs went down by about 41% and quality improved by roughly the same amount within one to two years. We presented those results at multiple industry conferences.
Reggie's instinct to bridge these gaps was something he developed watching the disconnects from the field for years, telling himself: if I ever get into a position of responsibility, I'm going to fix this. And he did.
When I asked Reggie about the top challenges facing grid reliability, his answers were characteristically direct.
The plan a utility puts together to improve reliability requires sustained organizational commitment — who's going to do the work, how it's going to be done, and what work management methodology is being used. If focus drifts, if priorities shift, if the scope gets muddled, the work doesn't get done. And by the time you circle back to a circuit you identified months ago, it has new problems layered on top of the old ones that never got addressed.
When CenterPoint started its reliability program around 1999, the company had a large field workforce wearing Houston Lighting & Power shirts. Over time, that workforce diminished as the company tried to reduce O&M costs while maintaining reliability — a fundamental tension. The theory was that contractors could backfill internal crews, but as Reggie put it, "that's easier said than done." And sometimes, in an effort to groom future leaders, companies put business or communications majors into operations roles that require deep technical understanding. "They don't have the background," Reggie said plainly. "And I'm sorry to say that. That happens a lot."
This tension — reduce costs while maintaining reliability and resiliency, all while keeping power affordable — is the balancing act every utility faces. Using contractors adds costs that affect affordability. But underfunding reliability leads to worse outcomes for customers and regulatory penalties. As Reggie explained, Texas's Public Utility Commission requires investor-owned utilities to report their SAIDI performance and maintain a 10% worst-performing circuit list. If those circuits show up again the next year, there are consequences.
Reggie's perspective on AI is shaped by his years as a relay protection engineer, and it's one of the most thoughtful takes I've heard on the subject.
In protective relaying, you anticipate problems — if this happens and this happens, then do this; if that happens and that happens, do that. You program devices with rules based on deep understanding of how the electrical system behaves. "That's, to me, what AI is all about," Reggie said. "An establishment of rules that you come up with and you teach a system to identify what those rules are and then to execute based off of that."
But here's the critical caveat: "It takes a person to understand that upfront before they can establish these rules that the machine will utilize." If you try to deploy AI without understanding the fundamentals of what you're automating, you'll misapply it. And you'll misapply it because you didn't take the time to learn how things actually work.
Reggie drew an analogy to the evolution from slide rules to calculators. When he started engineering school, they used slide rules. By graduation, Texas Instruments had the SR50A programmable calculator. I showed him the TI-36X I used for my PE exam — and mentioned that my seventh grader now has a more advanced calculator than anything I've ever used. The tools get more powerful, but the fundamentals matter more, not less.
"I applaud AI," Reggie said, "but I am very concerned that people are not going to take the time — they're going to take even less time to learn how things work. And if we have a bunch of people walking around that don't understand how things work because all they can do is push a button, it's going to get us in trouble."
It's a warning worth heeding as the industry rushes to adopt AI across everything from vegetation management to storm response to asset inspection.
I asked Reggie about his greatest career setback, and the story he told is one that will resonate with anyone who's worked in a large organization.
In September 2002, his VP asked him to manage substation engineering and construction with a specific mission: drive costs out and improve efficiencies to make the internal construction workforce as competitive as outside contractors. Reggie threw himself into it. He applied project management and critical path methodology to model repeatable work processes — adding power transformers, building new circuits, predicting outage needs and durations. After a year of hard work (and, as he admitted, "a lot of people cursing at me"), the system was in place. The crews were energized, giving each other high fives, proud that no contractor could touch their efficiency.
They launched on January 1, 2004. Six months later, Reggie got a new boss. The VP had told senior leadership that the internal team was performing well and he wouldn't be laying anyone off. That didn't sit well with the senior VP, who sent in someone new with a different agenda: outsource all construction.
"I said, do you have any idea the work we put in to revamp this group?" Reggie recalled. "He didn't know and he didn't care."
All the work, all the effort, all the pride they'd built — gone in a directive. Reggie had to regroup, pivot, and start working with contractors to maintain the schedule he'd built. He still had the planning and outage management framework — they didn't take that away. But the crews he'd invested in, the culture he'd built, the efficiency gains they'd proven — all of it was dismantled for organizational politics.
The lesson? "You have to be able to deal with it," Reggie said. "Because what's the alternative? You just walk away?" He paused, then added: "That goes on all the time in major corporations. You've got hen fighting at the upper levels. It's part of it."
My advice to young people listening? Go be an entrepreneur — then you call the shots. Reggie laughed at that, but he didn't disagree.
When I gave Reggie a hypothetical day as mayor, his answer was immediate and characteristic: he'd sit down with the Harris County Judge and develop a joint city-county plan to address the top five issues, working together instead of politically. "I think it's ridiculous that the two leaders are not working as well as they had in the past," he said.
It's the same instinct that drove him to bridge planning and operations at CenterPoint — get the key stakeholders in a room, align on priorities, and execute. And when I gave him a day as president? He'd promote vaccinations and public health, starting with children and the workforce. "We all saw what happened when we couldn't work," he said, referencing the pandemic. "Could you imagine? Look at how the economy suffered."
Then he asked for more time: "Give me that job for a couple of weeks. I'm gonna need more than one day to straighten this stuff out. And we're gonna do what makes sense. We're not gonna do stupid for stupid."
That might be the most Reggie Comfort sentence ever spoken.
Reggie Comfort's career is a testament to what happens when early inspiration meets relentless preparation, when a chance encounter meets the courage to act on it, and when deep technical knowledge meets the leadership to bridge organizational divides.
His father showed him the engineering ads in the Houston Chronicle. NASA sparked his imagination. A dormmate named Michael introduced him to cooperative education. A brilliant mentor told him to own the wires. And for 40 years, that's exactly what Reggie did — designing, operating, maintaining, and fiercely advocating for the electrical infrastructure that serves millions of Texans.
His advice for young engineers is deceptively simple: learn your trade. Take the initiative. Do your job. Don't wait for permission. And don't let AI or any other tool become a substitute for understanding how things actually work.
For those of us who've had the privilege of working with Reggie — and for the countless CenterPoint customers who've benefited from circuits that worked better because he wouldn't let problems go unaddressed — the impact is immeasurable. Even now, walking his dogs past a power line, Reggie Comfort is still owning the wires.
Thank you, Reggie, for your decades of service, for trusting a young entrepreneur, and for reminding all of us that there's no shortcut to knowing your craft.
From Boots to Boardroom shares the journey of those who power America — from the job site to the boardroom, leading with grit, tenacity, empathy, and vision. Not every leader sits in a corner office.
Listen to the full episode with Reggie Comfort and subscribe to the podcast here.
This episode sponsored by KYRO AI: Digitize work and maximize profits. Learn more here.
I owe Reggie Comfort more than I can express in a single blog post, and I told him exactly that on the show. Back in 2013, when I was a young entrepreneur trying to get Think Power Solutions off the ground, Reggie was in a position of responsibility at CenterPoint Energy. He trusted me enough to introduce me to his colleagues, and that introduction led to a contract that changed the trajectory of my career — and eventually both companies I founded, Think Power and KYRO, have had contracts with CenterPoint. That chain of events started with Reggie Comfort believing in a guy who, as Reggie's mentor once told him, "took the initiative and grabbed the bull by the horns."
So when I sat down with Reggie for this episode of From Boots to Boardroom, it was personal. But what emerged was a conversation that goes far beyond our history together. Reggie's four-decade career at CenterPoint Energy — from intern to director — is a masterclass in learning your trade, bridging organizational silos, navigating corporate politics, and never losing your passion for the wires that power America.
Reggie Comfort was born and raised in a small community about 30 miles north of Texas A&M University — so small, he says, that nobody recognizes the name. Both his parents were school teachers. His mother taught third grade; his father taught high school and eventually became the elementary school principal over a career spanning about 40 years.
One day in 1968, Reggie's father was reading the Houston Chronicle — the paper that arrived daily at the Greyhound bus station. He called young Reggie over to his chair and pointed to the classified ads. Pages and pages of job openings for engineers, all with strong starting salaries. "That's what you need to do," his father said. And then he added a piece of advice that Reggie never forgot: "Whatever you do, don't be a school teacher. Your mother and I make a decent living, but they don't pay well."
It was 1968 — the height of the Apollo program. Reggie had a science teacher who made the class track NASA's activities, cutting out newspaper clippings and discussing them weekly. The idea took root: he wanted to design the instrumentation panels for spaceships. Electrical engineering became the path, and it was set remarkably early.
There was just one obstacle: Reggie liked science but didn't particularly care for math. A middle school math teacher, bless her heart as Reggie put it, didn't know how to teach the subject. But when he got to high school, he had excellent teachers in Algebra 1, Algebra 2, and Analytic Geometry who, as he described it, "turned the light on." That confidence carried him all the way to the University of Houston, which at the time was a major contributor to the NASA program — nearly every professor was working on some NASA project.
The lesson Reggie draws from this, and one he shares whenever he talks to young people, is that it starts early. Direction, encouragement, and good teachers at the right time can change a life. Not everyone is gifted enough to breeze through without studying. "You got guys like me," Reggie said, "that need to work. If I'm going to understand this, I need to go at it. And I need to be ruthless about it."
How did Reggie end up in the utility industry instead of designing panels for NASA? A chance encounter in a college dormitory.
It was a Saturday afternoon near the end of his freshman year. Reggie and his dorm mates were goofing off when a guy a couple of doors down walked in and said he needed to get ready for an interview. An interview? They were barely sophomores. But this computer science major had learned about the university's cooperative education program — internships arranged through partnerships between the school and local industry.
Monday morning, Reggie went straight to the College of Engineering and inquired about the program. An administrator walked him through his options and gave him a list of companies. NASA wasn't on the list at the time. But Houston Lighting & Power — the predecessor to CenterPoint Energy — was. Reggie was interested in generators, so he interviewed, got an offer, and started that summer.
He interned for four terms across four different departments in engineering. Those rotations gave him a foundation that would serve him for the next 40 years. And here's the part that makes me smile every time: I told Reggie on the show that I owe a debt of gratitude to that dormmate, Michael from San Antonio. Because the chain of events that started with Michael mentioning his interview on a random Saturday afternoon eventually led to Reggie being at CenterPoint, Reggie trusting me with an opportunity, and both Think Power and KYRO having contracts with CenterPoint today.
Thank you, Michael — wherever you are.
When Reggie joined Houston Lighting & Power full-time after graduating in 1978, the industry was just beginning to open doors for minorities. "Let's just say they were open to the idea," Reggie said carefully. "Well, not everybody was open to the idea."
His first supervisor wasn't accustomed to working with people of Reggie's background and didn't give him much opportunity to learn and grow. Fortunately, that supervisor left — he was a square peg in a round hole himself, more mechanically inclined in an electrical role. The replacement was transformative.
The new supervisor was brilliant — a master's in electrical engineering, deep field experience, and a genuine understanding of what made the system work both electrically and operationally. His advice to Reggie was simple and powerful: learn everything you can about this business. Take the initiative. Take the bull by the horns. If you see something that needs to happen, go after it. Don't sit back and wait for someone else. Do your job, and the rest will take care of itself.
And then the phrase that became Reggie's operating philosophy: "Own the wires." Own the wires that deliver the product. Take personal responsibility for making sure the system operates within the parameters it was designed for.
Reggie took that literally. He devoured old articles from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and IEEE. He studied his mentor's published papers. He prepared himself to work in the field with line crews and industrial customers, where you had to understand theory well enough to apply it in real-world conditions. "You don't learn everything you need to learn in college," Reggie told me. "You learn it after you get into the industry."
That ownership mentality never left him. Even today, working at TRC Companies in retirement from CenterPoint, Reggie walks his dogs, notices something on a circuit, and calls the hotline to report it. When he was mowing his lawn and spotted an issue, he'd leave a voicemail for the operations team. People at CenterPoint told me about this, and Reggie confirmed it with a laugh. That's what "owning the wires" looks like after 40 years — it's not a job description, it's an identity.
One of the recurring themes across every episode of this podcast is the gap between the people who design things and the people who build and operate them. Reggie lived this tension for decades — and when he finally reached a position of leadership, he did something about it.
The problem was structural. CenterPoint's engineering planning department would design new circuitry based on balanced three-phase load conditions — everything nice and perfect on paper. But then Reggie's operations team had to actually go out and run that system in the real world, where conditions were anything but perfect. Operations would send feedback to planning, but planning was focused on balanced load flow models and didn't always incorporate what the field was telling them.
When Reggie became manager of distribution engineering, he made a simple but powerful change: planners were required to send preliminary plans through operations for review before finalizing them. Operations would provide feedback on real-world issues that didn't show up in the models, and no plan would be issued until everyone had an opportunity to weigh in.
He did the same thing when he managed substation engineering and system protection. The system protection engineers and the substation design engineers were chronically out of sync — protection specs would come in after the relay panels were already built, leading to expensive rework. Reggie required the system protection team to provide their input before design began, not after.
These sound like obvious fixes, but anyone who's worked in a large utility knows how hard it is to change entrenched workflows. I experienced this firsthand — when I was at Think Power, we worked with CenterPoint on exactly these types of issues. The program we put together brought operations and engineering into quarterly lessons-learned sessions and established standards based on feedback from both sides. The results were real: costs went down by about 41% and quality improved by roughly the same amount within one to two years. We presented those results at multiple industry conferences.
Reggie's instinct to bridge these gaps was something he developed watching the disconnects from the field for years, telling himself: if I ever get into a position of responsibility, I'm going to fix this. And he did.
When I asked Reggie about the top challenges facing grid reliability, his answers were characteristically direct.
The plan a utility puts together to improve reliability requires sustained organizational commitment — who's going to do the work, how it's going to be done, and what work management methodology is being used. If focus drifts, if priorities shift, if the scope gets muddled, the work doesn't get done. And by the time you circle back to a circuit you identified months ago, it has new problems layered on top of the old ones that never got addressed.
When CenterPoint started its reliability program around 1999, the company had a large field workforce wearing Houston Lighting & Power shirts. Over time, that workforce diminished as the company tried to reduce O&M costs while maintaining reliability — a fundamental tension. The theory was that contractors could backfill internal crews, but as Reggie put it, "that's easier said than done." And sometimes, in an effort to groom future leaders, companies put business or communications majors into operations roles that require deep technical understanding. "They don't have the background," Reggie said plainly. "And I'm sorry to say that. That happens a lot."
This tension — reduce costs while maintaining reliability and resiliency, all while keeping power affordable — is the balancing act every utility faces. Using contractors adds costs that affect affordability. But underfunding reliability leads to worse outcomes for customers and regulatory penalties. As Reggie explained, Texas's Public Utility Commission requires investor-owned utilities to report their SAIDI performance and maintain a 10% worst-performing circuit list. If those circuits show up again the next year, there are consequences.
Reggie's perspective on AI is shaped by his years as a relay protection engineer, and it's one of the most thoughtful takes I've heard on the subject.
In protective relaying, you anticipate problems — if this happens and this happens, then do this; if that happens and that happens, do that. You program devices with rules based on deep understanding of how the electrical system behaves. "That's, to me, what AI is all about," Reggie said. "An establishment of rules that you come up with and you teach a system to identify what those rules are and then to execute based off of that."
But here's the critical caveat: "It takes a person to understand that upfront before they can establish these rules that the machine will utilize." If you try to deploy AI without understanding the fundamentals of what you're automating, you'll misapply it. And you'll misapply it because you didn't take the time to learn how things actually work.
Reggie drew an analogy to the evolution from slide rules to calculators. When he started engineering school, they used slide rules. By graduation, Texas Instruments had the SR50A programmable calculator. I showed him the TI-36X I used for my PE exam — and mentioned that my seventh grader now has a more advanced calculator than anything I've ever used. The tools get more powerful, but the fundamentals matter more, not less.
"I applaud AI," Reggie said, "but I am very concerned that people are not going to take the time — they're going to take even less time to learn how things work. And if we have a bunch of people walking around that don't understand how things work because all they can do is push a button, it's going to get us in trouble."
It's a warning worth heeding as the industry rushes to adopt AI across everything from vegetation management to storm response to asset inspection.
I asked Reggie about his greatest career setback, and the story he told is one that will resonate with anyone who's worked in a large organization.
In September 2002, his VP asked him to manage substation engineering and construction with a specific mission: drive costs out and improve efficiencies to make the internal construction workforce as competitive as outside contractors. Reggie threw himself into it. He applied project management and critical path methodology to model repeatable work processes — adding power transformers, building new circuits, predicting outage needs and durations. After a year of hard work (and, as he admitted, "a lot of people cursing at me"), the system was in place. The crews were energized, giving each other high fives, proud that no contractor could touch their efficiency.
They launched on January 1, 2004. Six months later, Reggie got a new boss. The VP had told senior leadership that the internal team was performing well and he wouldn't be laying anyone off. That didn't sit well with the senior VP, who sent in someone new with a different agenda: outsource all construction.
"I said, do you have any idea the work we put in to revamp this group?" Reggie recalled. "He didn't know and he didn't care."
All the work, all the effort, all the pride they'd built — gone in a directive. Reggie had to regroup, pivot, and start working with contractors to maintain the schedule he'd built. He still had the planning and outage management framework — they didn't take that away. But the crews he'd invested in, the culture he'd built, the efficiency gains they'd proven — all of it was dismantled for organizational politics.
The lesson? "You have to be able to deal with it," Reggie said. "Because what's the alternative? You just walk away?" He paused, then added: "That goes on all the time in major corporations. You've got hen fighting at the upper levels. It's part of it."
My advice to young people listening? Go be an entrepreneur — then you call the shots. Reggie laughed at that, but he didn't disagree.
When I gave Reggie a hypothetical day as mayor, his answer was immediate and characteristic: he'd sit down with the Harris County Judge and develop a joint city-county plan to address the top five issues, working together instead of politically. "I think it's ridiculous that the two leaders are not working as well as they had in the past," he said.
It's the same instinct that drove him to bridge planning and operations at CenterPoint — get the key stakeholders in a room, align on priorities, and execute. And when I gave him a day as president? He'd promote vaccinations and public health, starting with children and the workforce. "We all saw what happened when we couldn't work," he said, referencing the pandemic. "Could you imagine? Look at how the economy suffered."
Then he asked for more time: "Give me that job for a couple of weeks. I'm gonna need more than one day to straighten this stuff out. And we're gonna do what makes sense. We're not gonna do stupid for stupid."
That might be the most Reggie Comfort sentence ever spoken.
Reggie Comfort's career is a testament to what happens when early inspiration meets relentless preparation, when a chance encounter meets the courage to act on it, and when deep technical knowledge meets the leadership to bridge organizational divides.
His father showed him the engineering ads in the Houston Chronicle. NASA sparked his imagination. A dormmate named Michael introduced him to cooperative education. A brilliant mentor told him to own the wires. And for 40 years, that's exactly what Reggie did — designing, operating, maintaining, and fiercely advocating for the electrical infrastructure that serves millions of Texans.
His advice for young engineers is deceptively simple: learn your trade. Take the initiative. Do your job. Don't wait for permission. And don't let AI or any other tool become a substitute for understanding how things actually work.
For those of us who've had the privilege of working with Reggie — and for the countless CenterPoint customers who've benefited from circuits that worked better because he wouldn't let problems go unaddressed — the impact is immeasurable. Even now, walking his dogs past a power line, Reggie Comfort is still owning the wires.
Thank you, Reggie, for your decades of service, for trusting a young entrepreneur, and for reminding all of us that there's no shortcut to knowing your craft.
From Boots to Boardroom shares the journey of those who power America — from the job site to the boardroom, leading with grit, tenacity, empathy, and vision. Not every leader sits in a corner office.
Listen to the full episode with Reggie Comfort and subscribe to the podcast here.
This episode sponsored by KYRO AI: Digitize work and maximize profits. Learn more here.
Hari Vasudevan, PE, is a serial entrepreneur and engineer focused on AI-driven solutions for utilities, construction, and storm response. As Founder and CEO of KYRO AI, he leads the development of AI-powered software that helps utility, vegetation, and field service teams digitize operations, improve storm response and restoration, and reduce operational risk. He also serves as Vice Chair and Strategic Advisor for the Edison Electric Institute’s Transmission Subject Area Committee and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering with professional engineering licensure in multiple states.
