What does it take to build a police department in nine months? Stockbridge Chief Frank Trammer shares how they did it — while putting culture, wellness and community first.

In this episode of UrbanEBB, host Rico Figliolini sits down with Chief Frank Trammer, Chief of Police for Stockbridge, Georgia, to explore the realities of building a police department from the ground up.

With over 25 years in public safety — including roles at Atlanta PD, Sandy Springs and Georgia Tech — Chief Trammer brings strategic clarity, deep community values and a blueprint for modern law enforcement in rapidly growing cities.

Together, they discuss how Stockbridge launched its own police department in just nine months after a 50-year absence, overcoming recruitment challenges, supply chain delays and startup logistics — while prioritizing culture, officer wellness and community trust.

This conversation dives into the “why” behind forming a city force, the hidden costs and the long-term impact of getting it right from day one. Whether you’re a city planner, resident or curious citizen, this episode offers invaluable insight into creating a modern, community-focused police department from scratch.

Resources:
Stockbridge Police Department: https://stockbridgega.org/police

Key Takeaways

1. Define Your “Why” Before Your “What”
   Chief Trammer emphasizes that cities should start with clear goals and community expectations before diving into operations or logistics.
2. Culture Over Credentials
   Hiring for character and cultural fit — not just experience — was central to Stockbridge’s successful recruitment and retention strategy.
3. Officer Wellness is Public Safety
   A supportive work environment and generous benefits created a healthier, more responsive department and helped attract over 1,200 applicants.
4. Smart Partnerships Pay Off
   Stockbridge leveraged regional partnerships for SWAT, drones and crime centers to expand capabilities without overextending budget or staff.
5. Policing as an Investment, Not Just an Expense
   A city-run department is a long-term investment in safety, accountability and local quality of life — and can redefine how a community connects with law enforcement.

“You don’t build a great department with just more people. You build it with the right people.” – Frank Trammer

Timestamp:
00:00:02 – Introduction & sponsor shoutouts (Vox Pop Uli, EV Remodeling Inc.)
00:01:00 – Chief Trammer’s extensive background in public safety
00:03:38 – Why Stockbridge re-established a city police force after 50 years
00:07:29 – Community needs vs. demographics in shaping policing philosophy
00:11:25 – How Stockbridge attracted 1,200 applicants for 62 positions
00:14:07 – Competitive benefits and work culture as a hiring tool
00:15:51 – Building the department: logistics, budgets, ARPA funds, and time crunch
00:19:32 – Team structure, city support, and how responsibilities were divided
00:21:45 – Partnerships with Henry County 911, SWAT, state patrol, and task forces
00:25:23 – Providing growth and specialization opportunities for officers
00:27:03 – Lessons from Sandy Springs and the importance of hiring for character
00:29:30 – Crime trends and Stockbridge’s intelligence-led policing approach
00:31:05 – Implementing technology: LPRs, drone programs, real-time crime centers
00:35:24 – The five-year vision: growth, national accreditation, and model policing
00:40:38 – Advice for cities considering starting their own police force
00:43:09 – Final thanks and closing remarks

Podcast Transcript:

00:00:02 – Rico Figliolini

Hi, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of UrbanEbb, a podcast here just north of Atlanta in the smart city of Peachtree Corners, Georgia. So I appreciate you guys being with us. I have a great guest today. We have Chief Frank Trammer from Stockbridge, Georgia. Hey, Chief. How are you?

00:00:18 – Chief Frank Trammer

Doing well. Doing well. Thanks for having me, Rico. 

00:00:20 – Rico Figliolini

No, absolutely. Appreciate you being with us. Just to give you a little idea before I introduce our sponsors, Chief Trammer. The experience has been over 25 years in police, public safety. You’ve worked with a variety of different departments, right? Atlantic Police Department, Sandy Springs Police. You were Assistant Chief at Georgia Institute of Technology. And you’ve been through, I mean, you have a rigor of diplomas and such in the public safety area, everywhere from the Northwestern University School of Police Staff and Command, to Georgia Law Enforcement Command College, FBI National Academy. I mean, you’ve got the experience, man.

00:01:03 – Chief Frank Trammer

The best you’ll ever look is on your resume.

00:01:06 – Rico Figliolini

True, true. So if anyone’s going to stand up a police force, you’d be the guy. So with the experience. Before we dive into that, let me just say thank you to our sponsors, two great sponsors that have been supporting our podcast, the magazines we produce and such. One of them is Vox Pop Uli. So if you have a brand, and almost every business has a brand, right? If you want to be able to sell to the public, to another business, you need to establish that brand. And what these guys do is they bring that brand to life, whether it’s an embroidered shirt or a vehicle wrap. They’ve done, I think, over 6,000 since they’ve started. And anything you can print a logo onto it, any object you can think of. Challenge them, let them know. Plus they do variable data printing for postcards and all that. So you want your brand out there, whether it’s trade show, local festival, they’re the people to check out. So voxpopuli.com is the place to go. Ask for Andrew or Daniel, father, son, the family business here in Peachtree Corners. The other sponsor is EV Remodeling Inc. Eli owns that company there. Him and his family live here in Peachtree Corners. Great guys they do design to build, anything that you need whether it’s a kitchen, bath, back deck, or whole house remodel, they’ve done over 260 homes. Check them out, they’ve done great work and we appreciate their support. So now back to the show I say show but you know it’s a conversation really. Yeah. So, you know, this podcast has been talking to a variety of different people along the way when we started this. And so I get an opportunity to really find out and deep dive a little bit into some of the stuff going on. Chief Trammer is from Stockbridge, Georgia, the city that I think up until about 2020 was about 29,000 population. That was about the time that you all decided, almost to start. But you started the police force in 22. You went live in 22. In 23, the population is somewhere around 36,000 or so. It’s a tough thing to start something from scratch, almost anything, right? Tell us a little bit about how that happened. What was the motivation to reestablish a police force after over 40 years of not having one? Since what, 1973? Actually, it was county police, right, I guess? I shouldn’t say you didn’t have any police force. It just wasn’t a city police force.

00:03:38 – Chief Frank Trammer

Right. So Stockbridge is unlike, I think, a lot of communities that we’ve seen establish their own police departments in that these cities that came about and started their own new police departments were new cities. Stockbridge was not in this position. Stockbridge has been a city well over 100 years. Stockbridge, like many communities in the metro Atlanta area, has seen substantial growth over the years. At one point in time, the city did have a police department, I believe somewhere from the 1940s, 1950s to about the 1970s, 1972, 73 was the point of time that it transitioned over to the county police department. But Stockbridge was a much different community at that point in time. Only several thousand residents as compared to 36,000 residents. And honestly, where we are right now with some of the recent annexations, I would say that in the next year, we’ll be approaching close to 40,000. So very similar in size and stature to the Peachtree Corners area and the initiative that they’re launching, or at least considering to start their own police department. But the impetus behind that was that the elected officials in the city of Stockbridge decided that they wanted their own police department so that they could collaborate with law enforcement to develop a style of policing that was reflective of the desires of the community. We here in, I’m sure you have heard, your listeners have heard and are probably familiar with the concept of community policing. It’s not a new concept, but when we think about community policing, a lot of times people think that that’s a division within a police department or that’s the role of an individual within the police department. But really, community policing has been around for well over 100 years. As a matter of fact, the principles of modern day policing were established by Sir Robert Peel, who was the founder of the London Metropolitan Police Department back in the 1800s. And one of the basic tenets of community policing was the whole concept that the police are the public and the public are the police, that the police are only members of our community who are paid to give full time attention to duties that are incumbent upon everybody in the community in the interest of welfare and community safety. Not necessarily by design, many agencies have not fully embraced community policing, and some agencies are more focused on a reactive style of policing. And again, that’s not always intentional by design. Sometimes that could relate to staffing challenges that agencies may have that does not allow them the discretionary time to be able to engage in community policing. So the elected officials in the city of Stockbridge decided they truly wanted a community-oriented police department that was engaged in dialogue and relationship with the community to really accomplish that objective that I talked about just a moment ago, and that’s co-producing community safety. And so this is something that they were considering for a number of years. I think it started back in 2015. And so it took some time in order for that to fully materialize. So the dialogue happened in 2015, and we didn’t fully launch until 2021. That’s when the decision to vote on the police department and establish it was made. The impetus behind that was truly a community-oriented organization that was really working in partnership with the community to address community concerns and enhance the quality of life.

00:07:07 – Rico Figliolini

Would that, you know, every city is different, right? The makeup of a city, the demographics, the, you know, just the energy of a city, right? Small, big. Did any of that have to do, you know did that philosophy come out of that, evolve out of the community the way it was?

00:07:34 – Chief Frank Trammer

Can you restate that question again?

00:07:29 – Rico Figliolini

Sure. So you know, so right now I think the majority, like Gwinnett county is majority minority right now, right? Gwinnett police is out there to some degree doing community policing as well but like you said with lack of officers sometimes it can be difficult right? It’s like a business owner that does the work and instead of going out and selling, that stuck doing the work maybe. And you could be stuck doing that and not realize everything else going on around you. Stockbridge is majority minority I think, if I remember correctly. Does that feed into the leadership wanting to get more community policing done in that way versus a different philosophy like you stated?

00:08:17 – Chief Frank Trammer

You know, I don’t think it necessarily has anything to do with community composition per se. I think that it has to do with the general community expectations. Stockbridge is a very diverse community. It is predominantly African-American. I think it’s 57, 58 percent, maybe more than that. Maybe it’s 60. I’d have to look at the numbers specifically, but it’s somewhere in that ballpark. High 50s, low 60s, African-American. And then followed up by Caucasian and Hispanic and Asian American. So it’s a very diverse community. The style of policing in many respects, I think, is predicated not so much upon the racial demographics as much as it is probably the age demographics. When you have communities like, let’s say, Midtown, where maybe you have many younger individuals living, they’re living in apartment communities. They maybe don’t have a vested stake in the actual community because they’re, in some respects, a transient population. And so their whole concern is, I just want crime to be low and my car not to get broken into. I really don’t necessarily need to connect with the officers in the community. Stockbridge is a very established community, much of it residential homes. Many of our community members are a little older. And so their desire is they want that. They want a department they can connect with, that they can partner with. The department’s going to be responsive, not just to crime issues, but quality of life concerns that they have. And so I strongly believe and have seen as evidenced by the participation of our community that that’s the type of policing that they wanted to see in Stockbridge and nothing to any of the agencies that had served the city previously. Because the Henry County Sheriff’s Department, the Henry County Police Department, during that gap had provided services to the Stockbridge community, and I think they did a wonderful job. I just think that the level of intentionality that the elected officials and the community members wanted from an engagement standpoint was something they were hoping to see a little bit more of, and that was, again, the impetus for starting the Stockbridge Police Department.

00:10:36 – Rico Figliolini

And that makes sense to me, right? You want to be involved in the community. You’re building out of the community also. When you were looking to hire officers, you know, it’s tough every police department. I know I think Gwinnett County is probably 200, has 200 openings essentially budgeted for. I mean, there’s just not enough officers out there, not enough people wanting to work. And especially when you all started setting up, I think. In 22, when you went live, that’s probably even more difficult just because of the atmosphere at the time coming out of, sort of coming out of COVID at that point and stuff. Did you find it difficult to hire enough police officers? How did you go about doing that? You know, how did you entice them to come to work in Stockbridge?

00:11:25 – Chief Frank Trammer

You know, I think there is a, we didn’t have any challenges, thankfully. We had 58 positions, full-time positions that we looked to staff for part-time positions when we began our police department. So 62 employees. We had over 1,200 applications for those 62 positions. A lot of it had to do with the vision, the culture, what we’re trying to create here. And you have to understand that there are a lot of folks that enjoy what they do. They enjoy policing. They want to be involved in the community. They want to help. When people are leaving to go to different places, it’s not always for better pay and benefits. It’s a better work environment. And we’re very intentional about creating the right type of environment. We first have a philosophy that we are employee focused. I believe that it’s not the community members that come first. It’s our staff, because I believe the way we treat our team members is the way that they’ll respond in kind in terms of how they treat the community. And so we really wanted to create a culture that was focused on officer wellness, officer growth and development, and to really create an environment where our officers could thrive. And that in and of itself was an attracting factor for many people in joining the police department, as they wanted to be part of that environment where they had strong, supportive leadership and opportunities for growth and development and a true concern holistically for the officers. So I think it’s getting the culture, getting the environment right. And that was a big motivator. But to our advantage, we also had the support of the elected officials at the time in getting our salaries to be the most competitive in our area. We, because of our geographic location, are not going to be able to compete with the salaries of places like Sandy Springs and Brookhaven and some of the other communities, which obviously have a much larger tax base and the communities are more affluent. But when we started our department, we did start off as the highest paid agency in Henry County. So that also was something that helped us to attract the candidates into our department when we started up.

00:13:34 – Rico Figliolini

Did you do any other, were there any other benefits outside of salary which is, you know philosophy is great because especially at the time, I think. There were a lot of anti-police sentiments and stuff so who wouldn’t want to work in a place that’s welcoming right? And also salary does make a difference right? You’ve got to be able to make a living, pay the bills, take care of your family and stuff. Were there other benefits, other initiatives that you all did to attract the officers as well?

00:14:07 – Chief Frank Trammer

To your point, salary and benefits is always on the table. It’s like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You have to be able to provide that baseline level of security. We all have to eat and live indoors, and so we can’t overlook that as a motivator. Beyond the salaries, it wasn’t anything that we necessarily did. The city of Stockbridge, thankfully, had a very attractive benefits package. So our officers pay very little in terms of their health insurance coverage. They have full health insurance benefits. If you’re a single officer and you have no dependents, your health insurance is covered 100% by the city. As an example, if you have a family for full health coverage, you’re looking at less than $180 a month. And that’s a great benefit from a health insurance perspective. We offer a health reimbursement plan for our officers up to $2,500. So any out-of-pocket medical expenses, the city will reimburse you up to $2,500. We have a five-year pension that’s paid 100% by the city with a 3% multiplier per year of service. So after five years of service, you have a guaranteed retirement benefit through the city. We had, of course, our take-home vehicle program. I think if you’re going to start a department, everybody has take-home vehicles to be competitive. You’re going to have to do that. We extended our take-home range a little further than most agencies were allowing so that we could pull from some of the surrounding areas. But we didn’t really have to rely on a lot of additional incentives and benefits and hiring bonuses and things like that that we’ve seen. Thankfully, we didn’t have to resort to that. We had plenty of people that were willing and interested in being part of our organization based upon the benefits that we were offering at the time.

00:15:51 – Rico Figliolini

Were there any initial steps or challenges that you all, well what were the initial steps? I mean when you stepped in, where were you in the process? And what did you have to do? I mean, how did that work? I’m sure there were lots of challenges of sorts.

00:16:07 – Chief Frank Trammer

Wow. It’s, you know it’s reverse engineering. It’s beginning with the end in mind and figuring out and working backwards from there. The actual logistics of getting the department established and recognized was very simple and very straightforward. It didn’t take a lot of time to do that. The next probably most time-consuming aspect of the process was we had to truly have an understanding of what the overall cost was going to be. We had some projections, but we didn’t have any hard figures and so in that pre-planning stage, we had to understand, okay, well, with the salaries, with the vehicles, with the equipment, what are we looking at? And we had to figure out, and this is what I would encourage communities to do, is we had a very short time span to start a department. And the time that was voted on October 21, I was onboarded. And the city wanted to go live with the police department July of 2022. So less than nine months. We had nine months during a global pandemic, supply chain shortages, staffing shortages to stand up an entire police department over that span of time. And while there were funds allocated, they were estimations. And so we really had to take a look at things. And what we realized was that we, we’re looking at a shortfall, a budget shortfall to be able to fully implement the size and scope of the department that we needed because there were some projections that were done. There’s various different methods, but because of the way the county had structured the city is they really couldn’t segment and let us know how many calls for service in Stockbridge proper are you looking at. So we had estimations. So until we began operating, we really didn’t have a full understanding of what’s the call for service demand within the community. So we had to take a look at what we need, come up with those projections for staffing, identify the costs associated with that and all the equipment. And then thankfully, there were challenges starting up in a pandemic, but thankfully we had ARPA funds that we were able to utilize through the American Rescue Act plan that we were able to use to offset some of those expenses, which really put us in a very good position to launch successfully but also enabled us to do some things like completely renovate an old city building so that we have a full functioning police headquarters because that’s another thing that you have to contend with is you have a police department, where you’re going to put folks? There’s obviously costs associated with configuring it so that you’re able to conduct law enforcement operations out of it and then sourcing the equipment, trying to figure out with chip shortages and things along those lines, how are we going to get these vehicles? How are we going to get this equipment? So there were a lot of long days, long evenings, weekends, cultivating relationships, just trying to figure out how we’re going to put all these things into place. And then the next biggest part was the hiring, doing thorough backgrounds, vetting processes for 62 candidates. And to get to that 62, we probably had to interview 200 people and go through the process to really identify those that we wanted to select to be part of our startup.

00:19:25 – Rico Figliolini

Did you all have an HR department at the time or did you farm some of that out as far as the HR part of it?

00:19:32 – Chief Frank Trammer

Well, HR couldn’t handle that. We only had one HR person for the entire city at that point in time. And so we absorbed a lot of that. We hired in phases. So it started with hiring me as the chief and then I hired four key command team members of all which had different types of experiences and they were given different segments of the startup. So as an example, one individual had a lot of experience in background and hiring and policies and procedures and things along those lines. So their job was to own that piece of it. We had another that was very good with the whole finance logistics. So they handled a lot of the things with the budget and the procurement and sourcing equipment and things along those lines. And then somebody focused on you know, the training and development and things along those lines. So we had people tasked out, but we had to bring on folks as we started to get into, okay, we need to begin hiring people. So we had to hire additional people to be part of that de facto HR team to work through the background process and to help us get all of those folks onboarded in such a short period of time.

00:20:40 – Rico Figliolini

Did you guys end up leasing or buying cars?

00:20:43 – Chief Frank Trammer

We looked at both options. And the lease option requires less capital from a city on the front end. And we were looking at that as a possibility until we learned that we were able to utilize the ARPA funds. And so we had the funding available to just be able to purchase the vehicles outright. Had we not had that, we likely would have looked at the leasing option so that it wouldn’t have had such a significant impact on the overall city budget.

00:21:14 – Rico Figliolini

Did you guys end up using the county’s 9-11 system? How’d you end up working some of that aspect of it? I know some different cities do different things, right? You probably didn’t do a helicopter or a SWAT team maybe, but you know, Like Peachtree Corners is trying to figure out, do they do a canine unit maybe, but be part of a larger multi-city drug enforcement group? Yeah, task force and stuff. So how’d you all figure that out? Like, where’d you go with that?

00:21:45 – Chief Frank Trammer

Well, the way that the county’s configured, it’s not like many other surrounding counties. Henry County 911 was handling police, fire dispatch for every city in Henry County. So part of the service delivery strategy was that they were providing that service. The only thing that was required of us is that when we started the police department, that all 911 fees get funded to the 911 center to be able to fund that portion. And so we work directly with Henry County 911. All of our dispatch calls go to the 911 center. We have a dedicated dispatcher that dispatches for Stockbridge only. And that was an arrangement that was made with 911 as we began the process of building the police department.

00:22:28 – Rico Figliolini

I didn’t even know that was an option. That sounds good. So as far as other organizations, local organizations, what type of partnerships were you able to do or set up to you know to work either with other police forces or public safety organizations or community organizations. How deeply are you involved in some of these?

00:22:52 – Chief Frank Trammer

At this juncture nearly three years in we’ve got just a multitude of partnerships. And that’s enabled us to enhance our capacity, but also we don’t want to be just givers or takers. We want to be givers also. And so when we talk about a partnership, it needs to be a true partnership. And so as an example, if I’m asking the county to provide a service for the city, what are we willing to do to lean forward to support them in their endeavors? An example of that is, is that the county has a SWAT team that provides that service for the entire county. And in conversations with the police chief at the time, we were discussing how can we participate? How can we partner? And so what came out of that was a multi-jurisdictional effort where we actually have our officers that can go through the selection process. And from that, it’s went from a county SWAT team to a multi-jurisdictional SWAT team. So we’re helping support the county by providing staff to participate in that so that when we need that service, we’re not asking for something without giving it in return. If an agency is not in a position to do that based upon the, again, it’s going to be based upon the number of deployments. So if you’re a community that’s very active, that has the high potential for situations like that, there may be, the county might want some requirement that you provide a certain amount of funding to pay for that if they’re not open to some sort of multi-jurisdictional effort. So those things are going to be conversations that have to be had with the respective parties to see how you can move forward. Thankfully, we were embraced when the department started up. I was part of the startup at Sandy Springs Police Department back in 2006, and that was not as warmly received. And so we didn’t run into a lot of issues, but we’ve got partnerships with the County Police Department, with the Sheriff’s Office. Even with neighboring counties, we have MOU with Clayton County Police Department. So if we need something like that, they’re our primary go-to source if we have an explosive device. And so we work directly with their bomb team. The Sheriff’s Office provides helicopter support. We work with them as part of their narcotics task force. We work with the state patrol for handling serious injury and fatal crash accident investigation. So we’ve got a lot of various different partnerships with local, state, and federal agencies across the board.

00:25:23 – Rico Figliolini

That’s great. I mean, your officers are not only are participating, but like you said, there’s a buy-in, you’re stakeholders in these things. But I think they get experience too, right? Being able to do it. If you all ever had to establish your own, I mean, you might have some background then at that point.

00:25:41 – Chief Frank Trammer

And that also is an attractor because when you are a smaller agency, so to speak, folks want opportunities. They want to see, okay, where can I grow? Where can I develop? And there are people that have interest in being part of a tactical team. And if you don’t have that as an option within your department because of the size and scope, they may look to go someplace else so that they can fulfill their career ambitions. But we try to create all those opportunities internally to the best that we can so that we’re still continuing to provide a development path for folks, and it’s a great retention tool as well.

00:26:20 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, great point. I can see that. When there’s no growth or movement, you stagnate, right? So I don’t think anyone wants to stagnate, unless you’re the type of guy that wants to be there nine to five for the next 30 years and then retire. But yeah, I think most people want some growth. You mentioned Sandy Springs before, and that’s, I’m curious too. So you were there during the time that they stood up their police force as well?

00:26:44 – Chief Frank Trammer

I was. I was one of the inaugural officers there when Sandy Springs started.

00:26:48 – Rico Figliolini

Did you see any difference between what you all did in Stockbridge? Did you learn anything from Sandy Springs, let’s say, from that, from when that was stood up? Anything that you utilized? Any experience from that?

00:27:03 – Chief Frank Trammer

You know, I think probably the biggest thing that I learned from that was the importance of getting the environment right in the culture and making sure that the people that you hired were on the same sheet, that we were clear on our purpose, vision, and mission, that we identified that before we got everybody on board. So that everybody knows the same frame of reference that we’re working from, who we are, what we believe in, what our philosophy is. In Sandy Springs, a very similar situation, didn’t have a lot of time to start up the agency. And that was the first time that a police department had been started up in a very long time. So in 2006, it was a relatively new endeavor. We saw, obviously, a lot of agencies come from that. Johns Creek, Brookhaven, Dunwoody, Milton, South Fulton, a lot of cities have developed. But Sandy Springs really was the catalyst that really cascaded a lot of these other cities and departments developing. So getting back to your original question. The emphasis was on experience, is that we want experienced officers. We want folks that have a lot of credentials. And I was joking with you, but I believe it to be true. The best that anybody’s going to look is on their resume. Just because you’ve got 20 years of service doesn’t mean that you’re going to be a great cop. It’s what you’ve done in those 20 years of service. And so I think that we probably should have took more time on the hiring process to really truly understand who is the individual. Because I believe that when you hire for character and you hire for cultural fit, you can train skill set. And so that’s something we did a little bit differently because I wanted people at their core, if you want a community-oriented police department, not to say that folks don’t, but I wanted folks that had a, or that most officers don’t, but I really wanted people that at their core had a servant’s heart and really was invested in this whole concept of community policing and working together with the community. And so the only thing that we really did differently was taking a look at our selection process and who we brought into the organization.

00:29:07 – Rico Figliolini

Right. There’s so many different ways of doing that right? The quality of the candidates that you hire, ongoing professional development, also. Because you might hire a certain way but you still need ongoing professional development right? To reinforce the reasons that you hired them right? Local crime is down, I’m assuming over the past few years, I think?

00:29:30 – Chief Frank Trammer

Yeah, we have seen considerable crime decreases over the last three years across the entire city. And I think that a good portion of that has to do with the fact that our officers are out there, that they’re proactive, they’re addressing issues. A lot of agencies across the country, though, we’ve seen crime trend down over the last several years, thankfully. But I would like to think that it’s a result of the intentionality that we put forth into really addressing the crime concerns. And looking at that, we have an intelligence-led style of policing. We just don’t shotgun things. We take a look at where things are happening, how is it trending. We focus our resources smartly. We focus on repeat offenders. We use intelligence to drive a lot of our decisions. We have a very robust investigative unit that follows up and has an extremely high clearance rate that’s beyond the national average. That goes back to the importance of selecting the right people, too. When you have the right people, you can do a lot more with the right people than you can with more people at times. So it’s really important to make sure that you truly have professionals that are committed to their craft.

00:30:36 – Rico Figliolini

Sure. And talking about enhancement and learning and wanting to be able to put your hands on to other programs and stuff, technology drives things, too, right? Force multiplier is a big phrase that’s being used in this space. How are you using technology or systems? How are they integrated into the police department? What are you doing as far as like drones or crime center in the cloud and stuff like that?

00:31:05 – Chief Frank Trammer

Yeah, so we have a number of different things that we’re in the process of implementing currently. One of the things, and this is actually happening in Cobb County as well, is that there’s a multi-jurisdictional real-time crime center in Henry County. Henry County Police Department and local agencies collaborate together regularly. And so their real-time crime center is able to support us in those initiatives, those endeavors. But we also are in the process of implementing our own crime center so that we have a common operating platform. We’re able to pull in all of our automated license plate readers cameras, all of our cameras across the city. We’re in the process of implementing a camera network in some of our problem areas in the community that we can monitor those things. We’re in the process of implementing a drone as first responder program. And we’ve been able to do that by virtue of grant funding. So a limitation in implementing that technology, there’s obviously a tremendous cost in the startup of an agency. However, if you want to police smarter and you want to utilize those technologies, there’s costs associated with that too. So these things can get very expensive and we always have to be looking at either how can we leverage partnerships? How can we share costs to implement this technology? Or are there alternate funding sources that we can use in order to acquire this so that we’re able to enhance public safety in the community? Thankfully, we’ve been able to secure funding for the Real-Time Crime Center, for our LPR cameras, for our network of AI cameras that we’ll be implementing throughout the community. And one of the challenges, though, is being a new agency. Again, we’re only three years going into July. There’s a lot that’s still in process. We’re still evolving. We’re still growing. We’re still building systems. And when you’re doing that and simultaneously trying to implement a lot of different projects and initiatives, it can be very challenging. And so what we found is we have to be a little more strategic in what we do. And we’ve had to slow down a bit in some of our ambitions. So that we can get our feet underneath this, because I’m one of those folks that I’ve got all sorts of ideas and I need my team to tell me, okay, well, let’s look. Can we get one thing done before we can implement this? Definitely to get back to your question. Leveraging technology is a force multiplier. It cuts down or has the potential rather to cut down on officer response time and certainly enhance your investigative capacities as well.

00:33:41 – Rico Figliolini

Yes, it’s interesting speaking to Chief Restrepo here in the City of Peachtree Corners when I’ve had some time with him. And we talked a bit about the technology they’re using, the 200-plus cameras in the city, the integrating of commercial cameras and ring cameras in people’s homes, at least as registered database, right, for some of these. Some of these are live, like commercial cameras and stuff. It does give them from the palm of their hand, essentially, the ability to check on areas that may sound like problems going on, but may not be. Group of people turn into just, you know, some people hanging out by their car. So it does, technology can do a lot. I feel like sometimes it can be like a kid in a candy store. It’s like, wow, you know, I’d like that. I think we could use that there or the bowler wrap or this and that. I can see how a police officer can look at that and say, well, that’ll make our job safer and maybe safer for the people around, you know, what’s happening. So I can appreciate all that. You know, the feedback that you get from the field also, I’m sure is important, you know, from the officers in the field. So how do you wrap your mind, you know, as far as that goes? How do you foresee the police force being over the next five years? I know you’re new, three years in, hardly three years in. But where do you see, you know, what’s the game plan? You must have some sort of game plan or vision for the next five years of what you want to be, where you want to be as far as policing, community and all that.

00:35:24 – Chief Frank Trammer

Absolutely. You know, we want to be a model agency of our size and really be the gold standard for agencies across the country. And so that’s sort of our ambitious goal. And one of the things, and of course, vision is always aspirational. If you can achieve your vision next year, three years down the road, it’s probably too small. And we really want to be the premier agency of our size across the country. We want other agencies to come to Stockbridge to see how we’re doing things, from how we’re utilizing technology to how we’re building robust programs that truly engage our community. And that’s a process. And you have to, again, be strategic in how we’re moving forward. We have a lot of wonderful people. And that’s why we’re able to do the things that we do, but we’re still a relatively small agency. We don’t have the staffing that we need really based upon calls for service. And thankfully we have the right people, but as the city grows, so does the department need to grow as well. When we started, we projected, and because of just the uncertainty with what’s this actually going to cost, I’m sure you can understand that in many respects, they said, when I say they the elected officials and decision makers, well let’s not go too big to start off with and and we’ll scale up from there. But the problem is that we’re forever needing to scale up. The community is growing. We started in 2022 in July and in 2023 in January the city had a referendum and there was a large annexation that brought in about 7,000 new residents in the city. So it took us from 29 to 36,000. And we had to provide service for those additional residents with the same number of staff that we had. And we continue to grow and to develop. And so you have to grow with the agency. And so smart strategic growth, obviously, is part of that plan. But we want to fully implement a lot of the technology programs. We have a very robust and one of the things I’m most proud about is our community initiatives. We have very strong partnerships with the community. One of the things that I started here was a police advisory council, which is composed of a broad cross-segment of members of the community. We have a representative from the business community, from our faith-based community, a youth representative, representatives from every council district, from every patrol zone that meet with me. As a matter of fact, we were in here meeting late yesterday evening, and they’re able to work in partnership with me, and I’m able to hear from them about what are the concerns, what are you hearing from your area. And introducing things to them, like as an example, is we’re rewriting our policies and we’re exploring things like our pursuit policy, being able to sit down with them and say, you know, what do you think we as a department should be pursuing for? You know, what would you support? And really just involving in that process, because we get in a vehicle pursuit and we’re an agency that’s pursuing somebody for a misdemeanor violation because that’s in our policy and we don’t have the support of the community if something goes wrong there that causes us to potentially lose trust. And so having that network of trusted advisors to work with us has been huge. But just to continue to evolve the department, to grow it in scope, to enhance our technologies, to continue to build upon what we’ve already established is really what we’re going towards. We’re still working on refining our processes and procedures, and it’ll probably be another couple of years. We had the ambitious goal of, many people don’t realize that in law enforcement that certification accreditation is a voluntary standard. That there’s not a requirement that agencies have to adhere to best practice standards. And within two years we achieved state certification of the 900 and some agencies across the state, there are less than 170 that are state certified so we made that a goal of ours because we wanted to let the community know that we’re committed to best practices. We’re now working towards national accreditation. And these are ambitious goals for an agency that’s still evolving and still growing and not quite three years old. But if we truly want to be the model, then that’s what we’re always aspiring to achieve. Officer wellness, well-being, leadership development, those are all things that are huge priorities for us moving forward also.

00:39:44 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, I see that. I mean, the thread that runs through all of it, right, is well-being, not only for your officers, but for the community itself, right? We’re all family in the end, right? I mean, they’re not individuals out there. Everyone’s part of a family of some sort, right? So whether you’re a police family or you’re a family of five or a family of two or one with the family around them, yeah, protection is a challenging role. And I don’t envy you all. So we’re towards the end of our time together, Chief Trammer. But I wanted to ask if there’s any specific advice that you would want to offer other communities that are looking to establish their own police departments? You know, what advice would you give them, having gone through the process already several times, it seems?

00:40:38 – Chief Frank Trammer

Yeah, I think the first aspect is really defining your why before you define your what. And I think we really have to ask ourselves, why are we doing this? What is it that we want as a community? And then you have to assess, what is this going to cost us? And is it worth the investment? I think that we have to contend with the fact that public safety is expensive. In most all governments, it’s probably, if not the most, one of the top expenses for city government. And it’s an investment. At least I hope it’s an investment. And that’s what we want it to be for our city. We want the community to actually derive value off of what we do and the services that we provide. And, you know, I do think that it’s a worthwhile endeavor. Launching a new department, it is hard. But when it’s done right, I believe that it stands to the potential to change the directory, or the trajectory, rather, of a city and the lives of those who live, work, and play in that community. It’s been, you know, a great experience. We’re continuing to grow and to evolve, but just with the positive feedback that we’ve seen from our community, the level of support and engagement that we have, it’s encouraging every time that we’re in a public forum or a meeting with our community members just to see the level of appreciation and support and partnership in what we do. And we’ve been able to do some great things across our community by virtue of that.

00:42:10 – Rico Figliolini

Glad to hear it. It’s success, right? Success is in everything that we do is a good thing. Thank you, Chief Frank Trammer, for being with us. Hang in there for a second as I close out our podcast. Everyone, thanks for joining us. If you have any questions for Chief Trammer, certainly we’ll have some notes in the contact information in our show notes. So you can email their department and such. If you have comments, of course, leave them in the comments, whether you’re on YouTube or listening on Facebook. Or if you’re listening to this as an audio podcast, we appreciate the review that you would give this podcast on Apple and Google Play and all the others. It’ll be easier for other people to find this as well. And thank you again to our sponsors, Vox Pop Uli and EV Remodeling, Inc. Appreciate their support for supporting these podcasts and the magazines and all that. Frank, if I may, Frank, thank you. I appreciate you being with us.

00:43:09 – Chief Frank Trammer

It was a pleasure. Thanks, Rico. Appreciate the invitation.

00:43:12 – Rico Figliolini

Sure. Thanks, everyone.

What does it take to build a city police department in 90 days? Billy Grogan shares how he did it in Dunwoody — and what cities like Peachtree Corners should know before following suit.

In this episode of UrbanEBB, host Rico Figliolini is joined by Billy Grogan, former Chief of Police in Dunwoody and now Senior VP at Sumter Local Government Consulting. With over 15 years of experience leading a nationally accredited department, Grogan recounts the high-stakes journey of launching Dunwoody’s police force in just 120 days — from policy creation and recruitment to integrating cutting-edge technology.

He shares candid insights into the challenges and lessons learned in building a police department from the ground up. Rico and Billy also discuss what Peachtree Corners should consider if it chooses to form its own police force, weighing the pros and cons of local control versus county-provided services.

This episode offers a practical, behind-the-scenes look at the complexities of creating and sustaining a city-run police department — from staffing and budgeting to public trust and community impact.

Key Takeaways

1. Start Big, Not Small – Grogan warns that underestimating a city’s long-term policing needs at launch leads to costly, continual catch-up.
2. Technology is a Force Multiplier – Drones, body cams and real-time crime centers now help cities like Dunwoody respond faster and smarter.
3. Recruiting Has Changed – Officer retention has become more difficult post-Ferguson and COVID, requiring stronger benefits and creative incentives like housing stipends.
4. Local Control Boosts Accountability – A city-run department serves its residents exclusively, fostering trust and deeper community ties.
5. Civilian Roles are Critical – Grogan emphasizes the importance of hiring non-sworn staff for support roles, freeing officers to focus on enforcement.

“If you start small, you’ll always be playing catch-up. Build to what the city truly needs from the beginning.” – Billy Grogan

Timestamp:
00:02:29 – Why Dunwoody broke away from county police
00:04:36 – Building the department in under 4 months
00:08:13 – Housing stipends and benefits to recruit top officers
00:13:39 – How Ferguson and COVID reshaped recruiting and retention
00:18:15 – Technology priorities: tasers, in-car cameras, drones, and real-time crime centers
00:21:51 – Switching 911 dispatch from DeKalb to CHATCOM
00:24:00 – Consulting services for cities considering new departments
00:28:35 – Code enforcement, animal control, and shared SWAT teams
00:32:02 – Using drones to respond faster than patrol cars
00:33:12 – The biggest challenges in budget and city politics
00:37:49 – Hiring civilians vs. sworn officers for key roles
00:40:34 – Launching a mental health co-responder unit
00:41:19 – Citizen Police Academies and community connection
00:42:00 – Active shooter training and emergency preparedness
00:43:28 – What cities must measure 5 years after launching a police force
00:45:04 – The real value of a city’s own dedicated officers

Podcast Transcript

00:00:01 – Rico Figliolini

Hi, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of UrbanEbb, a city podcast here just north of Atlanta in the smart city of Peachtree Corners. I have a great guest today. We’re going to be discussing and diving into quite a bit about standing up our own police force of the city of Peachtree Corners, and if that’s a possibility. So joining me for that, before I introduce our sponsor, is Billy Grogan. He’s the senior vice president at Sumter Local Government Consulting. He’s the man who built the Dunwoody Police Department from scratch, and the man that also won the Georgia’s Chief of the Year Award. He took Dunwoody Police from zero officers to a nationally accredited police force during 15 years. I’m sure it actually went even less than that. But thank you, Billy. I appreciate you joining us.

00:00:50 – Bill Grogan

Happy to join you.

00:00:51 – Rico Figliolini

Appreciate it. So let me introduce our sponsor before we get right into it. We have two great sponsors that support our podcast and the journalism that we do with the magazines as well. One of them is Vox Pop Uli. So if you’re a company that has a brand, as any company does, right, and you want to be able to share that brand with your customers, with the audience and the community out there, you need to be able to, you know, create shirts, vehicle wraps, all sorts of things. Maybe it’s trade show stuff. Maybe it’s putting your logo on any sort of object you can think of. You can challenge these guys. That’s what they do. They do all of that and more. So check them out at voxpopuli.com. There’s also EV Remodeling Inc. Eli, who’s the owner and him and his family, also live here in Peachtree Corners, as Vox Pop Uli, their business is based in Peachtree Corners. And they’ve done, I think, over 260 home remodel, renovation work. Everything from design to build, to adding a room, to doing your bathrooms, or adding a deck to your house. So check them out. It’s evremodelinginc.com. And I want to, again, thank both of those sponsors for supporting us in the work that we do. So getting into the show, we’re going to dig into some stuff. We’re going to take it a little wide, and then we’re going to drill down a little bit and get into the weeds a little bit, which I enjoy, and learning more about what Billy has done and some of the work that you do. So why don’t we start with when Dunwoody decided to break away from the county. And I think it was 2009. There were decisions that had to be made. So what was the absolute decisions that you all had to make before you actually did that?

00:02:29 – Bill Grogan

Yeah, so I think there’s a couple of reasons. It might be helpful to talk about this for a second, but there’s a couple of reasons why Dunwoody broke away from DeKalb County. One was zoning issues. There was a lot of zoning that they didn’t really like in the perimeter area that DeKalb was approving. And the second one, though, was for police services. DeKalb County had a precinct in Dunwoody, but they unfortunately spent a lot of their time outside the city limits. And so residents felt like they really needed to have visible police presence in the community. And so once the city of Dunwoody became a city on December 1st of 2008, then, you know, the process began to form a police department because we had a pretty tight deadline because DeKalb was, after December of 2008, DeKalb was charging us to provide those police services until we ramped up our own police department. So, you know, really it was the, you know, once we became a city, then it was the clock was ticking to start the police department.

00:03:45 – Rico Figliolini

Wow. Okay. So this was a little different than Peachtree Corners, right? We started our city for some of the same reasons, right? Zoning, a little bit more control of our area and planning the development of our area. The marshals came later, right? And part of it was, again, like you said, even, it was about enforcement, code enforcement and stuff like that. We didn’t think about a police force because we didn’t think we needed it. You know, things change. Cities looking forward, right? Comprehensive plans are made to look a decade ahead of where we’re going. But when you guys started the Dunwoody Police Force, you’re right, the clock was ticking. You were paying for DeKalb County services. Now, when you started up, how long did it take to actually start, you know, to get to day one, let’s say?

00:04:36 – Bill Grogan

Yeah. So I was hired December 17th of 2008. And our department went live April 1st of 2009. April Fool’s Day.

00:04:52 – Rico Figliolini

That could have been, too many landmines there.

00:04:54 – Bill Grogan

Yeah.

00:04:55 – Rico Figliolini

Was there, you know, I mean, was there overlap or was it DeKalb fell off and you guys started?

00:05:03 – Bill Grogan

Yeah. On April 1st, we started. So DeKalb provided the services December, January, February, March. And then we started providing them at midnight on April 1st. In fact, it’s kind of a, it was a cool situation. So, you know, we started with 40 officers and at midnight of March 31st, you know, going into April 1st, we lined up at city hall with all of our officers in their take home units. And we went in service at midnight and left city hall, which was an office building off Ashford Dunwoody. And we hit our blue lights and sirens and drove up to Ashford Dunwoody Road. There were hundreds of citizens in the intersection. And, you know, we went straight, turned right, turned left, and kind of dispersed in the city. And that was just, you know, the initial point. I had the mayor of Dunwoody riding with me. So he was in the car with me, Ken Wright, when we took off. You know, everybody dispersed then, except for the folks that were actually working that night, because some people had to be back at six o ‘clock the next morning to go to work.

00:06:17 – Rico Figliolini

Oh, wow.

00:06:20 – Bill Grogan

Yeah. So that was kind of a very memorable experience when we rolled out the department, you know, the first time and went in service.

00:06:28 – Rico Figliolini

Right. So I know people probably think, oh, wow, you know, day one and they got everything going. But yeah, it’s been probably months before that. Right? Police cars, uniforms, how you’re going to work the 9 -11 calls, communications. Were there any bumps in the road along the way that you had to?

00:06:48 – Bill Grogan

Oh yeah, lots of them. First, we had to really work hard to work on our pay and benefits because what we were trying to do was attract high quality officers that were working somewhere else and get them to say, hey, I’m going to go over here and work at the Dunwoody Police Department because we couldn’t send people to the academy. We could only hire people who are already certified in the state of Georgia. And so we had to give them a good reason to want to come to Dunwoody. And we had a short time frame. So we really had to make it attractive. And so we did a few things. At the time take home police vehicles was not as prevalent as it is today and so we offered that. And of course they did a really good job the, the council did on approving 100% insurance coverage for employees and 90% coverage for families and so that was a great benefit. And then probably the, the other big benefit was we decided to provide a housing stipend for those who lived in the city. So if they lived in the city we would pay them 300 more dollars a month to live in the city.

00:08:13 – Rico Figliolini

How many officers took up, took up that?

00:08:17 – Bill Grogan

We’ve really historically been at about somewhere between 20 and 25 officers.

00:08:24 – Rico Figliolini

That live in the city?

00:08:25 – Bill Grogan

Yes. And we still do that today or they still do that today. Since I’m retired, it’s they. But they still do that today. And it’s $800 a month to live in the city. And so it’s a great benefit. And, you know, if you go to Dunwoody and you’re married and you have a house and somewhere else and you got a family, you’re probably not moving to Dunwoody. But if you’re single or, you know, young and don’t really have any attachments anywhere, hey, why not move there? I think today there’s five officers who own a house in Dunwoody and the rest, you know, live in an apartment. So that’s a great benefit. So anyways, we had to pull all those benefits together and everything. Then we had challenges related to obviously, you know, recruiting. We had a, you know, really short timeline to do that. Obviously I couldn’t do the whole thing myself. So my first, really challenge was to hire kind of the senior staff. Myself, three lieutenants, a deputy chief, a sergeant, and executive assistant, my executive assistant, that would make the core group of people who were responsible for then doing all the work. And us, you know, pulling together as a team. And we divided up that work in really four areas. One was recruiting and hiring. And that was done by one of the lieutenants and the sergeant because we had to do background checks on everybody. And I mean, we had over 500 applicants for 40 sworn positions.

00:10:05 – Rico Figliolini

That was a lot different than today, I’m sure.

00:10:07 – Bill Grogan

A lot different. I will certainly give you that. And then we had one that was over policy development because we had to have our own policies. And then another person was over our equipment purchases and anything like that, like vehicles and tasers and you know guns and badges and all the stuff that you need you know to start a police department. And then last, lastly we had had one person that was over our training. So they designed our training because outside of the few that was hired early everyone was hired two weeks before we started and had to go through firearms training, taser training, oc spray training, you know all the different training and policy development, become familiar with the Dunwoody you know we did tours of the city all kinds of training. And so that was kind of how we divided up responsibilities.

00:11:08 – Rico Figliolini

A lot of work to be able to do that. Did DeKalb Police assist in any way, or did you?

00:11:15 – Bill Grogan

Other than providing police services while we’re doing all this, they didn’t assist with that endeavor.

00:11:22 – Rico Figliolini

When you developed the policies, was it based off, I know that when a city does it, right, for when Peachtree Corners started the city, we sort of based our code and four codes and stuff like that based off Gwinnett County. We didn’t reinvent the wheel, right? Was that, to some degree, the same for police policy?

00:11:43 – Bill Grogan

Yeah. So for the city, yeah, they adopted a lot of the codes that DeKalb County had. That was the easy thing. And then they went back and modified them as the years went on to account for how cities are different than counties. But several of us, myself and the deputy chief, came from the Marietta Police Department. The Marietta police department was an a nationally accredited department and state certified, so good foundation of policy. So we kind of based ours off of Marietta.

00:12:15 – Rico Figliolini

And were you vice chief?

00:12:18 – Bill Grogan

Deputy chief at Marietta, yeah.

00:12:24 – Rico Figliolini

So far as policy and upgrading those let’s, let’s stick with that for a minute. You know that over the years that, that was done, was there any big changes that you all realized you know a year into it that, oh we need to change some of this because it’s not working for us, for the city.

00:12:41 – Bill Grogan

Yeah, I mean there were, it was you know, your policy, you’re reviewing them all the time. I don’t remember off the top of my head any specific thing, but we certainly modified policies. When we first started we tried to do a trim down version, we didn’t need some policies and so as time went on we added those. Over the years the law changed maybe different things happened so we, you know policies are always in development and you always want to stay current with those kind of things.

00:13:15 – Rico Figliolini

Okay, let’s get back to a little bit about the employment if you will. So you had 40 sworn officer, you had 500 people at the beginning, 15 years ago applied for the jobs. Over the decade, over the 15 years, you know, did you see attrition rates go up? Did you see less ability to hire? What were some of the challenges during that 15-year period?

00:13:39 – Bill Grogan

Yeah, so our first year, we had zero people leave, zero turnover. And, you know, it was kind of a honeymoon phase. Everybody was pretty excited about being there. And then really over the next few years, we had very low attrition rate, less than 5%. And then when Ferguson happened, it had a negative impact on us as it did many law enforcement agencies. And we saw that our attrition rate increased. There were less applicants applying. And so we had a little bit of a spike in our turnover rate. And then, of course, when George Floyd incident happened. And that, COVID, you know, all those kind of factors that came together about the same time. It really had a negative impact on law enforcement and Dunwoody as well, but across the nation. And, you know, we even had people who had been a police officer for a couple of years who decided, I’m getting out of law enforcement. I’m going to go be a flight attendant. I’m going to go work for Facebook. I’m going to go build houses. I’m going to go do sheetrock. You know, we had all kinds of things, as most police departments did, that were there through this whole process. So it did become certainly more of a challenge.

00:15:00 – Rico Figliolini

When you, you brought up COVID before, where training is a continuous thing I would imagine. But when you come up on a pandemic like we had and you know it makes you really think about well okay there’s that but what about preparedness? What about other things that may happen? You know that summer of COVID wasn’t a pretty summer. I mean you know, if I remember correctly, CNN was you know the demonstrations in front of CNN itself where people were just trashing the place. And that was mainly in the city right? So but you know does that change a little bit of the training that’s required?

00:15:41 – Bill Grogan

Yeah, certainly. Certainly it does. I mean you know we do emergency preparedness for things traditional things like weather events which is what we mostly have. Also for active shooter, things like that. And, you know, before 9-11, we didn’t do a whole lot of training about terrorism. But then we, after 9-11, we obviously had to, you know, factor things like that in as well. And, you know, I think, you know, a lot of the riots that happened related to, you know, George Floyd’s death, you know, we were affected by them. We had a number of protests in Dunwoody, all peaceful. But our SWAT team went down to Atlanta. Especially on the first night, to assist them and ended up, you know, getting assaulted by, you know, frozen bottles of water, rocks and things like that thrown at them down at Lenox Square. And so, you know, we’ve had, you know, our experience sometimes outside the city, but sometimes in the city. But like I said, mostly peaceful, the protests were.

00:16:45 – Rico Figliolini

As far as the recruitment, and then we’ll move off that. Did things change towards the last 15, you know, the last few years of you being chief there?

00:16:58 – Bill Grogan

Yeah, I mean, we have to be more aggressive in recruiting. And I think the last probably three years, the mayor and council and the city manager have done an excellent job looking at pay and benefits, you know, for our staff, which has helped us, you know, with the recruiting. And, you know, I think the last time I talked to Chief Carlson over in Dunwoody, they had about four or five openings right now, but working hard to, you know, fill those. But it’s a, generally speaking, it’s, you know, it’s a challenge for law enforcement today.

00:17:38 – Rico Figliolini

When you started the police force, I mean, there’s always things you look at, right? I think any professional likes to go to trade shows, like to see what’s new, what’s trending in their space and stuff. When you started, you know, they were probably, I don’t know, you know, gunshot detection, probably not. But drones, AI, probably not at that point. But there were certainly body cams, other cameras, other things that technology that you would look at. So what were some of the things that were mandatory in your mind that had to be in place?

00:18:15 – Bill Grogan

Yeah, when we started we equipped all of our vehicles with in-car cameras, all of our officers with tasers, because we wanted them to have a less lethal option available to them. And they’ve been very effective for that. You know we had obviously computers in the cars. We had some different technology like fingerprinting folks in the field if they didn’t have an id that would go to the state, we had that technology. There’s a lot of different you know kind of technology like that. But that changes all the time and and things that we didn’t adopt body cameras until I think it was 2015 or ‘16 is when we first started using body cameras. It was right before Ferguson that we made the decision to move to body cameras. They were used in some areas, but weren’t widely used, but we made that decision at that time. And then, you know, the fixed LPRs came into play later on. Drones, as you said, that was kind of, as the department evolved, so did technology. And, you know, and we kind of evolved with it and adopted a lot of the technology, which has been certainly a game changer for the Dunwoody Police Department. They now have a real-time crime center and have gunshot detection, you know, live view cameras, LPRs. They have access to live 911 calls when they come into the 911 center. Officers can listen to the calls. and self-dispatch to it if it’s an emergency call even before the dispatchers call them.

00:20:07 – Rico Figliolini

So the 911 stuff is being done through DeKalb police

00:20:11 – Bill Grogan

So when we first started, no when we first started DeKalb county was providing 911 services but when I met with the the chief in DeKalb, or actually the contact was the deputy chief at the time. When I met with him you know, he said that, I said so, just want to work on getting our channel for our 911 calls and stuff. He said, oh, you’ll be on the precinct five channel. So they were putting us on the same precinct as the North DeKalb precinct. And which didn’t work for me because, you know, they’re busy and we’re probably less busy. And so if they have a priority call and then we have a call come in that’s not a priority and they keep having a high priority calls come in, ours is never going to get dispatched and that was my concern and it turned out to be true. They were holding our calls over five minutes on average because they had so many calls for Dekalb and then you know you’re fighting for radio traffic and all this. And so what we eventually did was Sandy Springs and John’s Creek had an authority that they put together called the Chattahoochee River 911 Authority. And short is CHATCOM 911 Center. And so we became a subscriber to their 911 center. And that still is true today. And we pay a subscriber fee. They provide the service. And we have our own dedicated channel. And so I think we moved over to that in 2010 maybe, is when we entered into an agreement.

00:21:51 – Rico Figliolini

So if I was a Dunwoody resident and I called 911 on my cell phone, it would get routed through to that, is what you’re saying?

00:21:59 – Bill Grogan

Yes. Yeah, you would call 911 and they would answer, chatcom 911, how can I help you? And they would know it was a Dunwoody resident based on GIS data.

00:22:10 – Rico Figliolini

Right. And they would transfer it to you?

00:22:13 – Bill Grogan

Yeah, they would dispatch us, just like if it was going to a DeKalb 911.

00:22:18 – Rico Figliolini

Wow, okay. I didn’t even know that service was like that. That’s cool that you can subscribe to that and it’s geofenced, I guess that to know that. I’m assuming if I’m on the border of Dunwoody, city of Dunwoody, I would still, there wouldn’t be a conflict they would know.

00:22:32 – Bill Grogan

Well any border city, any border between city and county, it depends on which way the the tower is pointing and sometimes it sends you to the wrong 9-1-1 center. That’s any city you know across the nation. They’ve gotten a lot better at it, from a technology standpoint but there’s still room for improvement in that area. You know every once in a while some of the calls on our east side of town can get routed to Gwinnett 9-1-1 because we border you know Peachtree Corners and or DeKalb 9-1-1 or Doraville sometimes. And so go ahead.

00:23:12 – Rico Figliolini

I was going to say would you recommend that same service to Peachtree Corners for example versus?

00:23:17 – Bill Grogan

Well it depends. It depends if Gwinnett will provide, let them have their own channel and dedicated dispatchers and it makes sense to you know to stay with DeKalb. I mean with Gwinnett.

00:23:33 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. Well I guess the, by the time you were brought into it any political pitfalls would have been, would have been removed I guess. Because you were brought in at the point where they knew, Dunwoody knew they were going to stand up a police force.

00:23:47 – Bill Grogan

Yes. And I think it’s a little different because they knew that from the very beginning. That was one of the services that, you know, when people voted for the city of Dunwoody, that was one of the services that they already knew was going to be provided.

00:24:00 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. In the consulting work that you do, do you come across other cities that are trying to do the same thing, setting up police?

00:24:12 – Bill Grogan

Occasionally. A lot of our work, we cover three areas. One is executive recruiting for local government. So we recruit city managers, police chiefs, fire chiefs, finance directors, you know, pretty much any position that a local government requests. The second area of the business is through interim services. So like a finance director resigns and they need somebody real bad while they’re searching for somebody, we’ll provide interim finance director services. And we do that for a lot of different positions, not just finance director, for city managers, for police chiefs or whatever. And then the third area is consulting. And we do different kinds of consulting, financial consulting for local governments. I’ve done some audits of police departments that needed that. Or also a recruitment and retention study that I’ve been working on to help departments and provide recommendations how they can improve their recruiting and retention of officers. So that’s some of the kind of work we do. And occasionally we’ll run across somebody who’s thinking about that. We’ve certainly talked to Peachtree Corners. I think there’s a couple other cities around that might be discussing it as well. 

00:25:30 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. Well, you were a police chief in Dunwoody. I would imagine that some of the legislation work up in the Capitol was probably important to know what was going on, what might be passed. Was that any part of what you had to deal with?

00:25:45 – Bill Grogan

Yeah, so I was past president of the Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police, and we have a legislative committee. And I chaired that for many years and was always involved at the Capitol during the legislative period of time because we had to look at bills that were being presented, how it would affect law enforcement, our police department, but also the police departments across the state. So I was very intimately involved in a lot of different pieces of legislation over the years.

00:26:19 – Rico Figliolini

Did you see any particular piece of legislation that you would have really not want to see passed?

00:26:24 – Bill Grogan

Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a lot of different ones over time that restricted police officers’ ability to do their job. And then other times there were pieces of legislation, I think, that mandated things that I don’t know that it was written very well. For instance, there’s been legislation introduced that mandates that all police departments use body cameras. Some smaller police departments would have a very difficult time being able to afford that because it is a, you know, can be a pretty pricey ticket. And we think that’s something that should be really left up more to the individual jurisdictions about what they do.

00:27:08 – Rico Figliolini

I’m sure there was also some policy that had to be set up around body cams, you know, when to release.

00:27:12 – Bill Grogan

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yep. Yep. There’s good legislation that’s passed over the last number of years that’s helped law enforcement and helped us do our job better. But when you have technology like body cameras, then the legislators have to decide how long you have to retain it, how open records requests are handled, those sorts of things. Same thing with license plate reader cameras. How long does the data get retained? That sort of thing. I think some of the legislation mandates that we have a policy which I think is good. If you’re using that technology you should have a policy about how it’s used to make sure it’s being used effectively and appropriately.

00:28:00 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, for sure. I mean those body cam video more and more hitting social media and all that you know can become a divisive thing. Can be looked at, especially if it’s edited or if it’s just a clip portion and not the whole piece, it could tell a whole different story from the situation, I would imagine. As far as other services, I guess what would be called legacy services like animal control, code enforcement, how was that sort of, was any of that rolled into what you do as a police department?

00:28:35 – Bill Grogan

Not as a police department. In the city of Dunwoody, our community development department did code enforcement. I think Shambly Police Department does code enforcement for the city of Shambly. And then some people have separate code enforcement departments. So it’s just done differently based on the jurisdiction. For us, it wasn’t. Animal control in DeKalb is provided by DeKalb County as a countywide service.

00:29:03 – Rico Figliolini

Did the police department also, you know, some police departments, I guess you have a SWAT team, canine unit, detective, forensics. I mean, and all that played into what you all did?

00:29:15 – Bill Grogan

Yeah. So we were a full service police department. And in DeKalb, they have like a special services district, police district. So jurisdictions can opt into that, which provides some things like SWAT, other type services. We didn’t opt into that as a city, Dunwoody didn’t. And so what we ended up doing was formed a multi-jurisdictional SWAT team called North Metro SWAT. So it was us, Sandy Springs, Johns Creek, and when Brookhaven became a city, Brookhaven joined us. And so it was a multi-jurisdictional SWAT team because we weren’t large enough to have our own SWAT team. But when you combined all the departments, we certainly had a 30-person SWAT team. You know really a highly qualified SWAT team. And so they provided SWAT services and we did that through an IGA and we bought equipment and different things and you know serviced that. And when you looked at the SWAT team operating you would, they had the SWAT patch and you would never know that they worked at different departments because they worked so seamlessly together and they trained two days a month. And so that was a model that we, I think, started that in about 2010 as well.

00:30:41 – Rico Figliolini

Do you think, I know some police, I mean, the city of Atlanta probably has helicopters, but with drones in place now, is that like a no-need thing, helicopters at this point?

00:30:54 – Bill Grogan

Well, there might be a need for it under certain circumstances, but most of the time with the drones today you can fly them even in places a helicopter can’t go. And so yeah, I think the unless you’re in a real you know rural area with hundreds of miles to cover and you know you don’t you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, you know a helicopter might be better or doing some kind of drug interdiction in rural areas you know it might be helpful. But in a highly densely populated area you know, drones work pretty effectively.

00:31:33 – Rico Figliolini

It’s interesting. I was speaking with Chief Restrepo of the Marshals here in Peachtree Corners, and we were talking a bit about technology and stuff, how drones at some point, probably over the next year or two, maybe, can actually almost be integrated into 9-11 calls in the sense that they could be sent out almost immediately to a situation before the police actually even get there, just to, you know, to spec out what’s going on.

00:32:02 – Bill Grogan

That’s happening today in Dunwoody with a real-time crime center that they’re launching drones before the calls even dispatch because they can listen, because they can listen to the call for service on the live 9-1-1 through flock safety. And so they’re able to you know send the drone to the call and what they’re finding out is that in about 10 to 15 percent of the calls, they’re able to, the drone operator is able to cancel the cars that are coming because maybe the vehicles are gone or they’re, you know, it’s no longer needed, no longer need the officers. And so they’re saving man hours, gas, time by canceling the officers just through the use of the drone.

00:32:47 – Rico Figliolini

Wow. Yeah. A force multiplier. Is that the phrase? Once the police force is set up, is there any landmines that might be a problem for, let’s say, city council, mayor, chief, working together, being on the same page? Are there any growing pains when it comes to that?

00:33:12 – Bill Grogan

Yeah, definitely. One of the things, let me go back real quick to a couple of the challenges that we had. One was getting vehicles because we were on a short timeline. You know like I told you it was a little over 90 days, and our vehicles were going to be black and white so we couldn’t order them from Ford because it was going to take too long so luckily we found 20 black cruisers and 20 white cruisers and then we just had to paint them both to make the black and white. So we got lucky on that one. But ordering our badges they didn’t come in till like the day before we went live and you know ammunition we had to borrow ammunition because we couldn’t get it in time from other departments. So that was just a few of the challenges besides obviously hiring folks. But in answer to your question one of the challenges is this, when the police department was started in Dunwoody you know we kind of had to do the minimum model due to financial reasons. You know we needed actually more but because we couldn’t afford more, we had to start out with what we could afford. And I think, you know, I would always, and I’ve talked to when Brookhaven became a city, I’ve talked to them and other cities about this same thing, which is when you start a police department from scratch, you need to start it as close to you can as what the department actually needs. You know, what your crime stats say, what your, you know, all the workload factors actually say that you need. Because it becomes very difficult to add people. And, you know, every year as the police chief, I had to come back every year and ask for additional people. And that you know, that puts the mayor and council, the city manager in kind of a difficult spot because we’re always asking for people and it could be justified, but it’s still a decision point every single year, yes or no. And then you’ve got other competing needs. And so the mayor and council in Dunwoody throughout the years, different mayor, different council members, they’ve always been very supportive of the police department. But that’s one of the big challenges that we really had was that pressure, you know, to keep adding people to the police department because of need. And then, of course, as time goes on, the need grows more. And so, you know, if you start out needing, say, 70, and then 10 years later, you probably need more than that. So, you know, those kind of challenges are probably some of the most difficult challenges. And then there’s always challenges when you add technology, you know, things like facial recognition technology. You know, people have different opinions about that. And, you know, as we added technology, we really tried to educate our elected officials and the community about what the technology was, how we’re going to use it, and, you know, that we’re going to use it based on, you know, policy and how it’s supposed to be used.

00:36:32 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, I can appreciate that because I would imagine a year after, two years and then you come back for more money and they’re saying, well, you’ve done a good job for two years. Why do you need all this money now? 

00:36:45 – Bill Grogan

Right. Yeah. No, no doubt. It’s if you’re not getting a lot of complaints about things related to the police department, then it seems okay. You know, maybe everybody’s complaining because of parks or paved roads or whatever. But, you know, it’s really the things behind the scene that sometimes you might not see. Like it’s taking us a lot longer to get to, you know, get to the calls. We’re not able to get in the neighborhoods as much because we’re busy answering calls and those sorts of things, you know.

00:37:19 – Rico Figliolini

As far as, you know, the hiring of police and such, there’s a mix in any police department, right, of sworn officers and civilians, if you will. Because civilians can more and more do different aspects of the back door, back operations, if you will, right? Do you need a sworn officer in every position, or do you think civilians can do a good job in that part?

00:37:49 – Bill Grogan

No, definitely. We started out with 40 sworn officers and eight professional staff. And then over the years, I think there’s, I don’t know, 13 or 16. So one of the things that we did, we added a couple of different positions. We added a civilian prisoner transport officer. So we decided it doesn’t take a sworn officer to take someone to the DeKalb County Jail. A civilian can do that, you know, equipped with the right equipment and training. And so we hired that person. We paid them less money to be able to do that because they weren’t carrying a gun. And then it freed up our officers to do the enforcement type things that only a sworn police officer can do. But yeah we hired a civilian crime analyst, we had property and evidence techs and a lot of departments those are sworn in our department they’re civilians. And so definitely outside of the enforcement, civilians can do a lot of good things. And as I was leaving we were hiring public safety ambassadors which are civilian people, employees who can answer calls for service. They can work minor crashes. They can do a lot of different things that where a police officer not needed. And those have, I think we hired, Dunwoody hired four, and those have been very helpful to take the little load off the sworn officers and let them focus on the things, the enforcement, the thing that you need somebody who has a badge and a gun to do.

00:39:37 – Rico Figliolini

What about mental health co-responders? Is that something that you all do too?

00:39:46 – Bill Grogan

Absolutely. A number of years ago, maybe five years ago, it became more and more apparent that we were dealing with, you know, 25% of our calls dealt with someone in a mental health crisis. And so as those units became more popular, we were able to do a partner with the DeKalb mental health group that’s over that for DeKalb County and partner with them to provide a co-responder. And we paid for some of that initially to start out with the ARPA money, through the federal ARPA money. Our mayor and council was very supportive of that initiative, and it’s been very, very helpful.

00:40:34 – Rico Figliolini

I’m just curious, does Dunwoody provide like, I know Duluth does this, like the police academy for civilians, so this way they can see what it’s all about?

00:40:44 – Bill Grogan

Yep, we do a citizen police academy usually once or twice a year, and we’ve done that since 2009, since we first started. And it’s a great opportunity. A lot of our people who are interested in the community go through it. And some of them have then later became city council members. Yeah, because it’s kind of, you know, learning. They learn more about the city and learn more about the police department. And it’s been very, very successful. People really enjoy going through that.

00:41:19 – Rico Figliolini

So let’s hit on one more thing, I guess. Because we’re sort of at the end of our time together, Billy. Unless I’ve forgotten other things that you’d like to mention. But I guess the biggest thing right now, just recently, just the other day, actually, it happened again. I mean, it’s continuing. Active shooters. We mentioned, we touched upon that before. I don’t recall if Dunwoody, I don’t think Dunwoody has had something like that. But, you know, what’s your thoughts on that? Because obviously, you know, we’ve talked about mental health co-responders and stuff. Do you have any thoughts on that?

00:42:00 – Bill Grogan

Yeah, I mean, you know, it’s one of those things that, you know, truthfully rarely happens in most communities, but it’s one of the things that you need to be prepared for. And all of our officers have gone through, in Dunwoody, through active shooter training, and we have certified instructors. And so we, you know, do recertifications periodically. And then we do exercises at different times to actually, you know, put their training into practice. And so we’ve conducted exercises at Perimeter Mall. We’ve conducted exercises at State Farm in one of their high office buildings over there. And so we try to do that at least to have an exercise at least once every one or two years. that we do a big, large-scale exercise. And that type of training is extremely important. Not only the classroom, but the practical exercises as well.

00:43:07 – Rico Figliolini

Okay. What would be the last, what would be like, bluntly, I guess, in one sentence maybe, the litmus test for any city that wants to stand up their own police force? Of where they should be five years from that point that they start?

00:43:28 – Bill Grogan

Well really they should be responsive to the needs and concerns the mayor council and citizens. You’ve got to be a responsive department connected to the community and when you start out you need to be that way five years from then you need to be that way as well.

00:43:49 – Rico Figliolini

Anything that we haven’t covered that you’d like to share?

00:43:53 – Bill Grogan

I don’t think I can think of anything. We’ve covered a pretty good bit and I think the, you know probably one of the biggest benefits of having, for a local city to have their own police department is the fact that that police department serves that city and they don’t go outside the city. You know, it’s not to say a county police department is bad or anything. They’re highly qualified, do a great job, but they have other responsibilities other than whatever city they’re patrolling. You know, they have other areas that they have to cover. Whereas a local police department, that’s a city police department, you know, they stay within the confines of that city and you’re going to get a higher level of service from your police department. And you’re going to know them. They’re going to be at your community events. You’re going to develop a relationship with them. And in my experience in Dunwoody and what I’ve seen in Sandy Springs, Johns Creek, Milton, Brookhaven, and the other newer cities with their police departments is they have the same thing.

00:45:04 – Rico Figliolini

We’ve been speaking with Billy Grogan, the former Dunwoody police chief that helped them stand up their own police force from scratch. 15 years running there, right? Now you’re a consultant for Sumter Local Government Consulting, speaking to cities about all sorts of things related to city government, from job placements to public safety and such. So I do appreciate the time you gave me, Billy. Thank you very much. If anyone has that, no, it’s an honor to spend the time with you. If anyone has any questions or just put it into the comments below and I’ll make sure we get back to you with that. And we’ll have links in the show notes to where to reach Billy in case you want to reach out to him. And otherwise, have a safe day and stay close and be good. Thank you, everyone.

How one family blends operational clarity, conscious leadership, and community-driven values to grow their business — together.

In this episode of UrbanEbb, host Rico Figliolini chats with Vandana Aggarwal, VP of Operations at Aggarwal Real Estate, about the winding road from global consulting to family-run commercial real estate in Norcross, Georgia. With honesty, warmth and insight, V shares how she went from working 80-hour weeks in corporate strategy to rediscovering clarity in the mountains of India — ultimately helping transform her family’s business into a community-driven real estate firm managing over 50 shopping centers.

The conversation weaves together themes of leadership, legacy, operational excellence and the transformative power of both AI and yoga. It’s a story about clarity, courage and conscious growth — both in business and in life. This is another episode you won’t want to miss.

Episode Highlights

• Why Vandana left a high-powered consulting career to join her family business
• How hiking Kilimanjaro and studying yoga in the Himalayas changed her leadership mindset
• The operational overhaul she brought to Aggarwal Real Estate to support growth
• What it’s like working side-by-side with your dad, siblings, and 700+ tenants
• How the company rebranded with intention and built a mission around “building communities as a community”
• Where AI is reshaping real estate—from lease drafting to property management—and where it still can’t compete with people
• Leadership succession planning with siblings at the helm
• The importance of clarity, calm, and conscious growth in both business and life

About Vandana Aggarwal

Vandana Aggarwal is the Vice President of Operations at Aggarwal Real Estate, her family’s commercial real estate investment and management firm. She brings a unique blend of strategic insight and operational excellence, shaped by her early career as a consultant at A.T. Kearney, where she advised Fortune 100 to 500 companies. A graduate of Georgia Tech, she also took a transformative detour from the corporate world to spend a year in India teaching yoga—an experience that continues to influence her leadership style today. At the core of her work is a deep commitment to family and a passion for building strong, connected communities.

Timestamp:

00:00:00 – Introduction and sponsors: Vox Pop Uli & EV Remodeling
00:03:12 – From Georgia Tech to global consulting
00:04:23 – Leading strategy for Fortune 500 companies
00:06:11 – The role of vision alignment at the C-suite
00:08:01 – Sabbatical becomes family business overhaul
00:09:35 – Bringing operational excellence to a growing real estate firm
00:12:02 – A year of yoga, nature, and healing in India
00:17:03 – Hiking Kilimanjaro, testing limits, and expanding self-trust
00:18:52 – Navigating family dynamics inside a business
00:21:56 – Planning for leadership transition: siblings, strategy, succession
00:24:06 – Rebranding the business: from American Management to Aggarwal Real Estate
00:26:33 – Where AI fits (and doesn’t) in real estate operations
00:30:04 – Legal, leasing, HR, and marketing efficiency with tech
00:31:01 – Community-focused retail and experiential shopping centers
00:32:00 – Reflections on AI, journalism, and digital trust
00:32:57 – Closing thoughts

Podcast Transcript

00:00:00 – Rico Figliolini

Hi, everyone. This is Rico Figliolini, host of UrbanEbb. This podcast comes out of the city of Peachtree Corners, and we have a special guest today. And if I don’t mess up the name, it’s Vandana Aggarwal.

00:00:15 – Vandana Aggarwal

Absolutely. You can call me V, Rico.

00:00:15 – Rico Figliolini

I’m going to call you V, trust me. And I’m Rico Figliolini, so a bit of a long name there. But V is VP of Operations of Aggarwal Real Estate here, based in Peachtree Corners? No, Norcross.

00:00:30 – Vandana Aggarwal

In Norcross, yeah. Norcross, Georgia.

00:00:32 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, yeah. Just off 85, and?

00:00:34 – Vandana Aggarwal

Jimmy Carter.

00:00:35 – Rico Figliolini

And Jimmy Carter.

00:00:36 – Vandana Aggarwal

We’re completing each other’s sentences already.

00:00:39 – Rico Figliolini

But where are we doing this? We’re doing this from one of our great sponsors, one of our two great sponsors, Vox Pop Uli. Was this tastefully obnoxious? Let me tell you, I asked them to do a corner cut for us, and this is perfect. So they have the Moxie logo and stuff. So they’re branding, right? Same way they can brand your stuff. They’ll put your logo on anything. They’ve done, I think, 6,000 vehicle wraps. They’ve done garments, obviously. They could do one-offs or they could do 1,000. They do trade show booths, wraps, everything. So anything you need a logo on, think of what object you want it on. They’ll figure it out for you. And if you’re doing, let’s say, 5,000 mailers and you want that database customized for each postcard, they could do that also. It’s called data. I forget what it’s called, but they can do that. They can work the data into the printing as well. So all customizable. Check them out, voxpopuli.com. Now, getting to something we were talking about, hands-on stuff, which is this also. This can’t just be done by machines, right? Although machines, you still need people. But EV Remodeling Inc., they are a remodeling company. They can do design to build. They can do whole house renovation. They can create your deck, your backyard gazebo. They can put a bathroom, kitchen, anything you want. EV Remodeling Inc. is owned by Eli and his family. Lives in Peachtree Corners. It’s based out of our city. They’ve done, I think, over 250 homes recently. So check them out, evremodelinginc.com. And I want to thank both of them for being great sponsors of ours. So, it’s always a long stretch doing that, but I’m glad to have you, V.

00:02:22 – Vandana Aggarwal

I’m happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me onto your podcast. Excited to chat with you.

00:02:25 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, no, this is cool. Well, you know, I met you, where did I meet you at? I think it was the chamber.

00:02:30 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah, the Southwest Gwinnett Chamber event.

00:02:32 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, and we were talking a bit, and I was like, damn, you know, I had my father owned a business, and he wanted his kids to be in it. None of us, none of us could go into that business. It’s a little difficult, different industry. It was a hard industry, plus my father was very patriarchal, very over-demanding. God bless him. He mellowed in age. But when you were telling me about your family, I mean, your father, your mother, your sister, your brother, and you, I mean, all in it. It’s amazing.

00:02:55 – Vandana Aggarwal

We’re all together. We’re the modern-day Brady Bunch.

00:03:03 – Rico Figliolini

I love it. Yes, that’s exactly it. But, let’s start a little bit. I mean, you were telling me, I mean, you came from a consulting world. You came where you were actually being paid a lot more than you’re being paid right now, actually.

00:03:12 – Vandana Aggarwal

I told my father he couldn’t afford me when he recruited me out. So I graduated from Georgia Tech in 2007. I actually did join his company right out of college for two years, learned a lot about the company. He actually had me go through a rotation in every department of the company to learn more about what we did, how we operated. And I think very quickly, it was also 2008-9 with a recession. But I was also very interested to learn how big companies operate. How can you take a small company at that time? We were much smaller than we are today and really understand how do you go from this, which is where everyone starts, right? As a new company to get to be one of the largest in the nation, in the world and see how they operate, how they grew it from, you know, a mom and pop business to this global enterprise. Consulting was a natural transition to learn about multiple companies, multiple industries. So transitioned into AT Kearney, which has now been rebranded as Kearney, and out of their Chicago office. So I was there for seven to eight years, almost eight years.

00:04:23 – Rico Figliolini

Entry-level position you got in?

00:04:24 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah, I went in as an analyst. The good thing with that experience was by the time I left, I was a senior manager with Kearney. I worked across 17 different companies in those eight years. So I got to experience how CPG companies, retail companies, transportation, IT, you name it, I’ve done it. In terms of the different types of industries I got to work with, worked with a lot of Fortune 100 to 500 companies at the C-suite level. So we were coming up with all kinds of strategy projects such as new market entries, mergers and acquisitions. A lot of what I ended up specializing in in those seven years was operational efficiency and growth strategy. So it was an amazing, I’m grateful for that learning experience, the you know the caliber of minds that you work with. You also get to experience what the C-suite looks like. How does the very top operate and then it goes from the top down right? So it is very much led at this very top leadership and you see how companies change in their culture the way they operate based on how the top is designed.

00:05:38 – Rico Figliolini

So did you see good and bad at the top?

00:05:41 – Vandana Aggarwal

Absolutely. And I’m not going to name names. But you learn a lot when you see how your CEO and your C-suite right below them, the culture they’re bringing into a company and their vision and their goals if they’re aligned, unaligned. Anyone that at the very top have different viewpoints of where the company has had it is where companies start to break apart, lose revenue, lose their you know people, which is very important.

00:06:11 – Rico Figliolini

Where did you see the pain point then? What was the common denominator I guess of those?

00:06:18 – Vandana Aggarwal

There’s no one common denominator, but if I had to kind of narrow in, it comes down to what is our five-year, ten-year trajectory? Where are we headed? As large companies grow, you’re not just in one industry. You’re not just doing retail shopping centers. You’re investing in all kinds of properties just to bring it back to our company. Similarly, a CPG company can make all kinds of products, so they have to decide what it is because you have to be concentrated on the right places. If you have a leadership team that is in alignment of what that ultimate goal is, right, then you have clear strategies and, you know, metrics you’re measuring your success against. So that was a big thing that I learned. Also just, you know, seeing how great leaders operate, right? Some of the best in the nation today, I got to be in the room with them and just to see how they lead is very important.

00:07:14 – Rico Figliolini

Did you see any family dynamics in any of those businesses?

00:07:20 – Vandana Aggarwal

No. You know, there may have been like a father-son duo, but when you’re looking at the very top, I won’t say it was like all in the family, right? You know, and it also becomes the size of a company, right? You know, when you get to an international scale, you’re not always blessed that every person in your family has the right skill set and experience to fill each role on that C-suite.

00:07:46 – Rico Figliolini

I’m just thinking Trump for some reason. Every kid has a job.

00:07:51 – Vandana Aggarwal

Every kid has a job.

00:07:52 – Vandana Aggarwal

You had the accent, right?

00:07:54 – Rico Figliolini

Pretty much, I guess. So after the C-suite or expansion, you traveled a lot too, I think, right?

00:08:01 – Vandana Aggarwal

I did, yeah. So after my seven, eight years in consulting, I was reaching 30. And Shiv, my father, came to me and he said, you know, you’re doing this for a lot of outside companies. Why don’t you help us grow and bring your expertise home? And I said, look, I’ll take a sabbatical. Let me assess the company. And after that period where I took a short sabbatical to come look at how we were operating, I said, I can give you three years. I said, you can’t afford me, but I’ll give you three years of my time. And I said, I think it’ll be the right, it was the right time in the company. We were investing very heavily. We were bringing in a lot of new square footage into the company, and we weren’t designed to manage it. So we as a company, as you know, we are the investors. We have an in-house management company, an in-house leasing company. So as we acquire new properties, our team does the management for those properties in-house. We don’t provide third-party services today. And we do the leasing in-house. But at that time, when he, you know Shiv started we had one or two and now we’re at 50 shopping centers plus and other investments that we have. And there’s a very different way you operate you know and how do you how does the CEO go from being an operator to where he’s overseeing it, but he’s not into the weeds right? So he has create a system for that to happen right? You have to have standard operating processes for your property managers, your accounting team, your marketing team.

00:09:35 – Rico Figliolini

And you quite didn’t have that before.

00:09:37 – Vandana Aggarwal

We didn’t, no. And, you know, and I think that’s why he wanted to bring me in is because my strength is operations and I love it. I love going into messy places and cleaning them up.

00:09:49 – Rico Figliolini

Is that what you did when you were a consultant?

00:09:51 – Vandana Aggarwal

A lot of what I was concentrating on at the end of my consulting career, yes. So I did a lot of operational efficiency work. So we’d go in, assess the way companies were designed. And we’d interview hundreds of team members to understand what their role is. You know, what are they responsible for? How are they delivering? What are they measuring for success? And then we’d redesign the way they did that based on, again, bottom line, what are your ultimate goals for the company?

00:10:21 – Rico Figliolini

So you had to understand that before you got to that point. And you’re not making the decisions, the C-level.

00:10:29 – Vandana Aggarwal

Present, right? And similarly even with Shiv, when I first joined, I said, look, this is how I think we need to redesign the company from a bottoms-up perspective based on ultimately our goal of growth, doubling, tripling in size over the next ten years. And I think this is where the father dynamic came in. I guess he trusted me. And he said, do it. He just said, do it. And it was beautiful because right when you’re with large companies, it’s a lot of time before you get. Those decisions made and that trust, right? And so it was great. And he said, yeah, just put it into place.

00:11:07 – Rico Figliolini

See, that’s a great dad, actually. Some dads would be like, I don’t know about that daughter or son or whatever.

00:11:16 – Vandana Aggarwal

It did take time, though, like to ultimately, he was in the operation so heavily. And, you know, until today, I’m still like, step up, step up. Like, I need you to not get into the weeds. Like I think at that time we had tenants calling him, maintenance guys calling him. Like every little and big problem would go through his cell phone. I said, you’re too smart and you’re such a good investor. This is not your skill set. You shouldn’t be managing this. You need to bring people on who are expertise in this area. And I said, you need to be focused on like the larger plan.

00:11:51 – Rico Figliolini

This way you can grow it better.

00:11:51 – Vandana Aggarwal

Which I think has been very successful over the last eight years I’ve been with him now.

00:11:57 – Rico Figliolini

So before you got to him, though, you were traveling a bit internationally as well?

00:12:02 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah, yeah. So this is an amazing year. I was very burnt out. By the time I left consulting, I was working 70 to 80-hour weeks, traveling Monday through Thursday, if not more than that, of the week. So I told Shiv, I was like, I’m going to take a month. I’m going to go to India, get my yoga certification. No intention to teach at the time. I just said it’d be a great one-month retreat. And I was up in the mountains like Himalayas and India in a city called Dharamshala. Beautiful place. One of my favorites in the world. And I just, I think I needed it for myself emotionally, mentally to take that break. So I turned one month into one year. I didn’t know it was going to be a year.

00:12:49 – Rico Figliolini

In that same city? In that same town?

00:12:50 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah, so I ended up the school that I had gotten my certification with. I asked them, I was like, do you mind if I hang around for a little while? Like very casually, I’m like, you know, I’ll pay for my room and board, but I just want to be around this group and this energy. And they said, well, if you’re going to be here, why don’t you intern? And they’re like, room and board is free if you intern. I was like, sure. You know, not thinking what it was leading to. This is like that beauty of the universe coming into play. Yeah, so I started teaching, ended up loving teaching. So then I ended up teaching the 200-hour yoga training course. And I was in Dharamshala for four months. And then I moved down to Goa, their Goa campus for another six.

00:13:30 – Rico Figliolini

Where is that? Goa?

00:13:32 – Vandana Aggarwal

Goa? It’s in southern India on their west coast. It’s a beach town. Yeah. So I had the mountains and the beach. But I’m a mountain girl. I’m a hiker. But no, it was a beautiful experience. Very different from anything I’ve done with my career, right? But I became a yoga teacher for a year.

00:13:52 – Rico Figliolini

Did that clear your head? Yoga, they say, can do that, right?

00:13:53 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah, it’s all the tools of yoga, right? The meditation, the breath work, really getting internal, going in, right? Just going inwards, being quiet, which we don’t have. We have a lot of noise in our life today, you know? And naturally, right? Between family life, work life, social, and then just all of the noise from everything else right? Like we’re sitting here and I can hear the cars right? So you know that difference was when I was sitting there, I could hear the ocean waves and so there’s something very healing in nature naturally. So it was the tools mixed with nature and I still think nature has a very strong healing power on us. So whenever I can, I try to get out on a mountain and by the ocean. But yeah no it was it was a beautiful experience but it did bring a level of calmness into the way I approach things. It changes your perspective of you know at the end everything’s okay. No matter what you’re going through it’s temporary you’re, and everything that’s happening to us is happening to us for the good. We don’t know it, sometimes it seems like a bad situation in the moment, but ultimately you know, universe, God, whatever you believe in is at play to bring you something better in your life. And you just have to step back to understand what is it delivering us.

00:15:19 – Rico Figliolini

I like the way you think. My wife every once in a while would say, aren’t you upset about that? I’m like, I think come tomorrow, it won’t mean anything. There’s no point in, just relax. Not everything, two days later, it’s not as important as it seemed at that moment.

00:15:37 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah. And it’s not just that it’s not as important. It’s also like…

00:15:41 – Rico Figliolini

In perspective?

00:15:42 – Vandana Aggarwal

It’s, what am I gaining from this? Like, what can I gain from this? Oftentimes when, you know, a lot of things happen, yeah, like you get hurt or, you know, it’s like in relationships, right? Or if you have a bad business deal, right? It’s like, hey, how am I growing, right? And I think that’s what makes life very exciting, right? Otherwise, if you’re always living on a high, is it a high?

00:16:06 – Rico Figliolini

Yes. So I’m thinking you were a consultant for seven or eight years. 80 hours a week. And all of a sudden you’re doing yoga on the mountains of India. It’s just like, it’s almost like a movie. It’s almost like…

00:16:18 – Vandana Aggarwal

Eat, pray, love?

00:16:19 – Rico Figliolini

Yes.

00:16:20 – Vandana Aggarwal

It was my eat, pray, love moment for a year.

00:16:23 – Rico Figliolini

That’s amazing.

00:16:24 – Vandana Aggarwal

No, you meet amazing people, but I think we were meant to meet everyone that we come in interaction with on a daily basis. You naturally have a connection. There’s a universe at play, and we were meant to cross paths and learn something from each other, gain something from one another, give to the other person. And I think you just have to look at life that way.

00:16:48 – Rico Figliolini

I definitely think along that way. I mean, I definitely think each of us nudges each other in a crowd a little bit. That one nudge can set you off going in a different direction. So I totally believe in that. So you joined your dad. Yes. And you’re, so actually, even before we get there, so yoga, but what other interests have you been?

00:17:03 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah. So, I mean, I’m an avid hiker. I’ve done recently in the last few years, I’ve climbed Kilimanjaro. I did the Machu Picchu trail. I’ve done a few 14ers out in Colorado, but I like to test myself physically. You know, just, again, it comes down to how do we find that push within us past our comfort zone? So is this a physical inability or is it a mental constraint? So to get past that mental constraint of discomfort and then really push yourself to the next level and say, I can achieve something. It’s not going to be easy. So to me, if I’m on a hike and it’s not hard, I’m like, well, was it a hike? Like it didn’t test me, but no I think, you know.

00:17:55 – Rico Figliolini

You should do the Appalachian Trail. That’s like 2000 plus miles.

00:18:03 – Vandana Aggarwal

I know. And it is, you know, it’s not just like the hiking part. It is like living out in nature and, you know, sleeping in uncomfortable conditions. Yeah. Walking in the rain. It’s cold. I think the last day of our Kilimanjaro hike, it was negative 20 degrees up in the mountain and my eyelashes were frozen and I couldn’t feel any part of my body. And, you know, and it tested my breathing. And there is that element of push yourself to the point that it’s not your ego anymore. Like if your body’s saying stop, you have to stop as well and respect your body. But yeah, to really test yourself.

00:18:38 – Rico Figliolini

To circle all that back now, you’re back home. You’re working with your father and your family. A lot of businesses grow or die because of family. If it’s a family business, right?

00:18:52 – Vandana Aggarwal

Absolutely, yeah.

00:18:53 – Rico Figliolini

So you have your highs, your lows, your, sometimes you don’t get along. Sometimes decisions are split. People get upset with each other. So you’ve been at your highs and lows physically and mentally doing other things. Has that helped you in some ways? Not that you’re having a bad time with family. Because it sounds like you all fit just fine, like the Brady Bunch.

00:19:15 – Vandana Aggarwal

Let’s keep it that way. No, I mean, there’s multiple dynamics at play. It is a family business. My father is also my boss. My siblings are also my friends and my coworkers. And it’s about no matter how hard you try, you cannot separate those relationships. There is an interplay of all of it when you spend eight to nine hours a day together. But we all have, again, a common goal for the company. And then a common goal for our personal relationship. So when we sit down, we keep in mind that we like each other and we want to keep it that way. Like very simply put, that’s first and foremost for me especially. Even when Shiv had brought me in, he said, oh, can you manage everyone? And I said, I’ll manage everyone but my brother and sister. I said, you know, like I won’t jeopardize the relationship I have with them as a sibling by being their manager. Especially because I said that’s your job like good luck. But not just that it’s you know we all have different skill sets so I said how do I manage my brother who is a genius he’s a CPA by trade you know like I can’t tell him how to run the financials of this company like he’s supposed to teach me that right? And same way I teach him that. My sister has a master’s in marketing right? She is by far the most social, likable person you’re going to meet, and she knows how to work with people. I said, she needs to teach us that. So I think we’re lucky that each of us, and this is, I think, rare, where you have three kids and each one of them has their own skill set. That, I think, helps us stay in business and we see ourselves foreseeably into the long-term future being in business together is because we each bring something very unique to the table. Ultimately we value the relationships that we have on a personal level as a family above all else right? And then you know the element of like, how does the yoga experience a hiking experience teach us. That’s, it’s not specific to anyone’s situation, I think it’s a baseline of who you become right? The foundation. Like it teaches you patience, it teaches you again, everything is temporary so let’s not get overly attached emotionally or get upset or too joyful, even like, let’s just stay neutralized on any situation because it will end. And then the next one will come up and kind of flow with the ebbs and flows of the ocean. You, you flow with everything that comes with you, comes your way at work, at home. But yeah, I mean, we do sit down as a leadership team. I, my father and my siblings and I, and we talk about, hey, we separately do the exercise. Where are we going to be in five years? What role do we play in that journey? And thankfully, all of ours are very similar in what our goals are. And then we have different skill sets that we bring. So even as we design the future of the company in a moment where my father is not at the head of the table, we’re working on that redesign work. But it’s very conscious. It’s very intentional. Again, we all step back and say, hey, look, how do we maintain, how do we solve problems? Because like, you know, we were talking about how tomorrow we may not agree on something, a big decision. What are we investing in? Come back to, you know, right now Shiv gets to make an ultimate decision because he’s the one leader at the top. Tomorrow it’s going to be three people at the top. How do you deal?

00:23:04 – Rico Figliolini

So is there an exit plan for your dad? Well, not an exit plan.

00:23:09 – Vandana Aggarwal

Not an exit plan. He already has. I think he, you know, he’s gone from, he’s the hardest working person I know. I get that from him. We’re addicted to work.

00:23:18 – Rico Figliolini

80 hours a week.

00:23:21 – Vandana Aggarwal

We love working. You know, this company is his baby. I think I’ve adopted it at this point and we all have. But, to stay mentally sharp, to stay alive, you have to keep working. You have to keep doing something. You have to be working towards something that brings you joy and purpose. And I think, you know, he stepped back to take time towards a lot of his nonprofit work, community work that he’s very much engaged with. But he’s still at the top. He’s still running, you know, his, you know, he’s, you know, not slowing down. You know, we’re constantly growing. We’re growing this year in a large scale, which is amazing, and he’s leading that charge.

00:23:59 – Rico Figliolini

How many properties do you own?

00:24:02 – Vandana Aggarwall

Today we have 50 shopping centers and then a few other assets. 

00:24:06 – Rico Figliolini

Is that like 3 million square feet or something? 4 million?

00:24:10 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah, over 700 tenants. But, you know, when we sat down a few years ago, we rebranded. Aggarwal Real Estate didn’t exist until two years ago. It was American Management Services. And we had a rebranding effort because we said we want the company’s name and the brand to represent who we are.

00:24:33 – Rico Figliolini

I like that, by the way.

00:24:35 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah, it needs to mean something. And we were also proud of what our father has achieved, right? He’s given us this beautiful life that we get to help grow upon. So we said it needs to pay homage to him. So we said, let’s make it Aggarwal Real Estate, ARE. And then as we were deciding what that vision is, we’re a family. In the company, we are a family, not just the four of us, but all of our staff, our team. We don’t, you know, we don’t look at them separate from who we are. And so we said our mission as a company is building communities as a community. And it talks about, hey, in all of the real estate work we’re doing, we try to make sure all of our properties are beautiful. Our tenants are happy. They have direct access to each of us in the company. And on top of that, as a company, we are a community within ourselves because we can’t create them until we are one. So it was very intentional to who we already were, but putting it into brand terms.

00:25:37 – Rico Figliolini

It’s amazing. All that property, tenants. Can’t imagine father tech can send text messages on all their problems, if they have any.

00:25:45 – Vandana Aggarwal

He’s a brilliant man.

00:25:45 – Rico Figliolini

You could be too possessed on that stuff. We want to be cognizant of our time together.

00:25:55 – Vandana Aggarwal

Absolutely.

00:25:57 – Rico Figliolini

So the next subject really was going to be about also AI, because everyone’s talking about AI. We were talking about that before the show started, before we started recording, which was kind of funny because V was asking me if we edit anything. And I was like, no, straight through.

00:26:11 – Vandana Aggarwal

I wanted to see if I could say a few things and then have it taken out of this conversation.

00:26:13 – Rico Figliolini

Nope. Nope. Doesn’t work that way. So, but ChatGPT, AI, that’s all. I mean, you know, could I create a bot to edit this? Probably. But there’s so many things we use in our lives. And you’ve been talking about how it would affect your business. Nevermind the consulting work you did.

00:26:33 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah. I mean, the consulting world is, I mean, it depends on the industry, the type of work you’re doing. In real estate, I’ve put a lot of thought behind this. There’s a lot of conversations happening across every industry, every sector, whether it’s education, automotives, real estate, et cetera. Everything’s being discussed. How is that changing the future? How do we incorporate it to be more efficient, right? Be the best in the industry that we can be or operate better. And so for me it’s again comes down to that operations element that I think about like, how do I incorporate it for a company that’s a medium-sized real estate firm today as we become a large company, a bigger player in the market. And people are very important in real estate right?

00:27:17 – Rico Figliolini

Talk about editing?

00:27:20 – Vandana Aggarwal

I was telling you, we should bring them into the podcast.

00:27:27 – Rico Figliolini

We’re going to run a little longer on this.

00:27:36 – Vandana Aggarwal

But let’s take retail shopping centers. This is brick and mortar. I did a paper actually for a large mall retailer back in my consulting days on how the title of the paper was, is brick and mortar dead? And, you know, full circle, I am fully dedicated to brick and mortar, retail, office, multifamily now. But you still need people to clean up your properties, fix your maintenance issues. We were talking about roofing, plumbing, electrical. That is hands-on work. You know, today there is, it’s going to be a long time before there’s a robot that comes in to do that. There will be. I don’t know. I do not see that in 10 years to say we’ve got roofers that are robotic drones that are going to come fix my roof problems.

00:28:24 – Rico Figliolini

Zumbas, they’re going to run around the roof or something.

00:28:26 – Vandana Aggarwal

That’s actually genius. A Zumba for my roof.

00:28:31 – Rico Figliolini

Why not? Attach it to the right thing.

00:28:33 – Vandana Aggarwal

But so those are very people-oriented roles today. Technology will advance how quickly it’s done or how well it’s done. But you’ll still need someone to operate the machinery of it and everything.

00:28:49 – Rico Figliolini

Just not as many.

00:28:50 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah. Construction, similarly, right?

00:28:54 – Rico Figliolini

Unless you 3D print a house. I’m sorry.

00:28:56 – Vandana Aggarwal

No, it’s true. It’s true. There’s so many options. I’m thinking 10 years now. I’m not going to have a 3D printer making the metal framing for my new construction project. You know, or installing the sheetrock, it does probably speed up the process, right? There will be machinery to help with that, a lot of AI development in that way. It’s a lot at an office administrative level, right? The speed in which you’re processing invoices, the speed in which you are, you know, getting payments taken in. Today, I would say as far back as right before COVID, we were still accepting checks for money. Now it’s all online. Like we do not accept money coming into the office, or it’s very limited to what we do, right? So that’s AI, if you think about it, right? The ability to pay online.

00:29:42 – Rico Figliolini

QuickBooks Online uses AI now, you can enable it.

00:29:47 – Vandana Aggarwal

So we’ve been using it for many years. The advancement of it has been a little bit slower, and now it’s sped up. Marketing, we were just talking about how you created a flyer on ChatGPT, was it? 

00:30:00 – Rico Figliolini

I won’t talk about the student that’s helping us out here and how they use AI.

00:30:04 – Vandana Aggarwal

No, AI in school, right? But yeah, it’s an AI processor for my HR roles, right? Instead of reading 100 resumes, it’s going through the system to filter them out. Whether it’s writing contracts, I won’t lie. Legal jargon is coming out of ChatGPT today. And so it’s speeding up the way we’re doing work. But my legal team probably, and they won’t say it, should be using AI if they’re not. To help create some of this work right? So it’s like these companies are still going to be needed, but the way that they’re able to respond to us at a quicker, everything would just happen faster right? From typewriters to computers, everything.

00:30:49 – Rico Figliolini

Especially if they know that they just did a lease from you for this property in Texas, that we need three more leases done for three other places, it’s not going to be that much different, right? It’s a template.

00:31:01 – Vandana Aggarwal

It’s coming out a lot faster. Yeah, I mean the negotiations, that’s a people-to-people thing right? So I think thankfully in the real estate world we’re still going to need people. We’re still going to need buildings right? The way built, we were just talking about how a retail shopping center is no longer just for shopping. It has to be for entertainment. It has to be for bringing families in and giving them more than just, hey, go into a TJ Maxx and buy something, right? It’s like, what else are you getting when you’re at that center? Whether it’s a play space or events, we’re starting to do more events at our shopping centers. So it’s, again, serving the community.

00:31:39 – Rico Figliolini

We’re seeing that more. More of that happening. We could go on and on here.

00:31:46 – Vandana Aggarwal

Chatting with you.

00:31:46 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, and we should probably do one on either AI in the marketplace. Or maybe a panel discussion on something similar. 

00:31:51 – Vandana Aggarwal

Yeah, overall, yeah. That would be exciting.

00:31:55 – Rico Figliolini

Yeah, I think that would be cool.

00:31:56 – Vandana Aggarwal

I think it’s interesting to learn about kind of where every industry is heading. It impacts all of us.

00:32:00 – Rico Figliolini

For sure. I mean, the magazine business, I mean, it’s all like we have certain, we have AI rules. But, you know, AI is still being used to degree to research things. And to do certain things like that. You know, hopefully journalism isn’t just handed over. They do say 40% of the internet is AI written. So, which is kind of incestuous almost because it’ll just feed on itself at some point.

00:32:27 – Vandana Aggarwal

There’s a whole discussion about the validity and the trust behind digital content. In the next few years. I think it’s going to diminish.

00:32:35 – Rico Figliolini

Oh, yeah. I mean, I’m seeing videos now and it’s just like, it just looks so real. And you could not tell the difference, even voice-wise.

00:32:42 –  Vandana Aggarwal

And that’s scary to think. It’s like, how do you trust what you see?

00:32:47 – Rico Figliolini

So on that note, and since this is not edited, so this is right from the beginning. So this is all true. But I want to thank everyone. I want to thank you, V, for being with me.

00:32:57 – Vandana Aggarwal

Thank you so much for having me. This was a great conversation.

00:33:01 – Rico Figliolini

It went by way faster than some of these go. So this is a great discussion. Thank you, everyone. I appreciate you for joining us. Thank you for Vox Pop Uli for the studio look and for letting us do it here, for being a sponsor and for EV Remodeling. Also, I want to thank Jeremy Pruitt behind the camera who has taken care. He’s a Paul Duke student. And it wasn’t him that I was talking about before, by the way. But all the work he’s done on the back end on this. So thank you, Jeremy. So thank you all. Thanks for being with us.