“I turned to my director of sales and said, ‘I'm gonna attack this. I'm gonna jump in with Montel and see what we can do here.’”
And the rest is history. Since then, Abel Womack, now one of Montel’s top partners in vertical farming and mobile storage solutions, has consulted and executed on many indoor vertical farming systems for cannabis growers and other agricultural ventures too.
One memorable installation, the largest project that Montel and Abel Womack have collaborated on, was a 70,000-foot cultivation center. The build included three-tiered slope-style vertical racks, with infinity trays, across 18 flower rooms. It was a complicated project with, at the time, a lot of new technology and a huge learning curve. Nobody had built an installation like this before, but luckily the strength of Abel Womack and Montel’s partnership carried them through.
“Everything was manufactured perfectly,” he said, “and it was such a big success that it spawned a lot of great relationships and some amazing projects, and we’re just continuing to push forward in that world.”
Michael has always been keen on how to bring people together for a good time. In another life, he ran a restaurant in Cuenca, Ecuador. Out there, south of the Andes Mountains, 8,000 feet above sea level, Michael brought American-style cuisine to Ecuador’s third largest city and its tight-knit community of American expats. He commissioned local craftspeople to build a handmade meat smoker for barbecues and even hosted bar trivia nights.
“It’s kind of an eternal spring there,” Michael said. “Beautiful year round.”
Sounds like the perfect weather for sharing a plate of home cooking with your neighbors! That’s how you bring the right product to the right people.
Michael’s hospitality and talent for forging partnerships is the same energy we hope comes through Montel’s free, no-obligation consultations. Anyone interested in mobile storage or vertical farming solutions can talk directly with a specialist (like Michael and his team) and receive free 2D and 3D renderings of what their dream system would look like under their roof. It’s our way of telling our prospective clients that they’re worth it.
“Customers are always really impressed with the 3D renderings, the aerial elevation views,” Michael said, “how a system, how a room, how a facility might actually look when it's all completed. It's been nice to have that ability to provide drawings and renderings that our competitors can't really touch.”
It also helps that, together, Montel and Abel Womack roll out products like the SPEEDDECK, the only space-conscious movable scaffold for vertical farming on the market.
SPEEDDECK, one of Michael’s favorite Montel products, was born from a common problem among small and midsize commercial cannabis: when all you’ve got is a scissor lift to reach your higher tiers, you don’t have much room to maneuver. SPEEDECK offers a safe, simple, and practical alternative, an innovation brought about by listening to customers’ needs and designing to them. We at Montel are glad we found partners who share in this ideal.
Here’s to many more fruitful years with Michael and the rest of the team at Abel Womack.
