Greg Mullis had a little difficulty deciding where he was heading in life, but once he did, he has been successful in his various endeavors.
Mullis, 56, grew up in Dodge County as an only child and enjoyed the benefits of living on a farm.
“I had a collie dog that I loved,” he recalled last week, “and that collie dog and I would roam all over the place: hunt, fish, do whatever we wanted to do. Literally, my parents’ house, you would struggle to hit a neighbor’s house with a deer rifle, let alone see it.”
Mullis went to Mercer University on a music scholarship but soon discovered it was more work than he anticipated. He began his career in music early in life, learning to play the piano in third grade before progressing to other instruments and into bands as he got older. He explained that he was not trying to sound cocky but added, “I was kind of a big fish in a small pond. I was one of the better musicians in high school. Things just came naturally to me.
“I got to college around some other really good musicians, and I figured out really quickly, I was not all that at all. I had to go to work and bring that work pail. Those college professors assume you can do it; if you couldn’t, you were drowning.”
Mullis ultimately decided that path was not for him and ended up minoring in music and art. He earned his degree with a major in English with an eye toward going to law school.
He decided that route was not for him either. “I was all set and ready to go, I thought. I graduated and just decided at the last minute, I don’t want to go to law school.”
Perhaps fate intervened then. Mullis had been working for a marketing company right out of college, but that wasn’t panning out as he expected. He saw a job opening at Tri-County EMC and talked to some good friends in Dodge County that worked for the EMC there.
“They’re like, ‘You should definitely do this. Go for this.’ And doggone if I haven’t been here ever since.”
The new employee began in October of 1991 as an energy auditor working with customers or contractors regarding energy efficiency issues. He worked with power supply, marketing components, corporate services, “a little bit of everything here except probably accounting or HR.”
New co-op venture
Then, five or six years ago, company officials began considering an idea that led to a venture that has had him excited, motivated, and proud.
“We started playing around with the concept … There were a lot of co-ops around the country getting into broadband fiber. And it was really because there was a vacuum.” Mullis asserted that the rural areas had been left out, “for lack of a better word, in the digital darkness, with very slow technology … and there were very few places that had fiber. Most of your fiber was either between big cities or in big cities.”
Mullis, now the chief operating officer and general manager of what has been tabbed Tri-GoCo, explained that the co-op talked to several consultants and went further. “We started ... doing some research surveying our members and just got overwhelming response, you know, ‘please do,’ and, the rest is kind of history.”
He said the service has grown from the first customer in September of 2021 to around 10,450 now, with one and a half percent more added per month.
“Our biggest challenge is not that people don’t want our service; the biggest complaint we get is ‘why can’t you serve me,’ ‘why can’t you get to me’, ‘why can’t I get your service?’” The customer base has grown much more quickly than expected. The ‘take rate’ — number of people in an area that are served by the EMC who sign up for Tri-GoGo — has surpassed expectations.
“Our feasibility study had us being at 60% take rate, which is a little unrealistic because the marketplace changed as we changed it, but to be at 60% take rate in 12 years, and we’re at 50% take rate in four and a half years, now into five years.”
Music, church key passions
On a personal note, Mullis met his future wife, Lisa Helgeson, while at Mercer, and they married in 1991. They have two children. McKenzie, 27, studied biology and works in a lab in Ohio, and Matthew, 24, is in sales and completing school in Woodstock, Ga.
Mullis never lost his love for music. He played at various functions while at Mercer, helped start a contemporary service at Riverside Methodist Church, and, along with Lisa, played in a Christian band at one point.
Then, 27 years ago, he was asked to join a band that had been around 10 years, Grapevine.
“I played my first gig at the Macon City Auditorium, a fundraiser,” he recalled. “That was the first of hundreds and hundreds of gigs. At the height of probably the Grapevine’s time, I think we played close to 60 gigs a couple of years. That’s a lot of time away from home and a lot of hours in the road. But it was fun. Great friends, incredible musicians, and just a lot of great members.”
Playing in the band enabled Mullis to meet a lot of different people in a lot of different events.
“We played so many special moments in people’s lives,” he shared. “We played a ton of wedding receptions. We played for a sitting president, President Bush. We played for multiple governors; we played for Kemp multiple times, senators, just a lot of different people.”
The musician stopped playing with Grapevine last year, primarily due to some medical issues with his hearing.
“What I hear in my head is different from what I’m actually playing,” he explained, adding that he has an appointment with a specialist in that field and that surgery is a possibility.
“So we’re trying to figure that out. But,” he stressed, “I feel like God gave me this gift, and I need to do what I can to keep it going. We’re a musical family.”
Mullis actually is keeping it going now. He and Lisa helped start Gray Community Church, which meets now at the W.E. Know Civic Center.
“We went from pretty much zero in just a couple of years to 400 roughly average attendance,” Mullis shared. Josh and Jordan Echols are the pastors.
“They have an amazing vision … God’s got something special going on there. And,” he reasoned, “there’s so many people in our community that don’t know church. They’ve never been a part of church, and that’s what this couple is all about: how do we find a place for the unchurched.”
Economic Development Important
Besides music, Mullis’ other passion for the past 25 years or so has been economic development. He has been on the Jones County Development Authority since 2003.
“Our community, it has so much promise, and I think there’s people that still want to hang on to the ‘we’re a bedroom community, we want it to look like 1950’ … Jones County’s property taxes are higher than any of our neighbors on average. It’s not because our politicians have spent a bunch of money frivolously. It’s because the industrial portion of our tax base is like three percent.
“I think 84% of our population still drives out of town for work every day,” Mullis said. “And I’d like to see those folks have a choice. I think the College and Career Academy at the high school has been phenomenal, but we’re not keeping that many of those kids here because there’s just not jobs.
“I want my community to truly grow in a smart way. And I want our community to be able to say, ‘Hey, we have this need.
Well, here’s the cash to pay for it’. Not, ‘Gee, can we just dream of that to happen one day.’” Mullis said that thought came from a grass roots organization once active in the county.
“That was really kind of an outlet of the PLAN group that did some really good things.
I’d love to see that group come back. And,” Mullis offered, “it might help with some of the communication issues with data centers and industrial growth and ‘should we be for it or against it.’ If people could understand we’re all on a team together, like it or not, and our commonalities are probably a lot closer to center than we think they are.”
While he has definite ideas about economic development, Mullis would not speculate on what the future holds for him personally.
“I haven’t picked a retirement date or anything. We’ve built a good thing, and I want to see it keep growing.”
He did make it clear he has priorities and legacy goals.
“The arts are important to me. Economic development’s important to me. I like to keep playing music. But,” he concluded, “I want to know at the end of the day something I didn’t know when I started the day. And I’d like to leave the world today better than it was yesterday because of something I did good for somebody or for the community.”
