Entrepreneurs for Impact (EFI) Podcast: Transcripts
#173:
Duncan McIntyre, CEO of Highland — $250M in Private Equity Funding for Electric School Busses. Selling Prior Business for $100M. Expect Tough Times. Garden Work in Cold Dark Mornings.
Podcast Introduction
Chris Wedding:
My guest today is Duncan McIntyre, CEO of Highland Electric fleets aka Highland, which brings turnkey solutions to make EV fleet adoption simple, reliable and cost effective for school buses and other fleets. Duncan sold his previous company in energy and emissions management for a cool $100 million.
In this episode we talked about how to convert CapEx to OpEx to make it easier for customers to say yes. Of course, that's capital expense to operating expense. What it takes to raise $250 million in private equity funding from smart investor friend of ours like Vision Ridge. The value of performance guarantees to reduce customer risks, how they reduce life cycle costs for city fleets. Why it's good to expect tough times and is routine of organic farming even in cold New England mornings before the sun comes up. All right, please give Duncan and Hyland a shout out on LinkedIn, Slack or Twitter. I mean X by sharing this podcast with your people. Finally, one last request before we press record Hop on over to Apple or Spotify to rate, review and follow this podcast.
I don't take any sponsors as you all know, so this little gesture of support means a lot to me and the guest. All right, thanks so much and hope you enjoy it.
Podcast Interview
Chris Wedding:
Duncan McIntyre, founder and CEO of Highland Electric fleets aka Highland. Welcome to the podcast Chris.
Duncan McIntyre:
Thanks for having me. I appreciate being on.
Chris Wedding:
Great. So in doing some more prep beyond our prior zoom conversations, this morning I saw this headline which was pretty eye catching. So we'll start with this one, which is you sold your first company for a hundred million dollars. So that's a pretty fun. It's a pretty fun number. Maybe describe what allowed you all to grow, to be that valuable, let's say. And then maybe what you learned from building that business, that translates to building Highland similarly or maybe even differently than you did.
Duncan McIntyre:
Chris sure. The business was called Altanex, and I think it was a little bit of right place, right time, to be honest. There was a moment in the 2005-2010 time frame when venture investors put a lot of money into climate tech. This is new solar materials, stuff like algae to biofuels, all this deep tech. And it was great in that some of it worked out and some of it did not. But what was really missing by the end of that run, from my perspective, was downstream partners to really commercialize the technology. It's great if that new solar material is disruptively productive and cheaper to make, but it's not good if you don't have any customers willing to adopt and roll it out.
And in the energy space generally, utility companies aren't paid to take risk and they don't have big R&D budgets, so they don't go do risky stuff. They get paid to deliver reliable power. And we built Altanex to really solve for what felt like a gap in the market. Big corporations like Microsoft said we want to power our data centers with renewable energy, but the utilities weren't offering that. So we developed a bundle and a package of services that helped to create a marketplace for just those renewable energy projects. So the market was growing quickly as were developing our offering and were a first mover, so were able to capture a lion's share of that market and really be the market leader leading to that value creation.
I think the second part of your question is really about what I learned, and I would say learned lots of stuff, made tons of mistakes, as many first time entrepreneurs do. But maybe one thing that stood out I would highlight, which is you can convince yourself on paper that you've got the right product to solve someone's needs. And it may make tons of academic sense when you build a model and you design that product, but when you go out there and start talking to customers and explaining that value, there's so many downstream implications that I think are lost at the planning stages. And when we wrote the business plan and started the company, were convinced we knew what that product should be.
And it took years before were able to iterate and tinker and ultimately really change dramatically what were bringing to market and kind of meet the needs of the customer. And I think it's something that lots of, you know, new companies go through, especially in emerging markets. You may have a concept, but the product layer of how you bring it to market, how you price it, how you support it, and what your promises are to your customers. It's the packaging of all that ends up maybe in some cases making just as much of a difference as the business thesis. So that's maybe one thing I'd call out.
Chris Wedding:
And you talked about right place, right time for that company you were building. And I mean, you know, probably something similar could be said for what you're doing at Highland as well. I think as we get into your old story, the gap you're filling, I think the audience would likely agree. I wonder if you can comment on, is there a method to in both cases being able to see trends that you knew had enough win in their sales that you could be early but not be in a, a brief fad, you know, you could really, you weren't really investing in building a solution in a space that had staying power.
Duncan McIntyre:
When you see really big corporations start to get behind new technology in a really meaningful way, it's a good indicator. So in 2010, wind turbines were manufactured by Siemens, GE and Vestas. You know, we're talking big global corporations, we're not talking startup companies. They were putting every ounce of power they had in terms of their sales organization, their support organization, their marketing arms behind this movement. And it was a good indicator that there'd be equipment and product support. On the other side, you had General Motors saying that within seven years they'd be powering all their manufacturing with renewable energy. These are big, successful consumer facing product companies making pretty dramatic claims. So fast forward to Highland. I started the business in 2000, late 2018. And in 2017, 2018, we started seeing real electric vehicles on the road around the world and domestically in California.
And I was inspired by how unbelievably efficient, quiet, remarkable the equipment was. And you bundle that with claims from companies like Daimler, the largest medium and heavy duty truck manufacturer in the world, Ford, you know, one of the largest consumer vehicle manufacturers in the world. And these claims are things like we will discontinue combustion engines in seven years. We will convert our entire line of pickup trucks to electric over the course of a decade. These are the types of claims they were making on the other side of the equipment. We have politicians running on platforms that are about clean air, healthy communities, environmental stewardship. And these aren't deep down, number nine, number 10, number 11 on the platform. These are top three, top four agenda items that people are voting on. And these are maybe simple, really simple examples.
But to me, sometimes the simple examples are the best. And it seemed inevitable that electrification would carve out a really meaningful niche in terms of market share based on both demand from communities and from individuals, but also from just the simplicity of the equipment. If it's cheaper to fuel and cheaper to maintain and cleaner to operate, it becomes an easier business decision for all parties.
Chris Wedding:
Mm. Well, let's go specifically to Highland. So give us the pitch. What is, what is Highland?
Duncan McIntyre:
Highland is a provider of financing and services for cities to make it affordable and reliable to roll out electric fleets. If you think about city or a municipality or a government of any kind, they'll have an assortment of vehicles, school buses, garbage trucks, street sweepers, Parks and rec usually has trucks and vans. There's all sorts of stuff. Utility companies have bucket trucks to repair poles. These are all fleet vehicles that circulate constantly around the communities that we all live in. They can almost all be replaced with battery electric versions today. The, those battery electric versions exist, but it's often too expensive for the communities. You know, they just don't have the budget without asking the taxpayer for more money, which is hard.
And they often don't have the internal expertise to know how to design and build an electrified depot, how to build and manage the software to integrate vehicles and charging stations. And the utility, they may not have the workforce training programs in place to bring all their drivers and mechanics up to speed. So we bundle and package all of these services with the capital needed and we turn it all into a performance based contract.
Chris Wedding:
Period.
Duncan McIntyre:
Yes, period.
Chris Wedding:
So much to unpack there. But let's start with the last piece, which was this performance guarantee. So, yeah, I can imagine lots of early prospective customers. Not that you necessarily started this way, but you know, going to a town facilities manager or someone managing budgets, let's say forget about just facilities and say, look, we have this new solution. I promise you it's going to save you on operations and maintenance and on fuel costs and so forth. Oh, by the way, it's cleaner air for the kids and so forth around the school buses. Sign here to purchase. Right. This equipment, which, yeah, costs more upfront, but I promise you it's going to save over Time, a lot of risk there. And it's not that your performance guarantee is one way to take out the risk to get to an easy yes.
Maybe just describe, maybe elaborate on that. But plus other ways which you took risks out of the equation to make the yes easier for your customers.
Duncan McIntyre:
Chris, you nailed it. You said it very well. It's difficult for the average municipal business official or whoever's responsible for these purchasing decisions. It's really hard to bet on all these downstream values. It's cheaper to run, it's easier to run. It's hard to bet on that and spend more money. Today. There's a handful of risks with running an electric fleet. One is just it's new technology. Things are going to break and some of it's under warranty, but it kind of rolls off of warranty. How do you deal with things that break and how long will they take to fix? How expensive will they be to fix? I'd say one other bucket is. What does the fueling look like? Is fueling really half the price of buying diesel fuel?
Well, yes, if you buy it in the right way and you structure your contracts in the right way. These are all often tricky for a municipal employee to navigate. There's one other piece which is tax credits. There's a whole world of renewable energy that's been funded by tax credits. And there are tax credits available for electric vehicles. But for a municipality that doesn't pay taxes, it's hard to sort that out. So we bring those tax credits into Highland. We, we make a long term bet on fueling and we actually put the equipment on the ground, we maintain the equipment and we provide the charging of these vehicles overnight every night. And when a part breaks, we pay for that part to be replaced.
And so it's truly transferring the cost of fuel, the cost and uncertainty around repairs, the inability to monetize tax credits and it transfers all of those risks to us. And then when the buses are fully fueled and ready to go every morning at 6am we might get paid $3 a mile. And so it's really making it a simple contract and a fixed priced contract and performance based. If it doesn't work, we don't get paid.
Chris Wedding:
How? From a kind of like life cycle costing perspective or systems level costing perspective or counting perspective. How clear are say facilities manager, let's say on the dollars per mile to drive their buses. And is it. That is to say you say it's $3 again, hypothetically. Do they know? Oh well that. I'm glad you Said that number because I know the math is perfect and it's 350 for us right now. Clearly we're going to save money. Is that how that works?
Duncan McIntyre:
It typically is, yes. I think there's always a transportation director or a business official or a city administrator who knows what their budget is. And it may take them 20 minutes to say, okay, here's what we pay to buy a vehicle, and here's what we paid for fuel last year, and here's how many miles we drove. And so there's a little bit of an exercise for them in building out what is our current cost per mile today. But it's usually pretty easy for them to get really close and we sometimes help them with that because there's some downstream pieces. They may not need as much overhead when they go to an electric fleet. You know, there's not as many parts that need to be processed and sorted in a part storage room. There's just a. Fewer moving parts.
Yeah, but putting the soft costs aside, there's usually a pretty good understanding.
Chris Wedding:
And I believe I saw on your website you aim for a 10% savings, is that right, relative to the business as usual?
Duncan McIntyre:
Yeah, we do. We try to deliver a savings to customers compared to their current costs to operate a traditionally fueled fleet.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I'm with you. Okay. And I think you also might have alluded to, you know, the cost savings and fuel at whatever 50% with electric can occur, but it depends on whether you do it right. And I'm wondering whether that's just as an example, when do you charge the buses? Right. In certain, you know, utility districts, maybe you're penalized to charge them in the middle of the day. Is that, is that part of what makes your. All kind of turnkey work, if you will?
Duncan McIntyre:
Yes, that's exactly right. If you think about buying gas at the pump, you don't pay a different price at six in the morning or six in the evening. It's just the same price. When you think about buying electricity, it's very different. And it's because of the way we've established our distribution network and all the components of supply and demand. We make power on demand basically almost everywhere in the world. And that's different than liquid fuels, which can be stored and so powers in demand often in the afternoons when everyone's running air conditioning and it's really hot and businesses are all operating and schools are operating, and then in the middle of the night, electricity is not in demand. And so all those power stations ramp down we focus on buying the cheapest power and the cleanest unit of power.
If there's a, a wind farm that's cranking overnight, we'll try to load up our fleet on that power. So it's a combination of making it affordable and clean.
Chris Wedding:
And you would know this better than me given your prior business, but I believe it's true. Correct me if I'm wrong that in many geographies the wind is stronger at night and so the, that may be, that may be the best part time of the day, if you will, to produce the cheapest kilowatt hour of wind. Is that true or no?
Duncan McIntyre:
It's exactly right. Yes, that's right. If you look at, you know, one of our greatest wind producing regions, I would go to Texas and there are plenty of those wind farms that are just cranking overnight when demand for power is quite a bit lower than during the day. And if you know, reverse back to the Highland business plan, a big piece of our thesis was just that if you can build out electrified fleets across the country, those electrified fleets are an unbelievably effective tool at integrating more renewable energy into our mix as a society. And, and by doing that, we flatten the load curve and we drive down electricity prices for ratepayers to win. Win.
Chris Wedding:
It's super interesting, right? I mean, that's also another example of how your first business relates to your second business. I think most folks who didn't work in wind or maybe who worked in solar would think the opposite. Right, all right, I love that. Yeah, let's go to kind of, I don't know, scale, commercial traction, et cetera. I think if folks go to your website, as I did, to refresh myself on our last conversation, they would see numbers like, you know, 3, 400 buses under subscription right now with you all. But we all know that companies keep growing and luckily for you all, it's growing fast. So clarify the updated number of buses under subscription these days.
Duncan McIntyre:
We're fortunate in that there's many states and communities that like our model and are signing up with us. So we're a little over 700 school buses under contract and we're starting to contract with a few other categories of vehicles as well, all to support communities. Trucks, vans, shuttle buses that support communities, support airports, things like that. We've got about 30 customers and we are growing quickly.
Chris Wedding:
Great. And I think listeners to our podcast here, they're thinking about climate, tech, climate solutions, et cetera, which is super important, obviously. But I'M guessing when you have conversations with these 30 customers and others, I don't know, where does climate rank? Where versus, you know, health of the workers, health of the kids, Obviously budget probably being, you know, top of the list. How does climate show up or not show up, by the way? There's no wrong answer to this question. Not a trick. Duncan.
Duncan McIntyre:
Yeah, I know. I appreciate it. Chris. Look, transportation is local. It's super local. And I would say if you think about there's a world of long haul trucking and rail, which is different, but the vast majority of transportation is local. It's local delivery vans running for bakeries and furniture delivery companies, it's city buses and school buses, it's garbage trucks picking up trash, and it's local. And so the conversations that we have in the electrification that we do tend to be more revolving around local health, community health, upgraded technology, more reliable fleets. And then budget's always part of the conversation. If it doesn't fit into the budget, it's usually very hard. Very few communities are willing to pay a big premium to convert their transportation technology.
I think in many of the communities we serve, there's overarching climate goals that everyone may understand and most, for the most part, people are quite on board with. But the conversations that we have, that is maybe more of a, an undisputed starting point. And then I would just say there are some communities where maybe climate is a disputed starting point, but we don't even go there because we focus on upgrading the tech, cheaper fuel. EVs have better torque and better braking and they're a pleasure to drive. And so it's an upgrade all around. And so it's a little bit of know your audience and make sure you meet them where they are and give them all the benefits of the services that we can offer.
Chris Wedding:
It's funny on the last piece about more fun to drive, more torque, et cetera. So one habit listeners may know that I have is when I go to bed at night, I try to list a bunch of great things from my day, like I count on my fingers, like I'm a grade school or doing math, etc. And if I have to drive anywhere, which is not every day, I'm like, boom, I love driving my electric car. What a, what a pleasure. What a pleasure when I get to drive.
Duncan McIntyre:
I'm glad to hear I do too. And if you interview school bus drivers who spent 20 years behind the wheel of a diesel bus and now they're in an electric, they would Say they love it too. They would all say they absolutely love it.
Chris Wedding:
Now just to clarify things, the model that is you all Highland, you own all the buses and the charging facilities and so forth. That is not what we call a, a capital light business.
Duncan McIntyre:
That's right.
Chris Wedding:
Correct. Yes.
Duncan McIntyre:
Yeah, that's right.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, so I think visitors to your website will see hooray, right. You will have such commercial traction and such a big market to serve that you've raised at least publicly, $250 million including from our mutual friends at Vision Ridge. Maybe just describe in this world where there's this kind of pushback to capex intensive businesses or I mean certainly or deep tech, which is now this is not really a deep tech play, but it is capital intensive. Maybe just say more about why this works or why it has to work, et cetera. Despite the, you know, 10 or 15 year old pushback on big capex budgets and clean tech, climate tech.
Duncan McIntyre:
Sure. Well, I would differentiate between a company developing new technology. I, you know, I used new solar material as an example where every dollar in is truly at risk if they can't develop a better solar material. All those dollars are out the door versus a company like Highland. We are buying best of breed equipment and then we're putting it into service. And the reason it's different is because if we like hypothetically failed to provide good services, we could always just sell all that equipment and you wouldn't get 100 cents on the dollar, but you still recoup a lot of money. So there's a backbone of equipment sort of asset value. We also have, we tend to have very long term contracts with very high credit worthy counterparties.
You know, we have a contract with Baltimore County is a big county in Maryland and they pay their bills for all the vendors where they have contracts. And that gives us additional comfort that we have 12 years of revenue. As long as we keep that equipment running smoothly and we keep our promises, they'll keep paying us. And so it's easier to deploy larger sums of capital into clean tech when you have best of breed reliable equipment and then you have really good contracts on the other side as well. And so we, yeah, we did raise 250 million. We fund our projects with a combination of equity capital debt capital and tax credit equity financing. And with the IRA there are now tax credits for EVs.
And so there's an opportunity to bring that flavor of capital in as well, which is part of the strategy.
Chris Wedding:
Yep. Okay. So for the listener. It might be easy to assume, what a piece of cake it's been for Duncan and team to go from, you know, an idea to this kind of capital raise to this number, hundreds of municipal vehicles under subscription. But I'm sure that's not true. Maybe tell a story or two about, you know, you thought this was a path, you thought this was a business model. It didn't work out. You hit, you hit a wall, et cetera, over some of these dead ends, if you will.
Duncan McIntyre:
I'm happy to. You know, the one I would give would be. In the early days of building out the Highland business, it seemed like one strategy would be to really become a, a fleet operator. And if you look at the North America today, about a third of municipal transportation is run by private third party companies that operate traditional diesel and gas fueled vehicles. These are companies like, you know, like First Group and National Express. And these are big companies and there are hundreds of them out there. Many of them are small and regional. But I thought to make real change, we needed to effectively fit in with that business and provide that suite of services so we could bid on contracts and we could bid on them in an electric format.
I think I didn't realize how hard it is to build that type of local presence and local brand. And I also didn't realize that we didn't have any good ways to differentiate our service offering amongst the bulk of what that service is. We had this compelling idea around how to electrify these fleets. But if you're electrifying a fleet 5 or 10% a year over the course of time, you're still running a very big traditional fleet. So we ended up pivoting and having to rethink the business. And so we reframed it around equipment and services just for electric vehicles. And that allowed us to develop a product that sells to the two thirds of the market that is in house, meaning transportation is operated locally by a municipal coordinator. So that would, I would say be one, one example. Chris.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, well, it also I think reminds us that and this has come up on a recent podcast, say with the one folks will hear from Scythe Robotics making electric lawnmowers and other lawn equipment where we think the data suggest, or early conversations suggest the following is our path to market or our ideal, you know, customer. And then later more data suggest it's not. It's like, well, that could either be, you know, super frustrating or depressing or whatnot, or it could open the doors to a bigger market. A better market. We went from 1/3 just now to 2/3. Right?
Duncan McIntyre:
That's right. It's also, it's also encouraging when you reach these milestones because you recognize that by being nimble and by iterating quickly and being, you know, super entrepreneurial, we're able to figure out a whole bunch of things that don't work pretty quickly and get to something that does. And sometimes you just realize how hard it is for competitors to be able to traverse the same grounds and, you know, come out the other end. And so that can be very encouraging.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, for sure. But first there's a brief message from our sponsors. Just kidding. We still don't take any sponsors, but did you know that 100,000 plus CEOs belong to CEO peer groups? And if that makes you feel a little fomo, and if you're a CEO or founder, then you're in luck. I have the privilege of leading North America's top peer group, Community for growth stage CEOs, founders and investors in climate, tech, clean energy and sustainability. Today's members are creating billions of dollars of market value and millions of tons of greenhouse gas reductions. With our monthly group meetings, annual retreats, and one one executive coaching calls, our members help each other, most importantly, help each other boost revenue, impact, capital raised, clarity, confidence, work, life balance and team effectiveness. If this sounds interesting, please go to entrepreneurs for impact.com and join the waiting list.
Today we're going to kind of switch now from, you know, the business, you know, Highland, to the person you.
Duncan McIntyre:
Okay, okay.
Chris Wedding:
So, so maybe tell us something that you strongly believe in. This can be about business or even better yet, not about business that influences how or why you're building Highland.
Duncan McIntyre:
So I have always loved organic gardening and the process of feeding yourself from the land and having to sort of figure it out. I think as a kid I went on all sorts of Outward Bound type summer programs and so I credit my mom and dad for insisting on that type of an upbringing. When I look at the world of commercial farming and then the logistics behind how our supply chains work and how we get food to market, it's always scared me a little bit. Feels like a very fragile ecosystem and there's a little bit of a movement around local farming and I just think it's fantastic. I think the food tastes better. I think it reminds us all that things don't all come in packages.
And so I've done a bunch of it over the last 10 years and I get my kids out there and I think we need to, as a society, figure out how to encourage more of it, because we may hit another. Another episode like Covid, where supply chains break down and grocery store shelves are more empty than we're all accustomed to. And so I've really enjoyed. I've really enjoyed that. It's purely a hobby, but I enjoy it quite a bit.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I think we see the. The localization theme come up again, right? Yes, for sure. With. With. With Highland. And it comes up again with. With food supplies. Now, if only. If only you. You all can grow a teepee on your farm and come next. Next pandemic. You're all set.
Duncan McIntyre:
I know. That's right. Yeah. I'll store it up, be a cash cow. Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
That actually relates to another question I'd like to ask, which is what are some habits or routines that keep you healthy, sane and focused? And I know that one area that we kind of connected on in prior calls was being up early and doing work that is not in a chair does not keep your hands clean. Maybe elaborate on that one or other habits.
Duncan McIntyre:
Yeah, I. Look, I find that for the most part, I have to sit behind a computer and behind a telephone, and I love getting out into the field and visiting a bus depot and visiting clients, but the reality is most of my professional careers behind a computer or a telephone. And I get some Zen in the mornings by getting up early and getting outside. And, you know, I just. I described organic farming. We do a tiny bit. Well, I've got all sorts of projects just at home that I enjoy. We've got two big English setters and a pug, and the pug thinks he's an English setter.
Chris Wedding:
And.
Duncan McIntyre:
And they all love going out at, you know, 5:15, 5:30 in the morning and running around. And unless it's below zero, we go out. And so we go out almost every day, and I get an hour outside to do a project. And, you know, whether it's fixing a split rail fence or doing a little gardening or, you know, doing whatever other project I might enjoy, it's a little bit of exercise. It's very quiet, nobody bothers me. And I absolutely love it. I look forward to it every day.
Chris Wedding:
Well, as were comparing notes before pressing record, you know, I was describing that my free sun, free sunrise, you know, exercise is more sitting in meditation or reading books about whatever some person in the 1930s traversing Chinese Buddhist monasteries or whatnot. But it does, in talking to you today, it does remind me that maybe I could be outside moving large rocks or other things in our little forest garden here that get me moving more than just. Than just sitting. More so. Yeah. All right. Yeah.
Duncan McIntyre:
But there's value in stretching and meditating too. I mean, I think it's all finding a balance and listening. Listening to yourself on what you need.
Chris Wedding:
That's true. That's true.
Duncan McIntyre:
Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
Let's go to having a conversation with a younger Duncan. Or rather just as you talk to emerging professionals. Right. What advice might you give them on how to be, I don't know, happier, more effective, more impactful on this building a career of impact exercise or path we're on?
Duncan McIntyre:
I think when you're young and first coming out and you have ideas that you think have merit, my sense of, is that I was always overly ambitious at the beginning about the art of the possible. It's good to spend time on the art of the possible. But then I've always found if you don't focus those efforts into doing one thing that's pretty specific and doing it really well, you're more likely to fail. And so with Highland, I saw an opportunity to build an electrified fleet business. And I looked at last mile delivery, looked at trash hauling, looked at ground support vehicles at airports. I looked at a bunch of categories. And then I got to school busing, and I was pretty excited about what I saw. You know, the vehicles have relatively modest duty cycles. They come back to the same depot every night.
They operate. And all of our suburban and urban communities and rural communities, they tend to follow population centers, their ideal battery backup for the grid. And so there was a fact pattern that got me excited. We focused on building Highland purely around doing that really well for the first five years. And only now are we branching out really to support our customers and their needs for other vehicle types. But when I look at many of our competitors, they do everything. And you can't do everything really well. You need to focus on doing one thing really well. Owning the market and expanding from there. And so I would say entrepreneurs are pretty classes, half full type of people. You know, they're stepping out there and being willing to go into the unknown to figure it out.
And there's a, a natural tendency with people like that to boil the ocean a little bit. We can do it. But I found that I would tell the earlier Duncan to rein it in, focus on doing something really well, go really deep on that one thing and develop a product, successful product, profitable business, a great team and a durable business. And. And then you can expand it once you've got a foundation.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I like that. And it reminds me a little bit, but a different scale perhaps to off grid solar companies. So I've done work with dlight in Ethiopia and Greenlight Planet India and they became great at first solar lanterns in small solar home systems. But what they soon realized, like you did, is that, wait, these, we're solving problems for this customer. This customer trusts us. How else can we help this customer that we've worked with for, you know, all these years? And then they branched out to how do you create, you know, new credit scores or versions of credit scores that didn't exist and now you can provide financing for whatever appliances or for school tuition or for, you name it. Yes, like be super focused but also be open to business models or plans you didn't imagine five years ago, 10 years ago.
Duncan McIntyre:
Absolutely, that's exactly right. And if your product is too complex, look for partners who can simplify pieces of it and focus on the pieces where you can really add value. I think especially in an emerging sector, you know, one would argue off grid solar. They were trying to not only build a company brand and build a product, but also define a new category. Right. When you're trying to do all of those things at once, it's hard. It's really hard. You're going to have a lot of dark days and it's going to take longer and more money than you expect. So stay focused.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, let's go to your recommendations for books, business or non business. Maybe it's other podcasts or quotes or tools, a few actionable things that listeners can take.
Duncan McIntyre:
Yeah, sure. I saw, I saw this question, Chris, and I had to think for a minute about it, but there's a couple books that I've loved, I've read a few times. They've always inspired me. And one of them is a set of books that are by McCullough. He's a biographer and he wrote about John Adams and then he wrote a book called 1776. And they are about, you know, the early days of independence in this country and what they were doing. When you read, when you read it, you're reminded that what they were doing was kind of crazy. It was really hard. They tackled something that was really hard and they did it in a way that was no turning back. Right. If they failed in, know, the English, they would have been executed. Right.
The, these are the people who stood out there and said we're going to do this. And the, and John Adams in particular is a character that I think, you know, most people haven't read the details on, but was just instrumental behind the scenes and so deeply committed and so passionate about achieving the outcome that, you know, he's willing to bring his whole family, you know, into this big bet. There's another one that is about building the transcontinental railroad, I think it's called Nothing like it in the world. And again, tackling a problem that was really, really hard and many businesses went bankrupt trying to build the railroad. And it's just an unbelievable saga. And so again, it's a similar theme. Having the willingness to sort of think bold and go tackle something really big like that is remarkable.
It's inspiring and it's helpful in learning lessons about building teams, about engaging in defining a new category. Building a new category. And then you said quotes and I had to think about that one. But there's one quote that I've always loved, which is actually Winston Churchill. And success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It's the courage to continue that counts. And that's important in your first, you know, 24 months of any new business because there will be very dark days. And if you run out of cash four or five times, that's pretty good because you're going to run out of cash a few times and you should expect it and be willing to grind it out and figure out how to live another day.
And so I found that the willingness to grind it out for, you know, some of these sort of historical figures has always been very inspiring to me.
Chris Wedding:
Well, and it's helps us see the future, I think, right. Where it's easy to think that the kind of work we're doing in climate tech, renewables, et cetera, that, you know, it's always going to be a small portion of the whatever your category is, you know, fleets or megawatt hours or, you know, tons of chemicals produced, et cetera.
Duncan McIntyre:
Sure.
Chris Wedding:
But the reality is that those folks had these visions and now we just take it for normal that there is a railroad or there is a country, formerly a startup, called the United States of America.
Duncan McIntyre:
A remarkable startup. It's really only a 240 year old experiment, which is remarkable.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, Duncan, we could keep talking, but I think we have something else. Both of us, in seven minutes.
Duncan McIntyre:
Yeah, thanks, Chris.
Chris Wedding:
What's a message, a call to action, an invitation, et cetera, that you'd like to leave listeners with?
Duncan McIntyre:
Look, I think if you're going to embark on a entrepreneurial endeavor, whether it's within A big company, it's a raw startup. You know, there will be tough times and do something that you love and you're really excited about, you're in it for the mission. And that for me started when I realized my 7 year old's mouth was at the same height as a diesel exhaust pipe on a school bus. And, and you can get really aligned around a mission and then it helps you through the dark times. And so my call to action is just to only do something if you're pretty darn excited about it and you're going to be excited about it when it's not going well.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. Now it comes up all the time in our climate CEO peer group community here that we run that expect hard times. Like I bought a ticket for this. I'm not, no one's forcing me. I chose this path and it's not a, nor it's not unnatural that there are tough times.
Duncan McIntyre:
Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. But if you can get through those, usually you can come out the other end with a, you know, with a great business that's, you know, got strong margins and good growth and a fantastic team. And that's the really rewarding part.
Chris Wedding:
They're here. Listen, Duncan, rooting for your old success at Highland? Solving a big problem.
Duncan McIntyre:
Yeah. Chris, love your platform and really appreciate the invitation. Thanks for having me on.
Chris Wedding:
Awesome. Thanks for listening. And if you want more intel on climate tech, better habits and deep work, then join the thousands of others who subscribe to our substack newsletter at entrepreneurs for impact.com or drop me a note on LinkedIn. All right, that's all y' all. Take care.