SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Future Ventures Podcast on scaling with clarity. Ben Klepaki is a co-founder of Westgen Technology, a cognitive-based cleantech company tackling one of the most overlooked problems in energy, methane emissions. But at its core, WestGen really is a hybrid power generation company. His work sits at the intersection of traditional oil and gas and climate innovation, developing technology that can eliminate up to 99% of methane venting at both sites while actually improving economics for producers. Ben's journey started with a sketch on a napkin and turned into a fast-scaling company deployed across welfare sites in North America. Ben is betting everything on the idea that the fastest path to impact isn't replacing energy systems, but rather it's fixing the ones that we already rely on. Welcome to the stage, Ben. It's an absolute pleasure. Love your story. Would love if you can if we can start with kind of like the origin story. I know Ben is a professional engineer, but how did you come to do what you're doing currently? And uh where was the idea born for Wexgen?

SPEAKER_03 1:29

I appreciate that. It's uh it's a little convoluted story, I think, uh similar to many entrepreneurs out there. I actually started my career um coming out of school with dreams of changing the world and uh got into alternative energy, did wind and hydro for a while, and and to be honest, became a little disillusioned with this there. Um at the time, I was a project manager on um Canada's largest wind farm, and the uh I had this whole save the world, do alternative energy thing going on in my head. Um, the amount of energy that it took us to build that wind farm, we were roughly 700 cubes of concrete. We had to build our own concrete batch plant. The uh the uh turbine blades got shipped up from Brazil. The uh cells got brought in from Denmark and from Germany, and um remember where the the towers came in from, like Africa or something like that. We barged all these things in, and remember uh back calculating how much energy was going into there and realizing that um the future it's an all of the above solution, that it wasn't this magical solution that we had. And then I ended up moving over into oil and gas and uh realizing that I think our traditional energy sources play a role, uh, particularly when we have all the energy scarcity challenges that we do around the globe right now. There's there's no magical technology until we have fusion available that's gonna change everything overnight. So we need to find a way to develop our traditional resources as responsibly as possible, and I think they play a large role in our our energy future for the foreseeable future.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

So, Ben, um I mean somebody would say like moving from alternative energy to oil and gas, it's it's almost like a radical departure or 180 pivot. But uh from our prior conversation, you see this is really a mix of all all energies rather than one to the displacement of another, and and maybe solar is increasingly becoming more important, but kind of like what took you away from what you were doing with wind farms and going into an oil and gas?

SPEAKER_03 4:05

It was the way I look at energy, I take that mechanical engineer perspective. Everything is just watts out, and and then you have an energy in it. And you have to look holistically at the whole system. So when you consider the amount of energy that goes into making concrete, that goes into making the steel, um turbine blades typically have a lifespan of around 20 to 25 years, and and you put this all together, you realize that I had a friend who actually did his PhD thesis on and calls it well the wheels energy cycles, yeah. You realize that they actually run pretty close, and and there's this massive opportunity because we're going to use fossil fuels. We're talking about even if you take power generation out, jet fuel. Um, there's talk around hydrogen-powered planes, things like that. Those are so far in the future. Your energy energy density with hydrogen is so low compared to jet fuel, you're not getting away from oil and gas in the foreseeable future. I realized the biggest impact I can make is let's go over into oil and gas and let's help develop this resource as responsively as possible. And the low-hanging fruits, we talk about methane there, was um, you know, I was working as a well pad design engineer, we were venting methane left, right, and center, and there's this whole efficiency concept. The climate change, venting methane, yes, that's a good thing. And here is this energy source that we're just venting to the atmosphere that we can and we can use, and it's just so inefficient, and that that just ate at me as an engineer. Like, there has to be a way to solve this problem, and that's kind of what kicked off Westgen.

SPEAKER_00 5:59

That's amazing. Um and and so in in the birth of Westgen, um, do you kind of like what what was the what was what was the ideation path? Uh, I'm assuming that you said that was eating at you as an engineer. I'm assuming that you started to do a calculation and schematics and graphics. So, okay, well, if we do this, if we take capture the methane and pop it back in and use it as a fuel source, kind of like what walk me through kind of like how did you take the the step from hey, I'm working for somebody else to no, no, I'm gonna take the the plunge and actually go and start a company.

SPEAKER_03 6:37

So I actually need to take a step back and I'm gonna answer your question a little bit differently. Sure. Um, because Westgen was not the first attempt to start a company. Okay. It was just the first successful one. And I think this is ultra important for any of your listeners that have interest in starting their own company one day. Um, learn a lot of lessons in the first kind of iteration. So there was a group of us we met, I think it was about monthly, for at least a year, um, year and a half. We, man, this would have been like 2015, 2016. We started building out different business ideas, and there was everything from um my brother-in-law, who wound up being co-founder with me, was throwing out uh importing Japanese toilet seats. Um, another gentleman was talking about anti-static cat callers. I had to walk through the physics with them and show you couldn't do that. And um and we actually had the software uh idea first that was around trying to manage equipment life cycles and and um and risk through that. And we ended up barking down this path for luckily didn't throw too much money barked down there probably eight months and started interviewing potential clients and and um looking at what a an MVP, a minimum viable product would look like. And then after eight, nine months of this, um, we realized that if we were super successful, we could pay ourselves fifty, sixty thousand dollars a year, like five years down the road. The business model broke. So we went back to the drawing board, and and we literally had this list of ideas. Um, and what became Westgen, this concept of the EPOD, was something that uh you mentioned in the beginning, I'd sketched out on a napkin. So I was working with a client up in Northeast BC, we were having a power generation problem, I was working with them to try and eliminate methane venting, and all of the power generation technologies, at the time there's what we call the power generation gap. So if you wanted to make a couple hundred kilowatts of power, there was a lot of existing technology out there. Um you've got your caterpillar, Waka Shaw engines, micro turbines, if auto-derivative engines, GMs and Fords, and if you wanted to only make a hundred watts or a couple hundred watts of power, you had fuel cells, you had uh solar. This gap that wound up being exactly what you needed to run air compressors to eliminate the methane venting through pneumatics uh in kind of one to 50 kilowatts, there was nothing reliable out there. So we started looking at what the automotive industry was doing at the time the Prius had been out, and the whole concept there is let's not run an engine 100% of the time. Let's run it as optimum point, it's optimal efficiency point, let's store all the energy. If you've got engines when they're running partly loaded, um your engine has a lot of ancillary loads, but uh oil pumps, water pumps, alternators, things like that take up about 20 to 30 percent of the energy. So if you're not running that thing fully loaded, you're actually actually wasting uh a tremendous amount of energy. And we ended up on a flight back from Grand Prairie Prairie. I started sketching out, call it the Toyota Prius for stationary power generation. And uh and bringing this all together, so this first software idea didn't work, started looking at this Western idea, we ran the business model, it looked like it made sense. I started talking to some of my clients at the time, and uh and there was interest. So, as we went around starting a company very intentionally, there's always something I wanted to do. Um, and I think it's really important to know that when you get out there, if if it's something that your listeners are interested in, you're gonna have failures, you're gonna have ideas that don't work. You know, the first one was a complete flunk, and and you just gotta get back and you gotta try. And then the other piece is you gotta jump in both feet. We learned that very quickly because you're trying to do it on while you have another job, you want to stay safe, you want to keep that income coming. And the challenge is the second you start a business, everything's gonna go wrong. And if you're not in there and committed, you're just gonna walk away. But if you have a good idea, there's gonna be things you can do that you can pivot and make it work, and and we needed to do that like crazy over the first six, nine months to actually get the business model to work. Yeah, agree.

SPEAKER_00 11:27

I mean, all in commitment. I mean, even when you're looking for an investment opportunities, that's the same thing for us. It's like, is is the founding team all in? Are they gonna walk through fires? They're gonna smash through walls. Uh it because that's the like for early stage companies, it's not so much the it's like what's the capacity of the founding team to execute on the idea? 100%. And so, okay, so you you started that you started a company, you I'm assuming you quit your job um and you started working on Dia. How long did it take to actually build the pot, DPOT, and then how long did it take to actually acquire your index client? Kind of walk me through a bit of a timeline. For sure.

SPEAKER_03 12:19

This is so I've um been lucky over the last call it year and a half, two years to be in a spot where uh I've been able to pull myself out of the day-to-day operation of the business and start doing some mentorship with some other companies going up. And the single um biggest piece of advice I have for people that have started companies is fail fast. Okay, don't do absolutely not spend your time doing research and trying to perfect your first product. There's uh, and we went through some accelerators, and it's funny, we got two polar opposite pieces of advice when we were starting. Oh, really? Okay. That comes up from academia, they come up from the government, and and it's all about perfection in research.

SPEAKER_00 13:13

And TRL four, TRL5, TRL six, get it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it, got it, got it, got it.

SPEAKER_03 13:19

And we were TRL one to TRL eight in three months. Wow. Okay, just go and build it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was this other piece of advice. And it was really funny. You have all we, I think we did three different accelerators, and two of these were backed by either a large school or a government program and advice in this other one. Um, Creative Destruction Lab. Oh, CDL, love it. Yeah, we love them. CDL, and what Alice Reimer's done there is phenomenal. And every single mentor in there has come from business and they've done it before, and they pounded into us no, go out, try it, fail, try again. Yeah, we just got out and we built the product, and we were testing and found a company that was that's uh really liked the concept. So we said, Hey, you're trying to accomplish XYZ, you're trying to reduce your methane emissions, you're trying to increase your efficiency, your power systems, reduce your operating costs, all the value prop. We've got this prototype. It probably is going to have a couple of issues off the start. We'll sell it to you for cost. We didn't have tons of money. We were we were bootstrapping this. And the one thing I found, and I love Calgary for this, there's this you'd think these large oil and gas companies would just crush you as a little company. It was the opposite. They were so welcoming and so warm, and um we're willing to work with you around that. So we ended up selling our prototype, didn't make any money off it, but sold it for essentially our cost of materials and got it out into the field right away and learned. And then found a couple more companies and had the same kind of conversation. And uh, you know, I'll say of six or seven companies, um, maybe there was eight companies that we had in the first two years, year and a half. Two maybe didn't really understand the concept that we were trying to get prototypes up, no matter how much we talked, and they'd get angry when they went wrong. Everyone else worked with you. It allows you to perfect the product. Yeah. And even more importantly than that, you're getting feedback that entire time. So if we spent that year and a half building isolated on our own, we'd come out with a product that they'd be like, we don't want this.

SPEAKER_02 15:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:47

Instead, you have it in the field, you're getting real-time feedback from operators from multiple operators in multiple areas. And uh, it took us two years to build or to perfect it, but I think we got there much quicker. And in the interim, we were making revenue. We were able to bootstrap this thing along.

SPEAKER_00 16:09

I mean, every entrepreneur should follow the same path. Perfection is the enemy of done. And if you're looking to build it, uh, I mean, that's the advice that we give to anyone of the portfolio companies or customers we work with, is like customer discovery, nothing beats customer discovery, be in the field, talk to them, learn, learn from them in terms of are you building somebody that that somebody wants and needs? And there's a difference between like, well, that's gonna you know help improve voices. No, no, this is gonna drive a massive improvement for what we do. And I'm assuming that's the case. I'm assuming that for the pilot clients, and walk me through it. Did the pilot clients kind of run this in parallel as a redundancy system? Because I'm assuming that there was a there was a risk of failure. So kind of like walk me through how did you risk because I mean, oil and gas companies are notorious for risk management. So I'm assuming that they would have had to have some kind of a failover mechanism in place to make sure that this thing works before they said, no, no, we're gonna try this uh inherently.

SPEAKER_03 17:10

So the problem that we were solving on these sites, and and you mentioned this uh when you first did the introduction, we really in the beginning we focused on methane elimination. This solar hybrid proprietary power tech, it worked great, but the problem we were solving at the time um was how do you eliminate methane venting from pneumatics on oil and gas sites? Yeah. So the the fallback was just to go back to what they're gonna use the air, purge it with nitrogen, and then go back to using your fuel gas. In that case, they didn't need any power. And uh we'll drop back there. Um coming back to what I go through, kind of those first six or eight companies that we were working with. The the six that went well really understood the concept of trying this. And and when they were building these well pads, we had discussions around the design so they could build that redundancy. The two that I'd say went less well was where they're you're working with one group of engineers that are the bring in the new tech or the clean tech guys, and we found out very quickly that they were incredibly siloed and they didn't pass that on to the operators and they didn't pass it on to the facilities guys. They those guys would be furious. What the heck? Bleep, um you know, this thing's supposed to work, and then you come to battery like, no, no, no, it's a prototype, and they're like, Why'd we install this? It's junk. Um, you certainly have some of those conversations, and and then the but the ones that worked well, and once again, advice to anyone out there. Uh, we always call three wide, three deep. So talk to as many people as possible, get outside of the niche of the new tech group that's helping to bring you in and get into the operators, get into the facilities group, get into the management, make sure they all know. Um, and then yeah, it's it's actually typically not that hard to build a redundancy in.

SPEAKER_00 19:15

That's amazing. So um, like I want to double-click on this because uh a lot of people appreciate it. Um, I'm assuming that the first eight clients who are smaller junior owing gas companies. Because no, because I see now you have big names like Shell. I mean, those are the super majors. So, kind of walk me through what was your path in terms of enterprise sales? Going into big, big, big companies.

SPEAKER_03 19:38

Yeah, it would so it'd surprise you. It was a mix everything. Uh very first client was small and uh really believed around the new technology. Uh Painted Pony, I think I'm allowed to say that's not around anymore. And um to the manager. They just got bought out, didn't they? They were bought out a couple years ago, but the man that team went on to form Kuitno. Okay. Has started a new company himself. Um, Tim Michaelis was someone else that we worked with. He's on the facility side. Both of them absolutely phenomenal. I know Mike's a mentor at CDL now as well. Um so they just love the concept of the ecosystem and new tech and really drive efficiency in the oil and gas world. Um, so they they were our first adopter, and that helped a lot. It is a true challenge. Every nobody wants to be first, everyone wants to be second. We had the first one out. Uh seconds were second was actually Petrinus. Oh wow, okay. And then we had a series of small and and big guys. Shell came on probably around nine or ten. Okay. Um the had a couple issues with Shell, but overall it went fairly well. They understood that it was a trial unit, and uh and that relationship has continued.

SPEAKER_00 21:05

So um I want to double-click on something else, Ben. Um you you talked about three wide, three deep. I mean, you you're putting words than than what I'm used to, but for me, this is change management, talk to as many people. So, how do you identify who are the innovation or change champion within those companies? Because obviously it's kind of like finding a building around them because they're the people that are going to be the proponent within the company for adoption of new technologies, a new way of doing things. So, how do you find those people?

SPEAKER_03 21:37

It's a great question. I think it's a little bit of a shotgun approach. So, everyone here is probably familiar with the adoption bell curve, and you have your early adopters, they're willing to take the risk. Um, you have to go out, those kind of people are going to be interested about any tech, and and they're not all. Always in the position you need them to be, but getting a champion to your comment, getting a champion in the company is absolutely necessary for any early stage venture. And we just went out and we talked to as many people as possible. So we probably did 20 lunch and learns, 20 or 30 lunch and learns with different producers, engineering companies. You can see the people that the vast majority like the adoption curve are hey, this is great, come up with a product, and then you'll see the one person perk up. Yeah. And it happened countless times where we went into a room and nobody perked up. So I always finished with a question well, who would you recommend? Who do you think we'd be a really good fit for? Who would like to try? And um what I learned is that early majority, so that first half of the um not the early adopters, but then the next stage in that bell curve, they want somebody to go and trial this. They're interested, they just don't want it to be them. So they will introduce you to the person that's gonna go and trial it. It's in their best interest. They're like, hey, I know this guy, he likes to try this stuff. Um, so they're doing half the work and asking that question hey, who can you introduce me to that you think would really like to give this a shot? And then all of a sudden you're leveraging everyone else's network. That helped a lot.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

I mean, that's amazing. And and a lot of companies have adopted this fast follower approach, and most notably Apple is in that category. They don't necessarily invent things, they just make the they just take the things that they already invented and make them the best they could be. Um because uh think about it from the perspective of an oil and gas company. Somebody's gonna take some risk off the table and come and prove out this, and I'll come in as a fast forward, and I already know that it works. It's gonna drive economics for me, it's gonna drive emission reduction. Like, why would I not do it? Yeah. So what Ben, what were the hardest things in year one in year two? Kind of like uh and at what point did you feel like I can breathe now? I we have the momentum, it's just a matter of scaling up. Those are two different questions.

SPEAKER_03 24:25

So uh year one, like we started March of 2019. Okay. And uh so beginning of year, year one. Um, I mentioned we're a couple of three three months or something, four months to build that first prototype. We got it sold after six months, started collecting feedback, and then we just at the end of year one, we we lined up a couple more um sales of models to ship out. And then uh so year one, the other big challenge, we didn't pay ourselves anything. Um, so it we were that mortgage the house, pull all your uh all your savings, and and you're living on a university string budget. Um both my business partner and I had our first children at the same time. He had one literally like two weeks after we started the company. Um, first was three or four months after we started the company. So you're kind of all in, and and that there was a lot of sleepless nights in the beginning. A lot of sleepless nights. The uh, and then COVID hit, and overnight, so we'd gone and we'd sold four units, and we were celebrating like crazy. It was amazing. We were we were profitable, um obviously very lean at the time, just a couple employees, and then oil went negative, and every single one of those orders got canceled in a day. I remember going, Well, looks like we're bankrupt. There it goes. Uh and then it turned around.

SPEAKER_00 26:05

And I think I mean I think this was almost five years to the day because I think it was in April of 2021 when it were well, I mean, it went negative for like a day. Uh but yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 26:18

It was I I remember I was on my way back from uh Fort St. John seeing one of our units up there driving back at the time. And I think I want to say it was March. Oh, maybe it was March, end of March. It was March 19th that the lockdowns came. Yeah, okay. Uh, because it was right after St. Patty's Day, and I still remember getting that call from the first time. And one company had ordered two of them, and I was like, oh shit, that's when it it really uh clued in that they might go. So there's there's a roller coaster, there's always a roller coaster. Um first two years, I thought we were gonna go bankrupt, oh, at least 15 times. Wow. And to that comment of being in, I truly believe, having gone through this process now, that if if you're all in, you find a way through and you're paying attention to customers. It's not that they didn't want the product, they wanted it, they just didn't want it right now. The wells got canceled. So we were able to call them up and work out some terms where they were uh so we'd we'd outlaid some cash to kick off these orders, and you just say, Hey, we're a small company is gonna bankrupt us. Can you pay us some deposit? We'll give you some deposit. Yeah, um, they wanted the product, and then you talk to your suppliers, and you're like, hey, our orders got you know canceled, but now they've agreed it's delayed. So can we push this down the road a little bit? You're still gonna make the sale. Um you need 180 days to you or something like that. And most people end up working with that. Amazing. As to when the stress came off, so we talked about this a little bit beforehand, and um we went through an interesting roller coaster. So WestGen scaled very, very quickly. Uh we were quite successful in the first kind of two, three years. We ended up doing a fundraise to help expand out in the states. And uh we pivoted.

SPEAKER_00 28:20

I Ben, are you comfortable with saying what's the current annual rec uh annual revenue? Or if you're not, that's okay. I'm just trying to get a scale.

SPEAKER_03 28:27

Um I I probably shouldn't throw that out at this point. Uh I can I can talk about I don't mind sharing past revenues because we've done a roller coaster. Sounds good. We were these are off the top of my head. I want to say we were 400k that first year, three, four hundredk that first year. Um, and then we scaled about four or five X for the first three years. Oh wow, okay. Call it two million the second, um like nine million the the third, or three million the second, nine million the third, and then and then things went really well, and and we were up in the 20 to mid-30s. Okay. And we lost our focus. We um we had some differing directions uh on a leadership level. If anyone here hasn't read Good to Great uh by Jim Collins, yeah. Uh like that is an absolute must read. Um and and I I feel that if I were a venture company or a private equity company, I would force everyone's portfolio companies. The hedgehog concept is absolutely what we did wrong. Okay. And we ended up chasing 17 different shiny objects, and we had no clear direction. We started pivoting into a digital strategy and software. Um we weren't we couldn't get any products done. We went from this company that pushed out a first prototype in three months to taking a year and a half to kind of get any iteration done. We got bloated and we were standing still. Um, we did a brand change to hyper focus on clean tech, this new emissions reduction um software, and and that fell quite flat on its face. Um and in June of 24, we were almost bankrupt. We were running out of cash, we were losing money like crazy, um, and and had to pivot again. And I would say it's it's not really until the last uh, so a group of us did a management buyout, we took a controlling stake back at the company uh in June, and and that's where we were. So we started as West Gen, we went to converge the whole roller coaster up straight into the ground, pivoted back as West Gen, and and really, you know, if there's one piece of magic sauce that we had in this rebrand, uh when I stepped into the CEO role, it was focus on your hedgehog concept, just one thing, do it super well, be the best there is at your product. And uh and that went well, and the company turned around, and it wasn't until it took us about six or nine months to six months or so to become profitable again, and uh wasn't until the last kind of year, year and a half, where I've been able to set back and say, hey, I'm actually we're in a good spot, you don't need to be I can breathe. I can breathe. So it it was years. There was a period there when we took on money where um stress came off for a little bit, but then there's the stress performing for uh for your investors.

SPEAKER_00 31:55

So can I just ask you about it about this? Um please. Um I and I completely agree with the hedge conk hedgehog concept. We we have a different saying just because it's a lot more memorable, it's called we call it niches, make riches. So focus on one thing and do it extremely well before you go and expand it, be everything to everybody. Um, but you said that you did a leverage management, like the management buyout. Did you buy out the equity private equity firm? Are they still on a cap table? Kind of like your minority shareholder on the on a capital. Okay. And where did the direction come in to become a software uh company? Like um do you how do you view the investment from the private equity firm as an enabler, as uh maybe a distraction?

SPEAKER_03 32:47

Um this is uh this is a really hard question to answer. So I actually where we went south was mentioned going in where we're coming into the software firm come from. It might have worked if we fully pivoted. Um I had a co-founder at the time, and I think the biggest challenge was um WestGen and the core business plan. That's what I knew, and that's what I wanted to do. And he had a different uh vision as we did the raise in a way to scale, um, which, in fairness, like the scaling that he wanted to do was far above what uh any e-pod would bring from a revenue standpoint. So we tried to go in multiple directions. Where this becomes a challenge is, and and this is why I'm a massive fan of governance. So even though we brought in, or sorry, we did a management buyout and and technically don't need a board or any directors. Um, very first thing I did was reform a board and and a varied board. And where I think we had challenges before is our board was 100% constituted in private equity. And you need, I fully believe you need diversity to be effective. We didn't have people with manufacturing experience, we didn't have people with starting and scaling companies experience. We had one gentleman, um, I should say it wasn't in 100% private equity. We did have one gentleman who came from large cap oil and gas. Um, and and that's one perspective. You talk about how do you get the shells? Well, there's a path to get the shells, and it's a different path than getting the painted ponies that we started in the insignia. We needed someone in small cap oil and gas and engineering. We reformed the board. I think where we broke down was um, I'm trying to be careful because I our our board chair was good and he wasn't being given the information he needed, and he didn't have the variety of opinions to push on him, and it made it very challenging for him to make the decisions, and and uh you know, boards ideally aren't fingers in their their uh direction, but they needed to make some changes, and and we were too late making those changes and and providing that that clear direction. Um I think that really good governance is the thing that solves those problems. My president and CEO of the company, I don't mind sharing that. Uh, between my wife and I, we have a controlling stake. And I first thing I did is set up a board that I'm accountable to, is the most important thing. As long as I think you have, and I'm sorry, I'm pivoting slightly to the second part of it here. I have uh I always talk about two concepts. I call me go and we go. Uh, everyone's got ego, everyone wants to be successful in the world, and me go people are those who need to be in charge and they need to feel important, and it needs to be their way. And we go people are the ones that need to win, but they don't care who scores the winning basket or um or who's captain of that team. And I think that's the most important thing. And when you set up good governing or good governance, I don't need to be and anyone on the leadership team, we don't need to be right individually. We need to be right as a team. Okay. And I have no problem being pivoted off a direction from particularly on my board. Every single person on my board is twice my age with five times the amount of experience. That's fantastic. Let's learn from that. Okay. I I think that is uh you know where we went wrong, following too many directions. Where are we now and what drives us right? Having really clear direction and strong governance, strong board.

SPEAKER_00 37:07

Yeah, I agree. I uh we see this across a lot of companies, and we do a lot of governance work. And and you know, you start with a standard like hey, what are we trying to accomplish? What do we need from the board? Let's build a uh board composition matrix, like what are the skills that we need? Do we have legal financial governance, like whatever, whatever experience we need? And so a lot of companies think that they can figure it out, or they don't have enough independent directors. Um, and then it's like, well, how how do you separate church from state? How do you separate like what's between the company? But uh one of my mentors when I was at Pambina was Jared Sprock, who is the chief operating officer at Pambina. And uh one of the one of the advice that he gave me that it still stuck with me is like we win when people on the team are high-five each other. It's like, well, what does this mean? And like, well, when you're not actually directing the traffic and people are just doing what they need to do, because like it's not the same, greatness is in uh greatness is in the agency of artists. Like, it's kind of like what you do is uh your concept around we go, it's not about me and what I do. Um, and when it came to performance review, it's not about what I did, it's what the team did. How would we win it as a team? So I wish more people would adopt this because that's how you scale company fast is by having people that they're going in the same direction, rowing the boat at the same time at the right cadence, uh like following the same direction. 100%.

SPEAKER_03 38:39

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got for leadership is when you win, make sure it's the team that wins. When you lose, it's you.

SPEAKER_00 38:52

Okay. On me. 100%, 100%. Um so you mentioned that uh um your founder had big bold visions around scaling up or going into the software space, and that potentially could could have provided a much higher upside. Would love to get your perspective around how do you manage founder dynamics? And in the current environment where um I mean you can even have AI as an advisor or AI as a companion. Do you see more companies emerging as as single founder rather than because you know the standard advice you when you when you go to an accelerator is have a co-founder. If you had a business co-founder, have a technical founder. Kind of like what's your perspective?

SPEAKER_03 39:39

So I I have to lay it all out on the table here. I'll be honest, um, I'm very grateful for having a co-founder. I would have never had the guts to go and start a company on my own. I always wanted to start a company and I was terrified of failing. And if there's one thing my my co-founder had, it was an incredible confidence that we are gonna succeed. Yeah, that helped me a lot in those early periods when you're going through the roller coaster and you're failing, and um and help me keep going. Um I do think that managing founder dynamics, it's really hard. And and my co-founder's off with a different company now, and and that's quite successful for him, and it's it's a more established company. I think there's different styles of leadership that are needed in different stages of a company. And it's really hard when you're starting a company and two people want to both start a company to figure out between the two of you, because I think it's rare that it's both of you, uh, who's got that skill set for the startup and who's got the scale up and and what stage of the company. Um you guys have assigned pathways.

SPEAKER_00 41:14

I'm accountable for this, you're accountable for this, or it was kind of like, well, we just gotta figure it out together.

SPEAKER_03 41:20

Uh, we did have assigned accountabilities. We did have assigned accountabilities. Uh the he was very much more structured in how he wanted uh to approach things and process. And I would actually say that to anyone listening, the person you want starting and scaling the company isn't the structured person, it's the person. There's uh I I um not to name drop, went to school and was friends with Michelle Romano.

SPEAKER_02 41:57

Oh yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 41:59

So one of the the Dragon's Den ladies, awesome lady, and and one of the things that I remember chatting with her about uh kind of right after her stuff started to take off was scrappiness that you need when you start a company. Um, you're not doing research, you get out there, you fail, you take some punches, you get up, you win no matter what. And that's the attitude that you need for the startup and scale up. And then there's this second perspective of building in process that I think comes when you when you break maybe 50 people and uh and you have consistent revenue in that you know over 15 to 20 million dollars. Um and that and that's when you can start to move to that. So coming back to your original question, and I hope this answers it. If you've got two founders, the I don't like the Apple example because Steve Jobs was fantastic, but if you have the the visionary and the Steve Wozniak, the engineer, you're almost better with that engineer in the beginning, starting and scaling. Um Jobs did get down and you saw the nitty-gritty details, but but that that high-level visionary um almost needs to, I think, step back into supporting the business role. And then they are, if you want to split roles up, true president, true CEO, they're a great CEO. They don't belong in the day to day in the in the beginning of the company. Okay, where you need the president or operations guy. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 43:52

So does it so um when you guys were like, for example, discussing of the the vision or uh um, I mean Vision high level if you go down uh a level to operations or execution. Um how what what was the process? Just kind of like getting the room and um talking through it. Um yeah, like how do you manage conflict? How do you manage collect? How do you drive to clarity? How do you how do you drive to precision? No, no, we're gonna focus on this. We're going starting with like a merging exercise and working backwards, like if this is the vision where we where we're going, these are the steps that we need to execute on to get there. Um what what what is your process?

SPEAKER_03 44:33

Yeah, I'd say that during that period, that's what we did not do well, and a lot of that takes a lot of growth as leadership. The reason Converge failed, and the reason Westgen succeeds now is we did not drive alignment as Converge through the leadership team at all. Five different people call them C-suite, six different people on the C-suite, and uh you had two or three camps, and and there was no consistency. Um one of the actually here's here's the last piece of real advice I will throw out there as like this is as important as fail fast and the hedgehog concept. Get a good executive coach that teeks teach you how to be a leader. Absolutely like for us and the team. It was amazing. We had an employee net promoter score. We were terrible. We were minus 44 one year um on ENPS, one year after bringing us in, I think we were 81. Wow, plus 81. So it went from like bottom 10, 15% to top 1% in 12 months. Um, and it was just implementing these these different leadership um techniques that that this executive puts out and our alignment now. So the secret is alignment, and and we go and um we have discussions where they're very round table. You beat up, we have a designated no person. So if everyone's in alignment, uh every meeting will pick a designated no person, and that person has to be the devil's advocate and tear ideas apart, and we try and beat up everything, and then we walk out. And at the end of the day, I get a veto, yes, and I'm never gonna pull that veto card unless it's absolutely absolutely positive, and everyone's gonna get gonna get in why. And they need to leave feeling that I didn't get my way, and I understand why that he's got this view, I know why he made the decision. I might not agree with it, I know why. And that drives alignment. And I think when it makes sense that not everybody wanted, you still have everybody on board, and everybody leaves that meeting and they uh chase the same direction. And we didn't do that before.

SPEAKER_00 47:16

It's interesting that you say this. I mean, I've I've worked with some pretty big company, and and I have yet to see a big company know how to set goals and drive alignment well. Um, and so I mean we would provocatively say when we do risk management work, we say, hey, your biggest risk is capital allocation. Where are you going to allocate your capital? And that's really the role of the CEO in terms of where that capital is going to get allocated. And so, one way for us to kind of coach our clients is like, uh, are you familiar with OKRs?

SPEAKER_03 47:50

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:51

Okay. So we've adopted from technology because I mean, this is John Dover inventing for Intel, but this is the best way to create clarity and alignment in terms of where you're going. What are your objectives? What are the key results? How does each member contribute to this? And then we use a lasting suite of products we still use like Atlas and Confluence for the OKRS, because then you have instantaneous clarity. I'm working on this, this is how my contribution contributes to the overall success of this result or this objective. Um, but a lot of companies don't do it well. Like, well, the fastest, the best outcome you can derive is if you go from point A to point B, is to take the shortest path rather than zigzag along the way.

SPEAKER_03 48:35

Do we do we have two minutes for a quickly? Please, yeah. As we came out of the challenges, I was meeting with uh a mentor of mine um talking about frustrations at Converge, uh a gentleman named Steve Glanville, he's the uh CEO over at STEP. Okay. And uh and when I ended up stepping into the CEO role at Westgen and had some more control over the uh the call it corporate policy and what we were gonna do, he handed me a book called Four Disciplines of Execution. Okay. And he said, So this is it's kind of like OKR, structured OKRs. OKRs on the rope. Um handed me the book, he's like, this is the reason Step has done so well. Do this. We've implemented this through the company. And so I had the entire leadership read the book, re-implemented it. Um, there was a product that we'd been working on to try and push out for two years, a solar-only EPOS, only air compressor package. Couldn't get it right, couldn't get it right, couldn't get it right. Implemented this 40x method. Um, like in six months, we had multiple iterations, the whole thing went out, and it's phenomenal. So it's just like OKRs, you you start top down, you set your strategy, and you go bottom up, and every single team has to develop their own goal uh as to how they're going to help the company accomplish that strategy. We have full buy-in through a team, we we meet. Um, every team has weekly meetings that they talk about how things are going. There's scoreboards that are open to the team. We have fun games and we hit our goals. Nice. It's been awesome on driving alignment. So, Keith, thank you. I owe you a huge uh big shout-out.

unknown 50:43

Yeah, appreciation here. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 50:46

Uh Ben, I know we had we had time, but our conversation has been uh fantastic. Uh I wanted to thank you for for the time. Um, if people want to follow you, um, where do they follow you? Do they look you up on LinkedIn? How do they get in touch? If if a if a prospective customer is listening, they just pick up the phone and say, hey Ben, I need this from my from my well sites.

SPEAKER_03 51:10

Yes, sir. So there's there's a a number with Westgen on our website, but the best way to get a hold of me is LinkedIn. You can follow me there. Um I've been uh actually from feedback from a group in our company started doing weekly energy updates. So I'd love some feedback on how those are going. I'm trying to get those perfected. So if anyone's interested, hop on LinkedIn, trying to release those on Friday and shoot some uh feedback on what I can do to improve in the comments. That's awesome, Ben. Amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks, thanks everyone for listening.

SPEAKER_00 51:43

Pleasure.