How Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley grew Crowley Carbon to $155.8M revenue and 4K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is norman crowley he founded and sold three businesses for over 750 million dollars before the age of 40. he's on a mission to cool the planet and is the current founder of an energy efficient company an electric car manufacturing company and a solar energy company norman you're ready to take it to the top yeah okay so people can read more about you at crowleycarbon.com what's your main business today though um our main business is the business of starting climate change and if you look at climate change there are three things that you need to do uh it all centers around energy transport and food and they're the three areas that we work in so energy energy efficiency the world wastes three of the four billion dollars that we spend every year on energy so solar is great and wind is great but how about we stop wasting it to begin with so that side of our business works with some of the biggest companies in the world saves them up to a hundred million dollars each annually which is a lot of dough um and then our car business is interesting so rather than trying to do what elon is doing and make electric cars what we do is we retrofit specialist vehicles so of the there's over 1.4 billion vehicles in the world there's over 60 million new vehicles every year so if we're going to wait for all of them to become teslas it's going to take about 100 years and so what we do is we retrofit things like mining support vehicles and classic cars so we do a good line in electric classic cars and so that business thankfully is booming um and then for food we're doing a startup in the area of food uh in particular the area of selag or cellular agriculture and are any of these so are there software components to any of these businesses or is it the car is obviously heavy hardware it sounds like yeah so software is so in our energy efficiency business it's all about software there's a thing in the world of energy efficiency or in the world of industry called industry 4.0 i don't know if you've come across that it's basically it's the current evolution of industry and everything now in industry is going digital from 3d printing to cellular agriculture and in order to make that work you need software basically in order to make it work properly you need to understand everything that's going on in your factory and how you understand that is with this internet of things um and our platform in that space is called clarity and because it gives you clarity as to what's going on in your factory yeah yep so let's talk more about clarity um so help me understand i guess it sounds like you're selling directly to the manufacturing plant yeah yeah and and so it's it's like if you think about a manufacturing plant it's just full of components full of machinery clunking away all the time making things and that could be anything from a pharmaceutical plant all the way through to a food plant right um and the thing all the time is you have no idea what's going on there are machines everywhere and they're up to all sorts of things and so if a machine decides to slightly change how it's operating that could mean that you're losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a day but in energy terms for instance but you don't know that or it might be affecting the throughput in the factory or the quality of what's coming out of the factory and so what we do is we give you this monster window into what's happening so we have sensors plugged in to everything so these super low cost sensors that have a five-year battery five kilometer range and that you can click onto anything in a factory and then once you have those the next thing you need is well then you have a huge amount of data so then what do you do with all this data right so that's where artificial intelligence comes into play machine learning comes into play but also it's where kind of people come into play because like you can have all the smarts in the world but in the end you just need people looking at it as well and making decisions and so what it does ultimately is it makes a kind of slightly dumb factory um very smart very quick and you have to figure out how to do that in an economic way you can't just say well i'm going to charge you a fortune for doing this so the way our one works most of the time is what we call share savings so if we improve the situation and then either you can pay for the software or you can just split the savings with us that's a very risky model because i imagine you find yourself in a lot of debates about attribution did you your software save the energy or did they do something not related to that save the energy right yeah yeah it's a great observation well after 10 years we've kind of figured out how the contract works and so what we do is we basically say is that right the software's been around for 10 years yeah it's been around for 10 years it's getting slicker and sicker all the time but um it's um it's been around a long time and like some of the biggest it's great like some of the biggest companies in the world use it like three of the top four food companies seven of the top eight pharmaceutical companies and and we're operating in kind of 23 countries this is impressive so norman let's let's really i want to hyperfocus you're doing so much but this is really interesting to me so i want to i'm going to naturally ask questions about this so there's a two-part play here there's an iot play where you have to sell an upfront hardware expense to get the monitors installed and there's an upsell related to the ongoing fee whether it's a cut of billing saved or a flat software fee if a manufacturer is going to pay you a fat a flat software fee what are they typically paying you on average for that i'm on average between per factory about 20 to 35 000 bucks um and the reason they're doing that is because they're saving kind of 10x that otherwise you wouldn't do it you know and it's much more like 25 grand annually annually yeah yeah and like look some are paying if we're saving somebody quite a lot of money they could be paying us a quarter of a million annually you know because like that's the average price is 20 to 30 but like if you have a very big factory or if you're saving them a lot of money then it it could end up being a lot of money norman can i ask what your biggest contract is what is your most you know the the con the manufacturer you've saved the most for paying you every year yeah we're we're not allowed to say who it is but it's a very large food company and we're saving them a hundred million annually and they're paying us about three million annually wow fascinating okay yeah that's more than one factory by the way that's in multiple factories around the world how many out of curiosity um it at last count about 34 35 yeah and so how many factories today around the world do you have at least one of your iot devices installed then uh at least one now actually about four thousand yeah and so quite a lot of factories yeah wow so there's now is it four thousand factories or four thousand iot devices installed across all your phones no no 4 000 factories how many iot devices uh i couldn't answer right today but it's in the millions yeah because it's not just our iot devices it's actually when we plug in we plug into all of their devices as well so you could get in one factory you could get 70 000 data points off them right and then you add your own yeah um and so in fact um let me we're this is a video podcast right yeah yeah throw it up you got something you want to throw up on yeah so just give me one second i'm gonna get a prop for this hello i love i love a good problem so these are the sensors these are pretty cool right can you see that well yeah for those for those of you listening only to audio what you're seeing here it's about it's smaller than the size of your palm of your hand it looks like a very small black almost battery pack kind of yeah and then they're magnetic so if you want to install one you just do that oh wow click on to whatever piece of machinery and i'll just show you so there's a qr code then on the top of it so if you wanna and they're they're all kinds of sensors so vibration sensors temperature sensors flow you name it and you can install like 250 sensors a day right in a factory so it's pretty it's pretty phenomenal and so you can make a very old clunky factory with no data available and within a day you can know everything that's going on you know and then the big trick then is it's not really a tech problem after that it's a people problem right because then you've gotta you can do all of this in a factory and make it all smarter and alert people to problems but the people who run that factory have to really engage with you and a lot of the time what happens is the ceo of the whole group he wants like or she wants energy savings and true put savings and quality improvements but at a factory level a lot of time they want just can i can this do my esg report so i can say how much carbon i'm saving so i don't have to spend saturday night working on these stupid reports all the time are can it you know can it stop something from breaking down so i don't get a call on friday night just when i'm heading for beers and so kind...