Crowley Carbon aims to simplify methods of decarbonization for the world’s largest and complex enterprises, such as business, transport, energy and supply chain through strong engineering, data science and experienced SMEs.
Nathan Latka sat down with CEO Norman Crowley to identify the challenges Crowley has to overcome to make a more energy efficient company using technology.
- 4000 plants
- Broke 100mm in revenue
- Introduced 2 new verticals: food and cars
Nathan Latka (00:00):
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 the 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 ready to take us to the top?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (00:17):
Yeah.
Nathan Latka (00:18):
Okay. So people can read more about you at crowleycarbon.com. What’s your main business today though?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (00:26):
Our main business is the business of sorting climate change. And if you look at climate change, there are three things that you need to do. It all centers around energy, transport, and food. And there are 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 100 million dollars each annually, which is a lot of dough.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (01:02):
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 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, classic cars. So we do a good line in electric classic cars. And so that business thankfully is booming. And then for food, we’re doing a startup in the area of food and particularly area of cellag, or cellular agriculture.
Nathan Latka (01:53):
So are there software components to any of these businesses? The car is obviously heavy hardware, it sounds like.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (01:59):
Yeah. 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. And our platform in that space is called Clarity because it gives you clarity as to what’s going on in your factory.
Nathan Latka (02:44):
So let’s talk more about Clarity. So help me understand, I guess it sounds like you’re selling directly to the manufacturing plant?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (02:52):
Yeah. And so 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. 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 are 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.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (03:30):
So what we do is we give you this monster window into what’s happening. So we have sensors plugged into everything. So these super low cost sensors that have a five-year battery, five kilometer range, 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? 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 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.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (04:11):
And so what it does ultimately is it makes a kind of slightly dumb factory, 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 shared savings. So if we improve the situation, then either you can pay for the software, or you can just split the savings with us.
Nathan Latka (04:36):
That’s a very risky model because I imagine you find yourself in a lot of debates about attribution. Did your software save the energy or did they do something not related to that saved the energy?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (04:46):
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-
Nathan Latka (04:54):
Is that right? The software’s been around for 10 years?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (04:56):
Yeah. It’s been around for 10 years. It’s getting slicker and slicker all the time, but it’s been around a long time. It’s great. 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 we’re operating in 23 countries.
Nathan Latka (05:14):
That’s impressive. So Norman, I want to hyperfocus. You’re doing so much, but this is really interesting to me. So 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’s going to play you a flat software fee, what are they typically paying you on average for that?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (05:40):
My on average between per factory, about 20 to 35,000 bucks. And the reason they’re doing that is because they’re saving kind of 10X that otherwise you wouldn’t do it. And it’s much more-
Nathan Latka (05:54):
That’s 25 grand annually?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (05:57):
Annually. And look, some are paying. If we are saving somebody quite a lot of money, they could be paying us a quarter of a million annually, because that’s the average price is 20 to 30. But if you have a very big factory or if you’re saving them a lot of money, then it could end up being a lot of money.
Nathan Latka (06:13):
Norman, can I ask what your biggest contract is? What is the manufacturer you’ve saved the most for paying you every year?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (06:21):
Yeah. We’re not allowed to say who it is, but it’s a very large food company and we’re saving them 100 million annually and they’re paying us about three million annually.
Nathan Latka (06:31):
Wow. Fascinating. Okay. Yeah.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (06:33):
That’s not in one factory by the way. That’s in multiple factories around the world.
Nathan Latka (06:36):
How many out, of curiosity?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (06:40):
At last count, about 34, 35. Yeah.
Nathan Latka (06:43):
And so how many factories today around the world do you have at least one of your IOT devices installed then?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (06:48):
At least one. Now actually about 4,000. Yeah. So quite a lot of factories. Yeah.
Nathan Latka (06:56):
Wow. Now is it 4,000 factories or 4,000 IOT devices installed across all your factories?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (07:01):
No, no. 4,000 factories. Yeah.
Nathan Latka (07:02):
How many IOT devices?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (07:04):
I couldn’t answer right today, but it’s in the millions. Because it’s not just our IOT devices. 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. And then you add your own. And so in fact, let me, this is a video podcast, right?
Nathan Latka (07:27):
Yeah. Yeah. Throw it up. You got something you want to throw on the screen?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (07:29):
Yeah. So just give me one sec. I’m going to get a prop for this.
Nathan Latka (07:32):
I love a good prop.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (07:35):
So these the sensors. These are pretty cool. Right? Can you see that?
Nathan Latka (07:39):
Wow. Yeah. For those of you listening only to audio, what you’re seeing here, it’s smaller than the size of your palm of your hand. It looks like a very small black, almost battery pack kind of.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (07:48):
Yeah. And then they’re magnetic. So if you want to install one, you just do that.
Nathan Latka (07:52):
Oh wow.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (07:52):
Just click onto whatever piece of machinery. And I’ll just show you. So there’s a QR code then on the top of it. So you want to, and they’re all kinds of sensors. So vibration sensors, temperature sensors, flow, you name it. And you can install like 250 sensors a day in a factory. So 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.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (08:24):
And then the big trick then is it’s not really a tech problem after that, it’s a people problem. Because then, you can do all of this in a factory and make it all smarter and that’ll 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, or she wants, energy savings and throughput savings and quality improvements.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (08:52):
But at a factory level, a lot of the time they want just, “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.” Or, “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 to kind of predict a break. And so the thing that the CEO wants is very different from the thing the finance director wants, is very different from the plant manager, is very different, engineers a lot of the time just want to work with cool cutting edge shit. And so everybody wants a slightly different thing and it took us a long time to figure out how do we appeal to everybody? How does everybody get a win out of this? Because just because the guy, the CEO, is saving a fortune doesn’t mean you got a win. That just means somebody is saving a lot of money. We find in order for this to become ubiquitous, everybody has to get a win.
Nathan Latka (09:50):
Yep. No, it makes good sense. Let me break into some economics here real quick. That device you just showed me. What does that cost you to produce?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (09:58):
It depends on the sensor. It’s rangy, right. So it could be as low as 30 bucks and it could be as high as five grand.
Nathan Latka (10:06):
But the one you showed me, just the one you showed me, what was that?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (10:11):
One of those was about 30 bucks. One of those was about 80 bucks, cost of production.
Nathan Latka (10:14):
Interesting.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (10:15):
And then. Yeah?
Nathan Latka (10:16):
Do you subsidize that? If you know someone’s going to pay you a lot on a software fee, will you subsidize the hardware installation?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (10:22):
Or we say, because meters can be a capital expense and guys can struggle to get CapEx. We say to people, “Hey look, why don’t you pay us three bucks a month for that sensor? And it’s saving you a hundred bucks a month. So you’re happy. We’re happy.” And so we can do it as sensor as a service as well.
Nathan Latka (10:40):
Are you doing loans there? Is there a finance product there? Are you making a-
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (10:43):
No, it’s kind of just we use our own balance sheet to put those in.
Nathan Latka (10:47):
Interesting. Okay.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (10:48):
We get paid forever. Yeah.
Nathan Latka (10:50):
Take me back to year one, 2011. You said if it’s been around for 10 years, do you remember how much revenue you did way back then, year one?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (10:56):
Yeah, we probably did about 150,000 bucks the first year.
Nathan Latka (11:02):
How did that feel?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (11:04):
Look, it’s scary. This is my fifth company. So they’re all scary in the beginning because you don’t know what you’re doing, and you’re just hoping that it’s all going to be okay, and that somebody will buy it off you. And then it’s that maturity curve to today where I can only tell you today what went on by looking at our systems. I have no idea what happened, and who met who, or what their feedback was. So it goes from you’re emptying the bins the first year and taking out the garbage to today, which is that you’re just hearing it all anecdotally from HubSpot or whatever.
Nathan Latka (11:42):
How many folks are on the team today, full time?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (11:46):
In the energy division, it’s about 180. All in across everything we have, close to 1,000.
Nathan Latka (11:52):
So you have all these businesses, the car business, the food business, the energy business. Is this all on one cap table, it’s all one business?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (11:59):
Yeah. It’s called Cool Planet Group. And it’s all to do with cooling the planet and we have our investor group, we’re very lucky.
Nathan Latka (12:08):
How much have you raised?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (12:11):
Not that much actually relatively speaking. Probably about 38 million bucks. So up until the beginning of 2020, we’d only raised five million bucks into the business and we were in 23 countries. So I think raising money is not… I know there’s a path at the moment that everyone does Series A, Series B and all of that, but I would encourage people not to put a whole lot of stead in that.
Nathan Latka (12:39):
So you just recently did a $33 million round that it sounds like, huh?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (12:43):
That’s right. Yeah. So we took on a strategic partner, which is a French group called T2. And they’re a climate change, or what’s called an energy transition fund, and they’re a billion dollar energy transition fund. And they are fantastic because it’s one thing just to get money from a bank, be it a venture capitalist or an investment bank. It’s another thing to have a partner and somebody who believes in the mission. And this is very much a believe in the mission type business. Yes, we worry about making money, but we worry much more about the mission.
Nathan Latka (13:19):
Well, yeah, let’s go back to the money real quick. Do you remember the year you passed a million in revenue?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (13:24):
Yeah, I would say it was year three.
Nathan Latka (13:29):
Okay. So about like 2013, 2014.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (13:30):
Then it kind of exploded. And it was kind of nascent enough until 2015, probably went to five million. And then from 2015 on, it just exploded because we kind of figured out some of the secret sauce. And then it was tripling every year and fairly consistently for a long time.
Nathan Latka (13:51):
And what are you at today?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (13:54):
We don’t disclose that, but it’s big. It’s in the hundreds of millions.
Nathan Latka (13:58):
Yep. I mean we can take 4,000 factories times that $25,000 hour? That’s a hundred-
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (14:04):
Some are getting it on the cheap, some of them are getting it expensive.
Nathan Latka (14:08):
Okay. But if we only, because again you have three business sectors, I really want to focus this podcast just on the one, the energy one, we talk about the software. Is that one alone, 4,000 factories, times $25,000 ACV, that’s $100 million in revenue. Is that one alone doing more than $100 million?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (14:24):
Yeah it is more than $10 million or revenues will be north of $10 million.
Nathan Latka (14:27):
You’re almost shy to admit that a little bit.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (14:31):
Well, the reason we don’t is we enjoy not being publicly quoted. And also what we find is that it’s better for people not to really understand the breadth of everything that’s going on, it’s simpler. Unless you’re an investor.
Nathan Latka (14:46):
Why is that? I mean, when people see what you’re doing and go, “wow, he really is cooling the planet. He’s at 4,000 factories. They pay 30 grand average. I mean, holy cow, this is incredible.”
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (14:57):
But what we find is that if competitors understand every single thing you’re doing and your margins on everything, then that’s not so good.
Nathan Latka (15:05):
But even if they knew that, they’re not Norman probably.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (15:09):
No. And I’m not worried about them really catching up. I’m more worried about them competing with us on a bid and knowing what margin is getting and all that kind of stuff. And also I floated a company in the mid 2000 and I did my quarterly reporting and my revenue disclosures and all of that. And I much prefer that our group is not on the market and our goal is not to float this business.
Nathan Latka (15:36):
Norman is scarred for life after his foray into public markets, he will never talk about metrics publicly again.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (15:45):
No, we don’t. We disclose things like how many tons of carbon we’re saving and things like that. But that’s it.
Nathan Latka (15:52):
Well, I think these numbers tell a more compelling story. So the ones you’ve chosen to share, I want to thank you for sharing those.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (16:00):
Yeah.
Nathan Latka (16:01):
So talk to me a little bit about, are there synergies on how these three different businesses work together? Like Elon Musk, right? There’s a battery business and then you do solar tiles and then it also powers Tesla batteries. Do you have these synergies?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (16:14):
Yeah. We have crazy synergies. In some parts, we have crazy synergies and I’ll explain those. In other parts, they don’t connect at all. Like if somebody spends a million bucks for an electric classic car, then there’s no tie-in to energy whatsoever. But in the bigger parts of our vehicle business… So if you think about putting an electric vehicle into industry, then it has to have a charging infrastructure that we deeply understand, it has to have solar, well it should have solar to supply some of the power. And then also if we’re doing your electric vehicles, what’s the point in having EVs, if you don’t have an efficient plant as well, or an efficient office? So they dovetail very closely.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (16:54):
And what we’re building now is what we call ETAAs. So E-T-A-A-S. So is energy and transport as a service. So you get the vehicle office for a service fee and that includes the energy that is supplied to the vehicle. And also because on top of that, we can get the vehicle tagged as what’s called a VPP, a virtual power plant. So when the vehicle is plugged in, it can help the balance, the grid as well.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (17:22):
And so that’s the first area where they’re all fully integrated. And then where food comes in is if you’re doing cellular agriculture, which is the control of a bioreactor to create me for instance, well, we happen to understand controlling bioreactors deeply because we have a lot of brewing customers and a lot of pharmaceutical customers. And so they tie together very well actually.
Nathan Latka (17:45):
Yeah, that just makes tons of sense. Now, if you look at, don’t disclose the actual revenue figure, but if you take the whole pie of all three businesses, what percent of revenue comes from each if you had to break it down?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (17:56):
It’s all about energy at the moment. Cellular agriculture is a startup, almost no revenue. And then cars is smaller, but is coming up very quickly. EVs are, as you know are exploding at the moment. Completely exploding.
Nathan Latka (18:12):
I see. Got it. So your business that we’ve talked about today, the manufacturing, one with the physical devices, that is your 99% of your revenue today, the other two are really startups.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (18:19):
Yeah, yeah. I can disclose in cars. Cars will do… Well, next year is easier. Cars will do about 70 million next year. This year, it’ll do, hard to tell with the pandemic, but it’ll probably do something like 15 or 20. That’ll give you a flavor for the speed of growth.
Nathan Latka (18:40):
Yeah. That’s good growth. What did it do last year, the car business?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (18:44):
Oh. Well 2019, it was a startup with 2 people and a shed-
Nathan Latka (18:47):
2020 though.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (18:49):
So 2020, it did about $2 million, back our way.
Nathan Latka (18:53):
And how do you get to the $2 million? Is that if you add up the value of the cars or is that actually your margin?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (18:59):
No, no, it’s if you add up the cars. It’s not that many cars last year.
Nathan Latka (19:03):
How many cars?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (19:03):
So the curve is scary. Last year would’ve been about 20 cars.
Nathan Latka (19:11):
I mean, that’s the fun number right, is when you can see a plan where you’re putting 100,000 cars on the market every quarter.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (19:18):
Yeah. Yeah. The funny… Well, I was about to use terrible English and say the funner number. The number that gets us properly excited about cars now is the software, that transport as a service, energy as a service number. So the recurring income on that is, it looks like it’s going to be, everything combined looks like it’s going to be about 35,000 bucks per vehicle per year, all in. So it’s kind of serious money and that’s quite exciting. So it’s much more money than you can charge just for a vehicle on its own. Like if you were leasing a Tesla, it wouldn’t be that kind of money. This is when you combine energy and vehicle together as a service, the revenue goes through roof.
Nathan Latka (20:08):
I’m confused. So I’m actually leasing a Tesla here in LA. It’s $7,000 for the year then I have to give it back at the end of the year. How do you make $35,000 extra for me if you’re spending all that.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (20:19):
I’ll explain. Yeah. We’re giving away a slight secret sauce here, but let’s go for it. So first of all, there’s the vehicle itself. Then there’s the amount of energy that that vehicle is saving. So fuel bill for a vehicle could be 20,000 bucks a year, whereas fuel bill for an EV is 2,000 bucks a year. Then there’s the energy efficiency in the plant bolted onto that. And then the final one, which is the real secret sauce, is you can get paid about 7,000 bucks a year for the vehicle supporting the grid. Just one vehicle. So when you add-
Nathan Latka (21:01):
Is that that virtual power plant idea that you talked about? These are little floating power plants everywhere.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (21:07):
Well, it’s crazy, right? Because the vehicle’s not being used a lot of the time and then you can plug it in. And then in the particular case of the 30, 40,000 bucks, the energy efficiency thing in some industries, the fact that the vehicle becomes electric, as opposed to a hydrocarbon vehicle, ends up saving like 20,000 bucks a year on something like air extraction, for example. So in a lot of industries that carbon monoxide or that NOx has to be stocked out of somewhere. And then if you are saving that as well, then it’s massively profitable.
Nathan Latka (21:38):
Yeah. Norman, this is great. I could talk to you for a long time. Let me hyperfocus on one or two last questions before I wrap up. On the IOT business, where you install the thing in the 4,000 manufacturing plants. One of the things I always talk to SaaS founders about is if you have an IOT play, usually your net dollar retention once the installation happens, goes through the roof, nobody churns. Are you seeing the same pattern? Do you have higher than 120% net dollar retention?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (22:00):
Yeah. We have greater net dollar retention every year, some negative churn. And the reason for that, there’s good news, bad news. The bad news is getting a customer in our industry is very difficult because you have to install stuff. You can’t just convince them to use your CRM. So that, the sales cycle is way longer, like nine months, between four and nine months and depending on scale of customer. Then the good news is because the platform is good, they don’t go anywhere. Because the difficulty of going somewhere else is just too difficult. And so it’s good and bad, but definitely time to deal or proof of value is long.
Nathan Latka (22:43):
And then is your number one way to drive upsell revenue, like you did with your biggest customer paying $3 million per year, really just selling addition them, installing your hardware and additional plants?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (22:51):
Yeah. More plants, more hardware, more value actually. Because the more you can save them, the more sensors they’ll put in because the more they’ll want to save. And that’s getting very big. And our team who run that are exceptional. They’re serious industrial engineers who really know where they can add value and you’re talking kind of PhDs who really understand process and stuff. And what we find in competitors is they can give you data in a bucket, but they can’t tell you what it means. And the customer wants to know what it means, they need to know what it means. And so that’s where you need people and AI and stuff as well. If you don’t have that, you don’t have anything.
Nathan Latka (23:35):
Norman, before we wrap up with the famous five last year, how many pounds of CO2 did you take out of the air?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (23:41):
You know what? It’s kind of embarrassing, but without going on our website, I can’t tell you that. And a couple of years ago, and I’ve stopped looking, a couple of years ago, it was the same amount of CO2 as all of Dublin, which is the capital of Ireland, uses. Yeah. So because someone-
Nathan Latka (23:57):
Why don’t you publish? I mean, isn’t the exciting number-
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (23:58):
It’s on our website, but yeah. It’s on our website.
Nathan Latka (24:01):
You just don’t know it off the top of your head?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (24:03):
I just don’t know. I stopped looking.
Nathan Latka (24:05):
I see. I see.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (24:06):
And also we haven’t integrated cars into it yet, so it’s probably not as accurate as you should be right now.
Nathan Latka (24:11):
Got it. All right, Norman, let’s wrap up with a famous five. Number one, your favorite book.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (24:16):
Oh, Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh.
Nathan Latka (24:20):
Number two, is there CEO you’re following or studying?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (24:23):
Yeah. Elon Musk. Nobody else.
Nathan Latka (24:25):
Number three, what’s your favorite online tool for building Crowley Carbon?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (24:30):
Currently HubSpot, but it changes.
Nathan Latka (24:32):
Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (24:36):
I’m pretty good now. I get about eight.
Nathan Latka (24:38):
That’s good. And what’s your situation? Married, single, kids?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (24:40):
Meditation, man. Meditation. I think that’s the key.
Nathan Latka (24:43):
Are you married? Single? Kids? What’s your situation?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (24:46):
Married with two kids grown up, 20 and 22.
Nathan Latka (24:52):
Wow. And how old are you?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (24:52):
50.
Nathan Latka (24:52):
50. Last question-
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (24:54):
Feel like 19, but 50.
Nathan Latka (24:55):
We love that. Last question, what’s something you wish you knew when you were 20?
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (25:00):
Say that again?
Nathan Latka (25:01):
Something you wish you knew when you were 20.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (25:04):
Just, well, a couple of things. Meditation. Exercise, diet, food, meditation are things the things, right? If you do that all the time, then everything else works.
Nathan Latka (25:18):
Guys, Crowley Carbon launched in 2011 has a very interesting play of a physical installation of an IOT device to save manufacturing plants energy. Then they sell software on the backside of that. Today, there are over 4,000 plants. Each plant pays between call it 20 and $30,000 a year on average. The largest plant pays, or the largest group pays $3 million per year because they’re saving them so much time, energy, and money. They broke a million dollars in revenue in 2013, $5 million in 2015. And now just this business line, more than $100 million dollars in revenue as he starts to reinvest into two new lines of business in food and cars, which sound very exciting. Norman, thank you for taking us to the top.
Crowley Carbon CEO Norman Crowley (25:55):
Thanks.
