James Wagoner is the CEO at Joule Case. He’s passionate about impacting lives through new technology. When he was coming out of college, he saw the need for a better system to provide power to heavy machinery rather than using gasoline. James wanted to find a solution that was better for the environment and more efficient for the companies. James joins host Valerie Cobb to talk about how he found his way out of the maze of revenue and some of his tips for others to grow their business successfully.

Takeaways:

• To get out of the revenue maze, you want to start with one thing and make that your product market fit. Once you have that, you can narrow down what you can do.
• Gaining the trust of current and potential clients is how you can make deals work for you. Sometimes you have to demonstrate that you are worthy of their trust.
• The electric power space is gaining popularity as an alternative to using gasoline and hydrogen power.
• You can expand your hold in your market area once you are sure about what your company does and the goal of the company.
• When running a business, expect things to take longer and cost more money than you were expecting.
• Don’t go into your business thinking you know everything or be too proud. Approach each situation as an opportunity to learn.
• Have a growth mindset and be open and honest with yourself and your clients. You will see the benefit for your business.

Quote of the Show:

23:47 “Come in with this curiosity mindset, with a growth mindset. Come into any type of conversation open and willing to ask questions and also offer up your knowledge.”

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameswagoner3/
• Website: https://joulecase.com/

Ways to Tune In:

• Amazon Music – https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7d80f727-4d62-4d16-a0c9-96ec7bda6c6b/the-revenue-maze
• Apple Podcast –
• Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/6azAXp0qFgrmjcql0jeJM8
• Google Podcast – https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucmV2ZW51ZW1hemUuY29tL2ZlZWQueG1s
• YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzoHMvtZIDc

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

Powering Up Your Company – James Wagoner – The Revenue Maze

I have a great guest. I’m excited. He has won awards, got a patent, cares about the environment, which we’re all way into, and is passionate about impacting lives with technology. He’s the CEO at Joule Case. Welcome, James Wagoner.

Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

I love that you’re here. There are many exciting things that you are doing. We’re going to get to that, but we always have to start the revenue maze. It’s the same way for the readers with our thesis of what’s one thing that you can tell the audience that will help them get out of the revenue maze?

It’s not revolutionary, but if you are in the revenue maze, you’re going to understand that it is to start with one thing and find that product market fit, and then you can expand. You might have to cast that net wide in terms of finding that product market fit. Once you find that and you know what that is, and if you’re wondering, “Maybe I have it here,” I’m here to tell you, don’t. It’s very obvious when you do. When customers come knocking at your door, asking for stuff that you didn’t even know you’d reached out to money like that, you have the product market fit. That’s when you can narrow that wide net and dive in deep to that focused vertical that has that fit and then go from there.

Sometimes we underestimate that clause product market fit. I’ve worked with getting on board SDRs and different things for different companies. The first thing they’ll ask you is if there’s a good product market fit, then we can take off. If it’s muddled, it could be a long time. What are a couple of things that you’ve done to help with getting that product market fit?

Joule Case has been on a very long journey. We were founded in 2015. There’s a big vision of building the standard product platform for all of your energy needs, broadly speaking, but then how do you go from there to customers and revenue? We had some pretty exciting customers at music festivals and events. We did a big, live demonstration in front of AEG Live, live music, and Insomniac, the biggest players around events. That was February 2020. We all know how that all went and we had to find another customer that was willing to pay for a Joule Case product.

We’ve had to find our product market fit twice, where, “Now what do you do when there are no events and the world changes?” What we’ve been able to do is cast that net wide again and then find that our product fits very well in these businesses, SMBs, and even enterprises that have large power applications that are portable or can’t be relied on the grid to serve. Those are becoming increasingly more. The trust in the grid is starting to degrade and the trust in batteries is starting to improve. We have a tremendous fit on the product market fit in businesses.

That is interesting that you had to do it twice. We all know the reasoning behind that. It’s almost like the world and the globe has been poised for this for a while. We’ll get into your product a little bit later. It’s nice that you didn’t just go, “Crap, now what do we do?” You tried to see somewhere other avenues to go into that. I think sometimes companies do spread themselves too broadly. I’m working with one that has many products that their sales team is like, “What do you do?” A lot of these smaller businesses don’t have the bandwidth of these massive companies that can handle that kind of thing.

I was laughing when we were talking before about some of the events like Burning Man and my daughters going, “That would’ve been a great event,” and all those things. I noticed that you guys were also at the biggest Food Truck event. I didn’t know there was such a thing. We’re in North Idaho and they have a food truck place. All they do is food trucks and it’s huge. Tell us about that. That was a lot of fun.

We’re a part of that association. There are several members. In fact, a lot of the leadership has already converted their food trucks to Joule Case. There was a big idea of having a big food truck rally in a baseball stadium right there on the ballpark in the field. How cool is that? To have the trust where they could trust that the whole event to be powered by Joule Case doesn’t just happen. There are a lot of case studies that they could point to. We were interested in it. Although the food trucks at the price of emission were to get powered by Joule Case. You have the early adopters in a lot of these food trucks, but then you have some that are not going to trust a new technology no matter what.

You will always have some people who will not trust a new technology no matter what.

The requirement was you had to be powered by Joule Case. The fact that there are several trucks that we are already powering gave them the strength to say, “This is, in fact, what you need to do,” the exposure to the stadium, the grass and everything, the noise and the pollution. They wanted to have something that had a better message than, “All of these generators being powering food on a ballpark.” There are eighteen food trucks that all participated. The whole event sold out. All of the food trucks sold out their food as well. It was a tremendous event. I’m sure it’s the first of many to come and a lot of excited Joule Case customers as well when we were able to prove that this was very easy for Joule Case to do for them.

It’s an interesting thing. The energy sector is quite hot. We all want and need that. Some in other countries don’t have it. I remember when I was living in the Cayman Islands and Hurricane Ivan hit, it wiped it out, I had to drive one of the ladies that I knew was Jamaican, and they used to share a place in a hovel. They had to have propane or they couldn’t cook. You had to go get a propane tank, bring it back because they didn’t have a car. They didn’t have the ability to have a car. If they were sharing space, that was how the world was in the other countries at the time.

One of the things that were interesting fast forwarding is I was in the heavy equipment space and all of Volvo and organizations are all moving and trying to move to electric powered even all the heavy equipment, which takes some serious juice to do that. I see those on the construction site, an entire container battery kind of thing. That’s not the correct term, but it’s challenging, especially with the infrastructure projects that are slated and happening throughout the globe for the places, like when I was talking about the girl in Jamaica.

You have a lot of those mega cities cropping up and they all need power. They all need all that infrastructure put into play. It looked to me a lot like Joule Case was right up there with all-green technology. I’d love to know a little more about how you got to this point. That’s great. You’ve got a product market fit, but did you wake up one day and say, “This is green and we’re going to figure this out?” You said it’s been a while. What brought you into the space?

I’m happy to give the backstory. This is a story with my cofounder, Alex Livingston, and I. We met during freshman year at the University of Idaho. North Idaho there. Fast forward four years, and we’re graduating. This was when the world started to realize that you have a global warming problem and all of these gasoline and diesel vehicles are an issue. The magic bullet was going to be hydrogen. In 2006, we were talking and both agreed that hydrogen was not going to be the solution. Bottom line, it’s great that like Shell or these automotive companies are saying hydrogen, but there are some massive problems that are not going to get figured out.

They’re going to prevent that from happening. It’s going to be batteries and charging. We ultimately developed a battery-swapping system for electric vehicles, the wet behind the ears, 22-year-old, mechanical engineer, building a whole of these battery blade systems. You have eight of them for your Honda Civic. You’d have thirteen for your Chevy Suburban.

You could go to a gas station and 20 pounds each have that gas station attend to swap them out. Now you don’t have that problem of charging for an hour. We went to a couple of different green trade shows. We got featured in Green Magazine, which was the publication back then and Spain reached out to us. We’re maybe 23-year-old kids. This is fun for us. We think this is a good idea. Certainly, you are not understanding what is exactly going on.

The other part of the story is that there’s another company called Project Better Place. They had another EV-swappable system. They were funded with $1.2 billion for an EV exchange system that would be one single pack. It’s a whole car wash. $1 million up this infrastructure with a giant mechanical arm that pulls that 800-pound battery from your car, puts another 800-pound battery in exchange, and then you drive off. That creates a lot of engineering challenges. They created some ugly cars. Now you don’t see Project Better place around.

Our cars need to be pretty.

They didn’t make it. It was the Great Recession. Clean tech, as a whole, took a backseat to the European Austerity Measures, the Great Recession and the jobs being lost. That was unfortunate in terms of the Cleantech story and trying to prevent pollution or prevent greenhouse gases. Joule Case didn’t make it, but we ultimately had this contract with Spain to supply 12,000 taxis with this battery system that Alex and I designed when we were 22 years old. That was pretty cool. When they said that they were canceling that contract, that was when my hair turned gray.

That was the start of the Joule Case. We had to take professional jobs. We’re in Portland in 2015 together. Alex was at Sharp. There are maybe some other legs to this. We were looking at Goal Zero. It sold to NRG around that time. We thought it would be even more exciting with what Goal Zero built, something that could build out not just a one-off sale but an ecosystem that you could engage with. Alex and I are on the sixth version of our product that we’ve built and sold to customers to iterate on how we want to build the product itself. There are two different markets now that we’ve focused on. It’s a lot of work. It’s not just a one-off sale, but I couldn’t be more excited about where we are.

The audience probably would love to know that you’re a cyclist as well because you practice what you preach when it’s calling green. I heard a little bit that you went from San Francisco to LA, Los Angeles, Seattle to Portland.

Seattle to Portland is a big ride. There are 10,000 riders that do it every year. That was the first ride I ever did. It was me and a friend’s New Year’s resolution saying what we’re going to do. He abandoned me, but I stuck to it. I end up doing it in one day. It’s normally a 200-mile ride in two days. I did the one-day version of it.

The theory being is that you don’t have to wake up sore and get on your bike again. I would have preferred the two-day. That spurred a passion of cycling for me I’ve done from San Francisco to LA. I rode around Mount Rainier in Seattle. That’s a 150-mile ride, 10,000 feet of vertical, a lot of century rides that I do every once in a while. It’s my stress reliever to go out on a beautiful day and get on the bike.

We want to get in and know more about you personally, but we want to talk a little bit more about the show because it is the revenue ways. One thing that, for my clients, I’m always thinking about is the value proposition on certain things. I don’t pitch products on the show or anything like that, but when we’re talking about energy, renewables, saving the planet and all of that kind of stuff, what differentiates Joule Case from some of the other types of things that would say, “This is the better option to go for the planet or investor wise?” I know you guys got your first round of crowdfunding and you’re on your second round. I’m curious, to an investor, what would you be saying, “You’re going to invest in this one versus this one.” I’m in sales. I’m always curious about that one.

I also love to talk about the customer side as well, but on the investor side, Joule Case has got a phenomenal team. You have Alex and I spending decades in terms of battery applications. You have a COO that’s got five successful exits. We’re able to hire Apple’s head of battery. This guy has a decade at Apple, building out all of the battery systems for all of the Apple products. He’s got seventeen patents around consumer battery applications. We promoted him to CTO, but he’s been with Joule Case and continues to develop our technology.

With Dave at our technology, seven patents are granted focused on the application of our battery systems. We now have twenty additional pending patents, and then you have some exciting large customers on board with our platform. They preferred power providers for Insomniac. Insomniac is a massive music festival venue. They do over 100 events worldwide. We’ve powered three of their events. That’s not to take it lightly because it means that they’ve trusted Joule Case to be integrated into their infrastructure for power.

Power is the fundamental part of their event. If they don’t have any power, it doesn’t happen. You can check out more we’re on Wefunder. We now have thousands of investors in our campaign. Wefunder.com/JouleCase, or go to the Joule case website and you’re going to see the banner up there. You can learn more about what we’re doing in there. You have multiple different markets and a product-market fit that we’re describing here. I might be a little biased, but the team that we’ve built is a world-class team and a leader in the industry. That doesn’t even go in this.

Talking about sales, we hired Grant Cardone’s right-hand man. Justin LeVrier has taken over as our Vice President of Sales, and he has made a huge impact. Our sales have grown dramatically since this is getting started. A couple of other tidbits of other people. Another one, our marketing person is a twice-over investor in a Joule Case. As an Angel investor, you invested twice, and he is excited about it that now he’s jumped on full-time as our marketing and has done a tremendous job over there as well.

I was curious because when I looked at it, I was wondering, “What would bring that second round?” It sounds like you’ve got great talent coming into it. People have to get to know you personally. We talked about cycling and some of those things. What else do you like to do? What are you passionate about other than batteries? I don’t want to hear batteries anymore.

It’s cycling, camping and backpacking in the summer and a lot of skiing in the winter. I grew up in Idaho. I started skiing at age three. I ski and snowboard. It depends on the mountain, the train and who I’m going with. I have to live in a place where there’s a mountain. I see someone and go skiing for a day, like on a Sunday, go for a day trip or something like that and try to go as much as I can because it’s my happy place in the winter.

In the darker places, that is what you have to be able to do. You were, that’s right. We were talking about Schweitzer Mountain up in the Coeur d’Alene and Sandpoint area. That is a lot of fun stuff. It sounds exciting, some of the stuff that you’ve been working on. You have the patience of Job, but you would have to be as an inventor and as starting a company. That’s amazing stuff there. To people and your younger self, what advice would you give them?

I was given this advice and I didn’t heed it. It’s always going to take longer and cost more money. One of your previous guests also said, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” I adhere to that piece of advice a lot. Be curious. Another one that is important is don’t ever come in with a lot of pride. You don’t know anything. Come in with this curiosity and growth mindset. Come into any type of conversation open and honest, willing to ask questions and also to offer up your own knowledge. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from fellow entrepreneurs, cofounders, investors and strategic partners, and I’ve immediately had to put that to use.

It’s not anything on my side. That’s more on their generosity to share and put that to use. It’s hard, but it’s not hard. Fundamentally, if you can do this without having the pride and continue to put in the hard work and have the patience, have all these things and you’re fine. If you can find something that you’re passionate and excited about every day, that even in the lowest of lows that you strongly believe in, then you have a winner. Go follow that. If you’re doing something that you don’t have passion for, it is going to be work every day.

If you’re doing something that you don’t have passion for, it is going to be work every day.

It’s going to be work anyway, but it would be nice if you’re passionate about it. That’s good advice. The audience has small businesses, and they are also traversing some of the very similar things. It can be difficult, for sure. With 84% of them failing in the first few years, you want to read advice. Don’t think you know everything. You’re the one that failed in the first 4 or 5 years. As I’ve gotten older, I don’t know what I don’t know.

Curiosity sometimes gets the best of me because I like asking questions, “Why?” and it helped me in new product development for sure. That was for other companies, not myself. I’m always curious about that. Crowdfunding, being humble and all this wonderful stuff. How can people get ahold of you for Joule Case? What’s the best way?

I’m fairly active on LinkedIn. To anyone who wants to connect with me on LinkedIn, that would be great. Send a note introducing yourself. I’m happy to connect there.

Should they invite you skiing too?

In the Great Northwest, they must go skiing or go cycling. I would love to talk business, go outside, enjoy the fresh air, and do some great physical activity. I would love to do that with anyone.

There you have it, everybody. It’s been exciting to talk to James, his story, and what they’re doing with Joule Case and ways to get out of the revenue maze. Thank you again, James. We appreciate you.

Thank you.

Important Links

• Joule Case
• LinkedIn – James Wagoner
• https://Music.Amazon.com/podcasts/7d80f727-4d62-4d16-a0c9-96ec7bda6c6b/the-revenue-maze
• https://Open.Spotify.com/show/6azAXp0qFgrmjcql0jeJM8
• https://Podcasts.Google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucmV2ZW51ZW1hemUuY29tL2ZlZWQueG1s

About James Wagoner

James Wagoner is the CEO at Joule Case. He’s passionate about impacting lives through new technology. When he was coming out of college he saw the need for a better system to provide power to heavy machinery rather than using gasoline. James wanted to find a solution that was better for the environment and was more efficient for the companies as well. James joins host Valerie Cobb to talk about how he found his way out of the maze of revenue and some of his tips for others to grow their business successfully.

Here at Revenue NorthStar, we are passionate about sharing experiences and first-hand knowledge from the trenches. No fake gurus or consultants; we get into the execution of well-proven steps, strategies, and frameworks to help your business grow faster and more efficiently. Stay connected with us on social media for regular updates, tips, and insights:

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