[00:00:08] Speaker A: Welcome to the Charging Conversations podcast, brought to you by EVconnect. Charging conversations is the go to audio stop for electric vehicle charging businesses. I'm your host, Seth Engle. Each episode I talk to different leaders in the EV charging space about the innovations, challenges, and successes that drive the industry forward. Whether you're just getting started in your EV charging business or you're an industry veteran looking to learn about the latest trends, you are in the right place. One if you like what you heard, please like, subscribe and share this episode. It helps others find the show. Today I am talking to Micah Batalia, the general manager of Dynamic EV Charging, which is an evse installer and network based in southwest Missouri. I talked to Micah about how dynamic got started, how he maximizes charger utilization, and how he thinks about setting up an O and M team.
Lots of insights to share on this one. So here is my conversation with Micah.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Micah, welcome.
[00:01:10] Speaker C: Well, thank you. It's great to be here.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: The first question I have for you is, can you tell me more about the story behind dynamic? How did you guys get started?
[00:01:19] Speaker C: The story of dynamic goes back quite a ways. 20 years ago, we started a company called LMB services, and we specialized in underground utility. So we did gas, water, electric, underground work, got a fleet of directional bores, boring machines, we got excavators, all the construction equipment that you would need for that line of work. And it was about five and a half, six years ago, we started to get hired by national companies to put the infrastructure in for EV charging stations. And after we did a few of those, we realized that here we are going into a fresh site, completing about 85, 95% of the work. And then after we do all that, then that contractor come in, hook up the units, activate them, and call it good. So at that time, we were like, well, you know, we did 95% of work, might as well do 100% of the work. And so we broke off dynamic EVC from L and B services and started dynamic as a strict, strictly an EV installation company.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: I think where you're getting at 95% of the work is kind of like the make ready work. Yeah, getting a site. Yeah, we see that, too. You know, that's definitely one of the big barriers to really pushing through EV charging, because not all sites, even if it looks good on paper, there's a lot of potential work that needs to be done to even make a site ready for EV. What made you go all in on charging as a business?
[00:02:46] Speaker C: Well, when we made that split, it was in 2020, and at that time, EV charging around our area, at least within 2300 miles. There wasn't anything on the map, as far as you know. You can go to Plugshare, you go to EV connect, you can go wherever you want to go to search for these EV charging stations, and there's just nothing here. And so when we started this, it was kind of a risk in saying that this area has not adopted EV's yet. If there was a need for chargers, there'd be a lot more around here. There just wasn't. We kind of built the or went with the mentality of, if you build it, they will come type of thing. We saw the writing on the wall with EV's. We saw the legislation coming across. We saw, you know, the plan that the government has to move towards a more EV, more environmentally friendly future, and we decided to go all in on it, and it has definitely paid off. We have been busy since day one. Not that there wasn't a lot of work involved in that. Of course there is. But once we started, and once we got our name out there, we really had to push to get to the public to say, hey, this is us. This is what we do. This is why we're good at it. And once we started up and got first couple of jobs under our belt, they just started flooding in. At that time, I think we just hit the perfect timing. There was a lot more EV adoption happening in our area, a lot more EV's being released into the public, and a lot more available for everybody. And so once we put it in place, we've found that the drivers were more comfortable. Oh, I can buy EV's now. We got these chargers across town if I need them, or whatever it might be. So it was a risk. It paid off. I think that every market in the US is behind. Like you were saying before, the number of charging stations you need to support, the number of vehicles that are going to be out in 2024, we're way behind, and so there's room for everybody to hop in and grow. And as long as you have that good structure for your business, you have that support from quality companies that you use or partner with, like EV Connect, then I can't say it's a sure thing, but, man, it's hard to miss right now.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: What's dynamics business model right now?
[00:05:06] Speaker C: So we are a full end to end turnkey EV installer. So we did not quite start out that way, but that is where we've migrated, like you mentioned before, with the help of you and the service platform that helped fill some gaps, but we do everything from lead generation to sales. We built out a nice boardroom with a whole bunch of charging stations that are active in it, so customers can come in and see them and we can run them through how to operate, then show them that EV connect app run through that. And so we do the whole excavation, installation, the site prep, and then afterward we're also there. One stop shop for the network. Cause they're on our network. We have the EV connect white level service platform. They log into our website, our branded network, if they want to look at, you know, stats of how the machine's doing, if they want to look at revenue, whatever it might be, we're their one stop shop. And so we feel that for the most part, if that customer just has that one contractor to deal with, and from the very beginning, all the way through the life cycle of owning that station, that's what we wanted to be.
[00:06:16] Speaker B: Where are you guys located? What are your four? I think you said you operate in four states, right?
[00:06:21] Speaker C: Correct? Yeah. So we're based out of Springfield, Missouri, and we operate in Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas.
[00:06:28] Speaker B: How's your team structured?
[00:06:29] Speaker C: We've got our sales team. That's the initial contact for the customer. And then we've got our finance team, of course, that handles all that. But then we've also got installation for. We have our civil side that does all the excavation of the site and site prep, laying all the conduit, digging all the ditches, doing all the concrete repair that might need done. Asphalt. We are uniquely structured, like I mentioned before, to have that fleet of boring machines. And so we don't have to sub out if we need to do a bore into our parking lot or to get the power to where it needs to go. So we do all of that, and then we have a couple of different electrician master electricians on staff, and each of them have a couple of teams underneath them. Most of them are installation teams. And we also have a service service team as well.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: One of the questions we often get is, how do you evaluate potential sites for EV charging? Like, what makes for a good site?
[00:07:20] Speaker C: EV drivers. They know the drill. They know that, you know, when you pull up to a site, you might be there for 2030 minutes on a DC fast charger or, you know, longer if you're. If you're looking at putting in level twos at a shopping center or whatever. But we just want to make sure that that site has the power availability nearby. One of the most expensive things is if the power is not near if you don't have three phase for DC fast charger coming to the site and you got to get that over to it, that's what's going to really hike your price a lot. But besides the power being there, we love amenities. And EV drivers, they, they're very comfortable with parking in front of a machine, plugging in and walking, you know, across the parking lot to grab a sandwich or a cup of coffee. And so all the sites that we own and operate ourselves, not only do we sell the customers, but we also install our own that we own and operate. And we just make sure that those sites are well equipped with amenities. We put one, the most recent one we activated was about a week and a half ago. And it's located in the parking lot of a 24/7 IHOP. Right next to that is a Starbucks. Right next to that is a Jimmy John's. And there's a convenience store right next to that. I mean, it's, it's packed. So you can drive through a drive through and park if you want to eat in your car and watch Netflix on the screen, or you can park and use the restrooms at the convenience store or go into IHOP. That's twenty four seven. And once we put that station in, we spiked in usage of that one right away. And so it's just confirmation that amenities are king. If you're wanting to put a DC fast charger in for public use, do it around amenities. And they'll come to that over another.
[00:08:57] Speaker B: One a hundred percent. I agree on that. We've done work with a dealership in Texas and they built a whole suite of, like, they basically built a whole, they call it an EV HQ in Dallas, Texas, like six chargers. And they have all kinds of amenities. People can go and they are busy around the clock. They've got like 40% utilization, which is very high. Why did you decide to be a service platform with Evconnect?
[00:09:27] Speaker C: That was the gap that was kind of missing. So, I mean, we do the installation. After that, we kind of cut ties with the customer. What we like to do is have that long relationship with the customer, build the trust, build a relationship. We know everybody. If I get or if our team gets a phone call from one of the station's owners, they know us, we know them, we've dealt with them since the beginning. And having that service platform is great for customer service. They know us. Like I said, we just are able to get out there and handle any issues that may arise. 95% of the time, we know if there's an issue before the customer does because of the alerts we get from the service platform, which is fantastic. All that being said, the main underlying of that is the recurring revenue that we can get from it now. So we'll sign the service agreements. And so now we have these five year service agreements that at the end they're going to renew again. And so it's just another form of revenue coming in that we didn't have before.
[00:10:24] Speaker B: Did you have to make any changes to your business model or to like, how you structure your business in order to shift to this service platform?
[00:10:33] Speaker C: Yes, some, a little bit. We already had all of our techs whenever we install a unit. So if we're working with, you know, a blink unit or Zurova unit or a breeze unit, whatever the unit might be, we all of our tech certified through the company to work on them and install them. And so our techs already had the training and the knowledge to do the service. We just had to dedicate some people in the office to monitor that service platform. And honestly, the monitoring of the service platform is pretty automatic. So we'll get the alerts if something is going on with the machine, and then we can open up service platform, dig into it and get out there and, and get the problem solved. So, you know, there's a little bit of shifting around of roles and hiring one or two other people just to monitor everything and get it all under control. But it's well worth it with the amount of revenue that you get from it.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: Speaking of service, you know, chargers break, and it is necessary to have a plan to fix them when they do. Like, one of the things that we heard from our customers, which is what precipitated the service platform is, even if it was on the EV connect network, it was like the installer or the distributor is getting the call when something goes wrong. And so they were having to say to the, that led to finger pointed. They were having to say, well, actually, this is like a uv connect thing, or this is your responsibility to fix to the customer, which is never a good experience. So I'm curious, like, how does dynamic think about operations and maintenance?
[00:12:09] Speaker C: Yeah, you're 100% right. I mean, whether you have a service contract or the service backend that EV connect offers, you install a site and something goes wrong, that customer will be calling you first. That's just how it works. And so we're getting those calls anyway and wanting to help our customers and wanting to have a good answer. Instead of saying, well, you need to call this person instead or you need to contact the manufacturer instead. And you know, good luck with that. We think that it's a huge part to be involved in that and it's a no brainer. It makes us look better when we're the ones that get the alert and we call the customer like, hey, we're going to have a guy out to service your machine today. It looks like it's not charging at the speeds that it should be. It's had a fault here or there. And so we're going to get out and fix it. And like I said, most of the time the customer doesn't even know that there's anything wrong. We'll know way before them. So it's definitely a key ingredient to make your company look more reliable, more dependable, be the one that they turn to. And then it just makes that renewal that much easier to. However long they sign the contract for, five years down the road they'll be like, yeah, yeah, we're definitely continuing this.
[00:13:18] Speaker B: What are the key performance indicators that are important to your business or really to any charging business?
[00:13:25] Speaker C: The thing I look at on a monthly basis at each location that we have are the utilization rates. A good example of using that to kind of dictate how a site is ran is at one location. We had set up one DC fast charger and with every site that we install, especially for ourselves, we'll put in the power availability to support multiple charging stations, even if we're only putting in one to begin with. And so this particular site, I believe we can have up to five charging stations at. We put one in, it was in an area that we weren't, you know, I mean it checked a lot of boxes, but I just wasn't sure if it was going to be a big success. And so looking at the utilization rate, I saw it from the day it was installed. So about 90 days after it grew from a 5% utilization rate up to about a 15% utilization rate in that short amount of time. And I purposely, at that site, didn't push it out advertising and do any social media posts. We didn't announce that it was active. We just put it on the EV connect network and kept our mouth shut. And it was used within 2 hours of activation. And so looking at that and how it jumped from five to 15% in that short amount of time, we thought to ourselves, well let's, I think that we can put a second charger in here. I expected putting a second charger in seeing the individual utilization rate maybe drop now that there's two on site, but it didn't. It stayed the same. It was at that 15%, again, using both of the stations. And so what that showed us was using those, you know, keeping an eye on those. That utilization rate, it's being used a lot. Might as well throw in a second one and, you know, see if that one works as well. And it did, and it was. It was awesome. Besides that, you know, we look at the unique customers that visit it. We install DC fast chargers kind of in central locations around a bunch of apartments. And so you'll see reoccurring charger or customer ids come through. And you know that these are people who possibly live in these apartments and don't have on site charging, and those, they'll come to us. We also look at reviews and customer satisfaction a lot. We look at the revenue that we get per charging session. We look at downtime and maintenance as well. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that we look at to help predict what we can do at the next site better. If a customer comes to us and they're like, how many chargers should we install here? We can look at all those KPI's that I talked about at other locations that are similar and say, hey, this is what we're doing here. They're seeing great utilization rate. This one's up to 25%. This one's at 30. This one's it. You should put this number of charges here. And we feel comfortable with that. And so keeping track of all of that comes through that EV connect app. And so that's been a great help with that, too. And just tracking everything.
[00:16:20] Speaker B: What are some key lessons that you've learned in the EV charging space that you can share with others who might be at an earlier stage than you?
[00:16:28] Speaker C: For us, a lot of it was making those initial connections. When you first get into the EV charging world. Yeah, you can find a distributor, you can get the chargers, you can have the network outsourced, have EV connected. Handle that all yourself if you don't want to get into it. But we found that the more connections you make, the more businesses and companies that are already established that you can get involved with. It helps even if you don't buy stuff from them. They're a great sounding platform for if you're having some issues or if you want to know what the next step is or how to scale your business, or if you're thinking about going to the next level and doing the service platform, it's great just to have all those connections and we've used a lot of those to get to where we are and just. It's kind of funny, but, yeah, forming connections has been our number one thing that we could have done to help elevate our business.
For the most part, we've actually knocked out distributors and we go direct with the manufacturers, and so it's nice to build those relationships. So if something does happen with the unit, we can get ahold of the manufacturer, help troubleshoot it. They know us on a first name basis, and we know them as well. And so making those connections just make every step of the process a little bit easier.
[00:17:43] Speaker B: What gets you excited about the future of EV charging in general and about your business dynamic in particular?
[00:17:50] Speaker C: We're still at the beginning phases, and that's exciting because there are big things happening right now in the EV world. I know that you were talking earlier about the hiccups that are happening in the industry, but you're 100% right. That sales are still growing. Hitting 10% in 2024 is a huge deal. Once we hit that, I think that the EV industry is going to start making that little bit of a turn.
The adoption rate is going to start going up higher, but it's exciting to be at something in the beginning phases. If everything plays out exactly how people are predicting, and we do hit this 30% EV rate in 810 years, if we hit that, it's going to be crazy. There's going to be so much business for everybody for the charging installation across the country. And so it's real exciting to be at that point right now to see the future. Even if we only hit half of what is predicted, even if what Ford says they're going to be doing in EV's in ten years, even if it only reaches 50% of what they're claiming they're shooting for, it's going to be a huge deal. And so it's pretty exciting to be in it at this stage.
[00:18:57] Speaker B: Trey, thank you so much for your time and thoughts on EV industry and on your business. Where do people find you if they want to get in touch with you, or if you're in one of the states that dynamic serves, where do they get in touch?
[00:19:12] Speaker C: Dynamic evc.com is our website. That's number one place to go. You'll find all our social media, our LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram's on there, as well as phone numbers and emails. But micahynamicevc.com, that's my email. That's the easiest way to get a hold of me. If you have any questions, or if you're looking at taking that next step, I can be one of those connections for you. So feel free to reach out.
[00:19:35] Speaker B: Awesome. Thank you so much Micah.
[00:19:37] Speaker A: That brings us to the end of this episode of the charging Conversations podcast. Thank you to Micah for todays enlightening conversation and especially to you, our audience, for tuning in. Thank you also to our podcast platform, Castos, for hosting and editing this episode. If you liked what you heard and want to support us, please remember to like, subscribe and share this podcast with your network. It helps others find the show and dont miss out on our next episode. Subscribe now and stay charged. If you have any feedback or requests for future episodes, please let me
[email protected]. until we meet again, keep charging forward.
