[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 the 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 favor to me, if you like what you heard, please like subscribe and share the episode. It helps others find the show. I had the pleasure of talking to Andy Koretsky, the CEO of Skyview Ventures, which is a project developer and investment fund and they own the Sky Charger EV charging network. I talked to Andy about how Skycharger got started, how he structures his team, and what business metrics are really important for any EV charging network. There's some golden here for anyone who is in the EV charging space. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Andy.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: I am really excited to be joined here by Andy Koretsky, the president of Skyview Ventures and CEO of Sky Charger Network. Sky Charger is an innovative branded EV charging network that was established in 2013. They put 300 stations on in less than twelve months on under the Sky Charger brand. They were in growth mode in 2021 and partnered with EV Connect to launch their branded network. Since launching, they've seen very healthy growth, including 130% year revenue. And it's great to have Andy to share the insights of the sky charger growth as a network. Andy, welcome.
[00:01:46] Speaker C: Thanks Seth. Thanks for having me and look forward to talking about our experience and our experience with uv connectivity.
[00:01:52] Speaker B: First question for you, Andy, is what's the story behind Sky Charger? How did you get started?
[00:01:58] Speaker C: So we are a chargepoint operator. We partnered in 2013, we partnered with General Electric, Hilton and Hertz to receive some grant funding from NySerda and we built a network of charging stations at Hilton brand hotels in and around the Albany, New York area. And we still operate those stations today.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: I know that you went into expansion in 2020. What made you go all in on EV charging as a business then?
[00:02:29] Speaker C: Well, when we built the charging network in 2013, we knew we were very early and particularly in New York state in 2020, we saw the combination of Tesla's success, other car oems coming into the markets with electric vehicles, and Biden's election made us feel that it was time for us to put more resources into building our network.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: So once you decided you were all in what did you do?
[00:02:55] Speaker C: Built out an installer and a referral network and we built 300 stations at 90 sites in New York state. We built an internal team to handle all the paperwork for the grant funding and almost all of these stations were grant funded and basically were able to build out our network in New York state with very low capital costs.
[00:03:19] Speaker B: Thats really key. Incentives do still drive a lot of the market. What is the sky charger business model?
[00:03:26] Speaker C: We own and operate our network. Revenue comes from the sale of electricity and on the west coast from the sale of low carbon fuel standard credits. So we now have over 700 charging stations. Half of those are on the west coast and the other half are in New York state and New England.
[00:03:46] Speaker B: And how do you structure your team?
[00:03:49] Speaker C: So we have a very small team, a couple of guys focused on business development and sales. We have a project manager and then we have an asset management team. All in. We have ten people. And because of that we've outsourced a fair amount of things. You mentioned the branding. When you use our stations you're getting a sky charger. A sky charger experience, but it's all white, labeled on the UB connect software.
[00:04:16] Speaker B: So since you do and make it a perfect site, make money from the electricity sales, I would imagine that selecting sites is super important and critical to your business. How do you evaluate potential sites for EV charging?
[00:04:31] Speaker C: A good site is one that's going to be highly utilized or where you can expect it to be highly utilized. That's a good site for us. Right now we're focused on DC fast charging stations, at highway exits and at transportation hubs, and less on multifamily and point of sale sites. And that's not because point of sale sites or multifamily are a bad business or a bad. It's just there's so, you know, it's a bandwidth. It's a bandwidth thing.
[00:05:01] Speaker B: Yeah. You only have a relatively so many.
[00:05:03] Speaker C: Hours in a day. Yeah, exactly.
[00:05:06] Speaker B: Let's say you've chosen a great site for EV charging. How do you procure your stations?
[00:05:11] Speaker C: We've procured in the past, we procured direct from manufacturers, but also through distribution networks. And both work. Obviously you give up a little bit of margin when you're using a distributor, but as you mentioned, smaller. You can order in smaller increments when you're ordering direct from manufacturers. Unless you're putting them all out in the field immediately, you're sitting on inventory. So there's pluses and minuses.
[00:05:38] Speaker B: How did you decide what hardware to install?
[00:05:41] Speaker C: So we picked a couple of hardware suppliers and tried them out to see whose hardware and software were reliable. And now that we have a few years of operational history, we're starting to narrow down our providers.
[00:05:56] Speaker B: Do you have an install team or do you outsource that?
[00:06:00] Speaker C: We outsource that. Someone else can do that a lot better than we.
[00:06:03] Speaker B: How do drivers find you?
[00:06:05] Speaker C: So they directly through the software provider or through aggregated sites, like, you know, sites that aggregate up like plug share as an example. And also like on a lot of the new cars they have in the mapping software. They're embedded in the mapping software.
[00:06:22] Speaker B: Why was important to your strategy to have a driver app in the iOS and Google Play stores?
[00:06:29] Speaker C: I wouldn't say that was important to our strategy. I think we started this before we even thought, even thought about that. But we always believed that that would happen, that there'd be driver apps, there'd be software to drive people to sites.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: Speaking of driver experience, you know, a big, big part is driver issues. Driver might run up to a station, have difficulty charging. How do you handle those issues in the field?
[00:06:56] Speaker C: A good portion of our network is on EV Connect.
Part of our network is not on EV connect. In both cases, all the stations have an 800 number. The drivers can call them if they have problems. In the case of EV Connect, you know, there's a customer service service person that answers the phone and they answer the phone as sky charger, as our brand and they resolve the issue.
[00:07:20] Speaker B: In that same vein, let's talk a little bit about O and M and service chargers break and it's necessary to have a plan to fix them when they do. How does Sky Charger think about O and M?
[00:07:32] Speaker C: Well, as a CPO, we make money when our chargers are being used. O and M is important. If our far stations aren't functional, we can't make money. So we outsource this function to our charging manufacturers or to our installers and we get daily reports through the software, we get daily reports on station functionality and we're able to see where we have problems and problems that need to be fixed.
[00:08:03] Speaker B: And what are the key performance indicators that you use for sky chargers? Driver support and O and M. So.
[00:08:10] Speaker C: KPI's are measured by customer satisfaction and drivers need to be able to reach when they have problems, they need to be able to reach a customer service person. We need to make sure that our stations have maximum uptime. And so with our own, with EV connect, we get reports that outline our KPI that outline and our KPI's so we're able to monitor them. We have one person whose job it is to manage the assets, and they can do that easily with the reports.
[00:08:42] Speaker B: We get from EV Connect speaking about the technology. So we've worked together for several years at this point. Why did you make the decision to build your network using an off the shelf charging business platform like ours versus building something bespoke something from scratch?
[00:09:00] Speaker C: Our core competency is selling and owning or selling and financing. Why rebuild what somebody's already built, and particularly when we don't have the core experience to do that? So it was probably the best decision we made, certainly one of the three best decisions we made when we set up our business, because it basically handed off a lot of the back end headaches that could have popped up and allows our team to. Allows us to keep a small team that operates efficiently and is focused on what we'll get at.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: And what are some of the key lessons learned from your time in the EV charging space that you can share with others who might be at an earlier stage?
[00:09:43] Speaker C: I mean, it's simple, like, know what you're good at and focus on that. That's certainly the. I think the biggest lesson.
[00:09:51] Speaker B: The EV industry is going through some turbulence, some headwinds from the headlines. What is your take on that as a practitioner? Somebody. Somebody in this space?
[00:10:02] Speaker C: We're definitely in a secular movement towards electrification in the automotive sector. The move to electric vehicles has been legislative into effect in Europe, the US and elsewhere. The oems that got caught cheating on their diesel emissions was the driver of legislative change in Europe. I think Tesla's success was a large reason for this move towards electrification in the US. China has been a huge adopter of electric vehicles and is about to enter the US market with cheap cars. I don't think that every car OEM wants electrification to happen. It's not easy to change your propulsion system from ice to electric. It really requires starting. The companies that have been most successful have been the ones that have built electric from the ground up. You talked about the growth in the EV markets, but yet you see all these headlines about how the electric market is dead, or you see these headlines from time to time saying that the EV cars are on dealers lots for twice as long as ice cars. And the answer to that is, of course they are. When a company markets a $45,000 electric pickup truck and then brings it to market at $90,000, that $90,000 truck is going to sit on a lot for a lot longer than you'd expect and those headlines are driven by the companies that are struggling to convert or adopt to electric. And theyre going to be forced to, because theyre going to be forced to become more efficient. And I see pricing coming down in the electric. The chinese company BYD coming into the US, and other chinese companies coming in the US, the availability of cheap electric vehicles is coming.
And those companies who are putting out the headlines of the negative headlines about electricity cars are, you know, are the ones who are currently struggling with getting cars to market at a reasonable cost.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: It is funny, speaking of it just dawn on me. So I've been doing some research on the automotive industry and the economics of car dealerships, and I was amazed to learn that car dealerships, by and large, don't actually make that much money in terms of profits on selling vehicles. Like, there's. It's a low margin business for them. Their high margin business is in servicing. And so if you're a car dealership thinking about converting to selling EV's, you have to make a substantial investment to sell, to sell EV's. But if the revolution is going to happen anyway and people are going to be converting, and by 2030, you know, maybe it's not, maybe it's not 30% of the market, maybe it's 25%, something you still can't ignore. The opportunity for you in doing this is really in becoming like a community charging hub. And we have a customer friendly chevrolet that did this in Dallas, Texas. And they, in six months, they're now earning like, like something north of $60,000 a month from EV charging, which is a substantial profit margin for them because electricity is cheap there. So it is an opportunity for those who are interested in exploring that. And in that case, the opportunity for, for car dealers is now you can actually own more of the value chain from, from vehicles. You know, you can never be a car. I guess you could be a dealership and also, like, you could own gas stations at the same time, although, like, you wouldn't be making a margin from them. Most of that margin flows upstream here. You can actually control more of the value chain and actually not only sell the vehicles, but service them and, um, and fuel them too. So, food for thought. Last question. What gets you excited about the future of EV charging in general and about Sky Charger in particular?
[00:13:53] Speaker C: I mean, as you just pointed out, there's going to be with, you know, we're in the first or second inning of the adoption of electric vehicles, and there's going to be a lot of things that gets disrupted and there's going to be a lot of opportunity and this adoption is going to require from our point of view, we look at the infrastructure piece of it and say, you got to put the infrastructure in to be able to charge the vehicles. I'm confident that sky charger, Skyview and Sky Charger can find enough good locations to build a profitable business in owning the infrastructure. And that's why we focused on being a CPL. So that gets us pretty excited.
[00:14:31] Speaker A: And that brings us to the end of this episode of the Charging Conversations podcast. I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to Andy for today's enlightening conversation, and especially to you, our listeners, for tuning in and for being part of this journey. Thank you also to our podcast platform, Kastos, for hosting and for editing this episode. If you like what you heard and wanted to support us, please remember to like, subscribe and share this podcast with your network. Your engagement helps drive this conversation further. And dont miss out on our next episode. Subscribe now to stay charged. If you have any feedback or requests for a future episode, please let me know at
[email protected] until we meet again, keep charging forward.
