Andrew Bowen Podcast Transcript
Andrew Bowen joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
[00:00:12] Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Andrew Bowen. Andrew Bowen is the CEO of Smart Cocoon. He is an entrepreneur with a passion for clean tech and the HVAC industry. Sparked during his youth when he was introduced to his grandfather’s metal fabricating business, which specialized in duct work.
Andrew brings a wealth of expertise to the table, having honed his skills in consulting, where he developed go to market strategies for high growth firms at BDC and in finance, where he managed billions of dollars at the Bank of Canada. His experience in product development and finance, and his keen eye for business opportunities, make him a valuable addition to the team.
Well, good afternoon, Andrew. Welcome to the show.
[00:00:52] Andrew Bowen: Thank you very much for having me, Brian.
[00:00:54] Brian Thomas: You’re very welcome. And I appreciate you making the time today, hailing out of the great country of Canada. Today we’re talking with Andrew Bowen and Andrew, again, I just appreciate having entrepreneurs on because we get to learn so much from people that are living their dream, living their passion, of course, with a lot of hard work, but thank you again.
[00:01:13] Andrew Bowen: Pleasure to be here.
[00:01:14] Brian Thomas: Andrew jumping in here, you’ve got quite the career in finance, a strategic advisor, you were senior executive. Now you’re the CEO of Smart Cocoon. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
[00:01:28] Andrew Bowen: It’s a great question. And it’s funny how life happens.
And I think for most of my career, I think opportunities because I was open to them, they came to me just very naturally. And I think it’s really just having that really open mindset to say Hey, that could be interesting. Let me find out more about it. And oftentimes it was just someone saying, hey, have you checked this out?
You might find it interesting. And I’ll spend that I’ll spend a couple hours. And for me, this is where my passion comes in. I’ll start really digging into say it’s a specific company or a specific opportunity that I just get really excited about, okay, what do they do? How can you innovate within this field?
Like what’s happening in this field? And you just enthrall yourself in there. And oftentimes before these opportunities, before I even think about taking them, I probably spent a day or so, or even more just researching and really figuring this out and seeing it. Does this really excite me?
Because I think we talk about hard work. But I like the fact that, yeah, I think typically how my career has progressed has been quote unquote through hard work, but it was really driven by passion and about being excited about innovating in each of those kinds of roles. And that excitement makes it more of a game, like a puzzle you’re trying to solve.
You’re always coming up against challenges and you’re trying to figure out, okay, how do I solve that puzzle? And then what different ways can I do that? What are other people doing? What, and then just sometimes just sitting quietly and trying to think about how we can tackle those challenges And I think that’s really for me, what’s worked really well for my career is that it’s really been driven by passion at each time.
I’ve never taken a position or a role that I didn’t love that. I didn’t think. Oh, I’m really going to learn a lot. I’m really excited about it. And I think that to me served me extremely, extremely well because it made it easy, even though you’re working hard doing long hours and that kind of thing, but it doesn’t feel that way.
It feels like it’s still energizing you. And for me, once you feel that you stop being energized with what you do, it’s a good time to step back and say, is it time to try something else? Because life’s too short to do something that you’re not passionate about.
[00:03:14] Brian Thomas: Absolutely. And I love that story. A lot of energy. We can hear it. Your voice. And every podcast is different. Every story is different, but we certainly love the ones where the energy is coming through and that’s what you’re doing with our podcast today. Awesome. Andrew jumping in here to the next question.
You are a product developer, passionate, as you mentioned, but make the world a better place through solutions that leverage new technology. Could you maybe share with us today about the inspiration behind your clean tech product temperature control system?
[00:03:43] Andrew Bowen: Yes. So, I think the, it’s actually kind of funny.
The actual, I think the real passion behind this and the real kind of light bulb that kind of ignited this idea is actually the light switch, Which is strange when you think about it, but when you step back in your home and and if you had one light switch for all of your lights in your entire home, you think it’s the most ridiculous thing that’s ever, imaginable, right?
Because it’s just an incredible waste of energy at the same time every day. People are going into their homes with one thermostat to control the temperature in every room in their house, which we all know doesn’t work. You end up with hot and cold rooms and people don’t like, someone wants it hotter in one room.
Someone’s a cooler, another room, and it really doesn’t work. And we realized that as this company that It was an incredible waste of energy. So, in Canada here in the U. S. Is very similar. About two thirds of your energy usage in your home is for heating and cooling. So, it has a much, much bigger impact than lighting ever will.
lighting. Just a fraction of compared to heating and cooling. And so, what Smart Cocoon as we started out on the journey was really about. Okay, so we have these hot and cold rooms. How do we start giving temperature control at the room level as opposed to having one thermostat doing control of the entire home and this typically would be rooms, for example, the room above the garage or your second floor, bedroom or office is too hot.
Well, in the meantime your basement is freezing, and we just realized like, Okay. Why are we over cooling certain areas of the house where people are wearing sweaters and pants in the, in the middle of the summer at the same time, they’re roasting in their bedroom. And so, what most people are doing are trying to turn down that one thermostat, in their home to try and, equate, to get that cool enough to sleep at night.
And so, what this technology really does, it actually says, okay, Okay. We want to redirect that cool air to where we actually want it. And so, the devices that we have with smart cocooners simply, take your vent cover off, drop it in, put the vent cover back on, plug it in the wall.
And the AI will start sensing, when your system comes on and automatically start pulling more cool air into that specific room, giving you that room by room temperature control. And then part of our innovation, obviously as we move into more into the smart home, we’ve got an app and it’s going to, our future plan is actually start, The smart home Hey, Alexa, turn my temperature to my office to 22 degrees, please or in, obviously in the U S it’ll be in Fahrenheit, but that’s the same kind of concept where you actually get that room by room temperature control.
[00:05:52] Brian Thomas: I love that. That’s so awesome. And we were just talking about that, how it’s so frustrating, here in the Midwest, your basement’s freezing in the summer. But you’re doing everything to keep the upper part of your home cool. It’s just so frustrating. So, I’m glad that you have this product and I’m so excited to share this with our global audience today.
[00:06:09] Andrew Bowen: No, it’s, and today too, with obviously energy prices being higher. So, our devices save on average about 30%. So, it’s a massive, massive savings, both in your pocket at the same time. You’re helping the environment. I think that’s one of the passions I had for joining Smart Cocoon as well.
That it’s very rare in life that you can actually do something that makes you more comfortable, saves you money and you’re doing something good for the environment. There was, there’s no trade off. All those three things are working in tandem together. So, I couldn’t think of a better company to join because of that.
[00:06:39] Brian Thomas: That’s awesome.
So Andrew, we are a tech platform and podcast here. I’m a techie. We do like to ask our guests if you’re leveraging any of that new emerging tech in your business or your tech stack. And if not, maybe there’s a cool tool or app you can share with our audience today.
[00:06:54] Andrew Bowen: Yes. We’re always looking to innovate and looking at different things.
And so obviously generative AI is kind AI is kind of a big thing right now. And one of the really cool kind of things that we used. Because obviously as a company, we’re always looking at marketing because we’re both D to C and B to B. It’s like, how do we create really good imagery for both kind of our social media.
And we always found that it was a slow process trying to get what we wanted. And so, we actually started using MidJourney. And so that’s kind of a similar product to OpenAI’s DALI E. And basically, what that is it’s obviously using your prompts to just, to basically create imagery for you.
That’s still photorealistic and for us, it just blew our minds, right? Where we could start being really creative and get the stuff that we wanted in literally like 30 seconds. There’s not like days or trying to get a specific photographer out and all these things now, and it just, the amount of innovation that you can do quickly it just blew our mind.
So that’s I’d say, If you haven’t checked it out yet and you’re into like the marketing, or maybe it could be even for your, if you’re doing any decks as a business and you’re pitching amazing content, you can generate in literally seconds. I highly recommend people check that out.
[00:08:01] Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Again, another plug for another product here on the podcast. We get those a lot. So that’s awesome. Andrew, last question of the day. Could you share something from your career experience to those that are listening today that would be helpful for them looking to grow their career in finance or entrepreneurship?
[00:08:20] Andrew Bowen: Yeah, I think one of the things that I sat back and looking back at my career, and I think. And the decisions that you make, I think it’s really, really important that you’re making the decisions for the right reasons, no matter where you are, if you’re in finance or entrepreneurship, and that’s, it’s really about making really good decisions because that’s what’s going to define your career.
That’s what’s going to define how much you enjoy work. Are you making the right decisions every day? And one of the things that we always have to caution ourselves off. And I, fall in this guilty sometimes too, right? Where there’s a lot of stress. Things are happening.
Things might be big challenges. But you always have to make sure that you’re making a decision when you’re calm, focused and with intention, you’re not doing it because, oh, our competitors doing this, we got to do it too, or we’re getting pressure from, you say, if it’s an investor or something else to do a certain thing, you have to really step back and think, is this the right decision for the company right now?
Or is this the right decision I’m making for my career right now? And being in a very calm kind of open mindsets state because those times where I made decisions when I wasn’t in that state, it ends up with more challenges down the road. Whereas if you say, okay, I’ve got to step back, I’m going to really think about this.
What’s the right thing to do right now? The decisions always become, if they feel very natural and they’re like, yeah, you just know intuitively that’s the right thing for us to do right now. And when you make decisions that way. Everything falls into place much more naturally both for your career and that specific kind of position because in business, you’re always going to have challenges.
That’s why we’re in this, right? if you didn’t want challenges, you don’t go into business or finance. You got to love the challenges. You got to love the fact that you’ve got something difficult that you need to figure out. And sometimes that involves other people as well, right?
When you’re in a business you always have challenges with people and how to figure out how to get the most out of people. Or if there’s someone on your team, that’s struggling, that’s creating some different dynamics with the other parts of the team again. If you find yourself reactionary, you’re going to actually make the situation worse, as opposed to if you step back and be calm and really connect with people, that’s where you can make the big headway and really propel both your business to the next kind of plane, as well as your career.
[00:10:19] Brian Thomas: Thank you. Love that. And again, as I mentioned earlier we love the energy, the passion, the enthusiasm. We hear your voice. It comes across the podcast loud and clear. Love that. So again, thanks for the gems today, Andrew. It was a pleasure having you on today. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
[00:10:36] Andrew Bowen: Perfect. Thank you very much, Brian.
[00:10:38] Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Andrew Bowen Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
