Gareth Evans Podcast Transcript
Gareth Evans 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 Gareth Evans. Gareth Evans is committed to a mission of empowering businesses and communities to make the global transition towards a more affordable, secure, and renewable energy future. Gareth has been a leader his entire life, from working in charity and community organizations, leading sports teams, to military operations.
Gareth has parlayed these experiences into building teams and businesses who challenge the planet’s greatest challenges and opportunities. He is now focusing on enabling companies to successfully navigate the energy transition. His time in Iraq following the Gulf War set his mission in motion. It opened his eyes to a world without access to reliable energy and other basic essentials needed to survive.
He saw the impact that can have on the stability of a region and the health and the success of businesses and communities. Driven by this experience, he committed himself to find solutions that create profitable and sustainable energy outcomes such that we all can thrive.
Well, good afternoon, Gareth. Welcome to the show.
[00:01:11] Gareth Evans: Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Brian.
[00:01:12] Brian Thomas: You bet. I appreciate you making the time and we were just talking before we hit the record button. And you’re just a globetrotter where you’re born, where you lived who you’re married to, and today in the United States, you’re basically Based out of San Diego, but traveling today to Texas and love that because we talk about that a little bit on the podcast, we’ve been to 50 countries now doing this podcast, so , we’d like to understand where people are coming and going.
And so that’s just totally, totally cool. Gareth, we’re going to jump right into the questions here. Let’s talk about your career in environmental science. You were a scientist, a business developer, a senior executive. Now you’re the CEO of VECKTA. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
[00:01:54] Gareth Evans: Yeah, it’s definitely been a really wild ride. I think what has inspired me is taking on new challenges, always challenging the status quo, not accepting that just because that’s the way it’s always been done, we should do it that way. And so I think being willing to put my hand up, take on the opportunities that very few other people want to get after being a bit maverick in nature and challenging that status quo, and then being able to be flexible to geographical changes, project changes, sector changes and being willing to be adaptable as being key to the success and actually being willing to Actually, voice differences of opinions, I think, has supported me to build an incredible network, which has then opened up new opportunities.
And yeah, I’ve lived and worked in Canada, the Middle East, Australia, and now in the U. S., and I’ve been exposed to a lot of different roles and opportunities, which really then rounds out the skill set and gives you the confidence to go on and do new things.
[00:02:50] Brian Thomas: I love that. And you’re absolutely right.
That diverse skillset and the exposure that you had based on where you worked in the industry and then the different roles certainly contributed to your success. And we’d love to hear that. Gareth let’s talk about your company a little bit. It’s considered an onsite energy marketplace and software platform.
It touts itself to be the most trusted partner for commercial and industrial businesses seeking to lower their energy costs. And improve reliability. Can you delve into this a little bit?
[00:03:16] Gareth Evans: Yes, of course. Business leaders globally are facing three primary challenges right now. Their energy costs are skyrocketing and that’s not going to change.
They’re going to continue to rise as the grid from which we get our energy today ages and becomes harder to maintain and manage. That is also driving more outages to occur. Resilience issues are concerning for business leaders. They don’t want the power to go off and their business to shut down.
And lastly, there’s huge pressure for businesses to reduce their emissions to meet sustainability requirements, whether it’s from their board, their CEO, their customers, or their supply chain. And so, there’s a great way to manage all three of those pain points, and that’s through what we call on site energy solutions.
So being able to generate and store energy right at your facility. And this can come in the form of solar panels, batteries, wind turbines, gas generators, fuel cells. It can even include electric vehicle charging stations. And so, what our platform does is support customers, regardless of the size of their portfolio, to very quickly analyze What’s possible?
Why would I want to do this? What’s the payback period? The return on investment? How much money can I save? How much can I reduce my emissions? And so, we help them very quickly prioritize where the opportunities are, then configure the right solution to meet their specific business needs and objectives and then get firm and competitive.
bids from suppliers in the market such that they can then have these systems deployed. And so what is a very complex process today, we really streamlined, automated, and removed the need to hire 10 in house specialists or consultants costing you hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and taking months to years.
We’ve compressed all that through the use of technology.
[00:04:58] Brian Thomas: I love that. And we absolutely need to lower costs. Obviously, it’s just been incredibly expensive these last few years, but also having that reliability of our aging infrastructure. And how do we look towards the future? Right? Because there’s still going to be a lot of demand on the grid, regardless of where you’re, you believe in green energy, et cetera, right?
There’s going to be an incredible demand. And so I appreciate You breaking that down, sharing that with us Gareth, what is the biggest challenge for companies to move to a more reliable and cleaner energy source?
[00:05:28] Gareth Evans: Yeah, I think the biggest challenge, and this is why I really appreciate this conversation, Brian, is the biggest challenge is actually education and awareness.
I think we’ve all been passive consumers of energy from our utilities and the grid. We’ve never really had to think about energy within our businesses. It’s very often a very big line item on the financial statement. Up until now, it was fairly affordable, fairly reliable, and there wasn’t a huge amount of pressure around sustainability, and so businesses were able to accept that as a solution, but they don’t know now what their options are to counter those pain points we just talked about.
And so exposing business leaders to the fact that they have options, the fact that onsite energy and energy efficiency practices can really actually help them massively reduce costs. We do not believe sustainability should come at the cost of profitability. They should go hand in hand. Absolutely. And so it’s providing business leaders one with the education and two with the data, the insights and the intelligence to act with confidence and remove the uncertainty and the complexity out of the process.
That’s really key to it is giving people the confidence to act and knowing that they have the options to act.
[00:06:37] Brian Thomas: Thank you very much for sharing. You’re absolutely right. We need to come up with the best of both worlds, right? Where we can save people money, keep the reliability in it as well.
And of course, sustainability is a piece of that. And how do we make it so it is affordable? That is a challenge right now. So, I appreciate you sharing that. Gareth, we are a technology podcast platform. I’m a techie for years. And we do ask every guest, regardless of your background, if you’re obviously leveraging some of that new and emerging tech in your business. Is there anything you might be able to share with us today?
[00:07:10] Gareth Evans: Yeah, I think the status quo in the industry today is to use spreadsheets to do extremely complex analyses of these systems. And for an energy system, there’s literally hundreds of thousands of variables, the impact, the business case, whether it be utility tariffs, energy consumption profiles, the cost of fuel outage rates, all of these are critical inputs to analyzing a system.
And so we use some very smart data science to crunch these numbers and do it almost instantaneously versus taking months to years to go through with spreadsheets. And now we’re applying, AI and some of these incredible products that are coming to market at this time to really crunch through that data, provide greater insights unlock the power of the huge amounts of data feed that we do have to really generate more and more insights for our customers.
[00:08:01] Brian Thomas: Believe it or not, I’ve talked to people who recently still do some pretty incredible pivot tables in Excel, but that’s just not going to work anymore. And so we do focus on analytics and now with the proliferation of, obviously AI, we’re looking at predictive modeling and some of those different types of predictive analytics for helping businesses move forward. So, I appreciate the chair on that. Absolutely. And Gareth, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
[00:08:30] Gareth Evans: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks.
[00:08:31] Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Gareth Evans Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
