It’s Never Been Easier
My CEO likes to say “It’s never been easier to build an Electric Vehicle charging company than it is today.”
It’s never been easier to build an EV charging business in the whole spectrum of human time; much easier than 2012 and most certainly easier than in 1910.
That is not to say it’s not hard to build an electric vehicle charging business, but it’s never been easier than it is today.
It’s hard, don’t get me wrong! We may even be going through a national ‘trough of disillusionment’ (a moment in any hype cycle) but it’s still the best time ever to be building this business. There is immense and well-capitalized global competition, there are rapidly changing technological requirements, certifications and standards that can blockade your progress on the turn of a dime, there is immense status quo in the energy sector and dogmatic adversaries who want to see the industry stall and falter…
AND YET…
It’s never been easier to build an EV charging business than it is today! Great opportunity invites competition as a market moves toward an efficient market but in the run up though, early bird gets the worm.
There are standard business seasons (or cycles) in any industry and then there are generational cycles. These generational cycles are ‘industrial revolutions’ in their own regard. The late 90s experienced the start of a generational cycle with the boom of the internet and a complete paradigm shift in how we communicate and interact with the world and its information.
Imagine how the train operators must have felt when James Watt invented the steam engine in the early 18th century and they saw the world of possibility ahead of them?
Imagine how shovel salesmen must have felt sitting at the banks of Sutters Mill at the base of the Sierra Nevadas during the gold rush…
I feel today the exact same way that I did the day I joined Xeal in early 2022 (Here’s why I joined Xeal). It’s very rare to work in a business with a growth rate that the electric mobility space is experiencing and to be laying the foundation for a paradigm shift in transportation that will impact the globe. I wonder if that’s how the industrial revolutionists in the late 1800’s felt when they were laying down railroad tracks connecting the country?
That’s how the charging industry should feel as the world careens toward a mass adoption moment. This is a once in a generational electric shift and we’re lucky to be playing an important part of this country (and world’s) transition to electric transportation.
It’s a wild thing to say and we can get lost in the daily minutiae, but it’s true. Imagine trying to build this business in 2012 like some of the earliest pioneers in this space (thank you Chargepoint!) when the electric vehicles were more of an aspiration than a reality. That would have been HARD but certainly worth it if you were willing to be patient and put in the work. Today, however, building this business has never been EASIER and there’s an inevitable future where all this work and infrastructure proves its worth.
There are a million ways to be successful in business. There are a million different ways to make money. You could run a successful plumbing business, you could own a scrap yard, you could be a real estate developer, you could be a Cardiologist, but very few professions and industries have a singular moment in history that they can point to where their market was truly created and proliferated. The electric mobility industries moment is right now.
It’s always a decent time to be building a plumbing business but it’s never been easier to be building an electric vehicle charging business!