Latest / Unstuck Pod / Only Winners Finish Their Story (Dustin Markowski and Jamie Schneiderman)
Transcript
- Jamie: everyone. I've got Dustin Murkowski here ⁓ and I'm going rather try to do a bad job of ⁓ introducing him and telling you about him, I'd much rather that he tell you about himself. And so welcome and please let everyone know. ⁓ Dustin Markowski: Yeah, thanks, Jamie. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, my name is Dustin Markowski. I'm the CEO and founder of a company called Power. We are a commercial solar ⁓ installer, if you will. So we help businesses get solar systems, battery, EV chargers, help them kind of look at how you decrease operational expenses and costs, especially when it's kind of germane to business operations. and help them be able to kind of scale, grow margin and get to the next level. So, yeah. Jamie: Well, you've well, welcome and thanks for taking the time today. Let me see. You have a pretty interesting, a very interesting entrepreneurial path. So I would love for you to share with everyone kind of what that looks like. Dustin Markowski: Yeah, I I spent the first 20 years of my career in tech and got, ⁓ you kind of like working our way backwards, I got hoodwinked in the best possible way to leaving everything that I had built and learned ⁓ and coming construction about like nine ago. And it was it's been ⁓ one of the most and ⁓ exciting ⁓ journeys I have on. So yeah, And it was because one of the people that worked in sales, she was like, you know, you need to come work for me and on my team. And, ⁓ and it was, did, I wanted nothing to do with sales. was like, yep, I'm good. I don't need that in my life. I I'm happy. ⁓ you know, I'm happy doing accounting and that I was doing. And, I'm, I'm very, I like to be very organized. So accounting seems like it fit really, really well. And she's like, no, you need to, you need to come over here. She's like, this is what you're meant to do. So at some point, I listened to her and I start working in sales and the rest is history. I tried to leave sales multiple times and I never could. just, I loved it too much. And, and so that's where kind of my career started. And like, you know, in semiconductor 20 too long ago, 20 too long ago. Yeah. Jamie: ⁓ my goodness. well, at least you know your thing. Like you found your thing, you found the right place for you. ⁓ listen, the right place for you is a combination of two things, right? It's sales and entrepreneurship, and the two obviously go together, right? Dustin Markowski: Yeah, yeah. And I think that's exactly right. So, know, I spent a couple of different semiconductor companies in the first kind of 10 years of my career. At the end of that 10 years, I went back to my parents company. And my was kind of, I think, done with his time. Like he, you he was, think, I don't know, he put so many years into it. ⁓ He was, so I started, you know, even though was running sales, I started basically running the company for a large portion of that. ⁓ And And it was extremely stressful. don't know if I would say that I enjoyed it at the time, but I learned so much. And when that time was done, when I looked around 2007 and looked around and was like, there's no semiconductor business here in Silicon Valley, which is, funny looking back because now another 20 years later, and that's all, we got Nvidia, we got AI and it's... Jamie: You Dustin Markowski: you know, revolutionizing it again. So we're kind of back to where we started in a lot of ways. Um, but I looked at, wasn't anything here. And I said, you know, I think I need to, I think, think software is kind of like the next place I need to go. And, um, I found a couple of guys that had started this business. Um, I joined and I was like, can go, I can go sell. Um, and so like my first prospecting list was the yellow pages. And, um, I picked up the yellow pages and started just calling every business that I could possibly think of and, uh, trying to sell them SaaS software, right? Jamie: Amazing. Dustin Markowski: And everyone's like, what's this SaaS? What's SaaS? What is this? And it was like, ⁓ it's software as a service. Like don't need to buy the software. You can just use it for when you need it. Right. And obviously over the last 20 years, you see how that's revolutionized. It's only way you can get software nowadays. yeah, yeah, exactly. yeah, did, a company was called ShareVault. We did like Jamie: Yup, pretty much. Dustin Markowski: documentation and data security and exchange and review and everything else. Now I think they just call them virtual data rooms. And I was coming up in this at the same time that like Box and Dropbox and ⁓ we're starting to come up as well. you know, like it was a really great time to kind of be in that collaboration space ⁓ early on. So, yeah. Jamie: No, I think they're awesome. Dustin Markowski: We went to you, sent it after that. So five years I spent at ShareVault. And I was like the third person there. so you have all of these and dreams and everything that you're going to build and what you're going to do. But you ultimately have people that you have to work with, partners you have to work with, and we have to all be on the same page. And sometimes ⁓ from what you do in your core business and moving out of that can be difficult. We had built this business starting in 2007 with no money. over the course of those five years, we'd, I don't know, grown probably somewhere to be like $8 million in revenue. ⁓ we'd never gotten funding because started this business or I started working for them at least. within like three months, Lehman Brothers shut down the whole financial, like everything collapsed, right? And we're like, okay, great. How, what are we going to do? ⁓ it turns out we were at the right place at the right time. Like everybody was looking to sell their business and we helped facilitate that. And it was too costly to do a physical data room. And so this was like the cheap alternative. it ended up being like the right move at the right time. But as you come out of that, know, like document collaboration was really like the thing you wanted, you know, like the thing that you wanted to be in. But how do you sacrifice the business you've built for the direction you want to go? And it was a really, really difficult thing. getting us to move out of you're kind of, people are paying you a dollar for every digital page that's in their room and getting them to paying like 20 bucks a user on a basis, like it's a really hard unit economics ⁓ transformation to take ⁓ to think through. really, we ultimately didn't do it is the answer, ⁓ right? Jamie: Mm. Yeah. Well, cannibalizing your own business, for what may be a long-term model, but like in the short term, it's gotta be unbelievable. Like ⁓ difference in the very near term, but, ⁓ Dustin Markowski: Yeah. And when you do it bootstrapped, you don't, you don't, you're not resting. You don't have anything to kind of say, okay, well we have, we have a way of making sure that we're going to be fine to get us through the term. and so yeah, that makes it extremely difficult at that point. So. Jamie: Okay, well, so can we, jump forward to where you are now. Cause I, and and I think we'll go back to you. You've got a ton of experience that we can live. So with power, who's your, the main customer? Like who are, who's the, who are you going after every day? Dustin Markowski: So we essentially have two customers. ⁓ So we have the customer who actually has solar system installed on their building. ⁓ It's a lot of businesses who own their own property and they're operating out of their own facilities. ⁓ There's a lot of other applications. There's people that are tenants in lease and they get their... Jamie: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Dustin Markowski: they get their property owners and their landlords to agree to sign off on undoing projects like this. the vast majority of them, they own their own property. these are folks that, you know, that are really looking at the margins in their business, seeing how the world has been changing and shifting over the last 10 years, electricity costs skyrocketing going through the roof. And they're figuring like, hey, I need a better, I need a more predictable, better way of being able to scale our operations. So where it makes the most sense, you see it a lot in the manufacturing, you see it a lot in like cold storage, at places where they have a lot of energy use, and it's part of what they do in their business, right? It's directly related. So if their business scales up, their energy use scales up as well. And it makes a ton of sense for those folks. Jamie: Mm-hmm. So you're going in and installing, I say like installing on the actual physical location where they're operating. And then that helps to dramatically lower or eliminate their costs, right? eliminate their costs, ⁓ the difference and the source of energy that they're looking for going forward. Is that sort of the way? Dustin Markowski: Yep. Yeah, so the way I like to think about it is it takes something that is quasi known and makes it much more certain. And so we now have a cost that is budgetable. We know exactly what the cost is. It can be spread out over 25 or 30 years, whatever kind of that lifetime of that system is. And so when you kind of look at union economics that way, you start to bring your energy costs to 25 % or lower. Jamie: Yeah. Dustin Markowski: what you typically see. ⁓ all future increases you're kind of shielded from, at least to some extent, which is great. Yeah. Jamie: Okay. Yeah. So what was the, so tell me the, the moment that you kind of, you know, Hey, we have something here. This is, this is a big thing we should let's go. Dustin Markowski: it that took us, you know, three years or so to figure out. So the first business I started in solar sort of a friend of mine, it was residential. It within two years, we did like $120 million in 2019. We just it was phenomenal. Yeah. at the end of that, I probably put you know, two and a quarter million dollars in my own money, all of my time. ⁓ to get to this place. And at the end of that, that year, we just had a phenomenal I was like, okay, cool. Like, like, I'm get my first payout. I really excited. got a bill from like my best friend and business partner, which just another lesson on, you know, ⁓ always everything in writing. It doesn't matter how well you trust the person going into relationship. But ⁓ I got bill and I'm looking at this and I'm like, ⁓ it's not fighting. so I said, know, I've done it once, let's go start another business. So we start this business and we're gonna just, gonna repeat. we're just gonna do the same thing we did before. And like five days later, like the world shuts down, right? going, you know, sending people into five homes a day, you know, ⁓ every single day does not gonna work anymore. And so we tried like messing with the model, we had some marginal success, but never like the same level of success that we had before. And so we looked at it said, okay, well, you know, what was it that we can do? So we just tried. Jamie: ⁓ huh. Dustin Markowski: all different kinds of models. Within the thing that worked the best is we had a couple of commercial projects that we wanted to get done. And as a sales and marketing organization, like we're looking for someone to go fulfill it, to go install it. And the folks on the residential side in solar, people all day will do this all day long, right? They'll go and install your projects for you. This is what it costs. You get paid the difference. And so it's a very easy business to go grow and scale when you're a sales org. Jamie: for now. Dustin Markowski: It doesn't exist on the commercial side. And so all the commercial businesses are like, yeah, give me your lead. We'll go sell it for you. We'll just, you know, we'll pay you some nominal fee for the referral. And we're like, no, no, no, this is like, this is what I do. I've spent 20 something years selling to businesses. I know how to sell the businesses. I don't want to give that up to somebody else. And so we looked around and we said, you know, it doesn't, let's just go create it. And so we over, it was like slowly over time, we got connected with all of, different lenders in this space. We started looking at subcontractors to go install. And so we kind of became a general contractor ourselves. then eventually we started doing it. So we basically started slowly vertically integrating and creating this. that was kind of like the big tipping point where things, we like, we got something and it's working well. And the where it kind of just skyrocketed and took off was when we said, I bet you there's a bunch of other sales orgs out there that would love to have the same thing. And so we started opening it up to everybody else. And that's really when the business took off. Jamie: Wait, so keep going. What do you mean when you say you kept, you opened it up to everybody else? Dustin Markowski: So the other thousands of sales organizations that out there like us from, you know, six years ago that are selling residential systems, going door to door, helping people, you know, get solar. a lot of them had stumbled across people who owned businesses, had projects they wanted to do commercial projects, but didn't really have a great place to go take them. How do I get it done? And, and, ⁓ so we created a turnkey solution for that. So you could come and say, you have a, you have a prospect. Not only are we going to help you go install this and make this thing happen, bring it to market, we'll actually help you sell. And so we said, listen, we'll jump in. You know, know how to sell really good to customers. So you can know how to talk to people. We're going to give you a structure and a framework how to actually sell the businesses predictably and get them sold. So kind of a big thing that we've seen is that a typical commercial sale for most folks would take between 18 to 24 months to close from beginning to end. Jamie: Just saying. Okay. Dustin Markowski: on the sales side. got that down to like under six months ⁓ a lot of for our partners. yeah, so that kind of change in sales cycle now really changes somebody's business. Jamie: Wow. Wow. That's amazing. Okay. okay. So wow, that's pretty amazing. Okay. So what wanted to know, so sounds like you've had, you've hit a hyper growth a bunch of times or significant growth a bunch of times. What like when you've scaling, what is the stuff that you found to be hard or harder than you expected it to be? Like what things have come up that have You know, either you, so it's funny because some things are going, but there's obviously things that have been harder than you expected or unexpected. What kind of stuff, whether it's this business or in the past, anything that you can point to. Dustin Markowski: Yeah. So one of the things that kind of mentioned in that first software business is shifting your kind of business focus. Okay, like this is the business we've built, we think that this is the future over here and how do you make that transition? And are you willing to risk all what you built for the next thing? And I that's been ⁓ a true tenant almost every single business I've ever been in is there has been that magic point at some point. And some businesses have managed it and have managed to actually succeed and do it, and others have not. And I will say that the vast majority of businesses I've worked in, but on the board for have not like have not navigated that well. And it is a hard, difficult thing to do. I mean, in our own business, switching from residential going to come, I mean, that only completely almost bankrupted us and took us out. Jamie: Yeah. Well, it's a, It's people, people use the term pivot. ⁓ I think sometimes pivot is right. Sometimes pivot is harsh, but once again, it's like, we're doing the same thing. Maybe we're doing it for a different group or we're doing it a different way, which is different, but it's not the complete pivot. Like we're in a completely different business unrelated to where we were before. Dustin Markowski: So. Yeah. Sometimes I think pivot is a marketing term too. It's a word that we use to like, hey everybody, everything's okay. We're just gonna pivot. Like we're already doing this. We're just gonna turn a little bit. And sometimes you're like, yeah, that pivot means you're ripping the foundation up and having to repour concrete. You know what I mean? Because the whole business shifts and changes. And sometimes we don't know. And sometimes we kind of find out in the middle of it. And sometimes you do know ahead of time, but Jamie: Yeah. ⁓ huh. Okay. Dustin Markowski: I feel like it's one of those things where we're like, hey guys, this ship's fine. We're good. Don't worry. Jamie: Yeah. Yeah, no, I, well, no, look, and, and look, and it brings me, it's interesting because you talk about it and it, and that perception of what is it, what does it look like? to me, the big part of that is ⁓ aligned is everybody on your team? So is everybody in the same place? Dustin Markowski: Yeah. Jamie: ⁓ how, and anybody else who's involved, I, if there's investors involved and others who are involved. So, so in terms of like, even in terms of running your business today, like when you're running it and you're growing and you're adding stuff and you, and you talked about gradually vertically integrating. How, how were the conversations, how was the, work through the leadership team to kind of get everybody, make sure everyone's completely aligned and bought into were evolving. Dustin Markowski: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's difficult, especially when you're growing, because you'll get, I think you'll find that there's a lot of people that are really great to have on board in the early days, the people that are just very committed, very loyal, will kind of see you through every everything and anything. But the moment that other voices come in, and you know, and it feels like, wait, that's not, ⁓ that's, not I do things. This is, you know, I don't have Jamie: And here's how. Dustin Markowski: they don't feel like they're they have the same control or the same influence that they've always had. starts to get really interesting because those folks, you know, it, shakes up their world. And so that can be it can be difficult. So what I've always done is, one is to see, you know, those things as early as you possibly can, and then and write these things down. And so and start and use that and refine ⁓ over and over over again, what that plan is, because the more times you go through it, like the more refined it becomes, it's like the easier it is to get people on board, right? And so I've always started with having like, as if I'm having a brainstorm session with all of my key leaders, like, you know, what ⁓ if did this one day? What if this is the direction we're like, or what do you think? I think I see the market going this direction. Like, what do you think about? And then we'll talk through those things. And it's in a lot of ways, it really is. ⁓ my ability to refine it. Like I'm getting ideas, I'm hearing their feedback and then go, okay, well, cool. How do we address that objection? And I'm going through it and kind of like refining that business idea over and over and over again. I'll do that 10, 20, 30 times, as many times as you possibly can until, you know, the nice thing is, is when I say, Hey, this is the plan. This is what we're going to do. The idea isn't new to anybody. It's almost like, Oh yeah, this is that like fun thing that we've been discussing and talking about for a long Jamie: Yeah. of all. Dustin Markowski: And then getting it on paper is like I'm obviously like for yourself But then you have to formalize it for the team because if you put it on paper It's the it's it's when things become real and people go. Okay. I now know what my focus is And I think that's always key. We we tend to talk through things, especially when we're small We tend to talk through so many different things and then we carry like 2 % of them So the more you can formalize things, I think that it just really helps people to focus and get on the same page Jamie: So, okay, so no, no, that's great. I think you've, you know, I gonna say, there things that you wish you had done differently in this business? I mean, the get everything in writing, I got that from the past, right? That's a clear learning, you've got it, you're not gonna forget that one. In your own business, like if you look back even the last, you know, 12 months, is there anything that you wish you had done differently? Dustin Markowski: Right. Jamie: that you think would have set you up even better than where you are today. Dustin Markowski: ⁓ I'm sure that there is, and I, and to be honest with you, I don't dwell too much on it. and for main reason of, you know, every, every obstacle you get ⁓ is, ⁓ truly believe this is, your stepping stone to the next place you're going to go. And so if you don't have, if I don't have the partner that, ⁓ the sales partner who sued me, and almost bankrupted our business three years ago Jamie: Yeah Dustin Markowski: we wouldn't have the business that we had today. right? And like, if I hadn't had the partner who sent me the bill at the end of our relationship, I would have never built this business. And so like every obstacle has always been the thing that's gone, okay, cool. What do I have? What can we do? How do we make an impact from here? Right? And so know, ⁓ theme that, that kind of taken with me my entire career, and this is like one of my tenants is only one difference. Jamie: Thank you. Mm-hmm. Dustin Markowski: between a loser and a winner. And that is where they define to end their story. Because every winner has had times at the bottom. And just said, I'm just, this is okay. This is the stepping stone to the next thing. It's, you know, this is the motivation to keep moving. And so this is now I know where I need to grow. This is how I'm going to, This is how I'm going to expand and get better. That's really the only difference is that the loser says, I can't do it. I'm done. And they quit. And the winner says, I'm not going to give up until I get to where I know I need to be. Jamie: I love it. think that's ⁓ fantastic advice for us to close that up on. Cause I, think that was great. ⁓ a great way to think about where you're at, obviously a winner yourself. that's just like, ⁓ do you, how do you, it's good that you're sharing that advice with others. All right. So ⁓ Dustin, do a favor, please let everybody know who's listening, watching, how can they reach you, find you stuff that you're doing. Dustin Markowski: Yeah, so I mentioned ⁓ have two customers, the other customer is all of our sales organizations and partners. And most of those folks, you can find me, ⁓ my handle is the official Duddy at every possible place that you can. D-U-D-D-Y, ⁓ it's nickname I was given ⁓ by my siblings up, they couldn't say Dustin, Duddy was my nickname. ⁓ But the official that's where you can find me and our website for our business is power.solar. Jamie: version. Amazing. All Duddy, I really appreciate your time, everything, thoughts, ideas, and just sharing with everybody. That was great. Really, really enjoyed it. So ⁓ thank you much. And to everybody who's watching and listening, thanks. And we'll see you next time. Dustin Markowski: Thank you.