What The Funk?

0:00 All right, we are back on the what the funk podcast with my friend, the man, Ben Clapacki, checking in with a couple of guitars behind him. It looks like a picture of an oil pad. Yeah, Ben

0:14 Clapacki CEO of West Gen Technologies. One of my highlights this year has been getting to know you better. I don't just say that. I actually mean it. Your wife seems wonderful. You guys work

0:25 together. That's one of the questions I'm going to get into Calgary guy, athlete, father, now kind of a Houstonian. I'm not going to steal your whole thunder though because I know that you are

0:36 just itching to answer the question. Who is Ben Klapacki? Jeremy, I really appreciate you having me on. We were talking before we clicked record on this and came in. I said you're sharing a

0:53 couple of questions you might ask and I don't know Well, how did I answer that question?

0:58 How do I take Ben Clapackey, put him in a box, you know, 40 years of life and 100 different directions I've gone. And I think the best summary I can throw behind that is I'm just someone that

1:12 wants to experience everything I can. We're, as I mentioned before, talking kind of off screen. And I don't, I've got four bucket list items. I don't really know where they came from I was kind

1:27 of coming out of university and like it'd be fun to check the box in what I felt were the four different kind of segments of life. And one was sports. So play on a national sports team. That'd be

1:41 really cool. I'll push and just see how far I could go. Two is start a company. Three was write a book that gets published. And four is, read a song that gets played on the radio You know they're

1:56 all directional, they. Uh, even they push you to be able to try and grow those skills. So, so the national sports team has been hit. The, uh, the company is obviously now a thing. The other

2:08 two, those are, those are a TBD. They're, they're direct. You got time. So like your part, if I'm going to think Canadian along these lines, we're looking to be part Wayne Gretzky part Tate

2:19 McCray, right? Part, um, who's a Canadian CEO, Irving, somebody from the Irving family So I was born in Boston. You were born in Boston. Born in Boston. Yeah. All my, all my families from

2:34 Massachusetts. I grew, uh,

2:37 not, not grew up there, but went back there often as a kid and, uh, didn't move into Canada until 89 grew up in the country outside of. Wow. So grew up. So how much, like how many years of

2:50 your life did you spend in Boston? Did like through, into school or before that? No, no, I left Boston young. So we moved, we went Boston, but that was oil and gas. Okay.

3:02 Obviously, not a lot of oil and gas in Boston. No. Moved down to Houston, lived in Houston for four years. And that's where I guess some of my early memories come from. And then my parents

3:16 wanted to do more of the mountains, nature, country sort of thing. So we kicked up into Calgary at the time and then moved outside of Calgary and spent about, I don't know, 25 years and say there,

3:31 moved out to Ontario for a bit for school, did some early work out there that we can get into after and then back into Calgary, now in Houston. And now in Houston, but going back to Calgary,

3:43 right? But moving back to Calgary. Moving back to Calgary, yeah. Interesting. So do you have dual citizenship?

3:52 I do not have dual citizenship. Should we not talk about this, or the authority is going to come to your house?

4:00 I got, I got in a lot of trouble

4:04 when I applied for my, my US visa. There's, you know, it wasn't,

4:11 it's getting better now. When I turned 18, and when you look at, at having the dual citizenship thing, it, it wasn't set up very well, where you could hold both in Canada and the US at the time

4:22 Yeah. And I distinctly remember, so I applied for my visa and you get to the airport, and there's this lady, she's about, oh, five foot four. And

4:35 I handed my visa papers, and she goes, you were born in the States. I said, yep. Yeah. I took my Canadian citizenship, Heather. She goes, I want you to repeat after me. And she, she

4:44 literally, this could have been a video, she took her finger, and she started poking me in the chest. And she goes, I am a grown ass man. and I made a stupid choice. He wouldn't give me my visa

4:56 until I - No way! It was pretty funny.

5:01 Your stupid choice being you took your Canadian citizenship. Stupid choice taken to Canadian citizenship. Yikes, yikes, that's really - There's a very proud American. I would say so. I would say

5:12 there are a few of those. There's a lot of Canadians too. I'm actually just proud of. Yeah, we are proud of it. We're also maybe sometimes too prideful, but that's a different conversation. So

5:24 you really grew up, I guess, in Calgary. Yeah, you had some time in Boston. You had some time in Houston, very different places. And just went on up to Alberta. What did your dad do in the oil

5:37 patch that moved him around like that? He was a geophysicist. So Exxon for a long time, and Exxon took him into Houston, and then up into Calgary. And I'm from there, he ended up going off on

5:55 his own and doing a bunch of consulting stuff.

5:59 So did you kind of know, like you had, so you had a little bit of exposure, I guess, through his career, into oil and gas? Did you have an inkling that you might end up in oil and gas, or did

6:09 that just sort of happen? That's a great question. And

6:16 coming back to who has been,

6:20 one of the things I've been always very passionate about is trying to make a difference. Everybody's got their theories of people, there's two kinds of people. Mine is, there are two kinds of

6:31 people. There are those who life happens to them, and they just live out the consequences of the events that happen to them. And there are those who happen to life, and they make their own way

6:46 they make changes, that they fundamentally move And I always wanted to be one of the latter. I wanted to be someone that made a difference. That was really important to me. So when you're young

6:59 and you're growing up and kind of going to school, the future was alternative energy, it was renewables. And I was gonna make a difference and I was going to lead this charge for renewable energy.

7:14 And so I went into mechanical engineering at school,

7:18 found the best school in Canada that had some power generation side of things and a really good mechanical course. And then left school, got into alternative energy, did a couple of wind farms and

7:32 became so disillusioned so quickly with what the industry was. I mean, started looking at the carbon footprint into actually building these things.

7:44 My first kind of real construction management project time, technically an offshore project was on an island, just outside of Kingston, Ontario. It was the largest wind farm. At the time, we

7:58 were bringing in shipping blades from Brazil. We were shipping in the cells from Germany. We had to create our own concrete batch plant on the island. We were about 6, 700 cubic meters of concrete

8:12 per turbine. And I was looking at this. I said like this, you know, I truly believe there's a place for alternatives and renewable energy.

8:24 We can't live our future. There is so much energy in carbon that goes into making these things. I stopped and I thought and I said, you know, I'd shunned the oil and gas industry and I'll be the

8:35 first person to raise my hand and say that's one of the greatest mistakes in my life and I live to show the opposite now that that the future

8:50 is an all of the above solution. There's a great, great podcast by a guy named Chris Luebicki who talks about we need all of the above. We need to develop our resources more responsibly. We need

9:02 to do it more efficiently, whether it's mining minerals or whether it's, it's bringing oil and gas out of the ground. But everything we do has a consequence in energy. Whether you're building a

9:15 solar panel and you're melting the sand to do that or you're building a wind farm or a hydro dam, we have to be responsible in everything. And

9:24 I felt I could make a bigger change, bigger difference getting in the oil and gas industry and helping make a system more efficient.

9:35 And I thought that was the best thing I could do for the future of my kids and through the world. Okay, there's like, I'm sorry, there's a lot here, plus it's a Friday afternoon And I want to

9:46 figure out, really put my finger on how. deep, I want to get, but I want to go back to the, sorry, I'll get off my soapbox. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, we'll definitely get into the

9:57 energy stuff, but, but I mean, there's two types of people, those that make life happen, and those that life happens too. And I couldn't get away from, from that thought, because I actually

10:11 think in some self reflection, I've been both of those people at points in my life Like, I'm trying to get better at seeing the gray area and things versus just being so black and white, which is

10:25 something that I've been most of my life, but, but there is a gray area here. And the gray area is that definitely at times I've been both. Is it possible to be both of those people?

10:41 Yeah, I think everybody at some point in their life, at some point, at multiple points in your life continuously. You're never one extreme with the other. Right. You know, you're, bad things

10:54 happen to you, you feel beat down. Nobody can, nobody's invulnerable.

11:02 But there is a net difference, right? You, people talk about open mindset and close mindset. That open mindset that I'm going to happen to life. You pick yourself back up Bad things happen, you

11:18 go down in the ground and go crying the corner for a little bit. The world's terrible. And then he hit that point and he said, I'm not done. I'm not beat. You turn around, you pick yourself back

11:31 up and you move on. And

11:35 we, it's not my place to tell your story. I know you've been through your own challenges. But look at what you're doing now here. You've built your own company You've got a podcast, you're making

11:46 changes to

11:49 life. Yeah, I mean, really even like going back to the roots of starting funk futures, like life happened to me. I was laid off. And two days later, I decided to make life happen and start my

12:01 own thing. Like, I think you can go back and forth pretty quickly, but between those. And I felt like shit when you got laid off. Like, I've been there, you just feel like you're useless, like

12:13 you're never gonna go anywhere. It's a step to the heart, your self value goes down, but you turn around and you pick back up. I didn't really have a choice, you know, it was sort of like I was

12:25 tired, I guess of life happening to me, at least as far as my career went, that I needed to make life happen from a business perspective and have.

12:35 There's still been plenty of ups and downs and things definitely still happen to me, but as much as I can control, I try to control, you are a big proponent, not just of energy and all of the

12:49 above.

12:51 but of coaching, right? And I've actually, you've been interesting to work with for me on the business side, right? Transparently funk futures and West Gen are partners and we're part of your US

13:06 sales arm and it's going well, it's fun. Certainly ups and downs already and lots of learnings and I think we're figuring each other out and our best cadence and how we can do all that. But one of

13:16 the things that's been fun about working with you is, first of all, you ask if you could offer some coaching and some advice and I'm very open to it, but it's pretty clear to me that you're also

13:30 open to coaching as well. Do you have an executive coach? Is that something that you've had for years? Do you treat that as a priority and maybe even talking about some of the learnings that you've

13:41 had in leveraging a coach, assuming you have one? I appreciate that. So, you know, maybe first. shameless plug. The answer is yes, I do have an executive coach. It's been absolutely

13:56 life-changing for me, not just in leadership, but in how I interact with people. It's opened me up to a whole world of, pardon me, performance that, and not just personal performance, but the

14:12 ability to encourage and help grow those around you, to maximize their potential. I never even thought it was possible. So the gentleman's name is Ross Martin, Black Tuss, leadership. Like I

14:25 said, honestly, it was life-changing for me. We,

14:32 probably similar to many entrepreneurs that came out and you learn these skills as a project manager and work to just get things done. And you start a company and there's one or two or three people

14:46 and you're really small, so you just do shit And then as you grow. you keep this, this attitude towards, I'm just gonna do things. So people come up and they ask you a question, you tell them

14:56 how to do it, something goes wrong, you tell them what to do, right? And I actually developed a nickname, Bendoser. 'Cause I fell into meetings and just absolutely take over the meeting. Okay,

15:12 this is the problem, you're doing this, you're doing that, you're doing this, you're doing that. And you know what, it caught results. It really did

15:19 And completely was setting both myself and the rest of the company up for failure.

15:26 Nobody was growing and the bigger we got, it just meant more and more and more gone on my shoulders. And I became the bottleneck for the growth of the company. Everything had to flow through bad.

15:37 My first leadership 360 we did, literally like the theme that came through from I think we did 12 or 14 people the like was outcome it And there of through

15:48 nine out of.

15:50 12 or something like that was

15:53 everything in the company goes through Ben and

15:59 there was this also like, what's Ben's strength? Ben has this phenomenal work ethic. And I came back and I'm like, I'm proud of this, right? That like, yeah, man, like I'm running this

16:08 company. I'm, everyone loves my work ethic and her office like Ben, this is terrible.

16:17 This is, how are you ever going to succeed? How are your people ever going to grow? And he taught me to completely change my perspective and focus on coaching. And

16:30 the whole goal, there's a really, really good book, two really good books. One's called Multipliers, I think it's Kim Scott. And then the other one is Trillion Dollar Coach

16:43 written by, I think it's Sergey from Google, but he was the guy behind. see jobs in Google and a whole bunch of the, a whole bunch of the different Silicon Valley billion trillion dollar companies.

17:00 And the concept that both of these books talk about is the leader's job to first and foremost escalate the skill level of everyone around them, to multiply the skill level of everyone around them.

17:16 And the way you do that is through seeking first to understand, so always go, never attack down, understand what's going wrong, and then coaching questions. And you have to genuinely care. And

17:30 hey, how do we get you to help solve this problem?

17:36 Wow. When did you first start getting executive coaching?

17:43 So I first started getting executive coaching recently about a year and a half. a few years ago. So we're probably about 20 months into it. It wasn't actually originally for

17:56 me. It was for someone else in

18:00 the company.

18:03 And then the opportunity came up in the board. I wasn't CEO at the time. The board came down and said, Hey, would you like some executive coaching opportunity to learn more? For sure. I had no

18:14 idea it was going to be so transformational One of the best things that's ever happened for sure.

18:21 Okay. I mean, this is good stuff. But I want to go back then to Westgen. Westgen converged as some people knew it for a brief period of time. Now back to Westgen. Where did this idea come from?

18:37 How did you start this company? How long has it been? Walk me through a little bit of that. And then we can talk about the journey because there's been a lot of changes Is that your company? There

18:47 has. So, I mentioned I kick my career off in alternative energy

18:55 in who I'm pulling this off the top of my head. I'm going to say 2009. It was right when the crash happened or on the tailside of the crash. I do a roundabout way, wound up back in or over in oil

19:08 and gas back in Calgary and started doing facilities design there. I've mentioned I had this passion about efficiency and the responsible energy development side of things. What that really means is

19:23 you just want to get every single molecule of oil and gas out of the ground as efficient as possible. You want to minimize how much capital you're spending, you want to minimize how much waste you

19:32 have, and then that way you're maximizing the value of the resource you're getting at. Profitability and ideally safety too. It's profitability, safety emissions, like everything gets better when

19:45 you have a more efficient design. So I was. absolutely focused around how do you, how do you get the best possible design for the field I was working in at the time, which was the Montney, so

19:60 Northern Alberta, Northeast, British Columbia. And I got really lucky that I, at a very young age, relatively for school, the VP quit at the company I was with. I got placed in a project

20:13 management role I should not have been in running a whole client, like two or three years out of school. Wow. You know, I think it was like a50 million development plan, 60 million development

20:25 plan is doing just for facilities. I should say that's not the drill or anything just for facilities.

20:32 And we nailed down a pretty decent patent design. And then I wound up going to another engineering company or issues that maybe we shouldn't talk about on the podcast. And this became a cookie

20:50 cutter thing that I could like we had better time costs than

20:60 a lot of competitions so they came in and started asking and all of a sudden we had this this pad site design that everyone wanted. The problem with this pad site design was

21:12 the ability to get right-sized remote power was very, very challenging. So you either had to stack a whole bunch of tags thermal electric generators. You couldn't do it with solar, we couldn't do

21:26 it with fuel cells or we had to get and what we were doing are these auto-derivative engines, so forwards and GMs and things like that. And they were much too big. You put load banks on them so

21:38 you're wasting energy there. Auto-derivative engines are great for a car, but maybe you get 10-15, 000 hours. Say you're doing 50 miles an hour, 10, 000 hours, 500, 000 miles, that's great

21:51 for a car. That's just over a year

21:56 of actual run time, right? If you're running that engine straight through. So we were spending an arm and a leg on operating costs on these things, they're blowing up, we had to do maintenance

22:06 all the time. And it was like this missing piece that the site design was great, and this power piece and the controls piece around it, just it was too expensive, it didn't work right. So what

22:23 kicked off his West Gen was literally, we left company called Arc Resources, we were up in Grand Prairie, they had a safety incident, which once again, I probably can't talk about what it was

22:34 related to methane venting on the site. They wanted to get away from venting from pneumatics and I was sitting down with the, their head of the. facilities at the time and start sketching out like,

22:48 hey, we can take these engines, but let's get smaller engines. Where do we get smaller engines? Well, you can take them from diesel to revenues, Kubota was one of the best manufacturers. We

22:57 looked at a couple. And then like, how do you drive that engine run time down? Well, Toyota had just come out with a Prius the time. I'm a car guy, I hate the Prius. Sure, you know, it's a

23:11 great car. It's not my kind of thing But they learned how to make engines super efficient and last a very long time because they don't run all the time. So we took the page from the Toyota Prius and

23:24 said, Hey, how about we make this a hybrid system? Let's pair it with battery. So let's get this engine to run. As a battery charger, it runs at 100 load when it's on, so it's way more

23:34 efficient, and then it turns off. And now, you know, we focus towards, increasing the maintenance interval, so we got the maintenance interval out to 2, 500 hours at runtime. Those are our

23:46 first projects that are bigger now, but

23:51 if we could get that engine to only run 30 of time, 20 of time, now that engine's gonna last three to four times longer in overall years. You're going a third to a quarter of the amount of time to

24:08 do maintenance, so your op-ex drops down And we literally sketched this thing on a flight back from Grand Prairie to Calgary on a napkin. Wow. Three months later, we were with my brother-in-law at

24:21 the time, we were whiteboarding a whole bunch of business ideas 'cause we wanted to start a business, and this idea just kept rising back to the top. So we ended up selecting it, and I guess

24:33 that's how the idea for Western got picked off. So then you've got to build something, right? So you've got this idea, Now you need to really turn it into. a product? Did you go out and raise

24:43 money? Did you cobble some cash together, ask for, you know, family money and build some

24:51 solutions? Like, talk me through the early entrepreneurial journey when you decided to make this move. It was absolutely terrifying. I will, I will be the first person to say,

25:03 we might so my brother-in-law is no longer with the company.

25:08 We've gone kind of our separate ways on that part. I did not have the guts to start this thing by myself. And I'll always throw a big pat on the back to him because he was, he was absolutely sure

25:20 we could get this thing started. And he provided a lot of the, the confidence at the time. I had a lot to learn about that. I think that

25:31 getting the guts to take the jump was definitely the biggest part. And to anyone looking to start a company, the best recommendation I can give. Yes, you know, it's easy to say it on this side of

25:43 the fence. But I know he tried to start companies before I thought about it. You dip your toes in. It's never going to work when you jump in, feet first, and you're actually in it. That's when

25:54 you have to make it work. Yes. Give it along the way a dozen times and everyone talks about the rollercoaster of entrepreneurialism. Um, I think that's a word. It is now it is now it is now or in

26:07 the States, we can make up words Yep.

26:12 If you're not all the way in, when you hit that dip in the rollercoaster, you get off here and so we, we didn't have any money. Uh, we literally did the mortgage, our house, whole retirement

26:29 savings thing. I sat down with my wife beforehand and we had a conversation and said, Hey, this is what it's going to look like. This is the risk

26:38 This isn't a me thing, this is a family. Like if we started this, this is going to take just as much of a tool on your life and just as much stress as it does to me, and she wasn't with us at the

26:51 time. And then we went, I think it was 18 months without salary, took all of our money. Wow. Man, it was pretty stressful and built a

27:07 prototype. And it worked. We sold our prototype I think we made3, 000 or4, 000 on a100, 000

27:13 unit. We

27:17 were wildly up on that, but that's what kicked it off. And it was first revenue and rest is history. And you realize that you had something. So it doesn't sound like you started this company for

27:29 the purposes of ultimate financial gain and return Like, you were doing this to solve a problem that you'd live through yourself, right? Like, talk to me a little bit about the. the financial

27:40 component of, obviously you took a lot of risk. Like you built this nest egg for yourself, you had a mortgage, you had a retirement because you worked for years and you worked hard. So there had

27:50 to be an element of, we're gonna get some sort of financial return from this, but you didn't say that. Like what you said was you built this because you acknowledged that there was a gap and

28:01 someone needed to build a solution to fill that gap. But on the financial side, did you also think like, hey, if this works, maybe I'll be worth100 million. No, no, that was never it for me.

28:15 It 100 was for a couple other people. Sure. My other co-founder, or at least that was my understanding. I don't want to put words in this mouth. And there's nothing wrong with that for the record.

28:27 Like there's different types of entrepreneurs, right? So it's funny, I was raised and my dad always said, You're never going to make money if you work for

28:38 someone else. Sure. So I'm actually here to say that's complete bullshit. It's not heavy. This is not true. Yeah. Your worst advice and I love that. Thanks, Dad. Thanks, Dad.

28:53 And you know, in fairness, so it also, it has not worked for my father at all. You know, there was, there was not family money coming in to, to kick this off by any means. Um,

29:11 I think that

29:14 you can make a lot of money working for someone else and working your way up. Yeah.

29:21 To be an entrepreneur and be successful at it, you really need to care about what you're doing.

29:29 You need to enjoy it because just as you know, Jeremy, there's gonna be times when you are absolutely be, You've worked a night. track of my hours, I averaged over 90 hours for the first three

29:41 years a week. Including the first 18 months where you didn't get paid a penny to work 90. Including the first 18 months where you didn't get paid a penny. You can't get through that if all you want

29:50 is future money because there's too much, you know, it's consulting. You get paid really well and you got to love what you do and the other thing I want to throw out there is we've been lucky we've

30:03 seen a, we've been involved a bunch of startup ecosystems and there's a lot of great ideas that come up that

30:14 come up as great ideas. They're not solutions to existing industry problems. I hate to say it 99 of them don't go anywhere. It's a great idea. It's nifty. It's a new mouse trap and you have to

30:27 start at the problem If you're not starting from industry and saying this is a pain point, what problem am I solving? You're in for a rough ride. A hundred percent. I'm like reflecting so much on

30:43 my own journey with this, where I

30:47 thought that I had a good idea. Obviously, the idea has changed and evolved, but the idea was there's a gap in the sales space, and I've seen too many companies go out with a good idea and even

31:01 prove out first revenue and then raise money, and then just throw salespeople at it And that just doesn't work, right? Before you know it, you're spending 100 grand a month for an underperforming

31:10 sales team when really all you needed was access to the market, and you can get that for a lot less, right? I wanted to be that conduit, that avenue for companies like OSgen, who don't need a

31:21 full-blown sales team. You need access to the market, and once you get in the room, your close rate becomes very high. And we can talk about Sam there and all that other fun stuff, 'cause I know

31:30 that you're into that.

31:33 So at some point

31:35 you did raise like a bunch of money. And it sounds like it was more your partner who was sort of like the financial mind. But behind this, you guys went out and had some success. This prototype

31:45 hit and people were buying your stuff. And then you guys raised a bucket full of money. Yeah. Probably created different stresses, I'm guessing.

31:56 It's definitely an interesting experience raising a bunch of money. And let's come back to your, 'cause I don't wanna drop this Let's come back to your conversation about sales, because I actually

32:04 think that is something for anyone that's listening and that has dreams of starting a company or has started a company, I actually really agree with what you do. And I think transitioning out of

32:16 founder led sales is one of the death gaps on a lot of companies. Yeah, yeah. So we had different kind of ideas around where we wanted to go. My business partner at the time, his lifelong goal,

32:30 his bucket list was 100 million top line revenue. nice. It's a fairly large. I was quite happy. I think we were about 20 million top line at the time to just sit there and grow more organically.

32:48 For me at the time there was a fair amount of tailwinds coming towards this small-scale remote power generation space towards the methane emissions elimination space and there was an opportunity that

33:05 my business partner saw to aggressively scale the company and we sat down and you know I think the thing that that really sold me on it is when are you gonna get an opportunity to go out and try and

33:20 build a hundred million dollar company and and I think a lot of people out there you know you hear twenty million dollar top line revenue sounds like a big company manufacturing it's really not it's

33:32 not

33:34 It's not that much. It's not that big for a manufacturing industry, and your margins aren't that huge. It's not like software. So

33:43 I got on board with that. We looked at doing a bit of a change in strategy, so I don't think that the core business plan would have ever supported that 100 million growth, the EPOS, the products

33:57 that we build. There's definitely a market for them. It's not 100 million a year And to supplement that, we started looking at different revenue streams and started barking down the path of a

34:12 software platform for emissions monitoring and things like that.

34:17 And then, you know, so we brought some cash on to try and scale and I think

34:25 I'm leading down so I don't know if this is running into another conversation, I just don't want to keep on talking, but ultimately, you know, a lot of lessons learned with that. cash, we threw

34:35 too quickly, we chased way too many shiny objects, another plug for a phenomenal book, but anyone looking to start a company read Good to Great, Jim Collins, I think, off that one, and the core

34:51 lesson that you're supposed to do out there is all these companies, they went and they tracked all these companies over 50 years or something like that, and they found the ones that stayed really

35:01 awesome, and then the others that got good and died, and what did the ones that stayed really awesome do differently? Well, they found what he calls their hedgehog concept. It didn't have to be

35:10 complex, but it was one thing they did really well, and just like a hedgehog, they curled around it, they defended that, and the other ones he calls, I think it's the Fox concept. The Fox is

35:22 always darting around, chasing some things, and yeah, and that's what we did, and it's a sure way to collapse your business

35:31 And at some point, like.

35:35 living in Calgary, right? The business is growing. And like a lot of companies, I would say in oil and gas or energy tech in Calgary, you realize that the growth opportunity eventually taps out

35:45 up there and you need to have a US. presence. So you and your wife, with really young kids, up and move to Houston.

35:55 Yeah, you know,

35:58 so

36:00 to be honest and transparent, it wasn't something we wanted to do in the beginning. I think that

36:09 Canada and Calgary in particular is a phenomenal place to start a company because it is so small and it is so tight. And if you do something well and you succeed, new spreads like wildfire. You can

36:29 grow and scale, Early scale company, very, very quickly, and Calgary, it's perfect. that. And the very thing that makes Calgary such a great incubator is the thing that then limits you. It's a

36:42 glass ceiling. Some market's only so big. And if you want to scale a company, the reality is the United States is the place to do business. So someone had to come down. As you mentioned, we had

36:53 kids, they were just under two and just under four at the time. So it's a blessing in disguise because they weren't kicking and screaming to change schools That's true. They didn't have a group of

37:07 friends yet that they knowingly would miss, right? Uprooted, moved to Houston. Love it. Love Houston. Absolutely. Like the weather. I do love Canada, but I love the heat. The people are so

37:23 friendly. That southern hospitality thing is definitely true. It's great people in Houston and heading back because it doesn't make

37:35 to now be the CEO of the company and run it from Houston. I need to be in front of the people that I'm leading on a day-to-day basis, but absolutely love this city. So your team and the roots of it

37:48 are in Calgary. Manufacturing happens in Canada, but you're here, right? So I get where that poll happens for you to come back. So you're moving back, pretty good timing too, 'cause it's about

38:02 to get hot in Houston. And that's when you guys decide we're moving back to a. Oh, this is where I love it, man. And you got a pool in Houston. You want a pool in Calgary, you're like maybe4

38:15 million minimum home. Which, which for those listening, that is still wildly outside of my price range.

38:24 And you're only using it like two and a half months a year, right? Then again, you're using it all day because the sun stays out till like 11 pm. out there. So you're about to get a lot more

38:34 sunlight in your life, even though it is sunny in Texas. Are you excited? How do you feel about leaving

38:42 or going back? I'm not, is it leaving? Is it going? Is it coming back? Like, you know, one of the things - I need to be moving this quickly. It's a nightmare to be packing up again.

38:52 You know, and buying and selling houses on this timeframe. Houston, the housing market isn't the best right now. Not for sellers. Calgary, the housing market is terrible for buyers I think

39:05 they're average four days on market or something like that. So the markets are a little

39:15 blocked. You look forward to the bright sides, right? You always got to look to the bright sides. Canada, Calgary, in particular, is blessed with some of the most beautiful nature of anywhere,

39:29 probably the most beautiful nature of anywhere I've been I know you're in Denver. I love Denver, and I'm sorry, you gotta check out Banff. You gotta get into Calgary. Oh, I've been, I've been,

39:40 no. I mean, like Louise and Banff and the green ponds or whatever you, it's different. It feels less trampled, is what I like to say. It is, there's a lot less people. And my family and I were

39:55 big campers, it's the opportunity to get out to nature. So I really miss that. Camping in Houston isn't the same That being said, there's a lot you can do in Houston. Certainly for the other 10

40:08 months of the year. Well, and just from a business perspective too, like you're flying out to Midland and you're going to Oklahoma and you're coming up to Denver and you're going to

40:20 the Bakken. There's relatively short flights for you to get anywhere. And from Calgary, you're not that far away. So you'll still be able to do that if you so choose. Well, one thing I want to

40:31 focus on a little bit before we get too far away from this first of all, we could probably talk for hours I'm gonna have to be pretty diligent about stopping this in like 20 minutes I'm just letting

40:39 you know because my daughter's by mitzvahs this weekend and I'm already getting some looks from Significant other out there

40:47 That I'm really really enjoying this and and I want to go back to the 90 hour work week yeah, cuz that's just not sustainable and First of all, how did you do that and survive? It while you were in

41:01 it and then was there any fallout cuz I don't get the sense that you work 90 hours a week now You're not sending emails craziest times. I actually think you're almost an advocate or not Working 90

41:13 hour weeks not to say you don't have an insane work ethic you do But what was like what was that like and what was the fallout and how did you maintain to work 90 hours a week for three years?

41:25 so

41:28 I've got to answers for that. And we'll dive a little bit deep. The answer

41:36 is, as I didn't maintain it. It broke me 100 broke me. I'd always thought that the answer to everything was more hard work. So I mentioned the athlete side. I was on the Canadian National Bobside

41:49 team. When I was doing that, I was still working 40 to 50 hours

41:56 as a consultant. And then training, you'd spend literally 25 to 30 hours a week at the gym. It was insane. And so I'd been going pretty much since university. Five hours of sleep a night, like

42:10 end of bed at 11 30 midnight, waking up around 4 35.

42:16 And I thought you could just push and push and push and push and push. And

42:24 until you can't, and about two years ago, my brain literally. broke. So I was out backpacking with my brother for his bachelor party at Stag. We were out in the mountains with a bunch of his

42:41 friends and I tried to stand up. Got up the next morning after, you know, I think we'd hike 15k or so what's that? 10 miles and 800 meters elevation gain or something like that sitting around 10,

42:55 000 feet and had a bunch of drinks that night woke up the next morning and just felt wrong and I got a Garmin watch and I looked down at my heart rate and I couldn't get my heart rate to go above like

43:09 60 beats a minute. So

43:14 figured that maybe it was just off, we started packing up camp a little bit, figured we'd go for a hike and start getting really dizzy.

43:23 Long story short, so my brother and the other people we were with, we hiked me back down. Um, started to get really worried, my lips were turning purple, uh, wound up going first to the closest

43:38 thing, because we were in the middle of nowhere was, uh, she had a fire fighter place. So they threw some EKG stuff on me, ambulance me to the hospital, wound up spending the most part two weeks

43:51 in the hospital, and then first they thought it was, um, potentially heart thing, then they realized it wasn't a heart thing. They thought it was a brain thing We thought it had terminal brain

44:01 cancer and a tumor, and there was about a week of like, you know, there's, there's that country song live like you were dying. That truly is a wonderful thing and it gives you a good perspective

44:11 on like long story short, I fundamentally broken my autonomic nervous system. I just pushed it to the point of failure and, uh, and it's been two years I still have - been struggling, trying to

44:30 get out of that slowly, I still get periods where the autonomic nervous system will just kind of break.

44:39 And what I realized, and if there's, we kind of chatted before, you know, what advice would I give younger than what advice would be people? I thought I was invulnerable. You come out and, and

44:52 I at least figured my brain was invulnerable You know your body's not right. You think your, your body's invulnerable at 18. By the time you hit 25, you're like, no, I can hurt. I'm not going

45:03 to live forever. But you, I always believed there was no limit to how far you could push yourself and your brain. Yeah. And, and I hit the limit and that there was nothing more disappointing for

45:16 the first bit than feeling your brain give up on you. You just feel betrayed.

45:23 I've learned to find a better balance now. I'm still definitely way too far. It's probably 60 hours a week.

45:31 I'm far better at spreading that out over the days. So I don't do 12 or 14 hour days anymore. I make sure that if I still work every single day of the week, but shorter periods and bring in

45:44 meditation and things like that. But

45:47 yeah, the short answer is short periods. Yeah, the answer is you just push through it. But if you push through too much, it'll work. Yeah. Well, this is intense. And I really, really

46:01 appreciate you sharing because I think, you know, the whole concept of grind mode and hustle culture. And I'm a, I'm a, you know, guilty of that too. I think you can outwork anything and

46:14 compare yourself to yourself from a year before, and you should be working harder and putting in longer hours and sleeping less than that's not the answer. Were there warning signs or this literally

46:27 just hit you on the hike that. that your brain and body started to break down. Looking back 100 there were warning signs. Yeah. You missed them in the moment. There'd be periods where as working

46:45 out, we used to joke that never understood what was going on with my heart when I'd go for jobs. So I jog like five or six K in, sorry, miles, three and a half, four miles, my heart would stay

47:02 at like 140, 150, and then it would jump up to 200. And for those of you who exercise, like 200 is not a number, your heart should even be able to reach at the age I was at the time in your late

47:15 30s.

47:18 So saw some doctors around that, couldn't figure out what was going on. There was a bunch of signs that things were starting to go wrong and upon reflection I look back. When things went wrong, it

47:29 was always when I was pushing extra hard and there was extra stress and stuff like that. But in the moment, I think everyone kind of thinks that, you know, hell, it's just a weird thing.

47:44 Everybody's got weird stuff that goes and happens to them and you push through. Until you break. Until you break. In some cases, break your brain. So then you go through this insane autonomic

47:56 condition Your brain breaks and your body fails you. Your brain fails you. And, but you're still running a startup. Like you're still running a small company. Like, were you able to actually

48:08 step away and like heal?

48:13 Yes and no. There was a, you know, a couple of week period. I will say one thing and actually, while, while Pat on the back to our board at the time, and

48:29 And our financial and ideal wealth capital are our financial backers, private equity. Everyone's heard these horror stories of how vicious private equity is. And my experience was the polar

48:42 opposite. It was amazing. They came together, said like, Hey Ben, this is the Canadian healthcare system. It's wonderful because it's free. It's terrible because you're deadby the time you can

48:56 use it

48:58 And we had to do some private stuff to actually go and get diagnosed and figure out that I don't have a brain tumor and I'm not gonna die in a week and start understanding what's going on. And

49:13 really the board and the leadership team just stepped up in such an incredible way to help support. Now we were going through some changes and transitions at the time as well and that's part of the

49:24 change back I'm converged to Westgens, ultimately Um.

49:29 Ultimately, and this is where we go full circle, I was not able to step back as much as I'd like or want at the time. It's because all roads lead to bed. It's because I was, we talked to that

49:43 beginning part of the coaching and the leadership, the executive coaching, I'd placed myself at the center of every single thing that was happening. And that was, the timing was fortuitous around

49:55 getting this coaching because I was able to start teaching everyone around me to carry some of that burden, shoulder to weight. And that's been, I wouldn't be able to do what I did without those

50:08 lessons and without that executive coaching. And certainly West End would not be the company it is now

50:15 without that. Well, I appreciate you sharing that story 'cause you just wouldn't know that, right? I mean, from the outside, it's you're the CEO, you're running this fast-growing company, you

50:25 got a beautiful family. move to Houston, you assume everything's just great, right? And maybe it is. Maybe life is great. Maybe you have a different appreciation for this, but that's a really

50:36 hard thing to deal with, especially at this stage of your career and life, to think like not only did like vulnerability hit you in the face and hard, it happened in the middle of your company's

50:50 growth. And when you have really young kids, so I can only imagine kind of the awakening that you had around this of it has to be different moving forward. And I'm glad that you had the support and

51:03 continue to have the support and that you get the coaching that you that you need. So I want to I want to flip this and ask you two questions because typically at this stage, I would ask like, what

51:13 does your company look like in three years or five years? What does West Gen look like? I also want to know like, what do you look like? Like, like, what does your life path look like in three

51:22 to five years and how you approach work as you kind of get to this your kids growing and moving back to Calgary, answer like the business question and the personal question, if you can, of where

51:33 are you gonna be at in three to five years? What evolutions do you see professionally and personally?

51:41 That's a great question. And deep, so I'll share stuff that, probably my leadership team will hear first on the podcast, I know if that's a great thing

51:57 I have no desire to be running a status quo company.

52:02 What we're trying to do with West Gen right now is add product lines and diversify. I am, as I mentioned, incredibly passionate around what I call the energy evolution. I hate this concept of

52:12 energy transition. It implies a change from one thing to the other. I think that we need all of the above. I think we need to get better at what we're doing That means more than just. reducing

52:27 emissions, it's not just that, it's increasing efficiency. It's better net backs. It's less dollars to produce what we're doing. It's better energy security. And

52:40 I literally, it comes from a fundamental belief that our standard of living in North America, we are tremendously blessed. Oh yeah. It's because we have cheap access to energy. The rest of the

52:52 world needs cheap access, secure access to energy to be able to grow That's the humane thing to do. And I want to be part of that tech side that helps support that. So we're looking and developing

53:07 new technology right now to continue to grow and add on to what EPOT is. That's the direction I want to take, West Gen. And I like being at the forefront of that growth. I'll be honest, I don't

53:22 know if we scale

53:26 Tremendously again, I don't know if that means me as a CEO or me stepping down and I'm moving into a

53:34 Development role because I found out that what I love is that growth. I love the I love the new products I love that start the environment and to me the definition of hell is like being CEO of a what

53:49 my old business partner wanted the hundred Million dollar company that's like just making millions of dollars like it's great financially But I don't want to do the same thing day in and day out. I

53:57 always want to be adding and developing and moving things forward making a difference

54:04 Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think you answered that really well and it a lot of reflection. I think already that's gone into that

54:13 Yeah, this is this is really really a special episode for me Thank you for being so vulnerable and sharing, you know everything that you shared and it's been Ben,

54:24 eye-opening for me. working with you. Because honestly, I made assumptions about you, and I didn't really know you, that were completely wrong. Because I think it's very easy to do that when you

54:36 see somebody that's at the helm of a fast growing company. You sort of think that this is someone that is about growth at all costs, maybe doesn't even care about the humanity involved. You know,

54:46 we'd like to push people to the edge, maybe culture's not the priority. And without even really knowing you, I made these assumptions about how the company was being run. And it's the complete and

54:57 total opposite, right? So I give you a ton of credit for bringing your personal nature, your belief in leaning into coaching and consistent improvement and valuing the people that make your

55:13 business happen, including working with your wife, which is got to be kind of crazy, right? You know what, we come back to that, what I've learned from the executive coaching. If I didn't have,

55:27 if I hadn't been taught, 'cause you don't have them. You're not, you're not born with these skills. If I hadn't been taught and learned the communication skills and how to interact, I think it

55:39 would be absolute help. Very blessed that my wife has learned a lot of these skills as well, and, you know, if anything, I think it just brings us together. We believe it or not, I can't tell

55:51 you the last time we fought I have no idea it is about work or other things. We have really strong communication, and it's just awesome to have someone that feels comfortable to challenge you on the

56:07 questions. Like she's my polar opposite, and I love being challenged, and we get to better answers because of it. That's fantastic. Ben, where can people find more about you, about Western

56:21 technology and Okay. learn more about all the great things you're doing from both the power generation and emissions reduction and energy addition perspective. Ooh, energy addition. I don't love

56:34 that. Jake Corley, shout out Jake Corley. He coined that. I'm like, that's too good, man. It's because it's not energy transition. It's truly energy addition because we need it to keep up with

56:41 demand. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm going to steal that phrase. Please do. I stole it from Jake. So, Jake, I appreciate it. I don't know you, but a shout out Yeah. You love him. He's awesome.

56:55 So,

56:57 wwwwestgentechcom.

56:60 That's our website. Not, not West Gen, if I recall. Not, you know what? There's some great other story. I have had so many hotel discounts because people think we're West Gen. Oh, yeah.

57:11 Sorry. Not West Gen. If anyone wants a good laugh. I won't share what it is, but wwwWestGencom. That's

57:23 W-E-S-T-G-E-N that is not us and

57:29 they didn't change their name to that until after we'd started, but it's hilarious. Perf, that was perfect, that's perfect. That's genteckcom.

57:37 Got it. It's,

57:38 my name is Ben Klapaki. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, try and

57:43 answer everyone that does. Jeremy, I really appreciate A, having me on the podcast This has been an incredible conversation, be everything that you've done, the direction that you're going. I

57:58 think what you do with sales can help these new companies grow and scale. It's a wonderful thing. It's like, yes, you have a business and be helping new technology enter the market is

58:13 so much of what we need. So thank you for what you're doing. Thank you for having me here. I really appreciate this. Likewise, I appreciate you too You know, it's great to. Work with good

58:24 people. It's great to work with innovators. It's also great to become friends with your clients. And I'm looking forward to wherever our business relationship goes. I know where our personal

58:33 relationship is going to go. And I appreciate you for that. So have an awesome weekend. Have a great move back to CalgaryWestGenTechcom. Keep an

58:42 eye out for these guys. Thank you, Ben.