Season 2, Episode 2 - Game Changers and Transition Makers: Creating more flexible, affordable transport for cities

Elena Lambros

Hello and welcome to ESG Matters at Ashurst. I'm Elena Lambros, the Climate Change and Sustainability partner for Ashurst Risk Advisory. You're listening to the second season of Game Changers and Transition Makers. In this series, we meet global entrepreneurs who are embracing disruption to boost business performance and drive the sustainability agenda.

In today's episode, you'll hear my conversation with Kyle Bolto, CEO and founder at Ohmiego, a specialist in all things e-mobility for large buildings. They're used by Mirvac, NRMA, Blackstone, Cedar Woods, CBRE, Fraser's Property and Knight Frank. So, without further ado, let's jump in and hear the discussion.

Hi, Kyle, welcome to the podcast. We're so happy that you can join us today.

Kyle Bolto

Thanks very much, Elena, glad to be with you.

Elena Lambros

I thought it would be great if you could just start by just telling our listeners a little bit about yourself and your background and where you've come from, and also a little bit about your business.

Kyle Bolto

Yeah, sure. My corporate career was in the telecom and telco industry, so I saw a couple of big industry changes there and I decided to jump ship and start my own business a fair while ago now, about seven years ago. I saw some similar things happening in the energy industry with the energy transition that I saw in the telco world, and I was really excited to jump into that space, I thought there was some really fantastic solutions out there we could build. My business effectively, the way we describe it is, we offer e-mobility solutions for large buildings, and that's a punchy little title with a lot of detail that sits behind it, but basically what we do is, we offer services to large buildings, whether they are large residential buildings or large commercial buildings that cater for all the different e-mobility in that building.

We have four customer facing products. We do shared EVs. We actually place electric vehicles in buildings exclusively for residents to be able to use as an amenity. We do exactly the same for e-bikes. These are very beautiful e-bikes, Dutch e-bikes, German e-bikes, they're not the, dare I say, the plastic ones you see in the street, they are a little bit different. We also have two charging products, so obviously we're in the very, very busy and competitive space of EV charging in buildings, but we have an end-to-end solution there. We are really excited that we've got a product that we're launching in Q4 that helps cater for what's called PMD, personal mobility devices, e-scooters, e-bikes, the charging of those in a safe control manner, which seems to be a really hot topic at the moment. We basically work with big clients like Mirvac and Frasers and Blackstone and the big REITs and developers, and we embed these solutions in the bottom of their buildings as an amenity for their residents and tenants.

Elena Lambros

Yeah, that's fascinating. Thanks so much for giving us the background and going through that. One thing I have noticed is just that kind of conversation around what you do if you are a tenant in a building and you don't have access to the sort of infrastructure that you might do if you're in a household, so it's definitely an area that's been getting more focused.

Kyle Bolto

Absolutely. Yeah, we were in a conference the other day about EV infrastructure and the head of the EV council stood up and said, this many people have homes, this many people live in apartments and said, look, EV charging in homes is relatively straightforward, we know how to do it. This party in apartments is extremely difficult and quite hard to execute. That's where we live all day every day.

Elena Lambros

Excellent. That's probably a pretty clear need then that you're addressing, but how did you come about around this idea? What did it look like and how does it really work?

Kyle Bolto

Yeah, look, it's a long winding story, but I'll give you the short version. A lot of startups, where you end up is typically not where you start. Look, we were building in the first iteration of our products and our company, we were building energy optimisation and energy efficiency solutions for large buildings. This was quite a while ago. This was 2016, 2017, 2018, and frankly, that was a very, very hard thing to sell. The technology was fantastic, we were able to manipulate air conditioners and all sorts of electrical devices very subtly using software to reduce the overall energy load on the building. As it now transpired, that's quite common and quite sought after. That's called demand response, but we were probably a little bit early to that. How we came across this was very interesting. We spent a lot of time with the building owners, with the developers, and we realised that what we were selling at the time was a little bit early and it's not what they needed, but in conversation, they were all relatively terrified about how to integrate EVs into their buildings.

It's very interesting to understand the scale of things, and it's always very interesting to describe is that a big building with a lot of air conditioners has a certain amount of electrical load, but you only need a couple of EV charges, and that you start doubling and trebling the load required. It's actually quite a proportional challenge. We realised that this was a challenge they are really, really grappling with, and I went and presented it at a PropTech conference in Hong Kong and we won the pitch competition, which was great, with our energy optimisation solutions. On the way back in the plane, I was kind of the madman when everyone was asleep, scribbling on my iPad, working out, hey, I think we've got something that might meet this need, and that came about, and then we were able to put a pilot in market with shared EVs in a big building in Melbourne in early 2018.

Elena Lambros

Given where you've come from then and thinking about that kind of journey, what does success look like for you? What are you thinking? Where is the business going to head next?

Kyle Bolto

Like the product and like the journey and the pivots that you end up making, I think it's an evolving story. I think we, like a lot of people that jump into things relatively new, the Dunning-Kruger effect is alive and well in most cases, but as you go through these things over a period of time, you learn a lot of things. Look, I think we're in a stage where we've kind of developed the normal process of MVP and developing product and testing it. We're now at a stage that the products we offer are quite mature. We have a very mature client base. We deal with 50-60% of the large tier ones, tier two developers and REITs in Australia, so I guess we're in a phase at the moment where our measure of success is really proving that quality product and delivering on what we say, doing what we say, saying what we do, and being the really trusted entity in the market.

Growing the Australian market, and I think the next big challenge for us is identifying other markets globally where our products and services would fit very well. Over the last year or so, I've done a few trips with Austrade to other markets just to understand where we might fit. Look, we're not going to jump into it without thinking about it very deeply and making sure we don't dilute the quality of the product we deliver in Australia, but the measure of success for us has changed, we're at the point where we're growing very rapidly and we're stable and we're looking at other markets where our technology is applicable.

Elena Lambros

Great, that sounds pretty exciting. I've been asking a few people this recently. In terms of, obviously Australia is your current market. Do you develop/build everything here in Australia?

Kyle Bolto

Yeah, we're a pretty unique beast, frankly. We develop everything in-house. We do no outsourcing and it's taken us seven years to build some of our technology, but the benefit is, we get to build that to exactly what we need, we get to build it such that we trust it. We develop hardware, so we literally design and build PCBs for electronics. We have a bunch of electronics in our solutions that we build and operate and build ourselves. We build the firmware layer, we build the software layer, we build the customer app facing layer. Like I said, we're quite a rare beast, we do everything internally. For us, it's about making sure that our focus is very extremely heavy on the user experience. For us, using someone else's third party solution starts to limit you as to what you can and can't do as a customer solution, you're typically stuck in someone else's roadmap. So we made the decision very, very early that we would develop it all from the ground up. There are pros and cons to that, which we can have another two hour conversation about.

Elena Lambros

Yes, that would probably take a while.

Kyle Bolto

Largely, I think it's hugely to our benefit and our customers are starting to feel that we curate and quarantine and manage that user journey from end to end, and it's really playing out strongly for us now.

Elena Lambros

Yeah, excellent. That's great to hear. I guess, probably following on from that theme, what do you think is really the key for you in terms of re-imagining the current system or changing the game?

Kyle Bolto

Yeah, look, I mean, we spend our life in that space thinking about it, and I think the thing that probably comes to mind the most is, the biggest enemy of progress is the way we've always done it. I think that's always an easy decision for people to make and it's low risk. Frankly, in a corporate setting, there's not a great deal of incentive for radical changes and radical propositions, but I think the advantage for us is, we sit outside of that, typically, we can take a lot of that risk or we can experiment with a lot of that risk. But looking at the world differently and actually having a pretty audacious vision of what the world looks like. We often talk to our customers. One of the big propositions we have, particularly with our shared mobility, whether it's shared EVs or shared e-bikes in the building, the consequence of those services is that, effectively we can have less cars on the road.

The one car, one house, or two cars, one house or in an apartment context, doesn't need to be the way it is. The vision of the world that we see, and it might take some time and you might have to claw cars from people's bare knuckles at some point in time over time. But the vision of the world we see, and whether it's five years or 10 years or 20 years away, is that private car ownership is probably not super sustainable in a really big growing city, but having on demand solutions for your transport needs. We talk about, it doesn't work in the far-flung suburbs, and it's probably fairly difficult in regional areas, but in those built up cities we have in Australia or around the world, if you are within five or 10 minutes' walk of a metro station or you've got Ubers at your door and you've got bus and you've got available public transport to go downstairs and have access to a fleet of different electric vehicles, a fleet of different electric bikes, you pick the mode of transport that suits your needs.

That's the story we often tell to our clients is that, that then frees people up from car ownership. Frankly, the car ownership is probably the second most expensive thing that people do in their lives in terms of their monthly budget or their weekly budget. In a world where affordability is becoming very, not only topical, but real for a lot of people, being free from owning a car and all the associated costs with that is really what we sort of push for as an end state solution. To answer your question, you really have to look at a different way of doing things to achieve that outcome, all the way from the design and planning, from council planning, from traffic planning, all of these things take many, many years, so you have to start with that vision in mind many, many years in advance. Thinking about the way we've always done it is sometimes a hamper to sort of freeing yourself from some of these things that sort of hold you back a little bit.

Elena Lambros

No, I love that. Thank you for that response, and I really like the focus on affordability, and then you should think through the convenience and access. That's essentially what you're trying to solve and that's what people are interested in.

Kyle Bolto

That's right.

Elena Lambros

Maybe turning to what I always ask people around their own personal commitment to net zero, do you have a personal commitment in the next 12 months that you'd like to talk about?

Kyle Bolto

Well, look, I'm happy to talk about my previous 12 months. I no longer own a car, so I'm trying to walk the walk.

Elena Lambros

Oh, good. How has that gone?

Kyle Bolto

Look, I'm in the extremely fortunate position that I have access to a lot of cars through my business, so I'm not doing it too tough to be very honest. Look, I am consciously trying to, particularly when I'm at home and I've got meetings in the city, I'll jump on the e-bike as often as I possibly can and just be conscious of those trips. I think my next 12 months, look, I would love to say I would love to be able to reduce my carbon footprint because I'm on planes a lot.

Elena Lambros

I know the feeling.

Kyle Bolto

The challenge in my business is, it's very hard to not be on planes a lot, but I'm certainly conscious of the fact that that's a very, very large component of my personal footprint, and the more remote meetings I can do and the more... Yeah, I guess that's really the only solution that I know of, and there are certain things that you have to do face-to-face. It's just a fact of life, but that's certainly on my radar for the next 12 months is reduce the number of busses in the sky that I take.

Elena Lambros

Thank you, we might change tips at another time around how to stop flying so much because I also am working on that. Finally, if you could provide our listeners with one action to take away, what would that be?

Kyle Bolto

One action item I would take away is, I think there'll be a lot of people over the next handful of years that make the decision to choose to go from, say, internal combustion engine vehicle to EV. Look, I'm very pro EV, but I'm not here to tell everyone that it suits every single use case and everyone must do it. I'm not a zealot about it, I'm certainly, I'm extremely positive, but I'm not a zealot. I understand different circumstances suit different people.

The action I would take away is, when you're going through that process, depending on your circumstance, depending on where you fit, I think, thinking about how you get around the city more broadly, that the transition from internal combustion to EV doesn't need to be a one-to-one switch from, I privately own a nice car to, I privately own an EV. I think there's a very interesting transition piece here where people can genuinely, depending on where they live, depending on the services around them, they can genuinely go to a car-free ownership model and have all the benefits of not having to worry about rego and insurance and all of these things, and actually get around the city in a much more flexible way.

I think, in the not too distant future there is likely to be a bunch of robotaxis around. That's yet another string on the bow of not having to own a personal vehicle.

Elena Lambros

Great, thank you. Well, thanks so much for joining the podcast today, it's been really great hearing about all the work that you do and the future of this industry, so thank you.

Kyle Bolto

No problem, thank you so much for having me.

Elena Lambros

Thank you for listening to this episode of ESG Matters @ Ashurst. I hope you found this episode engaging and inspiring.

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