And welcome everybody to another smart money circle show.
I'm Adam Sarhan. With me today is Arthur D Sam's,
who's the Co founder and president of M CEO at Polar
Power. Ticker symbol is POLA since
1979. Arthur, thank you so much for
taking the time and coming on the show today.
Well, thank you very much for having me.
I appreciate the opportunity to tell our story.
I always like to ask Arthur, can you tell us a little about
yourself and how you got to where you are today, please?
OK, well my fascinations from earliest memory have been with
biology for pre Med and engineering for inventing.
My life's goal is to apply technology to benefit mankind
and the environment, and I felt that I always had the talent to
pull it off. My partners and I launched Polar
in 1979 with a solar powered vaccine refrigerator we
developed to support cold chain services in rural and remote
areas. Imagine one refrigerator saving
hundreds of lives each year. And through this effort, I
learned the hard way about the barriers of bringing beneficial
and disruptive technology into the market.
I learned that it took a larger presence than what we had to
launch a beneficial technology. So we applied our skills and
knowledge and capabilities pursuing challenging military
programs to earn the capital to grow to the stage where it would
be easier for us to introduce and managed disruptive
technologies. Nice.
I love that. So your camp, your biology at
the beginning, engineer. You were drawn towards a higher
purpose, helping humanity, and you saw that through renewable
energy early on. Yes, you.
Did you have other interests in mind or how like why this so to
speak? Was it clear, do you have
clarity in the 70s that this needs to get done or how did you
end up with with this vision? Well, studying a lot of biology
and engineering and reading all the publications out there and
traveling around, it was just quite apparent.
Got it. And we, it was easy to when you
study technology, it's easy to predict.
It's easier to predict the future, yeah.
I love that. That is very, very powerful.
OK, beautiful. Can you tell us a little about
Polar Power, your business and some competitive?
Advantages. OK, well the thing that we're
doing disruptive is that we're applying DC generators to solar
and non solar applications to reduce the cost of generating
electric power while reducing pollution and greenhouse gases.
This will disrupt the use of diesel fuel and AC generators
for producing electricity. Our applications are extensive
and include the most notable markets of nano grids, robotics
for military, marine agriculture, telecommunications,
electric vehicle charging and off grid and bad grid power.
Now what is kind of gives us a competitive advantage is that
we're kind of taking a holistic approach of everything.
We're taking a look at the solar and how we can make the solar
more efficient. Or another way around is how we
can make the power generation without the solar more efficient
and be able to offer this in today's market and today's
applications as opposed to pursuing technologies that maybe
five or ten years or 20 years out of there out in the future
where you you can't do anything good today.
And I hate to say it, but you're then at the mercy of investors
for constant funding. We we have product technologies
that we are delivering now. I love that.
That is really, really powerful. So from a monetary standpoint
and growth going forward, there's obviously a massive
market here. The Tam is the total addressable
market is is explosive not just in the US but all over the world
I'm assuming. What type of growth projections
or trajectory do you or should investors expect going forward?
OK. With I would say that we have a
strong projection for growth. The amount of contracts and
negotiations that we're in now are are mind boggling.
Love it. We love that.
We love growth around here. So next question for you.
How do you handle risk and what are some mistakes that you see
people make with respect to risk management?
OK, I tend to analyze and learn from my mistakes and I keep when
I try to assess something. I try to go beyond the common
sense because common sense is not always a reality.
Risk to to, to minimize, to mitigate risk is with
diversification, diversification of your product line of your
marketplace and even diversification of your
workforce. Now, without this
diversification, it's easy to have one company crash your
future. It's easy to have one market
suffer A downturn and crash your market.
But when you're, when you're looking at multiple markets
throughout the world, there's always a good strong sweet spot
selling product into somewhere in the world, some application
in the world. Got it.
Now that makes perfect sense. How about some timeless lessons
that you've learned along the way that you'd like to share
with the audience? OK.
In terms of. Business, life, anywhere you
want to go. OK, well, let me start off with
some of the mentors I've had and they would essentially shape my
business and engineering capabilities.
My father was my first and foremost mentor and he was a
true hard working scientist at different stages of his life.
He was a cardiologist, a math professor, a physicist, a
mechanic and driver of battlefield tanks during World
War Two. Oh wow.
I learned how to explore technology, travel the world,
and work hard through his example and through his
mentoring. The second, I would say group
that's been quite influential have been junior and high school
shop teachers. Oh wow.
They gave me the confidence to work with my hands and solve
problems in a practical manner. I mean, this aided my
engineering studies and helped me produce my inventions and it
was a strong foundation for my engineering skills.
I mean, I mean, I was able to design and build things at a
more advanced stage than engineers 10 years, 15 years, my
elder. So the shop classes, they they
they teach you that you can't build this, but you can build
that. Yes, understood.
And my projects over the decades have attracted the attention of
other engineers who lent me their assistance.
And through this project process I had many mentors and my secret
that I learned was to learn on the mentors terms and not my
own. Oh, wow.
I love that. That is really, really powerful.
That is really, really great. So can you give an example of
that? Please.
OK, well, for example, let me give you an example from when I
try to mentor some of the younger engineers approaching or
working here at Polar and what they complain about is, well,
you didn't teach me right or you didn't, you didn't let me
understand what you're saying. You need to do this more and
more. And it's almost like saying,
well, you know, I'm an engineer, really not an instructor, right?
Wouldn't consider myself a professional mentor and I
wouldn't trust a professional mentor.
But you have to learn the best way that I can teach.
I mean, when I was growing up, some of my best mentors would,
would shout and scream. I hear you.
They would shout and scream because they're excited, right?
They would get so involved that they didn't even realize that
they're raising their voices. So many times the students or
other students would tend to avoid these teachers because
they thought they were too abrasive or too hard.
But I tried to learn on their terms, and I also tried to
reward them with my success. I love.
That yeah, that is really, really powerful.
How about the opposite? Timeless mistakes and what have
you learned and how do you avoid them?
OK, in terms of timeless mistakes, first of all, I'd like
to use humor. Please.
And I mean, I got a pretty good sense of humor, and humor eases
the stress of business. I make it a point to learn from
my mistakes, but I don't consider any of my mistakes as
funny. I mean, I would say that the
most important lesson that I learned is that common sense is
not always a reality. What you perceive is the way of
the world may not necessarily be reality.
It may not be of the way of the world.
I mean, one of the big mistakes that I did, for example, is
doing government contracting. I read a lot of books.
I tended a lot of lectures and presentations by the various
buying commands. And with that I had to shape.
I had an idea of what opportunities I had.
It was unfortunately until many years later that I I saw it
clearly. That was not a reality.
Understood. There was limitations on the
contracts that we could go after, despite the recruiting
efforts to participate in these contracts.
So there's nothing beats experience.
You can read every book in the world, but nothing beats
experience. I love that.
That is great. So you've been a leader now,
Arthur, for 454445 years with Poehler.
What? What makes a great leader, and
what are some lessons you've learned about leadership that
you'd like to share with the audience?
In terms of leadership, it's being able to understand that
there's two sides to an argument.
There's two sides to a story. There's usually a reason why a
person is behaving or acting a certain way, and then at times
you have to learn that sometimes you can be too lenient, and it's
always a balance between being lenient and being not so
lenient. Makes perfect sense.
How about some obstacles that you've had to overcome and or
adversity? Would you like to speak about
any of those please? Yeah, I would say diversity.
Adversity is I would say probably the the biggest
diversity that probably people run across as being different
than the group. If you're going to be a leader,
you have to be slightly different, which meant then
separates you from the group, but at the same time you want to
be part of the group. Right.
So it's being, it's being able to balance that.
And I would say that my upbringing has been kind of
different than most of my peers. They had not had the freedoms I
had being able to do the things that you wanted to do.
And then to some of the diversity growing up was either
you run into issues of color, race, religion, you know things
like that. Yeah, so.
That makes perfect sense. And then how about obstacles?
How do you overcome an obstacle? You're faced with a problem?
How do you quote, UN quote, address it, reverse engineer,
pardon the pun there, interjecting some humor?
Or how do you address those kinds of things that inevitably
show up? Well, it's kind of hard to have
a a, a blanket statement to cover that.
It depends on the adversity, whether I mean the types of
adversity I see is it can be funding, they could be
technology, it could be, it could be dealing with people, it
could be COVID, it could be a supply chain issues.
So I say the first thing to do is be calm and don't get
hysterical. Don't get set your motions aside
and attack the problem analytically.
Who look for areas where you can get help.
Look for areas that you can take the task on yourself and solve
the problem, or when you have to go to someone else to help with
the problem. So I would say that most
problems are are solvable if you can remain at if you can keep a
cool head. I love that it's so remove the
emotions from the decision making process, try to make
rational, not emotional decisions, etcetera, etcetera.
Exactly. I would say one time without I
had. I got drafted during a national
emergency act in Canada and I was pressed into service to
fight fires. And during some time off, I took
a walk with with some friends and I accidentally stepped into
quicksand. Oh wow.
So my greatest sales pitch was yet the person near me to enter
to intervene and to a rescue, right?
He wanted to run off and get help.
By time I would be under the quicksand, right?
So to convince him and the most calmest of voice to come closer
to the water with a Long Branch, pass me the branch and help pull
myself out of the water. Wow.
Wow, wow wow. That is fantastic.
I love that story. How about the best piece of
advice you'd like to share with the audience or give your 30
year old self? On, OK.
In terms of what not to do or to do in business?
Anywhere you want to go. OK, I would say that a short
list of things would be to say look, don't take technology and
search for an application. Focus on the application and
find the best technology. I've too often seen good
technology placed in inappropriate applications which
only led to short term solutions.
To limit competition. I've seen engineers
intentionally increase the complexity of the invention and
order to prevent it from being replicated elsewhere.
I say to simplify the invention as much as you can and make the
business model more complex by adding additional services.
Oh, I love that. Minimize the number and levels
of outsourcing. Outsourcing means that you've
got more partner sharing the profit.
Outsourcing can be very convenient and very very
popular. But as time goes on as the as
the world seems to shrink, it's harder and harder to pass on the
extra cost of this outsourcing convenience to the customer.
Now there are certain tasks that are best outsourced at a lower
cost than performing in house where someone has a better
technology in producing it and he can give you a lower cost to
produce the part than you can in house, but have the ability to
make an accurate make or buy decision.
And if the company, if another company, can produce the part
elsewhere at a lower cost, investigate why, yeah?
That's really good, yeah. Again, in terms of diversity,
keep diversity high in your product.
Just don't sell one widget because one day that widget may
not need be needed. Diversify your markets because
your customer or your market may disappear.
Diversify the applications within the markets and diversify
your workforce. Having a diverse workforce is
very important in today's world of increasing competition.
Got it. Well, Arthur, this has been
absolutely fantastic. And veterans can learn more by
going to polarpower.com and then clicking on the Investor tab if
they have the ticker symbols Pol 8.
And Arthur, thank you so much. It's been fantastic.
Hopefully we'll have you on again soon.
Well, thanks for having me and I look forward to the next time.
Thank you.