Plugin’s Path to Profit: Helping CPOs Get EV Charging Right

In this episode of Field Frequency, host Jason Cortes sits down with Chris Kaiser, President of Plugin, for a candid look at the realities of operating EV charging sites.

Chris brings 20+ years of clean energy experience, including 5 years in EV charging, and shares how Plugin is helping retailers, QSRs, and C-stores transform charging from pilot projects into fully managed, profitable destinations.

They dive into:

• Why uptime and reliability remain the #1 challenge for CPOs.
• How overlooked costs (like cable replacements) can derail profitability.
• The role of utilities, site design, and early planning in building sustainable charging networks.
• Why standardization and institutional knowledge are critical for scale.
• What it will take for retail and convenience real estate to unlock true profitability in EV charging.

The punchline? Charging can be profitable—if it’s designed with intention.

 Whether you’re a site host, CPO, or just curious about the next phase of charging infrastructure, this conversation cuts through the hype and gets real about what works, what breaks, and what’s next.

Transcript

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In this episode of Field Frequency, I'm joined by Chris Kaiser, president of Plugin. We talk candidly about the real challenges CPOs face when deploying EV charging, what breaks, what gets overlooked, and why profitability often feels out of reach. Chris shares lessons from the field on how Plugin is helping site hosts go from pilot projects to fully managed profitable charging sites. If you're in the weeds on charger uptime, hardware or software selection, or site identification, this conversation may be of interest to you. The punchline is charging destinations can be profitable. if there's an intention behind the design. Let's get into it. Chris, great to have you here with us today. Appreciate you being on the show. For the audience, would you please give us a brief introduction about your background? Tell us who you are. Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I'm Chris Kaiser. I'm based out of Atlanta. I've been in the EV charging space for about five years, and I've been in the clean energy space for 20 years doing initially some energy efficiency and renewable energy work. And then during COVID, it was time for a change. And I had been doing primarily lighting retrofits for the previous 10 years. And I kind of wanted to see what's next. And so I jumped into EV charging. And so I've been doing that for almost five years now. Tell us about plugin. What's plugin? Yeah, so Plugin is a brand new company. We've been a real company for about a year and you can call it stealth mode. And so now we just finalized our pitch deck and I'm out raising money in addition to working on some of our ongoing installations. But Plugin is a platform for operating, maintaining and monitoring, reporting and ensuring high profitability for EV charging stations for those who own those EV charging stations. And so, you know, our industry is given to a lot of different acronyms and a lot of different, you know, its own, has its own dictionary, you might say. And so one of those, one of those naming conventions is CPOs, Charge Point Operators. Is plugin classified as a CPO? No, we are not a CPO. We view the CPOs as customers. So, and to your point, and one of the things we cover in the pitch deck, and I'm very active on LinkedIn. I think that's how we've originally engaged Jason. And then there's this concept that's been floating around in the EV charging world of charging 1.0 and charging 2.0. And I think if you use 2025 as a dividing line and you kind of had... 2015 to 2025 is charging 1.0 and some of the companies and business model that sprung up out of that, some were successful, some were not successful. And then charging 2.0, it takes a lot of the learnings of what went wrong and what could be better. And that's what we want to capitalize on is how do we help those who own charging stations? And that could be a CPO or it can be a retailer or it could be an apartment complex. or a private equity company that owns an apartment complexes and a hundred gas stations and they have EV chargers, both level two and DC fast charge at both. But then all of these entities realize that operating chargers profitably is extremely challenging. And so a plugin wants to do is be the entity that helps them operate those chargers profitably. they, you know, no matter how much involvement they want to have. So we have a customer right now, a large retailer. The other company that plugin actually spun out of, Sona Energy, is a general contractor for clean energy projects. So Sona Energy installed four 150 plus KW DC fast chargers at this location. And then we have a separate contract to operate the chargers for them. The retailer basically has no involvement in the day-to-day operations. We handle all the monitoring, all the reporting, customer service issues. We recently had a CCS cable, the latch broke on it. So we troubleshot that. And then we got the quote for what it was going to take to repair it. We made sure that it was a respectable quote. We provided that to the retailer. They approved it. We got it fixed for them. We monitor plug share. So literally if someone wants to be completely hands off and just receive money from their charging stations, we can handle all of that and do that for them. And we think we do it at the top of the industry in terms of execution and the ability to do it effectively. Well, you touched on a lot of things. One of the things obviously is uptime. That's a CPO's, they tend to prioritize uptime as well as utilization, controlling the costs, the experience of the driver at the charger as well. How is, so you're... You're helping the CPOs manage each of these. What does winning and losing look like in each of these scenarios as you are adding value to the CPO, whether it's controlling their operational costs, their maintenance costs, or enhancing their utilization? How does that look? Or maybe you prioritize other things. If so, what? No, it's a good question and it's a little complicated and I've been working on figuring out how you, especially when we're out here trying to raise money. I have to restrain myself from giving a whole history of EV charging to potential investors because it's fraught and it's complicated and it's challenging. But I think to the point of your question, and I think for the rest of this discussion, if we just use CPO, which has traditionally been companies like Electrify America and EVgo and Tesla Supercharger, but if we use CPO, which stands for Charge Point Operator, so anyone who owns and operates chargers. Right. But if I think if we use that to not only include those companies that are purely set up to operate chargers, but a retailer, so like a Walmart is now a CPO because Walmart has stood up their own charging team. But they wouldn't traditionally be in that CPO bucket. But I just wanted to get some housekeeping out of the way of what we'll just use CPO to anyone who wants to own chargers and provide charging as an amenity on their property. That's who we view as our customer, in addition to the EV driver as our customer. So with that out of the way, CPOs have three main problems. Number one, and the most important, as we all know, it's no surprise that historically, in the United States especially, but probably around the world, EV chargers have not had a good reputation for reliability. And it's not just reputation, it's a fact that the fact of the matter is if many EV drivers pull up to a, a fast charging station, The odds of getting that to work every single time have been relatively low. there's been a lot of reasons for that that are probably outside the scope of that. But the number one problem we want to solve is reliability and getting every single driver who pulls up to that station to charge 100 % of the time on their first try. Now that's obviously the goal. There's a lot of things that make that very hard to achieve that are outside of a company like us, we're a tech enabled services platform. And we don't control everything. And a lot of what we do is herd the cats and get everyone to the table to help problem solve. But that is the goal. And I think that should be. Because as an EV driver myself, I know what it's like when I'm on a road trip with my wife and my two small kids in the back of the car. I know that ElectriFry, Marriot, or EVgo, or whatever CPO, fast charger I want to use. there has historically been fear that I'm going to pull up to that station. And, you know, my wife is like, Hey, is this going to work? And I'm like, yeah, it's going to work. know, internally, I'm like, God, I hope this works because I don't know what plan B is, is going to be depending on my range. And I think our number one goal is to remove that fear for EV drivers who are going into our customers, you know, parking lots or the parking spaces they manage to charge. Number two is let's say we solve that problem and everyone charges a hundred percent of the time, which, which would be great. and we would all celebrate. the number two is the EV driver represents the revenue part of the equation. To profitably operate chargers, you have to worry about costs. One of the biggest costs is obviously the utility costs. And right now, it's very challenging for people who own stations to wrap their head around the relationship between the revenue and the utility costs. Because if you've ever looked and analyzed the utility bill, no two bills are the same. And they're all extremely complicated and they change throughout the course of the year, depending on summer rates, winter rates, new tariffs that might come out, changes in demand charges. It's very complicated. in addition to utility costs, your other main cost drivers are operations and maintenance. things like field advantage does service break, fix, MRO type stuff. And we want to help manage that as well. and so building a platform to help. not just ensure reliability, which represents revenue and we want revenue to go up and we want utilization to go up, which means revenue goes up. But also to be a profitable CPO, you have to get control and manage your utility costs. And there's a lot of ways we can, we can help do that. But step one is just visibility, right? You can't manage what you don't measure. So step one is, is helping create a dashboard where operators can see like month by month, like what is my revenue? What is my cost? What is my profit? And then step two is once you do that, then you can start managing it, right? Once you're measuring it, you can manage it. So we want to help manage that. So that's one is EV driver, which represents revenue. Two is help measure managed costs. And the third way we want to help is around service and O and N. So if we do identify a problem working with the CMS provider, so we will also provide the CMS if needed. Other CPOs may say, hey, we're happy with our CMS provider. We just want you to handle the operational dashboard. Great. But either way, when a problem arises, when we're alerted to an issue at a site, it's often complicated to figure out what is the issue. Who do we need to send to that site? Do we need to send an electrician or do we need to send a technician? Or do we just need to send someone who needs to pick up trash or pick up a sign that's fallen or the camera's gone offline? It's because the wind blew it over. And so helping diagnose what the issue is and then working with the field service providers like a field advantage to coordinate the fix for that. And I think those who aren't in the industry who hear about reliability challenges at EV charging stations, they think that, it's just a power unit. The power units don't work, right? So someone needs to just go and swap a power unit. But oftentimes the reason EV drivers can't charge at a station has nothing to do with the physical electronics. It's honestly more often than not something maybe with payment processing where the credit card reader isn't connected. to the CMS in the correct way. And so the payment processing is not going through and people blame the credit card reader manufacturer, but it's actually not their problem. It's the CMS provider who didn't properly commission the credit card reader with their cloud software. And so the point here is that like diagnosing the problem needs to happen before you can fix the problem. But more often than not, someone sends a technician to a site And then the technician's just in the field trying to troubleshoot, but oftentimes they may or may not know. And if it's a software issue, they can't do anything in the field to fix that. So we want to help be that layer that correctly diagnoses and helps get these issues fixed as efficiently and as low cost and as reliably as possible. No, everything that you just spoke to there, Chris, as you unpack all that, because you said a lot and it reveals obviously a deep, multiple layers of deep institutional knowledge. So, and that's obviously experiential. It's through, you know, not only your perspective as an EV driver at the consumer level, but all obviously in a B2B context where... You've deployed chargers, you know, those experiences in deploying chargers at sites, et cetera. So clearly with that institution knowledge and those experiences, because you, you touched on things that the retailers, the CS QSRs, quick serve restaurants, the convenience store operators that want to become the CPO that, you know, the Walmarts of the world, the big box retailers that want to become CPOs. right. There's, a whole experience anchored around deploying those chargers for those that are using the chargers. There's the complexities of the construction processes to get the chargers in the ground. And then there's the you know, the communications to keep them online. The fact that it is a smart device communicating with a smart device inherently, should convey to all involved that there is going to be a need at times for that to stay. Those two devices, I'm talking about the electric vehicle and the electric vehicle charger communicating, and those are two smart devices communicating. right. tank on a car. know, it's a, it's, these are two smart devices communicating. So all of these complexities that, you know, plugin is, is the easy button to the retailer, to the QSR, to the C store operator. But what, what's it like trying to paint the picture? Because it's almost like they don't know all of this. So you've got to, it's almost like you've got to, you've got to, you've got to paint. Yeah. the value for them because they don't even know. It's like they don't know what they don't know. So how do you convey not only the problems, okay, retailer, you want to put some chargers. you, you don't know what you're getting into. How do you, how do you tell the story? It's an excellent question and I'm glad you mentioned the easy button because you kind of set up so that's exactly what we want to be. But it is an excellent question. And if you think about not only am I trying to convey that to potential real estate owners or people who manage parking spaces at real estate of how we can help them, but right now I'm trying to raise money to expand our team and plug in. And it's also a tough message to get to investors because we're living through this switch of the charging 1.0 companies, which struggled with profitability for a lot of reasons, reliability, but also utilization just wasn't there. But now we're in 2025 and utilization has climbed to the point where owning EV chargers can be a profitable business, the industry has been burned. both, if you remember the, the ZERP environments where money was just flowing into EV companies, cause everyone saw Tesla going up and they thought every company, whether it was an EV manufacturer or an electric vehicle charging company was going to be the next Tesla. And obviously that, didn't happen. and everything kind of crashed out. but it is, it is very challenging and all I can do is share our own experience. So everything I just said, is not because I just read some new articles and said, oh, we're going to create a company. It's because we've been doing all these things, mainly through Sona Energy, where again, plugins spun out of. But at Sona, the first time we did this was with Wendy's. So we have a relationship with Wendy's. We went to Wendy's and said, hey, would you guys be interested in putting EV charging at your property? It makes a lot of sense. And they were like, yeah, we love the idea. And we kind of said, hey, at a DC fast charge makes a lot more sense than level two just because of dwell times and the use case and how you can appeal to your customers. And they agree and they said, yeah, we like this, but we're in the food and drink business. We're not in the EV charging business. And so Sona is a CTO. So we designed the project. I was the lead on. negotiating with the utilities, with designing the site, with selecting the hardware, with selecting the CMS. And we designed and built that site and it came on in December of 2023 and we still operate it to this day. It's going well, but that was our first kind of eye-opening experience of it's very challenging to get everything to work reliably. And since then we've done another site and then we've done another site that we did for the retailer that they actually paid us to install the sites. or install that site, they own the charges, but then we operate them. And across those three sites, I have two different hardware manufacturers and three different CMS providers that we're using for experience and then just different requirements led us in the different directions. But I've gotten to see a large sample size now of I have two different credit card manufacturers, I have two different EV charger manufacturers, and I have three different CMSs. And I've worked with different field service providers across all of those. And so all I can do is share our experience and with potential customers and say, Hey, this is very hard, but look at the data from our sites and how it's going up over time. And the thought, and I fully believe this is utilization of EV charging sites is going to continue to climb. And I know we recently had some changes in Congress that have hurt tax credits or whatnot. And that's going to maybe slow EV adoption. but it's not gonna stop it because at the end of the day, I believe, and I think the majority in this industry believe that EVs are superior vehicles for the majority of the American population, right? You look at the majority of miles driven daily by the average American driver, it's like 20 something miles a day or whatever it is, it's well below the range of an EV. And when you drive an EV, you realize that, it's... faster and smoother and quieter and the technology is better. The infotainment system just works better. So no matter what happens at the national level with tax credit, like it doesn't matter. It might slow adoption. That's not going to stop adoption. And by the way, there's already millions of EVs on the road that use these charging stations. And so we want to tell the story of this is good for your business to put EV chargers on your property. Whether you're a retailer or a QSR or C store, it's good for your main business. Or if you just want to put EV charges on, you know, traditional CPO model just to get revenue and profit from those chargers, it is a good business as utilization goes up. And hopefully they partner with companies like us who are going to ensure the highest reliability in the industry, the fastest time to repair if anything does go wrong, the best warranties, et cetera, et cetera. So I know that was a long winded answer. Jason, but it was a good question because it is, you know, it's, it's, know in the EV world, it's, the, or EV charging a chicken and egg, right? Because you're trying to build out this EV charging network before the EVs are all there to make that charging profitable. It's, it's very challenging and everyone, you know, is plagued with that, with that issue. But we're basically selling the vision of the future because it is going to happen. then it is going to be here and the retailers and the people who have people, you know, customers park at their property. Those who figure out EV charging first are going to have a competitive advantage. So that's the long-winded answer. What I would tell someone who's like, we're kind of interested, but we don't know. You know, I always say you have to do one before you can do 10 and you have to do 10 before you can do a thousand. And it takes so much time if we're speaking specifically fast charging. If someone says, okay, we want to do one, we want to do a pilot project, let's get started on my great. It's going to be two years probably before those chargers come online because the biggest delay there is typically just working with the utility and fast charging. have new transformers and it's going to take a while. And so if someone says that, okay, we want to do our first pilot project in 2026. I'd probably say, sorry, you're too late, but now's the best time to start. So let's, let's start planning for 2027. But my point here is like the longer you wait to do a pilot project, you're going to get left behind. And so in short, going back to the easy button, if someone does want to do a pilot project, we can make that incredibly easy for them. Well, again, great response, lots to unpack. You alluded to hardware and kind of diversity there. I'm going to revisit that here in a little bit. Also, you touched on talking to developers. In my experience, I... I know what it's like to look at a green lot, literally a green field with nothing and take that green lot and convert it into a charging destination. I also know what it's like to look at an existing site, you know, parking lot and convert that parking lot to a charging destination. When you have an existing infrastructure versus a grassy, you know, field, the established parking lot to turn that into a charging destination can be 8X, 10X the cost of the green lot. why is early, well, I guess my question is why is early design integration so critical? when you're, What, what advice does plugin give to landlords and developers to future proof their sites? When you, when you're talking and it's like, like Wendy's as an example, when you talk to them about that side, about adding chargers, when they're looking at the real estate that they own, where they're maybe building new sites or maybe other customers where they they've got, you know, where they're building new locations, are you having conversations with them about integrating chargers into the plans in and speccing them in? versus trying to come back and remodel later to add chargers. Are you having those conversations? Absolutely. it's another big question because it's, you know, case by case. can tell you how we started with Wendy's is once we determined that we were, know, at Sona, we were going to be the CTO. We said, great, we are interested in doing this. Let us and we were working with Wendy's corporate, right? So wasn't a franchisee, it was corporate. And so we said, let's look at where Wendy's corporate owns facilities. And You know, they own facilities, they own stores in Florida and Massachusetts and Ohio and Colorado, and I think another state or two. And at that time, the Massachusetts incentive program hadn't come out yet. The state program was kind of a headache to navigate. Florida didn't really have any programs, but Colorado did. And so we said, all right, let's, let's focus on Colorado. So we applied for a grant from the Colorado energy office. We got the grant. And at that time, Excel, which was the public utility serving Denver, um, had a make ready program. So we applied for the make ready program. So our first site we built for probably 20 % of what the actual cost would have been without the incentives. And so, you know, I say that because that, that is our approach as, you know, so as a CPO is you obviously want to build sites for as little out of pocket as possible. and so that's my first advice is if you're looking for a pilot or where to do your first projects and all else being equal, figure out where the best incentives are at the state and the utility level. And I think, people might get caught up in what's going on with the current administration and cutting tax credits and whatever. I'm like, yes, it kind of stinks, but, and we have projects we're working on developing now that are. eligible for the 30C tax credit, which was the tax credit for EV charging infrastructure. But that was icing on the cake because those projects have utility incentives that are 10 times, literally 10 times more valuable than the tax credit. So I just want to make the point that just because things are happening at the federal level, it doesn't change if your utility is offering an amazing EV charging incentives. That is not impacted at the federal level. That is a state and utility issue. so we want to help, know, first thing customers is I want to help them understand that and help where to focus based on that. Because if you have two sites and, you know, say one sites in Florida and one sites in Denver and you might say, this Florida location is better because you know, we're a retailer and we have the data on store sales and we know the demographics in that area a little better for EV drivers. And so we think utilization is going to be 20 % higher. And I might say, well, that's good. And I agree with the utilization, but your install costs in Florida for putting in for 150 KW fast chargers, you know, with hardware and installation and design project management might be $600,000. We're in Denver. It might be a hundred thousand dollars because Excel has one of the best incentives in the country right now for putting in DC fast charge infrastructure. So while your utilization, which equals revenue might be 20 % higher, your cost of installs 80 % lower. So if you're trying to get the best return on investment for a pilot project, you want to focus on the Denver site all else being equal. So that's how we kind of, you know, manage that discussion and help them figure out where to focus. Um, to your point on new construction, it's obviously better to get something in the plans. And if you're tearing up ground or parking lots, just do that once and plan for the future and get infrastructure in place during that construction process. And, and then you can think about, all right, well, how do we maybe plan for the future? And if we want to put in four chargers now, but we want to step up for eight in the future. or four additional in the future, you can go ahead and lay the conduit. You don't even have to pull the wire and the utility may or may not allow you to upsize that transformer if we're talking about fast charging. And I think the majority of this conversation is going to be more fast charging focused because it's just a different level of infrastructure. And with fast charging, you typically need a dedicated transformer for the EV chargers that's separate from the building. And so that's why some of these answers change, whether it's level two or fast charging, but primarily fast charging where you do need a dedicated transformer and some utilities have different views on whether they will only put in a transformer that's serving the current load. And if you're going to add stuff in the future, you're going to need to replace a transformer. And so then you enter the discussion of, do we want to spend 10 % more on this construction project knowing that if we have to replace the transformer, we're going to have to maybe do some more infrastructure work anyway. but we can help, you know, guide all that discussion and the important thing, whether it's an existing site or new site, the utilities are monopolies. You can't really negotiate with the utility. They do their, you know, most of them do their jobs very well and they're very helpful. Well, you know, depending on the utility, but you can't say like, no, I don't like that answer. Give me a different answer. They, you know, cause they can just say go pound sand. Um, so a lot of these discussions start with utilities. if, you know, if you're at a retailer and your background is in marketing or your background is in real estate and you've never dealt and negotiate with utilities before, uh, I promise you, you need help. so that's, that's something that, that we're happy to do. I think I'm very good at, know, discussing and knowing how to even just, there's a certain way you have to communicate and there's a certain way you need to ask questions with utilities, knowing what, their constraints and what their rules are. because they're, they're quasi government and, know, they're regulated by the state public utility commission. And you have to kind of understand what their rails are and what their guidelines are to help. figure out how to get the result you want out of that. I think that's a piece that utility piece is overlooked so often. And if you don't have someone helping you guide in that discussion, good luck. But even at the utility level, I'm sure it's a different conversation if it's a co-op or if it's a municipality owned utility or a privately owned utility. There's probably different conversations, different processes, different, even different programs in place amongst all of those, because there's different initiatives. mean, a co-op in one particular area of the company, country could be in a I have. because there could be a need there, but yeah. So, yeah, it's not, there's certainly not one conversation to be had with, with the utility. yeah, it's a important point you draw out. when, when plugin is evaluating potential, you know, sites or, or, or, know, a site, know, ideal candidate or host partners. What, you know, how do you evaluate a site or how do you evaluate a potential host partner? What's, what's kind of some of the criteria? What's a, what's a good site? What's a no-go? What's, what's a no-fly zone look like? What's, what's that look like? Yeah. So like plugins role in that would be working with the CPO or whoever wants to own the chargers. And in that scenario, it always starts with just, you know, where do you have sites? and what are your goals of this project? Right? So it's a typical like sales process. It's like really understanding what our customers are trying to achieve and starting there. And it's got to depend on a lot. But if they just say, hey, we just want, we want to do the best pilot project. And it's like, great, does that mean the highest utilization? Right? Because that's going to mean the most people coming to that property. It's typically they might say, yeah. And I said, okay, just so you know, that may mean that it doesn't, it's not the best ROI cause your install costs might be higher. And they're like, no, that's fine. you know, our CEO loves EV and he's given us unlimited budget. Great. Okay. So now let's talk about where we're going to see the best utilization. And it's going to be, obviously you want to start with, statistics on EV ownership and a lot of States will tell you the department of motor vehicles will tell you where the EVs are registered at. And so if you get that data, you can overlay the store addresses on that data and say, okay, in this region, there's a higher percentage of EV drivers. But depending on the customer, they may have C stores that are right off the highway. And so they're not in metro urban centers, they're in off highway areas. so it's, you know, depending on the location, it's a different analysis. Right, but it's still, you want a PlayStation to where they're going to get used. And I think if in addition to listeners thinking, coming out of this podcast that plug-in is the greatest thing since sliced bread. The other concept I want to get across is utilization. is what matters in EV charging. If the chargers aren't used, there's obviously no revenue and there's no desire to keep them up by the owners because they're like, well, why am going to spend money to replace a cable? Because I have whatever, maybe I have three other cables on the site and one's broken and but it's going to cost $5,000 to replace that cable, which by the way is the real cost. just were quoted and the customer went through on to replace the CCS cable. They are not cheap. And most of that was hardware. and meaning the physical cable itself, the labor was a couple hundred bucks. But if you're not making money on the stations, if no one's using them, why replace the cable if you have a couple other working ones? So you need utilization to matter. And so you want to place the stations where you think they're going to get used a lot. And in addition to just some of our insight, there are several entities now. that helped, you know, one of them is stable auto has utilization, prediction tools, to donate analytics, Aaron, think want Terra. So all these companies that have spun up just to help predict utilization. and we're happy to work with them and kind of the initial design phase of where to put chargers. but in addition, you know, but that's just kind of like demo, you know, from a high level demographic utilization, there's other things to consider of. More at the ground level. So right so like there's the high level where you're looking at maps. You're looking at data You're using some of these software tools and I think those are all great, but I think what often gets overlooked is people are just looking at at it from a computer and they don't go to the site and Actually think about where is the EV driver going to park when they use these stations and is it close to the store or close to the building where we want them to go into, or is on the other side of the parking lot? And does that matter? And there's pluses and minuses to both. If you're too close to the store, what happens a lot of the times is ICE vehicles park in those EV charging spots. And so if you didn't have any experience in this, it's obvious you want to place the chargers as close to the store as possible, right? But I think, what's that? nice vehicle? Yeah. powered by dead dinosaurs. And I think those who have never done this or paid attention would, you know, if you're working with an inexperienced company, they've got to place those charges close to the store. Well, more often than not, those are going to get there's a term iced where non EV drivers parked there. Or what drives me even badder is when an EV is parked there, but not charging, because it's a good spot close to the store. And so there's, you have to think about those considerations. What I think a lot of charging 1.0 CPOs did was in a rush to expand their network. They just placed EV chargers wherever the property owner would let them. And that means oftentimes you're in like the back of the property, like the back of the store where the dumpster is and the EV charger was placed there. And guess what? EV drivers don't want to charge in a potentially unsafe a dirty area. So thinking about things like safety, right? Is it well lit? If someone is parked in an EV and if they're just going to sit in their car and charge, are they going to feel safe on your property? there's a lot of considerations and I just want to stress if you want to own chargers and you've never done it before and you've never thought about some of these things, please get help from Jason at Field of Aninge or me at Plugin or someone who has experience doing this and then actually operating the stations, not just selling the hardware. Well, you've said two things and I've had to do my best to stay focused on what you were talking about because man, red flags were going off. You said $5,000 for a cable replacement. I'm still trying to process that. I'm assuming this liquid cooled cable that had to be replaced. not a liquid gold cable. Wow. Well, I don't know if that's something you can talk about on this, but I certainly want to have a probably an offline conversation about that. or maybe we should have an online conversation about that because that, or if nothing else, just, just talking around that, that right there is a prime example of an unexpected costs that operators would be faced with because, you know, cable costs, you know, your, highest cost around cables typically are liquid cooled costs. or excuse me, liquid cooled cables. Those are the more expensive, you know, cable. but man, that's, that's, that's a, that's a high cost. Now one thing I'll, so this, that's a great question and a great point to zero in on that because it kind of leads back into the design question. So you could say that myself and my counterpart who helped design this site are responsible for that cost because we selected, I think it was 20 foot CCS cables. Because when you think about designing these sites, you have to factor in where the charging point is on these vehicles. And a lot of time, The old sites, the sites that were deployed under charging 1.0 were deployed with cables that were just too short. And you see this a lot with say a Ford Lightning trying to charge it, a Tesla supercharger where they can't, they have to pull in and block several spots just so that Tesla cable can reach the Ford. And so when our sites, when we design them, we want to put on as long a cable as possible. And that requires cable management. So you have to have a cable retractor on there. But I think part of the reason for that cost was because it was say a 20 foot and not a 12 foot CCS cable. And they're thick. They're like that big around and there's a lot of copper. But I think some of it too is just the cable manufacturers are just, maybe there's high demand. And so it's just like, well, we're not gonna work on reducing these costs because we don't need to. So I think there's some of that. I've heard through the Gravevine that a test the cable replacement is like a tenth literally of the cost of a CCS cable replacement. And so maybe as we go to to Nax cables, that that price will be lower. And again, not to go into the difference of CCS and Nax, but the industry is moving towards Nax, which is the typical Tesla charging point. And that's physically different. Both the male to female is physically different. And then the cabling itself, I'm not an electrical engineer and mechanical, but it is a little different. But I think to sum that point up or to sum up this tangent, Jason, the industry, meaning the hardware providers need to do a better job of getting costs down. So charge point operators can be successful. And obviously the hardware providers have their own challenges as I think we've seen with lot of the charging 1.0 companies going out of business. But those who want to survive and thrive need to focus on how are they actually helping not just deliver reliable charging, But how are they delivering profitable charging for those charging owners? And that means that they need to have a MRO support plan to help plug in to help the field service team get those parts, repair them quickly, but also affordably. No. um I'm glad you honed in because I was also shocked. in fact, not not to spend too much, but I can keep going on this topic. We actually spent a ton of time because we were working with another again, industry respected field service provider. And they had we were working with them because they had experienced replacing this cable because the hardware manufacturer was kind of a known issue that the cable on this hardware manufacturer had an issue with the latch. And what happened? The cable was fine. The latch itself was broken. on the CCS. if if you, EV drivers and you have a CCS experience, you know, the Tesla just plugs in CCS, it plugs in and there's a latch that locks over, something on the vehicle and to release it, you have to push up that latch up and pull it out. Well, that latch. was, it was honestly probably a dollar part that caused the $5,000 replacement. And we tried, we spent a lot of time. actually at our dime, cause we were operating the station. We sent a technician to the site to see if we could troubleshoot and just replace the CCS head because we thought we could, but it was broken to a point where we couldn't do that. but I just, I want to demonstrate that, that, you know, part of the value we're trying to bring is like, Hey, we're going to bring this institutional knowledge to figure out how we can try work with field service to repair these problems as cost-effective as possible. But it's not always possible. Sometimes you have to replace a component and, it is challenging, but it kind of just going into the main theme of like. If you're traditional retailer and your CEO, you know, you're head of real estate or head of marketing, but your CEO said, Hey, let's do a pilot project. I'm going to pick you. Like you have a day job, but in order for that pilot project to be successful, you need to make sure that EV drivers don't start bombing your site with bad reviews on plug share because your charges are down and you don't know what to do. And it could be a very stressful scenario if you have no experience. you know, most of these customers are dealing with, they're not Walmart, right? They haven't set up their own team because Walmart is Walmart, right? They're in another level when it comes to retailing. And so they need help, right? And that's what going back like plugin wants to be the easy button to help all that. No, going back to that institutional knowledge, you you talked about when you're looking at designing sites, you made a comment about cable length, 12 foot versus 14 foot. To those that are listening or watching, they may not understand why that makes a difference. so in line with institutional knowledge, the reason why there's a difference in cable length is because there's no continuity to the charging port on the vehicles. And so it could be the front bumper. could be the back left corner panel, could be the right corner panel. There's no continuity. It's not like on a traditional petroleum powered vehicle where it's either the left rear corner panel or the right rear corner panel. On an EV, it could be anywhere. And so when there's thought going into how the site is being designed and the positioning of the parking space in relation to the charger, cable length has got to go into that fact. It's got to be factored into that design because the cars, and then of course, can the car pull in, can it back in and all of that to where the cable can, cable in can reach the charging port on the car. so anyways, for those listening or watching wonder what does cable length matter? Well, that it does matter. And of course, the longer the cable, the thicker the cable gets, cause there's more copper in there and that drives the cost up. so Anyways, that's some of the things that just comes from that institutional knowledge that you have, Chris, and that your customers don't have and that you're having to educate them around. we're talking around technology and I want to get a little technical here. You talked about having multiple hardware spread across some of your sites. So, as plugins network grows, how important is standardization? Whether you look at it from hardware, software, service workflows, the customer experience at your site, et cetera. How important is that standardization to ensure consistency and control at scale? How's that look for plugin? Yeah, it's a great question and. it's extremely important. And I think again, I don't want to beat this whole charging 1.0 to charging 2.0 thing to death, but think it's, such a good point to make like charging 1.0. Like when I first got into EV charging, I would speak to a new charging manufacturer and they're like, yeah, we're OCPP. So we work with any, any CMS provider. And I believed that right. And then you go to deploy your first side and you're like, all right, we're to use hardware manufacturer XYZ and we're going to use CMS one, two, three, and we're just going to get it working. And then you. talk to the CMS provider and they're like, yeah, we don't, that company doesn't work well. We don't integrate well with them. And you're like, wait a minute. I thought this was OCPP, which is again, the protocol that's, you know, allows different CMS, which is the software that operates the chargers to work on the chargers and then communicate with the cars. And you realize just because someone puts OCPP on their charger doesn't really mean the whole lot of anything because that's, that's table stakes. but to standardization is you want to find providers that the product works, but also the support is there to back up that product. Because we have vendors we work with where the product is working pretty decent, but the support is not always there. So when we need some help, it's like pulling teeth to get someone to actually pick up the phone and answer our calls and get it to work. And then other providers, they drop everything when we call and are, you know, bend over backwards to help us. And that's how it should be, right? If your customer needs help, you drop everything and Jason, we've, we've worked professionally together and I know you're like that. And I treat my customers the same way when there's, when there's an issue. I treated it like an emergency and not like, whatever. I'll, I'll get to it whenever I can. And so standardizing on good vendors who are there to support is the most important. And whether that's, me, whether you're a CPO and you want, you know, two good vendors or whether you want 10, the bottom line is. they need to be good and they need to support you they need to be flexible and work with the full suite of solutions you have. So if you think about what plugin wants to do, we're not going to do the field service. We're going to have the field service providers again, like a field advantage that we know our work work well. have our backend systems down. We have our front end systems down. We're integrated with the customer needs and we want to make it again where it's an easy button, right? But it's one thing to say that, but then there's the realities of contracts and, you know, insurance requirements and making sure the insurance requirements are met before someone goes on sites to prevent lawsuits. And so there's this, that's, you know, the kind of what I classify as just backend, making sure that the paperwork gets done correctly. And I think a lot of times that kind of stuff is overlooked. Or just, you know, basic. table stakes or just basic conditions are overlooked if you're just using whatever vendor you find in the phone book to go to the site. I mean, I can't tell you how many times, Jason, we've had electricians go to a site to help us look at either install a charger or repair a charger. And I'm like, well, hey, did it work? And they're like, I don't know. What do mean you don't know? was like, well, I don't have an EV. I can't test it. And I'm like, well, you know, on your website, you guys advertise all your EV charging services and you can't even test what you're doing. So just. You know, making sure, so standardizing on, anyone who's doing field service at our sites has to be driving an AV so they can test it once it's done and, know, fill out the paperwork and check the boxes that yes, I plugged in and charged for three minutes, you know, having those requirements and those kinds of standard operating procedures. So kind of, you know, there's standardization on hardware standardization on software that runs the hardware, but then just standardizing on operating procedures. So you have kind of a consistent methodical way for troubleshooting, repairing, maintaining, operating these chargers is very important because if you just have a, just buy anything and throw it out there, it's just, it's going to create way more headache. It's going to result in unprofitable charging and it's going to result in unhappy drivers and customers at the sites. Yeah, know, Chargers themselves is one that has worked for multiple hardware manufacturers and has seen an influx. I think it was in 2024. It's like, you know, having been in the industry, I've been in the industry for, you know, eight years or so. And, you know, I think it was last year, you know, the industry kind of looked up and we saw, what was it, 30 manufacturers on the board. Yeah. States and, you know, and, know, you can, however you define manufacturing in the U S there was 30 pins on the board of, of U S manufacturing around chargers. And you look at chargers. mean, obviously there's a lot across the value chain when it comes to, when you talk about charging infrastructure from the hardware, from the, from the actual charging, the charger itself to the cables, to the credit card readers, all the parts and pieces, not, you know, not even getting into the software side, et cetera. But you know, the, chargers themselves have become commoditized and it's like, you know, there's all these different price points and different brands and different, you know, it's, it's, you know, that's gotta be a challenge for you for plugin is, know, you've got all these bright lights and all these, you know, buy our hardware, buy our hardware, you know, what How do you sort through the noise? Because I mean, think about the legacy brands and we can talk about them. know, companies that have been around for a long time that, you know, the next thing we know they're not here or we don't know if they're going to be here. And emerging players that they seem strong and they've got a compelling offering and they've got a compelling product line, but we don't know. And it's like with everything that's going on in the market. mean, How do you sort through all the noise and what do you buy? What do you, what do you stay from? mean, how do you, how do you evaluate that for those products? Yeah, again, a great question. And I think that's where you mentioned eight years. I mentioned earlier five years, I think longevity in the space helps. And I think there's nothing that replaces experience. Right. And I think that often gets overlooked. You have new entrants who are like, I just started. came from a payment processing industry or AI industry, whatever. I'm in EV charging and I got trained for two weeks out at a manufacturer. I'm an expert. But the reality is there's no replacing experience because there's that institutional knowledge of the companies. You know where a lot of the bodies are buried at those companies, how the sausage got made because you have friends. who worked at those companies and then went to different companies. And so through experience and building relationships in the industry, you kind of know who the good manufacturers are and who the bad manufacturers are. And you know who stands by their product and who doesn't stand by their product. And I'll call up people who knew install, like say there's a new manufacturer over from Europe and they're installing those. And I'll be like, hey, what's your experience been like with these chargers versus the ones you just kicked off your sites? And they'll say, yeah, here's why I love them or here's why things aren't going so well. And so you really just have to, you're not going to come fresh in the industry and build the relationships and build the trust of people who are going to tell you that. And so I think it, you know, it's, it's no surprise to you, but I think listeners who, may be more new or potential customers is find a trusted advisor who has the experience. And, know, one thing that that I see a plugin is we're technology agnostic from a hardware perspective. wanna, and if someone says, hey Chris, we need help buying a charger. will say, here are the advantages and disadvantages of this manufacturer versus this one. And because Sona Energy sells chargers, I know what the price points are. So I can help you navigate that. And so I think just having a trusted advisor who is not, like you don't want your advisor to be the salesperson. for the first charging company that called you. And I like to call that vendor led engineering, where you don't want a charging manufacturer to write recharging spec for you. You want a agnostic expert to write that requirement for you. Who knows what they're doing? So luckily, I've been doing this for five years and I've been doing electrical industry my entire career for 20 years now. And so I kind of know how to evaluate providers and there's, there's what's on the spec sheet, but then there's also what the team who you're speaking with, tells you and what the warm and fuzzies you get out of them are. I called, know, if the spec sheet is just the quantitative data, there's also that qualitative aspect of, do you really feel you're going to get the support from this company when you need it? You know, to that whole advisement comment, can also speak to that as a service provider. You know, we're in the field, we're working on hardware. We don't sell hardware. So we're definitely a disinterested third party when it comes to having a vested interest. We don't sell any hardware. We get asked to advise on what What are you working on? What do I not buy? What is breaking? Because they want to know, what are you touching the most of? Because that's what we want to stay away from. we ties back into that institutional knowledge. Well, man, this has been a great conversation. We need to probably land the ship. as we, right before we do, once you just kind of predict, put your predictive cap on, and I want to ask you this, what's the biggest unlock over the next three to five years that CPOs can... need to go truly mainstream in retail and convenience real estate? What's the biggest unlock? What's your prediction there? The biggest one is CPOs realizing that charging can be profitable. So owning charging stations can be profitable and it can be very profitable. And you know, luckily there's a lot of just like again, qualitative info that's out there, but EVgo is a public company. They're the only public company I know of that is a pure kind of CPO play. So you can look at their financials and if the numbers keep getting better over time, which they have for EVgo, that's a pretty good sign. But I'm in this industry because I believe that EVs are superior vehicles. People are going to keep buying them. Utilization at charging is going to grow. And the more people who come to your property charge, the better. Whether they're tenants in an apartment complex, shoppers for retail property, someone who just needs to stop and get a frosty at a Wendy's. Charging at properties is good. And the more people who use those is better and the better they work is better. So I think Over the next three to five years, people are going to realize that charging can be profitable and we want to help them with that realization and help them make it as profitable as possible. Chris, how can people keep up with you? How can people connect with you? Yeah, the first thing I would say is LinkedIn. I'm getting pretty active. Chris Kaiser, it's Chris Kaiser sustainability, I think is the URL. My email is kaiser.chris at plug in charge up all one word plug in charge up.com. And yeah, feel free to reach out to me if you're investors, we're looking for some angel round investors right now. But at the same time, we have a pretty good solution that we're ready to deploy today as well. But also I you know, do webinars I'm doing one on EV charging infrastructure next month so can find me there But yeah, feel free to reach out with any type of question EV or EV charging related I'm always happy to help answer questions Chris, thank you for being on Field Frequency. It's a pleasure to have you. Awesome. Thank you for having me.