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.