Alex Jones of RNWBL stopped by to talk with Allen and Joel at American Clean Power 2023 about their new app for wind technicians, DSPTCH. The free app gives technicians routes to every wind turbine in the US, Canada, and Mexico, saving hours of travel time. Not only that, but technicians can store their training certifications right in the app! The app even has payment features so you can get paid right away.

DSPTCH – https://dsptch.app.link/
Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Wind Power Lab – https://windpowerlab.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

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DSPTCH

Allen Hall: Well, we’re here with Alex Jones of RNWBL. RNWBL, if you’re not familiar, is a, a big repair company based in Texas. 

Alex Jones: That’s right.

Allen Hall: And does a lot of wind turbine repair business. But we’re not talking about RNWBL today. We’re talking about a new piece of software DSPTCH. And it’s a technician based software. It’s, it’s software for technicians. 

Alex Jones: That’s right. 

Allen Hall: And we had talked a couple of weeks ago, a a about this app, which you can download on your phone. 

Allen Hall: And it just sort of blew Joel and I away because —

Joel Saxum: It’s fantastic. 

Allen Hall: It’s fantastic for technicians because there’s not a lot of good software apps for technicians and you know, how difficult a job that it is.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. And like the traveling passport and all these, the great ideas, and you’ll share it with us, but we’ve gotta start with this. Yeah. It’s not renewable, it’s, well it is, but it’s RNWBL.

Alex Jones: We have to buy vowels around here. 

Alex Jones: And DSPTCH is DSPTCH. There we go. I wanna make sure that the people listening know that as well, 

Alex Jones: right?

Alex Jones: Yeah. So welcome to the program, Alex. 

Alex Jones: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. 

Allen Hall: Glad to have you . You wanna describe what DSPTCH is? 

Alex Jones: Sure. So we really wanted to sit down with all of our technicians. We’ve taken, you know, a, a playbook of go live the life of a tech. So we have this very unique perspective inside of RNWBL where we get to go be a traveling wind tech.

Alex Jones: We get to be a traveling solar tech and learn what it is that’s a pain point in their lives. And, In prior life, we came from the oil patch. Most of the, the team that came came over and we learned that, you know, if you, if you make the guy in the field more productive, it’s a thousand times more valuable than making the 10,000 bean counters in the back office more productive.

Alex Jones: Yeah. No offense, my wife is an auditor for reference between auditor and I started as data science. We’re about the most exciting people you could ever meet. There you go. But no So we focused on that. And right now the thing that’s driving a lot of DSPTCH’s usage is we have one certifications.

Alex Jones: When you sign up for the app, you put on your GWOID, we pull in all your certs and then we do turn by turn navigation to every wind turbine in the us, Canada, and Mexico. And what’s neat about that is we’ve mapped half a million roads don’t exist in Google, apple, or waves. Yeah, 

Joel Saxum: cuz it’s all lease roads, basically just Yeah.

Joel Saxum: Dirt tracks out in the middle of field and 

Alex Jones: it’s made cuz you know, Gertrude here didn’t want to go through her where she buried her dog 50 years ago. So you. Stop a road or you go across a ranch line and anyway, so you, you’ve seen kind of how those roads develop and it’s just incredibly frustrating that you can see where you need to go, but you can’t figure out how to drive there.

Alex Jones: So, yeah.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Okay. So from the take, this is standpoint, it’s about getting to the job easier, making the job a lot, a lot simpler. I You’ve been on sites, I’ve been on sites, I’m like, how the heck, I can see that wind turbine, but I can’t get to it. Yeah. DSPTCH gets rid of that as a problem. So it’s like a, almost like Google map for technicians.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Yep. 

Joel Saxum: I think an important thing to touch on here too is we know that with the technician pool the way it is in the states, everybody within the wind industry knows how it works. Right? There is the case of people jumping from company to company to company, and if they have a place to keep their certifications, that’s huge.

Joel Saxum: Right. That’s that traveling kind of certification passport. Yes. That, that, that is offered.

Alex Jones: That’s right. And so one of the things we did is we didn’t try to take an enterprise approach approach to the software. When you sign up, you sign up with your phone number and that phone number can go with you as your personal line.

Alex Jones: So it’s not a your work email SSO type of thing. And, and we think that’s a, a nice differentiator. So if you jump companies, all of that comes with you, your job history, so on and so forth. And frankly, we get a lot of resumes in at renewable, and it’ll be like the company they worked for, Siemens or GE and the number of years and it’s like, But what’d you do there?

Alex Jones: Like, yeah, what does that mean? And you know, that’s, that’s not a knock. Just, we’re trying to make it a lot simpler for those folks to be like, look, I’m a, I’m a great tech. Yeah. And you should hire me. So, yes. 

Joel Saxum: So besides the navigation, infield and, and of course keeping certifications up to date, what else does the platform do?

Joel Saxum: What does it help you guys with as your business? 

Alex Jones: Yeah, so we, I don’t think anybody right now can figure out how to make money in ev charging maintenance or batteries. It’s, they’re just small work orders. You get a, a job for 1800 bucks. If we put a guy on a plane and up in a hotel Holiday Inn and Delta made some money, and we’re sitting there like, well, we kept the guy busy.

Alex Jones: I mean, but it’s, it’s really not a lucrative business. So we would rather hand that work to a competitor or contractor and, and take a finder’s fee on that. And so that’s, that’s kind of the, the market that we’re chasing after is these one Z two Z projects that we’re not, not core business to us, and we can.

Alex Jones: Match somebody who’s capable, qualified, and available. Yeah, even if they don’t work for us. 

Joel Saxum: So renewable as a company as well. What, what does this service as DSPTCH set you guys apart from some of your competitors? Because you’ve got an innovative product, an innovative solution for renewable as this core business.

Joel Saxum: What does it help there? 

Alex Jones: Yeah, so I mean, we’re getting into a number of different things with our clients, and there are gonna be services that we do not offer, but we want to create one pane of glass where they can manage their technicians and. Ask for external providers to come do work for them. And then we’ve codified every single turbine at a global level.

Alex Jones: So you can go in and see all the work order history that we’ve ever performed. And then if you wanna do your own folks, we can do that as well. So, unlike some of the other platforms where you’ve got your SAP system or NetSuite system, we’ve got a global definition for, this is turbine, T 34 at such and such site.

Alex Jones: So, yeah.

Allen Hall: Oh, okay. That makes a lot of sense. This app is free. 

Alex Jones: Totally free. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. So technicians need to go where? Just to the app store. And to the app. 

Alex Jones: Download the app store search DSPTCH. And that’s, it’s their, give it a download, give it a try. So, 

Joel Saxum: so if Allen and I log in and set up a profile, are we going to work to fix battery storage. 

Alex Jones: We said qualified. Ah, yes.

Allen Hall: I’m, I’m definitely not qualified for that. Yeah, no. Yeah. You don’t not want me. No, no. 

Alex Jones: No one, no one wants me near electricity. Yeah. That’d be a bad day. Perfect.

Allen Hall: So from a technician standpoint, you know, the wind business is sort of in the states depending where you ares sort of march through late September, early October.

Allen Hall: Yep. After that, a lot of people are on their own looking for that second job. Yep. This, there’s an opportunity through the DSPTCH system to get. Toss some jobs, which you can’t accept or not accept, but at least you can choose to do that. So you can get that solo work, the battery work in the wintertime.

Allen Hall: Yep. Until the wind system kicks back off again in the springtime. Because right now it’s pretty hard to do those couple of months. A lot of guys end up just, 

Allen Hall: you know, a lot of guys enough for jobs. 

Alex Jones: A lot of smaller service companies live and die by. They just can’t keep everybody working. Then they don’t.

Alex Jones: And you know, We’re, we’re trying to sort of smooth that out because I mean, structurally it’s, it’s not getting better, right? It’s the same thing as the duck curves and everything else of just the overall grid, right? You have this structural challenge of the winter months don’t have as much work.

Alex Jones: And if we can help smooth that out, both for smaller service companies as well as individual contractors, we think we can do something pretty powerful. We talked to a bunch of the technicians that work for us today and we have an interesting model within renewable. We do have a number of contractors that work for us, and some of ’em come from the Midwest and they’re like, you know, I have a family farm.

Alex Jones: It’s been in the family 120 years. I’m taking harvest season off. And frankly, most of the very large companies out there are like, look, you’ve got three weeks of vacation. And they’re like, no, no, no. You don’t understand. I’m taking these months off. Yeah. We think that flexibility shouldn’t be reserved for software developers and white collar workers, right.

Alex Jones: If, if that’s what you wanna do in life, we can adapt the way we work to to all the tax. 

Joel Saxum: So it’s easier to manage that, that through the system as well. And 

Alex Jones: they can raise their hand and they go, I have a week. And depending on the job availability, you know, we can connect that person with available work and you know, hopefully keep smaller service companies up and operating and keep the individual contractor capable of doing work.

Alex Jones: Yeah. 

Allen Hall: Now there, there’s one aspect to the DSPTCH system about paying technicians that, that’s it, at least RNWBL is using that feature at the moment. You know, a lot of technicians the pay structure’s kind of weird. Depending on who you’re working for. Sure. But there’s an option to get basically paid directly, kinda like a Venmo almost.

Alex Jones: That’s right. So we partner with the same company that does payments for every Walmart employee. Uber Super Cuts dominoes, and they’ve got this really interesting model. It’s basically instant payments. So you go in, you put in your time card, your manager hits approved. Once that hit gets approved, it’s instantly deposited.

Alex Jones: So for us, we’ve been sort of dog fooding like we do with all of our features. You know, let’s bring this to our technicians and you know, frankly, there are some guys that they’re looking at payday loans and title loans and right. You know, I, I don’t care how much money you make, you can’t afford 30% interest.

Alex Jones: And so we’re, we’re doing it for 0%. But, you know, I think at the end of the day, if you can make the technician’s life easier, they’re not gonna jump for 50 cents and all those other things because we’re putting them first, we’re investing in them. Yeah. And really like what are the things that are bringing you, you know, chaos or not being able to go to work, you know and trying to solve those problems for ’em.

Allen Hall: Yeah. It, it seems like such an. Obvious solution to a, to common pain points, but there really hasn’t been a solution. It’s been a little helter skelter. We’ll, we’ll take care of this part, but not that part. It’s so, the way I look at this app, and I think I told you this before, it, it’s like the Uber app.

Allen Hall: For wind technicians. Yeah, sure. It covers all those bases. It, you get paid by it, it gives you directions how to get to the site. Right. And off different jobs. Right. The work orders come out. You get, you have your, all your certs in there, which I think is really huge for a lot of technicians that keep that in one place.

Allen Hall: What has been the adoption rate? Like, how, how many people were, were on the service already?

Alex Jones: Yeah. So at RNWBL we’ve got roughly 800 people. And then we now have 4,200 external to us. Wow. Wow. So you think of rolling out your typical corporate software, you know, it’s like, use this or you be fired.

Alex Jones: And I’ve got folks that our largest competitors, our largest clients, sure. Downloading without, we haven’t spent any money on marketing just yet. That I think this will be our biggest this little podcast. Yeah. We’ll get, we call it. Yeah, there you go. That’s a win. But no, I mean, if we can help guys do their jobs, you know, I think the thing that gets me up in the morning is like we had this guy call right after we released one of the apps and one of the bigger updates and he was like, before DSPTCH, I would’ve taken a Sunday, driven out to the field, found the o and m building, you know, pinned it on Google Maps, opened up at my run, breadcrumb my way home.

Alex Jones: Because if I’m late to work on Monday, I’m gonna get yelled at. Yep. And it’s like, I gotta go see kid play softball. And it’s like if I give a guy time back with his family, that’s gold. That’s huge. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. That’s a, that’s a win personally, right? You can sleep better at night. 

Alex Jones: Yeah. And then as we were doing a lot of that, we got a lot of feedback from our techs of like, what are the challenges?

Alex Jones: We did a lot of research in this area. 38% of workplace fatalities are vehicular related. And then we looked at West Texas. Fantastic wind in West Texas. Yeah. Also fantastic dust storms. Yes. Terrifying to drive down and bad roads. Yeah. And so we coupled those two things and we decided, you know, we’ll just make this whole thing free.

Alex Jones: It seems, you know, like a huge safety issue. And the the adoption’s been great. So yeah.

Allen Hall: Let’s, let’s talk lightning for a minute and, and thunderstorms and safety around thunderstorms. Sure. That’s one of the features in the app Now. Yep. Is to know what the, what the weather is. If you’re a technician up in a turbine, like, hey, it’s probably time to get down.

Allen Hall: Storms coming. You do not want to be here. From an operators standpoint and an owner standpoint, that makes a ton of sense. You don’t, you don’t want technicians up there anyway. It just adds another level of safety cuz you know, you know how you get, you’re, you’re working and, and you’re not paying attention to what’s happening outside.

Allen Hall: And next thing you know, the south starts rocking. 

Joel Saxum: We talk West Texas, west Texas. Lightning storm or, or thunderstorm can come now can be blue skies. You could pop your head back outta the nacel cover and then go, wait a second, we gotta go. Yep. 

Alex Jones: Yeah. Well, and you know, take this from a few different angles, but like we’re, we’re doing these things of how do I convince a technician that this is valuable for them?

Alex Jones: Yeah. While also accomplishing broader business goal. So like, we don’t ever have to worry about a dispute with a client that like, this was weather downtime. We’re not pencil pushing, we’re not trying to cheat them out of any money because. We can show, hey, here were all the lightning alerts, here’s the, you know, weather conditions that we had at that time.

Alex Jones: And Same thing with, you know, same day job costing when people are putting their time, we’re getting our largest cost stream coming in way faster than we think anyone else in the industry is doing it. So, yeah, 

Joel Saxum: I think the payment thing is not to be missed there, because if you talk to technicians in the field that have worked for a few different companies, ugh, majority of the time it’s, they left or they jumped or made, made a move because of something to do with pay.

Joel Saxum: That’s one thing you do not mess with someone’s per diem, some’s pay, because that’s what they’re out there trying to accomplish. Right. That’s right. Nobody’s going to work for fun. I mean, climbing wind towers might be cool, but nobody’s going to not make money. 

Alex Jones: They’ve got a better view than I do. Yeah.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. So I think that that payment piece is, is something that is it’s gonna be welcoming the industry. And I’m sure you guys have already ha have already heard that from your technicians. 

Alex Jones: Yeah. And you know, if you get a two day job, you don’t wanna spend two for whatever number of weeks or days waiting for that money.

Alex Jones: So, Yeah. Yeah. You know, when you’re, that’s the right thing to do. 

Joel Saxum: Especially in the spring when you’re first mobilized, like you said, if it’s been wintertime, you’ve been down all winter and you haven’t had that paycheck coming in, and then you gotta go and mobilize for two weeks. And then there’s the accounting period and the approval.

Joel Saxum: So you don’t get your first paycheck for three weeks, sometimes three and a half weeks. Yeah. That’s tough. That’s tough to live a, you know, you can only eat so much ramen, you know what I mean, before you get the first paycheck in. That’s right. I mean, I was, I was in the field for a long time in the oil gas world, and it was like that every job you went to, Yep.

Joel Saxum: It’s like, man, everybody was kind of struggling at the beginning there for the first while, and if you were to, to be able to get some of those funds in right away, that’d be fantastic. 

Alex Jones: Yeah. And you know, I think it’ll draw more folks to the industry of, at least let me dip my toes into this thing. So yeah, we think it’s, it’s kind of a cool feature.

Allen Hall: So it’s almost like a quality of life app. Yeah. That’s what it is, right? You’re trying to improve the quality of life of the technicians and make their life a little bit simpler and it’s, It was due, it was due 10 years ago. Yeah. I’m glad you guys have taken on that project and are getting it done.

Allen Hall: What, what are some of the feature feedbacks that, that the technician are saying, Hey, this is great, but could you add this? Could you add this? You must give a lot of feedback that way. 

Joel Saxum: Integrate Uber, eat so we can get one. Yeah. 

Alex Jones: Can I, can I, yeah. Within RNWBL I decided to be jfk, like a real Kennedy man of the people, and I gave my cell phone number out to every single person that works at the company.

Alex Jones: So anytime there’s a bug, It’s 11:00 PM and I’m getting calls. My wife does not love this, but yeah, no, we, we’ve we’ve gotten a lot more rigorous with testing and yeah, no, they, it’s, it’s really a, it’s an accelerant and incubator for the app because whether I want it or not, we’re getting a lot of really, really good feedback.

Alex Jones: So the next big trache is, you know, core to us as we’re building out forms. So just standardizing a lot of the safety forms and then process and qa, 

Joel Saxum: tailgate meetings, truck inspections, JSAs, 

Alex Jones: all that kinda stuff. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I shouldn’t be mean, but one company that we acquired, their vehicle inspection report was 260 fields.

Alex Jones: A lot of them optional, but it was like, give me the status of the driver’s side rear view mirror. Give me the status of this. And it was like they’re pencil whipping that It’s all font. Yeah. And then it was like, yeah. Optional comments, condition photos, and 

Joel Saxum: nobody’s doing that. No. That’s insane. What ends up happening is the technicians will just go like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joel Saxum: Check, check, check my vehicle inspections. 

Alex Jones: But you’re optimizing your entire business to some report. Some guy somewhere is looking at, instead of the tech will tell you if there’s an issue with the truck. Like, don’t put the onus on him to, anyway, I, yeah, these things actually irritate the heck out of me because you know, you’re, you’re.

Alex Jones: Putting so much tedium into someone else’s life and it’s, it’s just unwarranted. So, yeah. 

Allen Hall: So technicians out in the states up in Canada Yep. And south of the border of Mexico. Yep. Right. Can, can download the app and DSPTCH app? You should try it. You had nothing to lose. It’s free. 

Alex Jones: Yeah . If I can’t sell free put me out to pasture

Alex Jones: yeah. Yeah, yeah. I 

Allen Hall: think this makes a lot of sense. And I, I think over the summertime you’re gonna see, you’re probably gonna double the amount of users that are on that system. Do you, are you gonna plan to expand it over into Europe or, A lot of technicians are apac, Australia. There’s apac. Yeah. 

Alex Jones: There’s always expansion plans.

Alex Jones: We’ll see where it goes. Yeah. All right. Interesting. Europe. The density is such that it doesn’t seem to have a lot of the same problems. I think what we’re really excited about, we’re, we’re looking at some prevailing wage, like building a full payroll system inside the app to kind of help some of the smaller service companies.

Alex Jones: Sure. You know, unfortunately, I think some of the reality is that size starts to mean a lot. I, I don’t know if I dig that, but there is just a lot in the industry of like, you have to meet all these various requirements and I think that puts a lot of the smaller guys at a significant disadvantage.

Alex Jones: Mm-hmm. So I think our value long term is creating more options in the market for our clients and also the technicians. Right. If we can bring to bear all these folks, and even if you’re a 20 person shop, we can comply for this project for prevailing wage through DSPTCH. 

Allen Hall: Wow. Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. Yeah.

Allen Hall: This is really interesting. Alex. Thanks so much for being here. Good to see you in New Orleans. Yeah. Yeah, and if you’re a technician listening to those podcasts, get on the app store, download DSPTCH.