Fixing the $530B Commuting Crisis with Malcolm Adams

Fixing the $530B Commuting Crisis with Malcolm Adams

Kelly Kennedy: Welcome to episode 210 of the business development podcast. And on today's expert guest interview, we are chatting with Malcolm Adams, a former oil and gas executive who is looking to turn commuting on its head with his revolutionary platform, COREO Commute. He is looking to make choreographed commuting a household name across Canada.

Stick with us. This is an episode you are not going to want to miss.

Intro: The Great Mark Cuban once said, Business happens over years and years. Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal. And we couldn't agree more. This is the business development podcast based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and broadcasting to the world.

You'll get expert business development, advice, tips, and experiences. And you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEOs. And business development reps. You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business, brought to you by Capital Business Development Capitalbd.ca. Let's do it. Welcome to the The Business Development Podcast, and now your expert host, Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly Kennedy: Hello, welcome to episode 210 of the Business Development Podcast, and today I have an absolute. Rockstar expert guest for you in the rideshare services industry. Today, I'm bringing you Malcolm Adams. Malcolm is a distinguished entrepreneur and former senior executive with over 28 years of experience in the Canadian energy sector.

As a professional engineer, PNG, and a corporate director, ICDD, Malcolm has led and supported 11 energy companies, bringing his extensive expertise in team building, leadership, corporate strategy, business development, and technical and financial evaluation to every opportunity. His career spans significant roles at notable firms such as Shell, ARK Financial Corp, and Surge Energy Inc, where he was instrumental in driving growth, Optimizing operations and executing strategic acquisitions.

Malcolm's tenure at Black Crane Energy Corp as president and CEO exemplifies his ability to found and scale companies with a keen focus on sustainability and longevity, underscoring his commitment to responsible and innovative energy practices. Now, as the CEO and founder of COREO Commute, Malcolm is revolutionizing the daily commute with real time, choreographed carpooling solutions aimed at reducing driving costs, vehicle emissions, and commuter stress.

COREO Commute, formerly known as Tango Ride, is set to launch in Calgary in late 2024, and it promises a reliable, convenient, and eco friendly alternative for commuters. Malcolm's vision for COREO is not just about enhancing transportation. It's about transforming lives by making commutes more affordable and sustainable.

With his unwavering dedication to climate change mitigation and sustainable transport, Malcolm Adams continues to pave the way for a greener and more efficient future, making him a formidable force in both the energy and transportation sectors. Malcolm, it's an absolute honor to have you on the show today.

Thank you for having me, Kelly. Pleasure to be here. Dude, you do so much and I'm really excited. We've had a few conversations ahead of this show and I'm really excited to chat with you. You're my very first ride share company. And so it's, it's fun. It's a fun one to chat about. And that industry is challenging and changing all the time.

And you have an interesting, an interesting outlook on it and interesting. Offering on it. But first, before we get into that, Malcolm, how did you end up on this path? You'd energy sector to ride share. That is an interesting transition.

Malcolm Adams: Absolutely. I agree. And just clarify one thing. I would say, you know, we are very different than ride share.

So we are, we are share the cost commuting. And share the cost carpooling. So we, we don't want to be lumped in with the Ubers of the world and and that kind of thing. So on a sustainable transportation kind of focus. So how did I get here? Yeah, that, that, that's the first question that usually pops up when folks, when they hear that I've got a, an oil and gas background.

So I'd say it's, it comes from three sources. One, my dad my dad was an entrepreneur. Ran his own business for many years. My brother and I were from very young age supporting the businesses. Essentially he had a lighting business. So we, we, we helped with deliveries and carrying a lot of boxes.

And he ran another house and my mom was like, so I grew up in sort of an entrepreneurial environment to say the least and His favorite line was it's a lot easier to save a dollar than to make a dollar and carpooling and saving money in this tough time of affordability issues for folks. Most people don't realize that that private transportation is our 2nd highest household expense and number one is shelter, number three is food, and, you know, a lot of people can't help you with items one or three but we're here to help families save between three and five thousand dollars a year per household, so that's some of the background of, you know, and I'm also an engineer I hate waste I hate inefficiency to my core, and there's no greater inefficiency in the world right now than solo commuters that we could be increasing our mobility density.

Helping people save money, reducing emissions and building stronger communities. It's, it's awesome and I'm really, really excited to chat with you about that because you're launching it, you know, in our backyard right in Calgary for you. It's home for us. It's our backyard. I'm in Edmonton, but yes, you know, like even before this show, we were supposed to record this show yesterday and my internet went completely, completely down and like went down.

Kelly Kennedy: We've lived here for over a year and we have not had like an internet outage and so I'm checking him a tell us. I'm like, where is our internet? What happened? And they're like, look, somebody has cut out and stolen all the wires out of the box. It's going to be a minute. And I was like, are you kidding me?

And we talked briefly before this show, but I really think it does speak to the current situation of our economy and the current situation with inflation. There are a lot of people hurting and we need alternatives to help people out.

Malcolm Adams: Absolutely. And like I said, yeah, I mentioned that I was also in the oil and gas industry and.

Theft in the in the, in the oil fields, we'd had wells go down because someone cut out the copper. So there are a lot of desperate people right now. And, and this is going on, you know, several years and, and nothing's really getting that easier. You know, inflation is down, but it's still inflation.

And so you can look at vehicle prices and I've done all the stats and you can appreciate that I'm an engineer, so I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to data. And the average vehicle price. In Alberta has gone up by 28 percent in the last five years. Used car prices have gone up by more than 50%.

Fuel prices are up substantially. I don't think anybody's salary has gone up by that amount in the last five years. No, definitely not. Yeah, it's, it's really, it's tough out there. I've been blessed, like I said, to work in the oil and gas industry. For some amazing firms, and this is my opportunity to give back in a way you know, it's one thing to run an oil and gas company.

It's another thing to help people change their lives and open up opportunities. And to when people say, you know, why did you start this? It actually came from a point of anger which a lot of people and I know CEOs have said that before that either you start a business for one of two passions lover or hate.

And so in my case, it was anger because, you know, we, our previous company, Black Crane, we'd raised over 75 million and in an equity line from private equity. And partway through our business, you know, we, I think we were drawn about 12 or 14 million into that business as an organic growth model. And then we lost our funding primarily because big endowments back those private equity players and they, you know, had pressure from students and others saying no more supporting fossil fuel companies.

And the angry priest for me was most people don't know where emissions come from, from a barrel of oil at the end of the day, the largest source of emissions is actually the tailpipe of vehicles. It's about 81 percent of the emissions and upstream oil and gas is about 12. So if you want to make a difference, the biggest lever is about 7 times.

Bigger it's to address the vehicle emissions at the end of it. And that's, what's exciting. So we lost our funding. We sold that company. And then I wanted to transition to where I can have a major impact. We've got 114 million people solo commuting in North America every day, spending about 2 billion per day on parking fuel depreciation and repairs.

And. That's, you know, that's where I want to make a difference.

Kelly Kennedy: I can see why that would be why that might be a point of contention. My gosh. And, you know, I was looking at when you launched Black Crane and like, for those of you, you know, we're talking to people in the U S we're talking to people around the world, but let's just say that 2015, 2016 was a damn hard time for the oil and gas industry in Alberta.

My gosh, what was it like launching a company? Based in oil and gas in 2016. Let's talk about that for a second. That couldn't have been easy.

Malcolm Adams: Yeah. So it's, it's something I've always wanted to do. I'm 52 now. I, I left ARC financial in 2010 when I was 38 thinking I was ready to start my own oil and gas company.

I wasn't, so you know, by 2015, I definitely had identified, you know, the team that I'd like to put together after working at both Surge Energy and Annapolis Capital for a bit and realizing that, yeah, the buy and exploit model in oil and gas wasn't there for junior oil and gas companies anymore.

So you know, it was really the organic growth opportunity that was out there. So. Yeah. And, and, and having a, you know, 10 plus years in private equity, there's no such thing as blindfold capital anymore. You needed to come forward with a business plan with the assets and, and everything, you know, teed up ready to go.

And if you want to get funding and so. Yeah, with a blank piece of paper in January 2016, when oil was what, 25, 25 bucks a barrel, I looked at that going, well, there's no better opportunity than to potentially do farming deals and put together a big land base. So Joel just identified a play that was a bypassed Ellerslie oil play northeast of Airdrie and.

But no one had ever really captured it because it's a checkerboard of ExxonMobil and Prairie Skyland and some crown land. And with, you know, the advances in oil in horizontal drilling and directional drilling, it's a thin zone. We now have these, you know, gamut bit tools that could drill thin zones.

And so we approached ExxonMobil I approached Exxon at that time going. Listen, I haven't raised any capital yet. Half my team, I can't disclose who they are yet because they're working other places. And would you like to do a farming deal with us? And the guy said you know, you're the first company that's approached us in two and a half years.

That's not trying to steal our production. We'd love to do a farming deal because these aren't lands that we're going to drill. We'd happy to be with the royalty. So now we had half the checkerboard. And with crown land and then a deal with Prairie Sky, we now had 70 sections of contiguous land, 200 plus drilling locations.

Now we can go to private equity with a business plan. We raised for 1. 5 million friends and family, and then we can go to private equity and say, hey. We've tied up the play here's how we can scale it, and we need funding. So, that process, even the private equity guys, they call it sort of just in time funding they had delays in their own funding.

We, we originally were supposed to be closed by February 2017. So, you know, raising 70, 50, 50 million plus in 13 months in that environment. I was pretty, pretty excited about that. They had some delays in funding, so we had to bootstrap it through till October of, of 20 2017 before we actually got going.

And so we, we did get the funding and we drilled our well the next day which was a vertical, which, which worked out great. But the challenge going forward for us in that environment. As you can recall, is now the best rigs, the best tools, we're all going stateside and yeah, and so it became very challenging for us to drill horizontal wells in that thin zone because the best, best tools and gamut bid tools 5 meters back.

We're now stateside. So we had to pivot to to another play. So we did that. We also did some Bitcoin in there. That's where we enhanced tech. So we did, you know, Bitcoin, we had an advisor, but you know, we own the miners. We order our own miners. And we had, it was a really cool play. We, we tripled the value between buying the miners and actually getting going.

The, the miners tripled in value and we paid out that project in less than six months once we got, and that was pretty exciting. I didn't want to bet our entire company on Bitcoin because I just don't understand where the heck it's going. And it did take it, it did crater a lot. It's now bounced back.

But there are some neat synergies in the oil and gas industry with Bitcoin mining. My gosh, that's so exciting. And so that's kind of led you like really. I kind of see it as the path, right? I kind of feel like the Bitcoin kind of led you hold on, maybe we could do something a little more modern, a little more ride share or exactly.

Like app based, right. You know, at Arc Financial, when I worked there, you know, we did some really interesting things. I used to be in the non conventional group non conventional energy group, and so we were sort of a bit more on the VC side in some of those investments where. We did an LNG project from scratch and sold out in 18 months.

We were doing heavy oil, oil sands, biomass gasification tech company, which was really cool. And then this stuff called CBM and shale gas that came along. So, you know, really in the, on the front lines of. So I enjoy learning new things. I enjoy taking things that are complicated and sort of breaking it down into something, you know, simple.

And I love solving problems. Absolutely.

Kelly Kennedy: Definitely a through and through engineer.

Malcolm Adams: Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy: I've had the pleasure of speaking to both Ian MacGregor and Sean Collins on this show. And, you know, I mean, they speak just the same as you. And I look at like some of the things they've done and it's been so varied.

You know, I always looked at business and kind of thought, like, stick to your lane, stick to what, you know, before this show. Okay, that was very much. My idea was like. If you're good at something, stick to that thing, because in my experience at that point, what I'd seen is when people ventured off and started to try new things or new things that were outside of their area of expertise per se, that it didn't tend to go well.

But my gosh, I've spoken to so many people on this show now who have went in completely different directions, but had the know how and just brought that experience with them and had great success just like you. It has definitely changed my view. I think, I think entrepreneurs are capable of a lot more than than we think or that we give ourselves credit for.

Malcolm Adams: Yeah, I agree with that and they don't always work and you got to be, you got to be comfortable with that you know, taking calculated risks. I think, you know when I was an arch financial I got to know, you know, and we were supporting Pat Carlson. If you've, if you've known Pat, that's. Wow. He's, he's had multiple, multiple success.

He's a serial entrepreneur built, you know, huge companies, North American oil sands. Then he did seven generation, which was another massive one. He now runs a a public oil and gas company, but he's so, so innovative and inventive. And, and Pat gave me a book. So I was probably 36 at the time. And he, yeah.

He gave me the book the five secrets you must discover before you die.

Kelly Kennedy: I don't know if you've heard of that one. It's a pretty, I have not, but now that's on my reading list.

Malcolm Adams: Got a catchy title. Yeah. It's not brief. Anyway the, the author in there, he, he did something really cool. He went around. And he didn't interview, but he asked about, you know, a ton of people, like 3, 000 people who's the, you know, Kelly, who's the smartest person that, you know, the wisest person, you know, that I could interview that's still alive that I could interview and you'd be like.

Oh, that's my, that's my grandfather. Here's his number, blah, blah, blah. Or it's my barber or my pastor, whatever. And so he got a bunch of those names. Then he, he narrowed it down to you had to be minimum 70 years old, even though there were some people that were clearly wise, let's say in the forties. But he interviewed all these people and asked them that question.

The same question everybody said, if you could go back and tell yourself, tell yourself something. In your twenties, what would that one piece of advice be? Okay. And then he wrote the book around the top five answers because he found a big cluster and the number one on the list of those five was take more risk.

And and that was really resonated for me. And then they had, you know, different stories, some positive, some negative, and these were people that. Either took the risk and it worked out, there's people that were still in their 70s regretting never taking that risk. But once it's a calculated risk and so for me at that time you know, venturing out for Mark and doing something else was around taking, taking more risk and, and part of that comes from my DNA and my dad who, who started his own business as well.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, I always like to, I always like to ask entrepreneurs like you, what was your catalyst? Like for me, it was, it was COVID. Like I'd worked, I'd worked at an inspection firm for the better part of a decade, you know, I knew business development. I knew account management. I'd done that for a very long time for that organization from, from infancy all the way up to it was a 6 million company.

By the time, you know, we did that in two years, we went from about 300, 000 to 6 million in two years and really just. Kind of sustained that throughout, but obviously oil and gas turned and inspection industry took a pretty big nosedive. And, you know, my my boss at the time kind of came in and said, Kelly, you know, like, I'm not sure what the next few years look like.

Do you have and do you have another plan? Do you have something else you could do? And I was like, yeah, you know, like he didn't know it. But at the time I'd already been thinking about going out on my own and doing business development on my own, starting my own firm. And that was the kick in the butt.

That was the kick in the butt that I needed. And I always find that like, we all need that catalyst. We all need that kick in the butt. Right. And I guess I wanted to know for you, obviously you were incredibly successful. What, what was it? What was the kick in the butt for you? That was like, okay, I need to do something on my own.

Malcolm Adams: Yeah. Oh, to, to leave art. You're talking about back in that, yeah.

Kelly Kennedy: Like it's always scary to leave that, you know, you were probably incredibly well paid, you know, it's scary to leave that like cushion and go out and have to do it on your own.

Malcolm Adams: Yeah. Well, like I said, I, I didn't do it in isolation. I obviously have many chats with my wife before that we had three young kids at the time.

So that was 2010. So yeah, we had A four year old, a three year old, the one year old seems like a crazy time to do that. Part of it for me is at that time was I wasn't learning and growing anymore. And yes I was comfortable. Arc Financial is one of the most amazing places you can work, you know, largest private equity firm in Canada.

But I just didn't feel I was learning and growing anymore. And at that time I was sitting on six different boards chairman of one board, you know, chair of comp committees and audit committees and other boards, both public and private. And for me, Here I am advising CEOs and trying to help them build their company.

I've never done that. So, so, so part of it for me was if you want to call it a fraud type feeling that.

Kelly Kennedy: Bit of an imposter syndrome.

Malcolm Adams: Yeah. And so. I, I saw that, you know, the value I could, I, I tried to add as much value as I could, but I'd never been in that seat. Right. And so for me getting back to the operating side.

Getting to build out my own team all of that you know, you've got to go do it and experience it. So that was really the catalyst. Financially, we were in a place to be able to that. And my wife was super supportive of that decision. Cause she saw, yeah, I, I, I, I wasn't energized, I guess. And so, yeah, nothing like jumping into a new startup to energize you.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, no kidding. No kidding. You know, and I wanted to chat a little bit about it. Black crane, did you, did you guys end up shutting it down or did you end up selling?

Malcolm Adams: We ended up selling. Yeah. And so and we, we timed the market really well and exit oil was 120 bucks a barrel. We had, we had like, we ran a sales process.

I think we had seven bids. One that looked like it was clearly the best offer for us all cash. Not subject to finance or anything like that. And they were really interested in our assets. We had a really good LMR. They were really interested in our Bitcoin operation as well. They were interested in our people.

So really good fit to, to exit at that time. So yeah, bigger fish took us out.

Kelly Kennedy: Amazing. One of the things that I wanted to ask you was, was it hard on you personally when it was time to walk away from that? The reason I ask is I actually interviewed Mike Fata a while ago who sold his company, Manitoba Harvest Hemp Foods, for 419 million dollars to Tilray in 2019.

And he said, like, obviously there were more things to this. He'd ended up losing his marriage. His mother had recently passed away. Like, it was all in a eight week window. A lot of things happened. But he mentioned that he had to grieve. The loss of his company, even though he walked away an extremely rich man, it was very hard on him because you tie so much of yourself to your organization.

There's so much of you in any organization that you found started and build. Did you experience any of that when when you sold black crane?

Malcolm Adams: I think the biggest grieving process, because yeah, you put you put so much of your, your identity and yourself into it. You know, we've been stuck, you know, without without fresh capital for a while.

So we've been grinding, you know, over that that previous year. And we did some really good things, like I said, on the Bitcoin side to to increase value. The biggest piece of reason I love the team that, that I had that, and, and to wrap up that piece of it I'm still obviously close to, you know, we were a small team, like six of us.

 What's been really cool is, is three of those individuals have been able to move on and are now geologists, lab men, and, and VP ops are together again at another, another company and they're thriving. So I think that, that that's great in terms of helping with the grieving process, if you will, on that front.

Yeah. But yeah, you, you learn a lot through, through doing your own, your own startup on that piece. And. You know, private equity was the only source of capital at that time and, and. When they are, you know, the three or five directors, you know what they say goes, so you, you, you, and I know, I know the game, you lose a little bit of your control, obviously, as an entrepreneur, when you, when you do that, but we, you need access to capital to grow.

So, I guess, in terms of the grieving process for me, you know, that was we closed by June 2022. I didn't have a long grieving process because, you know, I got introduced to Vish and Tango Ride. During COVID and, and I was, you know, mentally stimulated to research how big this problem was and how it, how it could be solved.

So, you know, shortly thereafter, I probably took a month off and then really jumped into Tango Ride, you know, finalizing a recapitalization acquisition with my partner, Tom with, with the original founders and brought everything to Canada. And we incorporated in November of 2022.

Kelly Kennedy: Okay, so you didn't have a long, you didn't have a long break.

You kind of you just coped by starting another company. Okay. Okay. And this part is the part that I want to spend a lot of time on because this is a really, really interesting jump choreographed commuting. You said it right in the beginning. We are not Uber. We are very different. You know, take me into it.

You came from oil and gas. What the heck? What, what was it in your brain that's like, okay, nope, nope. There's a huge problem here and we need to fix this. And I know I don't have experience, but I'm going to figure it out. Walk me through this one.

Malcolm Adams: Yeah, totally. So the catalyst moment, if you will the spark was November 2019.

And as, as you know, the, I was probably a little bit late, but, you know, the ritual in October, November is you go get your winter tires on. And so and, and, you know, full disclosure, I've been like, like 80 percent of North Americans. I've been a solo commuter my entire career. Yeah, there's a couple of years I did transit, but.

Once we moved out into the suburbs of Calgary, you know solo driving. So I was heading north on 14th Street to go drop the vehicle off to get the winter tires on. And that's a pretty busy road that south goes into into downtown. And the city had taken out the left turn signal where I needed to turn, and I was 10th in line, and I'm not the most patient person.

And because they took out the turn signal, only one car could turn left at the end of the red light. So I sat there for half an hour inching forward, and I got to watch a thousand cars. So instead of being one of the salmon in the flow, I was going the other way. I had to watch a thousand plus cars go by on the morning commute at 7am and 95 percent plus were solo drivers.

Yeah. And so that was the catalyst moment when I was sitting there as an engineer going, this is insane. How many people are doing this? How much money are we spending? Every one of those people is going, if they're going downtown is paying 25, 15 plus to 25 a day for parking. Here we are as oil and gas executives and companies being demonized by the world.

From people that don't understand where our missions ultimately come from. I wonder how much we're spending a day in Calgary. I wonder how much we're spending a year in Alberta, Canada, North America on this specific activity. And so that launched me into research mode. I won and sitting there going, there's gotta be an app, you know, that sort of takes some of the pickup experience of an Uber.

And, you know, that. That piece of the puzzle with Matt, almost like a matching service or a dating service piece that puts it together that, but, you know, not dating, but, but essentially coordinates a commute for people and connects people in their community that, and, and I lived in the burbs and I knew very few of my neighbors because, you know, you open up your garage door at minus 30 and drive out and you go to work.

Do the same thing. You don't meet your neighbors unless you have young kids. We didn't at the time and you're coaching timid soccer or hockey. So you know, I get why people do what they do, but the numbers were staggering. And so that's where I looked at it and and started searching apps to see there's got to be an app out there came across tango ride.

Vish was the founder and, and lives in Melbourne, Australia, originally from India. And so I reached out to him on LinkedIn and said, Hey, I'm the CEO of an oil and gas company in Calgary. What you're doing looks really interesting. I'd love to hear more about it. And, and so we, you know, had a zoom call.

I think that was about February of 2020. And that's when he said, he said, yeah, we've done some pilot work. We've built the app. He had a, he had an angel investor out of the UK. They've done some, some marketing testing in the UK and he said, yeah, we're about to launch our first pilot project in Aberdeen, Scotland in March of 2020.

And of course, that never happened. COVID, COVID crush.

Kelly Kennedy: Something happened in that time.

Malcolm Adams: Yeah. So that's where we, we sort of, you know, stayed in touch over, over that period of time. I started building more models. Tom McGinnis who's a good friend of mine, Tom was the head of investment banking at National Bank.

And before that, a founder of Tristone, one of the smartest guys I know he's also a great black hatter. So, you know, I went to Tom, actually called Tom that morning when I was stuck in traffic swearing about, you know, having to sit here for half an hour and how ridiculous this is. And, and he, he remembers that call vividly.

And so but as we got together and started looking at, you know, the, the business plan, I kept going back to Tom and saying, tell me why this won't work. Cause he's a great black hatter. And we keep going through and identifying issues or how to solve those issues. And essentially we, we couldn't kill it.

And the reality is, you know a company in the States called scoop commute had started two brothers. It started something in San Francisco in 2015. They also got punched in the face really hard by COVID. But they, they were doing this was in San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. So they only got to three cities.

But had north of 350, 000 users just before COVID hit them. And they were, they were they had a great gross margin on what, on their business had big clients like Microsoft and Amazon and then, you know, so there's a model out there that this will work. They never came to Canada for a lot of reasons, you know, the U. S. guys don't normally come to Canada. But the problem in Canada is actually worse. From, you know, from affordability issues, you know, our, our fuel prices set a 60 cents a liter equivalent us, you know, obviously we're like a buck, 50 bucks, 60. Your vehicle prices are in Canadian dollars. Like everything's just more expensive up here.

Not to mention that people don't like taking transit at minus 30. Well, and you know, we chatted about this earlier, but like the cost of vehicles here is Astronomical, right? Like, I remember shopping for, you know, I mean, I've always had a work truck and, and, you know, call it what you will the Alberta way, whatever you want to call it, I've had to go to Calgary, whether it's a blizzard or whether it is beautiful and sunny outside and as a business development specialist for a lot of years.

Kelly Kennedy: I, you know, I prided myself on being able to get where I needed to go regardless of the scenario. And so for me, that meant a, that meant a truck. And when I started my company, I wanted a work truck. I wanted a specific truck that was mine and that I could take back and forth. And I remember like, this was like 2021.

I want to say 2021 or 2022 when I bought my, when I bought my truck. And I remember man, like shopping around, trying to find the best possible deal. I think I ended up settling for a truck. It was 57, 000. And that was a great deal for what I got at that point. I think an average new truck at that point was around 80 to 90, 000.

So just to give like people around the world, an idea of the cost of vehicles in Canada. It is astronomical. It's, it's pretty high. And like I said, I think the average Alberta and most of our trucks that are sold in Alberta the average Alberta vehicle in 2019 was about 40, not 8, 000. And now it's over 62, 000, but the average we, we hit a new record for New vehicle sales in Alberta in April of 2024, which is 1.

27 billion just in the month of April. Wow.

Wow. Yeah. And so you're right. Like if you factor in, you know, an average payment for a vehicle, I think most people are probably spending anywhere between 600 and 1, 000 a month for their vehicle payment. I think that's pretty fair, probably across the country, if not just across Alberta.

If not more, like let's get real. If you're buying a brand new truck, you're well over 1, 000 at this point. All in, it works out to from what I've read, Stats Canada stuff. It's about 1, 200 per month is what the average Canadian is, is spending on parking, insurance vehicle. If they finance the vehicle, that kind of thing.

Malcolm Adams: Yeah. It's yeah. And fuel. Yeah. It's, it's a big number.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah, no. And, and okay. So, so. Why? Why choreograph commuting? Right? We have uber, right? People around here in Edmonton have been using uber for a long time. I think for me, like, that's the one that I hear about. I feel like if people are using any type of app based service, they are using uber.

That's been my experience. But talk to me a little bit about the challenge. Obviously, we're driving to work. Traffic's crazy. We're paying astronomical amounts of money for both our vehicles, gas, fixing them, insurance, like insurance. Literally, I saw a thing the other day that said insurance companies are pulling out of Alberta because of the cost to the cost to insure they're not making any money.

We're, we're paying out, you know, astronomical amounts of money. You know, you, you're a, you're a statistician. What is, what is it? How much are we spending, you know, on average in this, in this country on just driving to work?

Malcolm Adams: So right now in Canada, the number, it's about 56 billion dollars a year for just solo drivers.

And in North America, it's about 530 billion a year. And that's just for the solo commuters and that's the biggest component. And that, that assumes about a parking average parking costs of like 10 bucks which is tough to quantify that, but in that realm. And so it's a 30 percent parking, 30 percent vehicle depreciation, and then you get into, you know, sort of equal components of fuel and, and maintenance and repairs.

So, yeah, it's about 2 billion a day. Per year is about 1. 8 billion Edmonton solo commuters are spending about 1. 5 billion like the numbers are, the numbers are wacky, but back to your first comment about uber. So, I mean, people don't typically commute to work with uber. Right? Like we use Uber for, we're going out to the bars or restaurants or a sporting event, maybe even going to be have some pops and, and, and don't want to drink and drive people from like, and this is all stats can stuff.

And the, and the best example to show is like Airdrie. Okay. So Airdrie is one of the fastest growing cities in Canada has been for the last five, six years. I think there's almost 90, 000 people there now. 10, 000 of those residents work in Calgary and and this is 2021 stats, Canada data. So it's probably grown since, but of the, of the 10, 000 people that work in Calgary, 95 percent solo drive to work 1 percent take transit.

And then your other remainder in there is some people that are taking Uber or they bike or walk or something. So. We don't compete with Uber because we're not doing, you know, Uber is not focused on what we do at all. What we're focused on is the 95 percent trying to help those solo commuters find a match and find a carpooling partner that they can safely and reliably go with.

And the, the concept here is I call it car trooping, not carpooling. So. And it comes from a friend who she, her, her kids dance. Okay. So think of a, think of a dance trip, for example. We're the choreographer. And so in that dance troupe of like 25 people Kelly, your best partner is Sarah and that's who you usually, let's say tango that's who you usually dance with on stage, but you know, if Sarah sprains her ankle the night before in rehearsals, then because you're part of a troop, then Jane can step in and be your, your partner on stage.

So that's. What we want to create and why we call it choreographed carpooling, choreographed commuting is, you know, Sarah might be your neighbor that lives 3 doors down from you and you both work at National Bank. So, it makes a ton of sense to carpool together if, you know, in your community that there's also another 30 people that.

Commute from your neighborhood to downtown Calgary, downtown Edmonton, whatever you know, before you leave the house that if something happens to Sarah, or in your case, you drove to Sarah to work in the morning, you have to stay late that night and you can't drive Sarah home. We automatically rematch Sarah with one of those other people in your troop, so she does get home.

And so that's why, historically, like, over 40 percent of the people we interviewed have tried carpooling in Calgary, but only about 7 percent practically do it. And that's because two people in a network is technically a network, it's just not stable. So, if Yeah, once every four commutes, your schedule changes and you can't get Sarah home.

Well, she has a 25 percent failure rate of getting home. That's completely unacceptable, but in a 12 person troop where you have eight drivers and four passengers, even with a 25 percent individual failure rate, those passengers get home it fails once every 12 years, not once per week. With, with those, it's kind of like Yahtzee, you know, you know, Hey, Kelly, like throw eight dice and, and have six sixes come up like it doesn't happen very often.

Kelly Kennedy: No.

Malcolm Adams: You'd have, you'd have to get to seven. So even at six, six sixes, it's the network is still safe, stable where the network would fail was Hey. Throw eight dice and have seven sixes come up, okay? The chances of that is like one in two million. Like it's really, really a small number. So that's the kind of network we want to create.

It takes sort of critical mass, but you don't need a hundred people or anything like that. You need like a dozen. And you can create this super stable choreograph commuting network.

Kelly Kennedy: And it's really interesting because, you know, we talked about it before, but like, you're right. Like we, I know my neighbor to my left and I know my neighbor to the right.

I do not know the neighbor across the street. I do not know where he works, what he does or any of those things. Right. But for all I know, he works at the building across the street from one of my clients.

Malcolm Adams: Yeah. And in big companies like the CNRL or Cenovus or others downtown. They might work in, they actually might work in your company and you've never met them because you're the engineer and you're on floor seven and they're the accountant on floor 15, because they always keep accounts and engineers pretty far apart.

And, and, and, or, or they might even work in your same building, just at a different company. And so for us, and this is how Scoop and another company in Europe started, this is. To alleviate any kind of stranger danger piece you build this out with bigger companies for co workers. And so, the second part of this is we've developed a SAS product and we just launched that in November.

And it really just helps us minimize our costs. It's called EMA. And it's the Employee Mobility Management Application. And, With and we can we can disguise the data. So people aren't worried about privacy issues or anything like that. But we don't want employee names. We don't want employee phone numbers.

We don't want employee emails. We don't want any of that. We don't want their complete home addresses like none of that specific info. What we can, what we want either is the first three letters of their postal code or the full postal code, but just replace the last number of the one to disguise it and we can find the clusters.

You know, you have 5000 employees. We can find all in a matter of seconds. We can geocode that and find the clusters of carpoolers in your organization. For those 5, 000 people and we can identify how many of those people could be carpooling together and, and saving between three and 5, 000 a year.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

And that's huge. And especially for a company, you know, CNRL, Suncor, any of these big office towers downtown, you know, how many thousand people work in those buildings and then how many of those are paying for parking or how many are the companies paying for their parking or how many, you know, like you said, it's, it starts to become.

A bigger challenge than just carpooling because, you know, right now we're post COVID sure, but we've also gotten pretty used to working from home. And I think a lot of companies are like, Hey, you know, we're like, obviously we're working from home. We like this, but it's not easy for everyone. Not everyone is a, is great at working from home and they're trying to get, you know, even if it's just back to the office for two to three days a week, companies are trying to get people to come back to the office, but you know, it's like they've given them this work from home thing and made it work and.

People are reluctant. And so now if you're asking them to come back to the office, plus now you're gonna have to pay for parking. Plus you're gonna have to pay this gas fees and get a vehicle. It's a lot to ask of these people and they're fighting back.

Malcolm Adams: They are. And, and so, yeah, so the genie is sort of out of the bottle on that.

And what we found, you know, there's different groups. So for let's say oil and gas companies. It's, it's paramount to have your creative people together. There's, there's, you know, CNRL saw that in the data right out of the gate. So, you know, they, they push people back to five days a week, I think in like April of 2021, you know, when, when sort of COVID released, they're like, get back to the office, everybody has to wear a mask.

And lots of oil and gas companies are five days a week. When you look at, we'll call it more sort of liberal, flexible organizations, accounting firms, legal firms that I've talked to. They have struggled to try and get their people back and, and absolutely big hand in the face saying I don't like transit.

It's not safe. Or safe enough or clean enough. I met 1, 1 individual. He has what he calls bus pants. And I'm like, the hell are bus pants and he literally wears them on the bus and he gets to work and then he changes out of the bus pants into good pants because he doesn't want to get stuff on on his other pants.

And I was like, wow. Wow. And yeah, they've, they've struggled. I think the city of Calgary's push their people back to 4 days a week. There was a lot of obviously push back to that. And it's like, yeah, you're not paying my parking, parking expensive. Yeah. Transit's inconvenient. Transit, I don't feel safe on or clean.

That's a lot of pushback. So to be able to bring a new solution to the table that says, Hey we can get you to work for a lot less than the solo cost, you know, up to 60 percent cheaper than your solo cost. Plus in some cases, your employer might cover part of that cost to get you back to the office because you know, the productivity level is so much better for the company.

And then there's a whole bunch of, you know, cultural things where, yeah, you've now got an inch and we've interviewed those people that people that carpool together that work at the same company, they end up talking about working and they've joked about it saying, you know, we should actually charge for our time when we're commuting home because we end up solving problems for the company in the car.

Yeah, like we, we talk about some work stuff. So you get those kinds of collisions. A lot of young people, one accounting firm I talked to, is recruiting people to come work for them has become more difficult because a lot of young people don't drive. And, and they can't get to work efficiently enough with, you know, transit can't keep up, you know, said almost every North American city after World War One to the exclusion of, let's say, New York, Boston and San Francisco, which were originally walking cities, every other city in North America is an automobile city.

And we were, we were built around the automobile as it took off and our freeways and everything else. And, you know, the pop, the, the, and I geeked out on this stuff too. The population density of our North American cities is about one sixth the population density of Paris. So Calgary has one sixth the population density of Paris.

We have one fiftieth the transit coverage on LRT or Metro compared to Paris. Okay, wow. So trying to design our city and so we have 160 people to pay for it and we have 150th the coverage of Paris for walking distance to get to a metro. We can't use the same strategy to develop our city that way. We are an automobile city.

We need to figure out how to increase mobility to density and building a green line is one way of increasing mobility to density. It's also the most expensive and cost overruns. I'm pretty worried about those. Our solution of density has no infrastructure cost. It's more of a behavioral change, a step change here, and we want to be the carrot to do that, not the stick.

It's super interesting. It just happened June 4th. In New York, if you've ever, if this is part of the whole stable commuting piece is New York was going to put a toll of somewhere between 15 and 23 a day for vehicles to come into Manhattan. So if it's a car, I think it was 15 bucks. If it was a truck, a big truck, it was like 23.

They've been working on it for 10 years and everybody had supported it and it was about to be implemented. And on June 4th it just got approved in like April and on June, it was going to raise a billion dollars a year for New York's public transit system to increase, you know, to subsidize the repairs and everything else that's needed to enhance the public transit system.

And because of the pushback from people, because that is a stick we see in Canada with like a carbon tax, the governor of New York canceled that on June 4th. And so, because the governor want's to stay in power.

People don't like more taxes. And so but if you, from the pure logic and engineer, if you ran all the numbers and the math, it is the right thing to do for, for society to do that, to increase. Without an alternative, like choreo commute for people to be able to carpool together efficiently, and now you're, you're forcing people to jump all the way and have to take an inconvenient transit, people will revolt.

And so that's why we have to find a solution between affordability and convenience that is practical. And that's what we're trying to develop and launch here. And what's encouraging is, you know, like I said, scoop scoop got there, right? Like they, they got the. You know, north of 10 million a year in revenue just before COVID punched him in the face and they'd only gotten to three cities.

So the opportunity and then that's circa 2019 and like you said, everything's gotten more expensive from that time. So our number 1 focus here is. To help people with affordability, but it's really cool that in some ways we're a clean tech company because we literally take cars off the road, reduce emissions, and we also help build community and can have social impact in the social impact piece for me was a big surprise.

I mentioned. When I first started this, it was out of anger. It's now evolving to the other side of, man, we can do something super cool here that no one else can do. And this area I call the gift of time. Okay, and this was after doing a bunch of customer discovery work. We were at the Airdrie home show, meeting people at a booth talking about what we're doing because I said those 9500 people in Airdrie that work in Calgary are spending about 50 million a year of their after tax salary.

To get to work, that's huge. That's the number they're all. And if you've ever been on the deer foot, and while they're expanding the deer foot again right now if you've been on the deer foot, it's, it's brutal because there's so many people that solo drive. So, as we discovered that and talk to those people, talk to some students, I had no clue that if you live in Airdrie and you need to take public transit to get to UC as a student, it's 2 hours, 1 way, wow, 2 hour commute.

So. There's people either that are doing that and spending four hours a day on trains and connecting northeast and getting on a C train and getting on the connection and get up to the university, or they don't go to university because the other alternative is you need a car. Right? Yeah. And so even for state, even to get to say is a 2 hour commute.

So when I saw a part of that, I was like. We have a solution that can enable people to actually upscale, go to university and then the ultimate one we came across, which really shocked me as well. And like I said, I lived in my oil and gas world and bubble and. Oil and gas people are extremely generous, generous, the United way and getting involved in different, different causes.

I was involved with the Tom Baker cancer for many years, but I had no clue when I saw this new report out from what was it? Not the Calgary chamber, but they'll come to me in a second. They talked about people that are in 60, 000 a year or less. are in, you know, the percentage of those people going to food banks is, is like crazy high.

Like they're, they're skipping meals to feed their kids and, and everything else. Well, most of those people don't live in the core of the cities. They live in the suburbs where they can afford their first house. And when you look at the stats, there's over half a million single moms earning 60, 000 a year or less.

The biggest dropouts in high school are kids from single parents. And so there's a video he came across called bus stop jobs. It was produced in the U. S. showing, you know, a mom that gets, gets up at, what is it? 5 a. m. with her, with her like 7 year old little boy. And she works at a bank, but because the only way she can get to that bank is through transit.

Her son leaves with her at 5 a. m. He's dropped off at a school and hangs out with a janitor for an hour and a half while his bus is ready to go to school. She commutes all day. So what we found, for example, in Airdrie was there's the single mom that has to leave at 5:45 in the morning to get on the one bus that's an express bus to get, let's say downtown Calgary to get to her job.

And she could be an EA making whatever, 70, 000 a year. She doesn't get home till like 6:45 at night. Meanwhile, there's 9, 500 people on the road and a good chunk of those are going to downtown Calgary. What's your kid doing at 5:45 in the morning? If a neighbor could pick her up at 7 a. m. And give her a lift home, she could gain what I call the gift of time.

She could gain somewhere between, you know, an hour to two hours a day of nurturing time with her kids. Or just time to sleep, you know, some extra sleep because she's exhausted. The cost to subsidize that to get her down to her bus ticket price. Is about 3, 000. Sorry. It's about 2, 000 a year. And that would give her back more than 300 hours a year of nurturing time with her child.

Wow. 6 and whatever, 6. 67 changes her life. Uber doesn't do that. One way Uber to downtown Calgary is like 80 bucks during rush hour. Yes. So, coming back to it, we don't play in the Uber field whatsoever. We play in the field of, of truly helping people share the expense and, and lower their commuting costs materially.

Kelly Kennedy: Okay. Yeah. We are going to spend a little bit of time on this because I know we have a lot of people listening. They're like, this sounds super, super interesting, but how does it work? So walk me through how it works, Malcolm. How do we, like, obviously. We talked about one of the biggest challenges that you face is the fact that we've done things one way for a long time and changing people's minds on that is tough, right?

Like, I think, I think the hardest challenge in anything like this is going to be to convince the people who do drive daily and can afford it or, or feel they can afford it, even if they can't, there's a lot of us like that who are like, you know what? I like to drive myself. I want that freedom to make the choice to leave exactly.

I think that's the hardest point in this, but I think that. It also makes a lot of sense and we are wasting so much time sitting in traffic, paying for parking, like We're just wasting a lot of time and money in the grand scheme of things. And if we can reframe that to how much life could we be having back here?

How much, how much more enjoyment with our kids? How much more time could we be productive if we are entrepreneurs looking for solutions for more time? Because I know me and you, we're always looking for more time to get the work done that we need to be getting done. Correct. And most of the time we're stealing it from the morning.

Malcolm Adams: Yeah. And so I'll answer the first piece, which is like, so how does this work? How does it work? And. And then secondly yeah, it's going to take more than just what we offer at the end of the day. There's, there's other ways to enhance and motivate people to do this. For example, I don't I can't think of one in, in Calgary at all.

And, and I'm curious if you can think of one off the top of your head in Edmonton. Do you have any HOV lanes? Because I don't think we have any

Kelly Kennedy: We don't. No.

Malcolm Adams: No. So, so, so right there where people value their time that much and with an efficient carpool solution. And now you can get in an HOV lane. So this is where, once again, that's not a big infrastructure cost but that's where you know, municipal or, or provincial governments can support what we're doing is, is implementing HOV lanes, which are obviously, you know, almost every city in North America has them.

We just don't have them in Alberta right now. So how it works exactly is we batch match, and this is how Scoop. You know, did their piece, but so we will batch match you with other riders the evening before commute. So, 830 at night is the cutoff where you can submit what you would like to do for commuting the next day.

And so at 8:30 you get a response back saying, hey, and you can put yourself in as saying, I want to be a passenger. I want to be a driver only, or I'm good to be either. I don't care. I just, I just want to save money. Okay.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Malcolm Adams: But I, I, I'm going to be a passenger only if, if the network is big enough and stable.

So at eight 30 and this is what I'll call phase one of what we're doing, Kelly is the choreographed carpooling. Eventually, we're going to integrate this with parking app companies so we can choreograph your entire commute, but I'll explain that later the night before a commute. You can either set in just just your request for the next day, or you can set, like, on a Sunday, you could set your requests for the week.

Like, I. I commute Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and the thing if you're, if you're a hybrid worker. And so what we do, we have a cutoff at 8:30 at night, and that's when we do a single batch match. You find your morning commute and your afternoon commute. And then at 3 o'clock the next day, we will reaffirm that return commute to make sure it's still valid.

And because. It's usually the commute home is where things get screwed up. People have to stay late. You got free Oilers tickets and you're not going home now, you know, what have you. So you get a notice, let's say, after you've put in your request to be a driver. You can be a driver, a passenger or either.

And so let's say you put in a request as a driver and you get matched at 8:30 saying, Hey, Kelly, you're picking up Sarah tomorrow. She lives, you know, 300 meters away from you you both work in the same building and you're going to, it's a 30 kilometer commute. So you're going to recover like 11. Sarah pays 13.

Our app makes 2 bucks in that. So, and so we handle connecting people. We handle the transaction for you within that so you don't have to negotiate anything around the fees or anything like that. It's all made to be fair and we set that up. So in that case, you're both saving about 40 percent and you know, you go to bed knowing that that's all set up.

And so like I said, it's, and it's now the afternoon, it's almost like you get a a push message, like your physio appointment's coming up in two hours, you know, just a reminder, we will send you a reminder before three o'clock saying, Hey, Kelly. You're set to give Sarah a ride home at five. Are you still good?

And you're like, yep, I'm good. And so we'll reaffirm that, that situation. If it's a no, then we will batch match Sarah with someone else at that time. Our symbol, the choreo symbol, we use that. That's the trooping symbol. It's two green people and two blue people, driver, passenger. And in that, when you get matched on a Sunday night, you'll not only just get matched with Sarah, it'll have a little circle that says, like, 12, okay?

And what that means is Sarah was your best match. But there's 12 other people in your troop that live within a kilometer of your house that work within 600 meters of your office. That's your troop. You can click on that and open up and see people that are in your community. And what we found is, you know, 75 percent of the time, Sarah's probably your best match.

You also have your own favorites list, so we will priority match people. No one else needs to know who your favorites are. But that sort of favorites list is in there. So those are a couple of the, the, the ways we do that. Eventually, once we integrate with APIs with parking apps that are there one example is like ParkChamp in Calgary.

They're in Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, expanding to Toronto. They're doing well even though they had to battle hard through COVID. We can now create what I call the choreographed commute. So it'll now be like, Hey, Kelly at 8:30 on Sunday night, your match was Sarah. You're going to recover 11 from Sarah plus because we're integrated with.

Park Champ. We have Reserve Spa num spot number 1 2 7 in the ampersand building 400 like in your building. We've got a reserve parking spot for you for $24 on the return trip. Sarah and Dave are giving you're gonna give Sarah and Dave are gonna meet you. This is the other part. This is not Uber is because we can inconvenience the driver.

Sarah and Dave are gonna meet you at your preferred meeting spot, which is, let's say the lobby of your building. Yeah, you're not picking them up like an uber picks up somebody they're coming to you, which is easy for them to walk and meet. So you meet in the lobby of that or by the Tim Hortons in your, you pick the preferred meeting spot and that's really where the journey starts on the way home.

And so on that return journey, you're going to cover 15. On the return journey. So over the entire day, you recover 26 bucks. Your parking was 24. You've got all the other normal costs. You're not making money. This is all about cost recovery. You're not a you're not a COREO paid driver. Yeah, you're not an uber driver, right?

So this is pure cost recovery and we make sure it's always below the CRA limit for cost recovery, which is about 62 cents a kilometer. You're going to recover probably around 30 cents a kilometer. Okay? So that's more of the process. And then, of course. You, you drive home safety wise, which is massive for us of course.

And that's why, you know, the stranger danger is, is, is much less obviously with coworkers but in our existing first MVP app if you're female and you only want to drive with a female, you can specify that you'd never be matched with a male. However, one of the really cool things we think is important is, as I asked my wife about that is.

If you, if you start specifying, you know, female only, you collapse the size of the network and now you get something that's less reliable. So what we want to do is create trios because like, well, what if you went with 2 people in a car and my wife's like, well, that'd be fine. I don't, I wouldn't find that weird at all.

And so trios allows the network to stay more stable. It allows people to save 60%, not 40 percent and never any kind of weird one on one between a guy and a girl that. Uber had all these same kind of concerns initially, right? The key thing here is you're commuting with coworkers and you're commuting with neighbors.

It's, they're going to become your friends, right?

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. And like you said about like the community building, like how many of us even know our neighbors, right? Like think about that from like a standpoint. If you now know 12, 15, 20 people from your community, you're going to be better off just frankly, for knowing that many more people who live right next to you.

Malcolm Adams: Really tough to quantify. All the social impact that has I've had friends, you know, that they ended up commuting and carpooling for their kids for sports. Well, now they go, they go on vacations together now and stuff like they, they've become the best of best friends. Those are some of the, the outcomes that are, are really cool, but, and, and so at some point, the stories that can come along with the impact we're having is really neat.

You don't do that Uber, right? It's like, Oh, I have this amazing Uber ride. And we, we, we became best friends. We're going to hang out now. Yeah. It's, it's, it's very different from that perspective.

Kelly Kennedy: Well, and you know, I don't know about you, but being making new friends as an adult feels almost like an impossible task sometimes, right?

Especially as families, right? Especially when it's outside of work and you just want to meet new people. Like I see this as being an amazing opportunity to both put money back in your pocket and introduce you to people that you would have never met who could change your world.

Malcolm Adams: Yep. Yeah, we thought about like said.

Not in the MVP right now, but sort of icebreaker questions or, or things that people, you know, if they need that, there's, there's, that's the power of tech. I mean, look at, you know, look at dating apps like Tinder, right? They, they, they, and I'm not saying we're anything like Tinder, but here's people that would never meet each other, but all of a sudden they seem comfortable meeting each other because.

There's the picture of them on the app, I guess, and whatever information that's added, I personally don't use it, so I don't know the rest, but TED talks, there's a really neat TED talk, which talked about both Tinder and Uber, which once or not, not Tinder, sorry, Airbnb. So Airbnb and Uber, for example, like, like the stranger danger thing for Airbnb blows me away where it's like, yeah, I've got a spare room in my apartment and I'm going to rent it that out to a complete stranger.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Malcolm Adams: Could kill me in my sleep, right? Well, they found an Airbnb and uber that as soon as someone has 10 rides You know, the number of magic numbers, 10, this trust leap is complete. Once someone sees that someone has done 10 rides or had 10 Airbnb bookings, just 10. Right.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Malcolm Adams: So those are some of these interesting social dynamics back to your question of like, Hey, I like riding alone.

I get it. And so that's why when we were doing who's our ideal customer. It's, it's not necessarily me. Like it's not a guy that's 52 that can afford. The parking and, you know, so it's not for execs of companies per se, although I think it's kind of cool once again, on a collision basis, when does an executive ever have time to spend time with a junior person at a company in a bit of a mentoring role like we're and and.

If you did actually give a junior person a ride once in a while and have a junior person having one on one time with an executive, how super cool and valuable that could be, right? Very cool. But to the other point of that. We were looking at it going, and you have to be 18 plus to use the app, you have to be an adult, we're not doing this, nothing to do with kids stuff, there's other people that do that but we thought our ideal customer profile was 18 to 40.

You know, they're tech savvy. They're interested in, you know, tech, they, they've used discord before slack or something else. And, and obviously my kids use whatever it is, snapchat all the time. Like, they know where every one of their friends are crazy. That's right. So what we found though, as we, we did customer discovery work, particularly in Airdrie, We had women in age up to 55 that were super interested in what we're doing because they're budget conscious.

Like, they're like, I need to find ways to save money period.

Kelly Kennedy: Yes.

Malcolm Adams: Full stop. Yeah. And so it came back to the again and they didn't mostly like almost all of them didn't bring up the fact that, you know, I was thinking, well, I need to go as a safety trio and what's the background checks and some of these things.

Because maybe someone's you know, serial killer. Yeah. And, and they were really just super focused on, I need to find ways to save money and this could really help me out. The serial killer one's kind of interesting because like we started, if you're starting with neighbors and coworkers if, if, if your serial killer hasn't exposed themselves into your neighborhood or working environment, then I think you're okay.

I think there's a really fair comment. Go as a trio. If you've got that, but we've got all kinds of safety features built into you can, you can set, for example Before a ride starts, you can send a quick text message to a spouse or to to your mom or whoever else saying, Hey, I just got in the car with Kelly.

Here's his license plate number. You never hear from me again. This is where you start. This is where you start looking.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Malcolm Adams: Yeah. Yeah. And so you have to think about things like what's cool about scoop 15, 000 rides a day and. Didn't have issues like that. So once again, I'm not overly concerned about it, but we will design as, as much safety as possible in, in the app, of course.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. And so for the listeners, like, you know, essentially what Malcolm's saying is this model isn't necessarily reinventing the wheel. Like there, there have been existing examples of this that were incredibly successful. COVID was a tough situation for everybody, but. This, this isn't just could work, it's going to work like this is amazing.

Malcolm Adams: It has worked in other markets Northwest U. S. exactly. And there's no reason it can't work in Canada. It just never was brought to Canada.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, and you know, obviously you're launching in Calgary, so that's super exciting at this point. It's actually launched. It's live in Calgary, and I'm very excited to see what's happening.

We're actually recording this on July 16th, so we're a little ahead of launch in the recording. But by the time you're hearing this, it's out. It's happening. What is the rollout plan? Like, obviously, Yeah. Edmonton could use something like this. I'm sure Vancouver wouldn't complain and neither would Toronto.

You know, what's the plans for the future? 100%. Yeah. And so the, the business model we have is, is not, you know, pure B2C. I say that for a couple of reasons. It's honestly not pure B2C because the marketing budget around that would be insane. And you know, dollars are important to us, obviously, in minimizing the burn.

Malcolm Adams: We're really a B2B2C rollout. And what's cool about so yes, we have to, we have to get a beachhead. We have to get, you know you know, we've got this pilots set for 2024 and doing that with sort of larger corporations. Super excited to hopefully get something going with the University of Calgary come to Edmonton with U of A, for example, like students when it comes to the affordability issues on students is, you know, that's another level of pain that's out there.

So the rollout plan is that plus what's kind of cool about what we do is we can provide. Get more people back to the office. So the property managers we've talked to, you know, the the Aspens, the Brookfields, the Colliers the Oxfords out there, of course, they want to see more butts in seats back in their office more days a week.

Yeah. Yeah. And so if we get the formula right here in Calgary and are showing benefits to businesses, benefits to property managers, benefits, obviously to employees. Benefits to the city, we now have, you know, the Mayor of Calgary endorsing us to the Mayor of Toronto to the Mayor of Vancouver. We have the the guys that Aspen properties or Oxford introducing us those property managers, introducing us as the property managers in Toronto.

Vancouver Edmonton. And so we can leverage off of those pathways to spread. And, and what I think we found when we looked at some, what Scoop did, for example, they got some, you know, big anchor clients. I mean, kudos to them, but you know, the Amazons, the Microsofts, the world, and all of a sudden it's like, well, if they're doing it, we're doing it kind of thing.

Yeah. So that's, That's the way we see it. We definitely want to get down to the US as well, where there's, you know, it's 10 times, 14 times the market market. But Toronto is a hot mess. You know, the Ottawa transit system they put in their new C train LRT thing is not worked out. Well, my brother lives there.

Yeah, there's, there's lots of places. And of course, you know, the costs, the affordability costs of commuting in Vancouver versus Calgary is. Is even more pain, so that that's really the, the rollout and then in each of those cities, we will essentially have like, you know, a CEO. That's how Uber does it.

They essentially have like a regional or a city manager. That's in charge of that market, right? And so in Calgary, we'll have the team built out to support, you know, essentially those regional managers. Military wise, a forward operating base, if you will, that have their own P and L's that are in charge of building out those markets.

Kelly Kennedy: Okay. No, this sounds awesome, dude. And I know there's a lot of executives listening right now, probably from a Calgary office thinking this would be. Awesome for our company. I can already see the benefits. If we could integrate something like this with our company, there might be like a compensation share package or something like that, which I think makes a lot of sense for this, especially if you have a large building or you're a large corporation, say 500 to 5, 000 employees.

This makes a lot of sense. Talk to me. How do they get ahold of you? What's the best way to get ahold of you to set up a meeting?

Malcolm Adams: Yeah, absolutely. I can give you a phone number and email that, yeah, my, my cell is 403 354 3833. Email is Malcolm@gocoreo.com. MALCOLM and yeah, happy to happy to come down and explain what we can do for, for Corp's in particular.

There's a, there's a host of different benefits 1 of the neat synergies. It's, it's, it's not going to be out day 1, obviously, Kelly. There's so many given my background oil and gas carbon credits as well. Because we have all the data. That that showed, you know, you picked up Kelly and your Tesla or your, your Ford Lightning.

I guess you like trucks. And she didn't drive her F 1 50 gas cuzzler. And we have the data that you picked her up on this date. You drove here during rush hour. It took this long. We can calculate, you know how much that. How much emissions were avoided by literally taking her vehicle off the road during that time.

And so 1 of the cool things and we'll partner with someone on the carbon credit side of it, in terms of developing that tech and integrating what we do, because there's a bunch of folks working on that that are more experienced and smarter than me, where we want to partner with, let's say, you know, CNRL or Cenovus for example.

Just to put some numbers around it is, you know, eventually we could sell those credits at a, you know, fraction of the cost of what they would be paying in carbon credits. For their emissions to make it a win win for them. And as an example, I think Cenovus is about 25 megatons a year is their scope one emissions.

If we eventually convert one out of 20 solo drivers to passenger, we would generate in North America, we would generate around 16 megatons of carbon credits each year. Wow. So we could Cenovus offset 60 percent of their carbon credits. without an infrastructure investment to do so. So that's why, you know, partnering with Cenovus or CNRL or some of the big companies in Calgary to start the pilots.

That's really the focus of, of fall 2024 is the pilots. And then we can launch that to any size business outside of that. That's really the focus for Calgary. We're hoping to have 2, 500 passengers on the application by call it September of 2025. And then, you know, continuing to grow there and moving into other cities, the ultimate market is massive.

There's 114, 000, 000 solo commuters in North America and you know, partnering with universities, partnering with corporations, partnering with municipalities. Uber doesn't do this. That's why people say, well, Uber does this. I'm like, Uber does not do this. It's not. Uber was created initially to find a way to connect rich guys with limo drivers, and then they went down market to as far as people would pay for that sort of enhanced taxi service.

We are specifically to and from work for rush hour or to and from school for rush hour commuters. We, we only do this twice a day.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. So in a sense, like you're not competing against rideshare. What you're really competing against is public transit.

Malcolm Adams: Public transit and and solo driving. Solo driving is really what we're competing against.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I still see this being better than public transit. 80 percent of the people are solo drivers that they've already voted. Like, I'm not here to crap on transit in any way. They've already voted that. Transit is not their preferred method. Transit is about seven to 10 percent of how people get to work without sticks like New York charging more for road tolls.

The, the only, and, and maybe over time, we can talk a bit about that too. I've got lots of opinions on it. Carbon Tax. Okay. So the Federal Carbon Tax, it's like a, right now it's like a boiling a frog. Right, like, it's such a slow, low number that's creeping up the frogs, never hopping out of the pot. Okay, if you need to, if you need to make the frog hop out of the pot, the carbon tax number needs to be a lot bigger before someone's going to change the behavior.

I've also done the math. Like, for example, if you make 100 grand a year, and you live in area. And you work in downtown Calgary, the, and you value that at 100 an hour and most people value their time at more than what they make 100 an hour. Sorry. 100, 000 a year salary means your, your free time to you is worth about 50 an hour.

So, when you look at the cost to drive to downtown Calgary, parking, everything included as a solo driver versus. The, the real cost of the time cost of taking inconvenient slow public transit. The break even point for choosing to take transit over parking and, and driving is 65 a day for parking. That's the break even point.

So at 25 a day, people will not change their behavior.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Malcolm Adams: Yeah. And so the Carbon Tax and downtown parking costs are, and if the city of Calgary came out and said, Hey, we're now making parking 65 a day downtown, the world would revolt and the city councils would be all replaced. So, so that's the gap. So that I get why there's a Carbon Tax.

It's, it's to try and push people to consume less. But when the cost of it is so low, people really don't change, you know, a small fraction of people are changing their behavior. Not enough to make a real big difference. So, yeah, our approach is. And that's so we'd love to work with the federal government and love to work provincial government, municipal governments.

You know, HOV lanes. Ooh, that saves me time. My times were 50 an hour. Cool. Plus, I can save time, plus I can see materials, real savings by using the COREO commute app. Plus I go to bed at night knowing my entire commute is planned out for me. I know where my parking spot is. I know my parking costs. I know exactly how much I'm going to recover from the passengers that I took to offset some of my costs.

I know all that before I go to bed. That's worth something too.

Kelly Kennedy: This is amazing, Malcolm. And I'm really, you know what I'm really looking forward to? I'm looking forward to having this conversation with you again in like three years, because I think, I think at the end of that three years, calgary, Alberta, maybe even a lot of Canada is going to be a very different place once COREO Commute is available.

Malcolm Adams: Yeah, and I've talked a bit about this before because people, the irony is not lost on me at all. That, hey, you're an oil and gas guy for a long period of time, now you're technically Like I said, you're, you're technically doing something that is lowering oil and gas demand. Why would you ever do that?

Because a lot of people think we're somehow evil you know, we're all about profit and we just, we're evil. Yeah. A lot of engineers, like I said, love to solve problems. We don't want to hurt the earth. Oil and Gas, you know, I've always said this before, if, if you lower demand for the product, then, then they'll produce less of it.

That's, that's the problem is we're car crazy in the earth. And I'll give you a couple other crazy numbers. And I'll ask you this question 1st, Kelly. Have you ever seen a going out of business sale at a car dealership? Not once. I've never seen it. And I'm I'm originally from Fredericton, New Brunswick, and I looked it up because my grandfather was a mechanic for Clark Chevrolet.

Which I knew is a very old dealership. I just looked it up before a call Clark established that business in 1883. Okay. And really, and then they became a Chevy dealer, I think in 1905 they just sold the business to someone else here a couple of years ago, but they were in business for 136 years, Valentine, Volvo, and Calgary been around decades, like I think 40 years or something like that.

So car businesses don't go to out of business and. That's because from 1920 to 1980 there were, the number of vehicles on the road grew to 400 million. That's in the world. From 19, so 400 million. It took 60 years to put 400 million vehicles on the road By in 1980 to 2020 2021 there's now 1.4 billion vehicles on the road.

Okay, so, so it took 60 years to put 400 on the road. It took 40 years to put another billion on, and we're supposed to hit 2 billion vehicles on the road by 2030. Holy cow, okay, so that's why car dealerships don't go out of business and we get back to all the things about so new car sales. Yeah, in 2023.

And we can jump on this topic if you like. So, because I'm an engineer, I love problem problems. And my brother's in the military. And we talk a bit about obviously NATO commitments and, you know, Canada, we can't meet our 2 percent and all these types of things, the, the shortfall for right now, for, for meeting our goal to NATO is about 13 billion a year.

We're supposed to be around 40 and we're, we're, we're shy about obviously around 27. So we're 13 billion short and we can't come up with the money to pay for that. However, we just spent 91 billion in Canada last year on new vehicles. And between vehicles, new vehicles, old vehicles, repairs, maintenance, gas, we spent 300 billion last year.

We can't come up with 13 to meet our NATO commitment, but we can spend, but you know, we can help drive people there in our new cars to the front line. So anyway, this is some of the craziness around, you know, vehicles are the worst investment we can make other than buying a lot of ticket. But when there's no alternative.

We see it as a necessity. It's a necessity that I get to work. So it's a necessity that I can get to work conveniently and on time. So I have no other choice, but to solo drive right now. And that's what we're trying to create is give people a new choice that can materially help people save money. Yeah.

And so that's the the mission savings, the dollar savings you know, 1. 8 billion a year of solo spending costs in Calgary. We convert 1 and 20 people that's 90 billion. Sorry. 90Million dollars. That would stay in the Calgary market. That's 90Million dollars to go towards mortgages, food, supporting local businesses, you name it.

The cumulative effects of this are insane, and that's, that's why I call it the solo commuting fiasco.

Kelly Kennedy: At this point, anything that benefits Albertans and Canadians as a whole, dude, I am on board, you know, like I'm right there with all all of our listeners, right? It's not an easy time to be Canadian. It really isn't.

It's more expensive than ever. It's been more challenging to keep up with bill commitments than ever. I get it. I feel you guys. And so yeah, Dude, I'm on board. This is amazing. And you know, it's an honor to be able to interview you ahead of this because I already know this is going to be huge. And so Thanks for your time today, Malcolm.

It was great chatting with you.

Malcolm Adams: Thank you, Kelly. I really appreciate the opportunity and this has been a lot of fun. Thanks.

Kelly Kennedy: Until next time, this has been episode 210 of the Business Development Podcast, and we will catch you on the flip side.

Outro: This has been the Business Development Podcast with Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly has 15 years in Sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry and founded his own business development firm in 2020. His passion and his specialization is in customer relationship generation and business development. The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your business development specialists.

For more, we invite you to the website at www.capitalbd.ca. See you next time on the business development podcast.