Episode 14: The LOO Power Origin Story

Episode Summary

What started as a conversation about a restroom trailer turned into a six-year journey to rethink event power. This week, I’m sharing the story behind LOO Power and why we set out to tackle the noise, fumes, and fluctuating costs of traditional generators. I’ll walk you through the battery-powered system, its onboard internet and weather monitoring, and what it could mean for the guest experience and the vendor team. We’re also talking about the costs of powering an event and where those savings could go. If you’re planning a wedding or producing events, this one is for you!

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julianleaver.com | @julianleaver

Resources

LOO Power

Full Episode Transcript

Hi friends, and welcome back to Mind Over Matrimony. This week we're going to chat about my newest passion project, which is called LOO, which stands for Logistical Off Site Operations. And it's a funny story because it's got this cute and darling little name because it originally started with a conversation about a bathroom trailer. And so we named it LOO. Go to the loo. It's very British, it's very cheeky, it's very fun. But this whole conversation really started because in 2020 when the world was shut down and then events were starting to come back, everybody really wanted to have their event outdoors.

And so at Julian Leaver Events, we were doing a lot of tents. It was back-to-back to back tents outdoors in the open air, like less people, right? But still in, in the heat, in the cool. We needed to be able to do these tents. I was talking about this with someone on a walk this morning. That our business is so dependent upon commodity. We don't think about that in the wedding world. We think about, oh, it's pretty and it's beautiful and it's functional, but everything that we really work with is a commodity. So the food and beverage is a commodity.

The flowers are actually a commodity with prices that go up and down based on what's happening in the world and how travel is working. And power and HVAC are also a commodity because they're highly dependent upon the commodity of diesel and that price fluctuates all the time. We're seeing that in the world right now given what's going on. So the price of diesel goes up, price of diesel goes down. That then directly affects the pricing of power and power generation at events. So I was having this series of conversations every single weekend, basically in the fall of 2020 into the spring of 2021, where every weekend I would have to go back to the parents of the couple and explain to them that the price of diesel had gone up X.

And so that now the power generation that we were going to be deploying at the event had gone up by X. And so there's not really a choice in that situation. You have to have the power to be able to power the kitchen or power the band or power the lighting or power the restroom trailer or power the HVAC. And so I kept having to have these really hard conversations, and I was just tired of having them. I'm like, this is insane. Why are we still worried about this power and having this conversation? And the weird thing about power at events as it stands right now is that we bring these huge generators on site.

And generators are inherently built to fail. Basically, it's a combustion engine, right? So every system on this generator is meant to trigger a warning that says, oh, you're overheated, or oh, there's too much torque or oh, there is too much energy that's coming out. And so it's not a consistent flow. And so it shuts the generator down. And so what's even more wild is that we have to have two generators at every single event because the generators are so finicky that one of them breaking down and having to revert to the second generator is an actual common occurrence. So you have to have two at least on a very basic wedding.

Sometimes on a larger tented event with a lot of HVAC, you have to have three or four or five to be able to power everything correctly because one of them is always going to fail. So we're having this conversation again and again every weekend, and I just thought, why couldn't we solve this problem? Isn't there an easier, softer way to do this? Because also the generators are generally put right next to the restroom trailer, and so the restroom trailer is basically filled with CO2. That whole area smells like a generator, so your guest experience is really not great when it comes to having the generator next to the restroom trailer, next to the kitchen tent, next to whatever the other infrastructure is that you're building for your tent build.

I work a lot with Jacob Towe of Jacob Co Creative and they do lighting design and installation. And Jacob and I have been working together for a very long time and collaborating in terms of lighting and coming up with new fixtures and how to do things in a little bit of a different way. And what cool new thing could we come up with? And, and then he would go and tinker on the said little thing and then he would come back and say, OK, Julian, I figured out how to do this really cool dual beam light that will affix to a pipe and drape pole.

And then it'll give you almost like this accent lighting more like residential lighting as opposed to event lighting. And so we would just tinker like this and probably once a year we would have a conversation about, oh, wouldn't it be cool if we could do X, Y, or Z and then he would go away for the year and tinker on it and then come back the next year and say, oh, hey, I got this new really cool product and I 3D printed it and it can come in every different color, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So we had been having this cadence of of invention and exploration and design for five years, probably when we got to 2020.

And so after I think probably five of these conversations in a row about having to go back about the cost of the generator, I realized that we needed to solve this problem because we could. And the technology had caught up enough from a battery perspective that we could maybe eliminate the traditional generator from the equation. And so our initial idea was to put the generator inside the restroom trailer, hence the name. And we thought, OK, we can put the generator inside the restroom and then it's one big unit and off we go. And then it cleans up the aesthetic of that whole portion of the event from a guest experience perspective to make it a little bit more palatable and also be very mobile.

Basically, we could take it wherever we needed to take it and it could drive on the road. It didn't require a flatbed truck because what I will also say here, just to deviate into the logistics of all of this is that when you are having a generator at your event, the generator is not being driven there behind a trailer. The generator is being lifted from the yard where it's stored onto a flatbed truck, then driven on the flatbed truck to the location. Then a crane needs to be present to lift the generator off of the flatbed truck and place it in location.

So all of those elements are what actually makes power so expensive. It has so many different components that have to be paid for. There's labor at every single one of those steps, and there's also different equipment needed at every one of those steps. What if we could eliminate all of that and actually drive the power to your event towed behind a vehicle and eliminate all of those logistical elements? We started thinking. And so then began my power journey and learning all about how power works and how circuits work and volts and inverters and battery storage and also how many pounds of vehicle can be on the road and be towed correctly and within the transportation department guidelines, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

So it's been an interesting adventure. I've learned a lot in really six years. And what was funny about this is that in the beginning in 2020, really none of this technology existed in a format that we could build the unit that is now called LOO. It was too big, it was too heavy, it wouldn't fit in a standard trailer. It would still have to have all of those elements of the logistics in terms of the flatbed truck and the crane and all of these things that we didn't really want to have. So we just kept developing and developing and gradually the technology caught up to now get us to a place where there's an actual next generation generator that is silent, that can be driven to your event and parked.

It's 8 by 10. It's no bigger really than the two generators that you were already renting and much smaller than the generators you were renting for HVAC. And again, can I just say it's silent friends? Because generators are loud and they sit right next to your event and disturb literally everyone who is in their vicinity. So maybe it's not exactly your guests because it's been placed behind a wall or slightly away, but it's generally sitting right next to the restroom trailer or it's sitting right next to the kitchen tent. And so that kind of noise pollution is perpetuating through your whole space.

And so now there's this next generation generator. And what's cool about it is that it can power an entire event. It can do 12 or 13 circuits depending on what you need for each circuit is a dedicated 20 amp circuit. And it can do it for 14 hours flat, full out and never run out of power. And then the beauty is that just a regular generator where the diesel truck has to come and fill it back up with diesel because you're going to pay for multiple days of diesel with a generator. Every LOO is actually delivered with a Tesla Cybertruck, and what's cool about that is that the Tesla Cybertruck can dump all of its power into the generator and fill it right back up to where it was, so you get clean energy throughout again and again.

It's silent. It also has solar onboard to keep all of the systems operating. And if it needed to be deployed in a location for an extended period of time, it can be easily attached to like a larger solar array. So it could be deployed at a festival, it could go to Coachella, it could be at your tent build for two weeks in the middle of nowhere and have an entire solar array deployed with it. What's also cool about it is we thought, what other cool problems could we solve? The other big problem that you have in the middle of nowhere is the Internet right?

Do you have no ability to communicate? Phones are not working properly, the Wi-Fi is not working properly. The band can't download what they need. The DJ can't download what they need. The kitchen needs to access all of its recipes, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. The problem of Internet is a perpetual one. And so onboard every single LOO, we put a Starlink. And so you have 75 acres of uninterrupted Internet that you can use for the vendor team. And then if you needed to, you could also deploy that to your guests as well if they needed it for some reason. And so it solved that problem too.

So two boxes checked, right. And then the third box that I really am so excited about is weather. And we talk a lot about weather here at Mind Over Matrimony. I feel like we're talking always about the catastrophes that happen when the weather turns against us because it's the thing we can't control. But what we can control is knowledge about the weather. We can gather as much knowledge as we possibly can about it. And so what we did was we actually put an onboard weather station on LOO. It's cool, you guys. When they get there, the technician basically sets up a little weather station that goes right on the top and it measures the wind and it measures the rain, and it connects into a larger Doppler radar and it reports back to you in real time what's actually happening where you're standing, not what's happening at the nearest airport, not what's happening at the nearest weather station, what's actually happening where you are.

And then the fourth feature that I think is really amazing is the camera feature. And so LOO has cameras on all sides of it. And this ties in with the weather feature, basically because sometimes you can't be on site right in the middle of the night. You don't know what's going on, you don't know what's happening. You're not sure what the weather actually looks like at your event site. But with these cameras, you have access to be able to see exactly what's happening and you can measure the wind speed. Maybe you need to call for an evacuation.

And you can make that decision in a very educated way with all of the information at your fingertips. I know this is really exciting for vendors from the people on the vendor side of everything are like, Oh my God, this is amazing and this is so cool. And and this is really going to change the way that we we interact with power at events. But how does this really benefit you as a couple? I think that's really important to understand as well because there's lots of elements of weddings that are unsexy, right? And those are the things that everybody's like, oh God, do we really have to pay for that?

Do we really have to pay for that transportation? Do we really have to pay for the power? Do we really have to pay for the HVAC? And those are the things that are really guest experience elements, right? Like they're not dollars that you want to spend because you're not getting like a big, huge floral arrangement for them. But what you are getting for your guests is goodwill. You're getting a power company that is providing continuous power. And what's different about battery power versus generator power is this generator power has spikes in it. OK, so it goes like this, friends. I'm just going to break it down like in the most simple way.

Battery power is a clean, straight—and what it's going to do for your guest experience is that it's going to provide the band a clean, straight line of power, which then improves the quality of their performance because they get a clean, smooth line all the way through as opposed to spikes up and down that you get. And then you hear that in the music, you hear that in the speakers, you hear that in the sound. That kind of comes back. And so it's a really cool enhancement for basically the same amount of money, but you get this clean through line as opposed to the spikes that benefits you in so many different ways.

It allows your vendor team to maximize the power. It allows them to be able to access whatever they need to make the decisions that they need to make for you. It also allows your guest experience near the restroom to be a lot better. They're not standing next to noise pollution. They're not standing next to actual CO2 pollution. It's a totally different experience. And so I think sometimes couples have a hard time wrapping their head around all of these other different elements. But what we can say to you is that this is designed with the client in mind from a wedding planning team that thinks about experience all the time.

And so I wouldn't put my name behind something that I didn't feel was going to enhance everyone's experience at the event. So what does this cost you guys? I think that's the thing that everybody is always, oh, what does this cost? Basically less expensive than what you're currently doing. If you're looking at HVAC and power for two days for a 200-person event, you're looking at a cost of around $45,000 over two days. And then if you need an additional diesel drop, then it kind of changes exponentially based on the price of diesel on the day. The beauty of the LOO system is that it's a flat rate.

So it's a flat rate of $5000 a day for the actual generator, and then it is a flat rate of $25,000 for the air conditioning. So you are literally maybe paying $30,000 as opposed to 45. So you tell me what you could do with an extra $15,000. I'd love to see that in floral, friends. I'd love to see that in decor. I'd love to see that in your dress. I'd love to see it wherever you'd like to spend an extra $15,000. That's a huge savings and I think something that can benefit both the wedding vendor community and also the client community because those dollars can be deployed in such a different way to make such a different impact.

And so that's LOO Friends. We're so excited about it. I'm so stoked about the possibilities of providing all of this really cool technology to literally everyone. It's available now and you can go check more out about it at loopower.co. And there's tons more information there. And it started being deployed this spring and we just can't wait to see what it does. It's going to make your life easier. It's going to make your life more stress-free. And stay tuned because we're also about to roll out an HVAC product that's drastically different than the one that is currently in use. It's much quieter, it's much more efficient and it's really going to change the way that people see and experience events.

So thank you guys for listening and I can't wait to see you next week.

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