Ep. 14 The Definition Of A Hero Featuring: Adam Feuerstein

Bob Roark: This is the Exit Series. I’m Bob Rourke. This is for founders, brokers, attorneys, and valuation professionals. The people are in the room when the deal closed before talking about what happens next. This is the conversation that nobody else is having. On this episode, we have Adam Firstein. He’s the founder and CEO of Mendera Energy, based in Denver. He also bought a distressed commercial electric company, Clay Dean Electric, built it from the ground up over seven years, sold it, and is now building again. Adam, welcome. Tell us a bit about what you’re building and who you serve.

Adam Feuerstein: Well thank you, Bob. I appreciate the invite and you hosting your show here and inviting me

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Adam Feuerstein: to be a part of it. Thank you. I spent my entire career in the electrical industry, power energy, power and energy distribution systems, generative systems. about going on thirty years now. built a company, got got into a company, actually it was kind of a rescue turnaround situation, sold that,

Bob Roark: Because we are situations.

Adam Feuerstein: spent four or five years chasing my wife around planet Earth.

Bob Roark: Very question.

Adam Feuerstein: And decided we needed to contribute again. And the way we’re doing that is through Mandara Energy, which is currently building a two hundred developing a two hundred megawatt power plant in Pueblo, Colorado.

Bob Roark: A small task and and you you and I have common ground with Pueblo Depot for sure. Yeah,

Adam Feuerstein: Mm-hmm.

Bob Roark: you know, and so we talked about that a bit before the show. big events in your life today, so congrats and celebration for that stuff. You know, when when you

Adam Feuerstein: Thank you.

Bob Roark: yeah, when you picked up Cladine and got involved, what did it look like the day you walked in?

Adam Feuerstein: The company had been founded by a telecommunications company. So a telecommunications company decided that they were going to start a commercial electric company essentially. they did that. They had quite a few contracts. The telecommunication companies well established in the Denver Front Range area. They’re now all over the country. At the time they stuck mostly to Denver and the Phoenix area. They decided to start an electric company, they put somebody in charge of that, resourced them, lots of contracts, lots of working capital from day one. and it took about 18 months before it found itself in trouble, very serious financial trouble. I had known the owners for a very long time. they asked me to come take a look at it. I spent three weeks doing an evaluation and realized that it was in far more trouble than they had realized. one example, the first job site, there were five total operating simultaneously from Jump. good significant size job sites, half million to eight hundred thousand square foot projects each. I visited one job site. I had Read on the drawings and and through the financials that there was a 300,000 square foot parking structure that had been built for, so I assumed that it had been constructed. I couldn’t find the job site because I kept looking for a large parking structure, only to find out that the large parking structure was not built. that they had billed and paid been paid for and spent all of the money that they had line itemed for a large parking structure that didn’t exist, if that gives you any idea of the of the the situation the company was in on day one.

Bob Roark: Well with with that being said, what

Adam Feuerstein: Mm-hmm.

Bob Roark: made you buy it instead of walk away?

Adam Feuerstein: I didn’t buy it immediately. we spent a long time put together a plan what what was gonna what that was gonna look like, how bad it was gonna get financially. of course the reputation of the company was decimated, both with the public at large, potential employee pools, labor resources. and our vendors the vendors were charging mm around twenty-two to twenty-three percent above industry standard because God knows nobody was paying attention. so we just put a plan together to to put an actual functioning company, like resources and for the people that work there. we we basically had seventy-seven people from day one. We reduced that down to six employees and then rebuilt from there. the new employees Having a ton of resources, having a lot of structure. We implemented everything from a centralized logistics program. We called the ARM program, which stood for asset resource management, purchasing program, support for our project managers. I mean the whole spectrum. We started to build an executive staff, had a 1200-page operating manual for the company and the employees that worked there to just reestablish what had been lost.

Bob Roark: you you know, I’m I’m thinking about the forest for the trees kind of issue. So, you know, you y you walk in, presumably you have disciplines and systems that you use and r and rely on when you’re faced with that kind of magnitude of a problem. You know,

Adam Feuerstein: Mm.

Bob Roark: what system did you put in place first and why did you pick that particular system?

Adam Feuerstein: the first system I put in place was a purchasing system. There’s a purchasing program. the company at that point was buying millions of dollars worth of material and didn’t have a purchase order system. One of the problems was one of the reasons it was in such financial hardship is they had estimated the projects, created project budgets that were vastly undervalued. So my first order of business was to target where that was coming from, why it was there. what I could do to salvage the jobs we had in place. And then I had a projection, a goal, that told me how much more work I had to sell above market rate. We couldn’t sell competitively. It had to be above market rate. To turn it around before we ran out of capital that the partners were injecting for the turnaround. So those were my variables. So from that, I started with a purchasing system. I very, very quickly introduced a safety system, safety program, an HR program to support our safety efforts inside the company because that was suffering. But definitely purchasing to get our vendors

Bob Roark: Everyone is.

Adam Feuerstein: under control. I knew that we were gonna go way past due on a lot of our invoices and statement billing. So I needed to establish integrity and dependability with those vendors if we were going to have any chance at all of surviving.

Bob Roark: I’m just thinking about walking in the door, being faced with what you were faced with. Did

Adam Feuerstein: Mm-hmm.

Bob Roark: you get much pushback from the people were that were there? What was their reaction?

Adam Feuerstein: well the gentleman that I replaced took it upon himself to do a public campaign talking about how I had stolen his job, that he was purely victimized, that and his wife spread incredible rumors online, both there and locally, and some of that actually made some local press. that was wonderful. one one place they one place that was particularly interesting, they had a relationship, the previous management structure and a particular project manager for one of our clients. I was brought into a room with 30 people and told and was called Fat Boy in front of everybody and a liar and a cheat. very interesting. There was a lot of pushback. That was outside the company. The people inside the company, a lot of the employees were used to nobody paying attention and not having to work. And so when we came by with not only an expectation, but a timeline for the delivery of that production, but also a budget, you can imagine we lost basically our entire management staff in about five days.

Bob Roark: Hmm, when did you start to see the trend change or the trajectory start to settle down?

Adam Feuerstein: it started primarily with our vendors. One of the things is I n I had my partners, Owen and Terrence, incredible human beings. In fact, they’re also a part of my new project, our Terences, that we’re developing. Basically knew exactly where we stood, the resources that I had available. I had presented the turnaround. So my accountability was in place. And I knew exactly what I had to do that and how much time I had to get it done. And they never questioned a single thing. Ever. Their their entire attitude is, move forward, fix the problem, move forward. I had a couple of rules that I knew in my mind when I got there. rule number one. My job was not to interfere with the larger telecommunications company and their partnerships. That had nothing to do with what we were doing at all in any way, shape or form. I stuck to that rule. Second rule was that blaming the previous president of that company was not an option, that I had to take full and total responsibility for everything that had happened in the past, even though I was not there, so that I could be empowered to move the company into success in the future. So I owned everything. Never a single time in the almost two years it took to turn it around that I say, Well, I didn’t do that, or that was what this other guy did. I took ownership from day one on everything. And that was exploited. it was a wonderful

Bob Roark: Right.

Adam Feuerstein: lesson in humanity and in and in morals, because that was very much used against me for two years. But then what happens in God’s world is you’re you’re that you’re exploited for your integrity. But when that cycle comes back around and things are different, it becomes your most powerful weapon.

Bob Roark: You know, I I gotta ask, where f you know, in the military, which was my former background, you know, there was a whole standard way of you kind of took over a new unit and you know, look for weaknesses and strengths and what you did. Where did you learn this approach? Where did it come from?

Adam Feuerstein: Well, ironically, my very first electric company went bankrupt. and it took me with it personally. The company went bankrupt. I personally went bankrupt. it was terrible. I ran it for five years and I lost everything. It’s actually one of the reasons why my partners the partners that I would eventually have called me is I knew what it looked like for a company to fail and therefore I knew what it looked like. What the the the the things we needed to avoid in order to succeed. I I should also mention we worked together for seven years. We did a lot of work together. Like a lot hundreds of millions of dollars. And I never signed a piece of paper with either two of my partners until we sold it or until I actually bought it from them. We did all of it on a handshake.

Bob Roark: Well, that doesn’t happen much anymore. It surely doesn’t. You know, for you, at

Adam Feuerstein: Hmm. No.

Bob Roark: what point did you start thinking toward selling cladeine? What was the the genesis or spark that caused that thought?

Adam Feuerstein: Well well first I had to buy it. I certainly had no interest in being a partner in a failing company. So again, what my partners did for me is they allowed me to buy twenty-five percent of the eleventh largest construction condo or commercial electric company in Colorado. I bought the first twenty five percent for eighty five hundred dollars. and that’s about what it was worth at that time. It was more of a timing thing, right? You can imagine. Yeah. So a wonderful gift that they did for me.

Bob Roark: Wow. Okay.

Adam Feuerstein: Is allow me to to do that. of course the company was worth much less than zero. as we started to bring the company around as it as it approached near zero, I bought my first chunk of it. and at that point there was something to buy because we were turning a profit and we had repaid a lot of the debt and things were starting to really turn around. so that was a great deal. It was a it was a deal based on actual value. The timing was perfect. So I bought that. later, a huge multinational company would come by and make a pretty incredible offer for the telecommunications

Bob Roark: Mm-hmm.

Adam Feuerstein: company. That offer had a stipulation. The stipulation was that the owners, my two partners, were to divest in every other business venture they were involved with. That meant the electric company. And they had a very short period of time to make that decision. So we went to a tequila bar, had a few shots at tequila. worked out the sale and I ended

Bob Roark: Yeah, yeah.

Adam Feuerstein: up purchasing the rest of the company at that point so that they could quickly turn their company and sell it. So they were again things I couldn’t have done on my own was showed so much grace and opportunity by my incredible partners that it made for a very affordable purchase. I held the company for 34 months and then sold it at the end of that 34 months for significantly more than I had invested in the totality of my time and efforts there.

Bob Roark: You know, I think about the gift of good partners. It’s

Adam Feuerstein: Mm.

Bob Roark: not it seems like that’s not the typical story of being blessed with good partners. You know, after that period of time of resurrecting the dead, the week after you sold the company, in your mind, what was the most surprising thing? that occurred or no that you experienced the following week after the sale.

Adam Feuerstein: Hmm. Well, for me it was it was really dramatic. n not because of dollar amounts. My wife, who I had met through this entire process, owned a national accounting and finance firm. the electric company was so systematized at that point that we were actually able to advertise it as essentially what are they I’m gonna lose the term here, like owner of vacant. I was there, but I was only there part time. There was a good sized corporation with a full-blown executive staff running very, very well, largely autonomously. so what that allowed for me to do is advertise

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Adam Feuerstein: it at as at a a greater rate where you got a higher multiplier. But it also meant that I didn’t have to hang around for like two years. Like a lot of these transactions of that size, you know, the old executive staff or sometimes the CEO or president, whoever ends up hanging on for like you know working there for two years which I had no interest in doing at all. So I had a 90 day out. I basically ran orientation with the new owners for 90 days and then that was the end of it. So closed, you know, were paid handsomely, extremely

Bob Roark: Yeah,

Adam Feuerstein: well, very successful transaction for us. And I stayed on, I was there a couple days a week, nothing crazy. And then in 90 days it was completely gone. And I basically became the office coffee and breakfast and lunch fetcher for my wife’s national accounting and finance firm. So that was a huge, huge adjustment for me. that took a long time for me to to get used to. And actually I ultimately didn’t. what ended up happening is we put

Bob Roark: Adam. Yeah, it looks like we’ve got a problem. it says, can you refresh? Yeah, I think so. Better. I don’t know what happened. No, that’s happening. That’s podcasting, I suppose.

Adam Feuerstein: Sorry about that.

Bob Roark: you know, for a as you approach that, you know, maybe two years in, you know, w what set the timing of the exit for you from that business?

Adam Feuerstein: We my wife and I had a bunch we have kids, we have six kids between the two of us. She I brought four, she brought two. We have a blended family. we had a house full of kids. And we find out that we have COVID in the middle of the pandemic. And so we are now quarantined with what felt like half of our neighborhood’s worth of teenage girls because we have four daughters together. The older the boys are older, they were moved out.

Bob Roark: Okay.

Adam Feuerstein: So it was me and my daughters and my wife, the dogs, even a girl, and a whole bunch of house guests. at the time we were quarantined for ten days. so we we didn’t feel sick, we had no idea. We actually were supposed to go to Hawaii. We found out at ten o’clock the night before, and those days you had to get a you know, your test that we had COVID.

Bob Roark: Okay.

Adam Feuerstein: So we had to literally unpack our bags at ten o’clock at night because we were no longer going to Hawaii. and then hang out with all these kids for for ten days and try to figure out what to do with our life. for those ten days what we ended up doing is having a very serious conversation about what our life would be like because we have these companies they’re worth enough money to have a have an impact on our life to the degree we maybe don’t have to work. would that look like? And at first I just it was just kind of giggling and laughing and I’m like, You’re you know, ’cause that’s like your identity, right? Like, who are you? Well I’m not Adam. I’m the guy who runs this company, right? That’s my value. But in the course of those 10 days, we came to this conclusion that we would at least test the market and see what the value was. Of course, at that time it was an essential business. It was operating despite COVID. Most guys know, I’m sure you do, Bob. There was a tremendous amount of capital on the market in those days. And not a lot of companies to choose from, least of all, in our particular marketplace. Our company was slightly different. We had an infrastructure division. We called it Tug, Team Underground. They did all of our underground distributed infrastructure for us and you. utility companies we would contract to. That brought a price that was a whole lot more than I even estimated it would actually bring. Broker came by, they spent a couple of weeks. Our books were very clean, our company was very well run from an integral standpoint. We are to this day the only company that was that was transacted by a large national company broker. Who never paid a single dime in Clothac because we were perfectly transparent. As such, they had a buyer. We had 17 offers in the first week on the company, even at this exaggerated, exaggerated price. We were able to choose who we wanted to work with and very quickly. I mean, it just did not take any time at all. I mean, six weeks into it, we had a buyer on

Bob Roark: Quite the different

Adam Feuerstein: So that was it.

Bob Roark: yeah, quite the different story than what you normally hear about an

Adam Feuerstein: Mm.

Bob Roark: exit. you know, post exit, post COVID, you know, how what was how long did it take you to start feeling like yourself instead of the run the operator of the company?

Adam Feuerstein: It it took a while. I we did a lot of spiritual work too, honestly. The thing that really gave me, this

Bob Roark: Mm-hmm.

Adam Feuerstein: may not be typical for your show, but my wife and I found our way to an ayahuasca ceremony. that was

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Adam Feuerstein: quite eye-opening. that that that to this day, if I were to compare that to the day I sold that company, I would tell you that the company was. a very small fraction of the impact on my life that some of the spiritual work, in particularly our time with ayahuasca had. And I was I I’d not I’d only done it the one at the one retreat, you do it several times, but it was over this one weekend. but it it gave me an a a mechanism to reflect on my own life and see myself as a father and as a husband in a very different perspective. Before I was basically under the impression that what I provided from my family is what my value was. discovering that we as men and fathers and and husbands have a much higher value than the provisions that we bring to the table was very eye opening for me and it was very healing and and really made that transition wonderful and very, very beautiful for me, but also my relationship to my wife and my now six children.

Bob Roark: What was the decision process like to approach deciding whether you’re gonna do the ayahuasca experience or not? What was that like?

Adam Feuerstein: They say that ayahuasca finds you. And at the time, I had a very different opinion about these kind of things and was very rigid. My wife came to me and said she wanted

Bob Roark: Mm.

Adam Feuerstein: to to to do this. We are not drug people, we don’t drink alcohol, we don’t do drugs, we don’t smoke weed, we don’t do anything like to do something hallucinogenic seemed extremely radical

Bob Roark: Mm-hmm.

Adam Feuerstein: to me. but she let it be known. And as luck would have it, sitting just a few blocks from where I am right now, a woman who we had never met before in a place we had never been, certainly we’re not thinking of ayahuasca, we were drinking coffee, walks up to our table and puts a piece of paper down and walks away. And it’s an invitation to an ayahuasca ceremony. completely and totally unprovoked. And so my wife looked through it and the woman returned, asked what we thought, and Michelle’s like, I’m in. And so We were in

Bob Roark: Wow.

Adam Feuerstein: and and we were off and two weeks later we were there and and participating.

Bob Roark: I I have some friends that have gone through the experience and remarkable stories much like yours. Positive experience for them. Yeah. you know, when when you sold the company, what did you miss most about the company after you sold it that has nothing to do with the money?

Adam Feuerstein: largely the camaraderie. most people don’t realize this and sometimes I get myself in trouble for stating this. but the people in that industry, the the men and women who work at our company who are doing the actual, the real work, are five times more likely to die at work than all of the firemen and all the police in this country combined. when you work under imminent threat, often The camaraderie that comes adds a depth to your work that is really, really hard to experience outside of that particular environment. And so that the camaraderie was I mean, there were crews that they’re they hung out with everybody’s family. They had they ate dinner on the weekends together, they went to movies together. I mean, truly, truly. As owner and executive, of course,

Bob Roark: Okay.

Adam Feuerstein: you’re not as privy to those things. But I was fortunate enough to several of the men on my and women on our executive staff that I had known as we’ve come up through the trade together. And shared in that camaraderie was great for me personally, but even to just witness it amongst the crew, I I miss that terribly.

Bob Roark: You know, and thinking about that month afterwards, do you you know, who who called you and who stopped calling you? Do you remember what that was like?

Adam Feuerstein: I do. One thing that was interesting. One of our tactics in turning the company around is we took a l we took we took kind of a I don’t I want to be careful how I describe this. We became very politically involved. And I don’t mean for one side or the other, just with like zoning rules and regulations and the building department here in Denver. And we worked with, you know, Mayor Michael Hancock and his staff and his chief of staff. And we worked with we worked with them the the governor too, Polis. his chief of staff was a huge fan of ours. And so we we were involved in that a lot. We had something Denver at one point was buying for the Amazon proposal fifty thousand dollars fifty thousand jobs landing for sub headquarters for Amazon. we were a part of that proposal, mentioned in that proposal, and assisted with it on a very small level. So but we had a lot of that influence. We were able to understand like where the developers were coming from, what they were trying to develop. get to know them, understand how policy affected the future projects here in Denver. and it was it was exciting. I enjoyed that very, very much. We had to take that approach because our reputation in the beginning was so bad. You couldn’t just market or advertise. Denver is a wonderful city to do business in if you understand. It’s very eccentric marketplace, very different mentality I think than most places. It’s big enough that you can do large projects, but it’s small enough that It doesn’t take long to erode a reputation at all. So we put a tremendous amount of effort into working with policymakers and governors and mayors and city council people to really get involved in a from a communal way and it had a huge impact. But I’ll tell you, I had a lot of friends in that game on Tuesday. We signed it on a Wednesday and I never heard a word after that. Not I mean nothing.

Bob Roark: You know, and do you think that’s an unusual experience for the business owners that sell?

Adam Feuerstein: I mean I d I don’t think so. I don’t think so.

Bob Roark: I don’t think so. it’s not what I hear. Not what I hear. Which I it is frankly somewhat disappointing. You know, f for the folks that were at Cladine post sale, what did they stay on with the company or w what did you observe after you left?

Adam Feuerstein: I think most people did. There were there were two critical executives that started a company not long after the sale. I don’t know exactly when it was, but I know that I don’t know the exact impact of that, but I’m sure that probably wasn’t pleasant at that point in time. But some of the other people stayed on for a for a very long time. But it it it was a big place. There’s a lot of people turnover in that industry. It’s just high, it just is. So it just kind of happens, whether you’re selling it or not selling it, turnover is just a a big deal in in that industry.

Bob Roark: Switching gears a bit, what was AM Ventures solving for you? You know, what what caused you to form that and and execute with AM Ventures?

Adam Feuerstein: that’s just a holdings company essentially that my wife and I have that we keep different assets in, different holdings part of. That

Bob Roark: Okay.

Adam Feuerstein: that that company doesn’t necessarily have operations as much as it just is a holdings company. like every sold Michelle’s company that’s that holds her stake that remains in in in her company and it held some assets and things for us and post the electric company sale. we’ve had to move things around a little bit to make room for Mendara, but that’s pretty much all we did there. And continue to.

Bob Roark: You know, you you’re now w we talked a little bit the other day about Mandara and what’s different about building Mandara knowing, you know, you’re ex with your experience from Cladine.

Adam Feuerstein: Clayton being a subcontractor in the construction industry and what we’re doing now is is full-blown real estate development. we’re developing real estate for energy generation. What’s beautiful is the convenience of

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Adam Feuerstein: the position that we take as developers as opposed to

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Adam Feuerstein: subcontractors. when you’re a subcontractor, what you kind of start out and you think, well, when I get the next big contract, I’ll have some leverage, right? Or the next big contract or the next big contract. And what you realize is as the projects get larger, your customers are a lot better financially resourced and they spend a lot of that money on lawyers making sure you absolutely do not have any more leverage. You know, they’ll spend $100,000 chasing $50 just to make sure they that you understand your place. and I understand that, and it makes for it makes for successful projects in a in a weird way. Having gone through that for 27 years prior to Mindara gives us a very lethal perspective on how to manage and execute projects from the developer perspective. really, truly. And I have enjoyed that tremendously. the idea that we are kind of the tip of the spear in this project. We’re working with the policymakers once again from a very different perspective. when we, for example, where we’re building has a huge interest in jobs, a very good job, not just jobs, but good jobs. so when we do an experiment in internal to Mindara and we look at how we want to base our wage scales, which is We want our wage scales, and right now our but we’re budgeted that ninety-two percent of our fifteen hundred employees that will work this plant at full build out will make a hundred and eighty-three thousand dollars a year or more all in. That’s benefits, compensation, everything. So for example, when we’re talking to city council, when we’re talking to the county and we’re understanding the needs of this smaller town that we’re building outside of, we have this incredible opportunity because We’re the developer, we’re on the front end of the project, we’re setting the budgets, we’re setting the timing expectations, we’re working with huge EPC construction companies to build it, but then also managing our OM once it’s built. we’re free to satisfy the requirements of the people that we’re working next to, in particular, county officials, city officials, and the people who actually are going to run our plant. So we’re free to to set that. One example is rather than figure out what the lowest minimum O and wage scale is at a power plant like ours, we sat back and said, We’re gonna look at this totally differently. In America, as a national average, not in New York City, not in small town Mississippi,

Bob Roark: Yeah, I think so.

Adam Feuerstein: but on average, what does it take for a single breadwinner in a family of five, two adults and three children? How much does that single breadwinner have to make, both in benefits and And money compensation, you know, monetarily, to put all three of those children through college debt free, pay off their house, retire sixty five comfortably. That’s where our wage scale begins. And so that’s our approach to hiring, that’s our perspective on our contribution to local jobs and economy and market in Pueblo, Colorado, is from that perspective. It’s a lot higher than national average, but we’ve also found a way to incorporate that into our business model

Bob Roark: And so.

Adam Feuerstein: that shows it as a primary risk mitigation strategy. Without getting into a bunch of detail and putting your listeners to sleep, we found a way to pay the young men and women who will maintain our multi-billion dollar asset

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Adam Feuerstein: the kind of money to truly prosper the way my grandparents prospered in this country and make it cost effective for our business. That’s something you can’t do as a commercial subcontractor.

Bob Roark: You know, I d I am not sure that I’ve run across somebody that’s thinking about employee benefits where you’re working basically from the endpoint backwards. No, I don’t think that you know, I was thinking about as you were talking about Mandara, there had you know, in my mind there’s usually a spark or an inspiration or some moment where you go, you know what, I think I’m gonna do this. What was that spark or moment? Ken do you remember when that hit your mind that you might do something like this? Mm-hmm. Apparently no. My editor will have a big time. You know,

Adam Feuerstein: Okay, good, good, good.

Bob Roark: I I think about that inspir you know that moment. You know, I remember where I was when it came to my mind.

Adam Feuerstein: To be completely honest, one of the one of the things that I’m getting so much satisfaction out of this with, the numbers are large and that’s exciting. I I get that. and and there’s a part of my ego which loves that. But our ability to impact community is what I’m absolutely 100% excited about. We can talk about engineering specs and turbine generators

Bob Roark: That’s interesting.

Adam Feuerstein: and GPU consumption and power dynamics and all that stuff, and I still enjoy that. I truly do. But when I realized that if we built from this perspective, if we developed this project, that we could have such an impact on a local economy and their families, I’m that’s it. I mean, I I’m willing to take the risk on turbine generators and distributed energy systems and all that s technical stuff to make that kind of an impact. Because you know, my my grandfather Both my grandparents were in World War II. They’re part of

Bob Roark: Well can go to it.

Adam Feuerstein: the greatest generation. my dad’s dad, who grew up in the same neighborhood where I currently live and I’m sitting right this minute, went to war, served in the Pacific Theater in combat, came home and became a glazer. And on a glazer’s salary, he built a 2.2 acre horse farm, just a little tiny horse property, with a custom home on it, and raised three raised three children with his wife. That same person in my children’s generation, so from my grandpa to my children, doing the same exact job with the same three children, still qualifies for food stamps in today’s economy. I find that incredible.

Bob Roark: Yeah, you know, in in my family, my father was the tail end of thirteen kids. And he grew

Adam Feuerstein: Mm.

Bob Roark: up on a forty acre farm in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee. And the Navy was his up and out and air traffic controller and that kind of thing and served in the Pacific as well, you know, and and built a custom home on the side of the lake I grew up in, my little hometown, and was able to do it. And you know, and you look at that now. And that’s out of reach for

Adam Feuerstein: yeah.

Bob Roark: for many, you know, and you you look at your kids and now grandkids, you know, and and you go, what’s it gonna look like when they’re trying to do the same thing? And you know, it it’s you know, there’s a tipping point somewhere in here where that’s no longer gonna be acceptable, you know, and and what you’re describing is gonna change the trajectory of many families in Pueblo for sure. So

Adam Feuerstein: And we’re gonna leverage that, we’re gonna advertise that, we’re gonna show a standard for these things, for these kind of developments

Bob Roark: Yeah, you know.

Adam Feuerstein: that say that this can be done. It’s part of a legitimate business strategy. This is not charity. I challenge anybody to add to to claim that what we’re doing is charity, and I can show from many different

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Adam Feuerstein: perspectives this is an actual critical part of our business function. our profitability and our ability to grow in the future. It is 100%. If you are the greediest person in the room, this is the model that you’re building and this is how you’re compensating the people that keep you moving. We’ve been we’ve been removed from that. We’ve been taught differently. There’s some mentality somewhere along the way between my grandpa’s generation and my own, we decided that you just don’t pay any more

Bob Roark: Is that

Adam Feuerstein: than you have to. And if you pile up enough money having done that, that you’re a good business person. There’s a lot more to business than just figuring out how to

Bob Roark: Thank you.

Adam Feuerstein: squeeze everybody for the last penny. There’s a lot more and a lot more responsibility as founders and executives to this country and the people who populate it than just pennies and nickels and dimes on a balance sheet and a profit loss somewhere.

Bob Roark: Was there a a moment where that became front and center of your thought process versus what you might have thought early on?

Adam Feuerstein: It it it became it’s something you kind of always want to do, right? Like I I I would love to have a Ferrari, let’s say. I don’t really want a Ferrari, but let’s just say, you know, it sits in the back of

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Adam Feuerstein: your mind, I can go buy a Ferrari, but I just don’t have time today, or maybe next week, or at some point I’ll go buy a Ferrari. And then at some point like the perfect opportunity presents itself. And that was very similar, I think, for me, is like is you have this idea, you want to contribute. I I was so fortunate to grow up. In a vertical German family, right? Like my grandparents literally, if you’d asked me

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Adam Feuerstein: when I was 10, did they walk on water? I would have said they absolutely walk on water. and my father, my uncles, and my parents, all very successful, very wonderful people, very inspiring people, to to to be raised by. And so you kind of have that in the back of your head, and you’re kind of looking for that because it’s part of who you are as person. And so when I realized that

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Adam Feuerstein: we’d have the opportunity to truly exercise that and set an example. Really set an example, challenge the other people. This industry that we’re in is catastrophically large. I mean, trillions of dollars over the next 10 or 15 years. Some of the largest economic market

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Adam Feuerstein: migration we’ve ever seen in human ec in human history. So we have this incredible opportunity. And you just and I honestly, if I’m being completely honest, I think our business landscape in America is so screwed up. It is so screwed up that the solution has become very simple. And when I say screwed up, I mean ethically. All we need, in my opinion, all my six children will tell you that they’re looking for, and their friends and their friends, is for somebody to come along who has every opportunity in the world to do the wrong thing and simply chooses not to. I think that’s the standard, the new, pathetically so. Barrier of entry, lowest definition of hero in our community in our American business community right now. and if we just can do that and get a couple people, a couple of the good guys, to just do that. They don’t have to walk on water. They don’t have to change the world. They just have to have the opportunity to do what’s wrong and choose not to. And I think we can have a really incredible impact on our culture in this country.

Bob Roark: You know, I and a lot of times in working in the past, somebody said, What should we do? And I said, Do the right thing. And so,

Adam Feuerstein: Yeah.

Bob Roark: what well what if we don’t know what that is? It’s pretty simple. Just do the right thing. You know, and you think you know it’s going, please, thank you, show up on time, do what you say. Take care of your family, you know, and you may not be able to change the entire country, but you can change the folks around you. And how many folks did that take h here? there like you’re describing, you know, and I think that, you know, that’s I think it’s around the edges. I don’t think it’s mainstream yet, but I’m hoping, you know, that we’ll see some of that. You know, in in for the Mendera project, you know, looking down the road, what’s the time frame on on that project from where you are now to to where it’s up and running, like Clay Dean did? What do you think?

Adam Feuerstein: Well, very, very quickly, actually, again not try to spare everybody the

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Adam Feuerstein: details. We did a lot of research finding out where we could fit in the marketplace most effectively, but also where we could effectively exist in the current supply chain. and I’ll give you an example. Our project is 200 megawatts. Most six hundred megawatt projects or larger, six hundred megawatts or larger, billions and billions and billions of dollars per project. Have a 10 year backlog right now. our EPC that we’re I’m meeting with our project manager next week for the first time, very excited. I can’t mention their name, but they’re one of the largest EPCs in the world that builds power systems. Has a 10 year backlog on six hundred megawatt or larger projects. The economic impact from that statement alone is incredible, but that’s the times we’re living in. So we couldn’t possibly compete, right? It’d be Anybody who’s thumbed through the first three pages of Sun Tzu would look at that and realize that’s not where we need it to be. Where we need it to be is in a place where we have access to turbines. We have access to realistic real shorter time frames for supply chain issues and manufacturing. So we’ve done a r I think a really good job, if I may say so, of figuring out where we can fit into that marketplace and get it done quickly, as quickly as possible, and then broken the 200 megawatt project into phases where we can really be effective. So all that to say that our first phase should be online. We’ve already sold all the power from our first thirty megawatts for the first ten years is already sold. and we owe that power delivery the first quarter of twenty twenty nine.

Bob Roark: Sounds like a waves, but it’s not.

Adam Feuerstein: No, that’s not that far. No. I yeah, if I’m being honest, like my feet and hands sweat a little bit every time I have to give that date. It’s like, man.

Bob Roark: You know, you know it’s fascinating to talk about what you’ve got in mind and what you’re doing and the influences that got you here. You know, so you know, and and trying to think about the you know, first, how do people find you if they want to talk to you, you know, about what you’re doing or working for your company or whatever, how do they find you?

Adam Feuerstein: Just Bindara Energy dot com

Bob Roark: So you know.

Adam Feuerstein: is good place to start. as as we get moving forward, we’ll have more and more people that are kinda helping us. We’re getting a lot of attention as we are. We’re doing the very best that we can to maintain that. But

Bob Roark: Remember pressure, which we do.

Adam Feuerstein: right now that will that is the very best way to get a hold through g get you to get a hold of us.

Bob Roark: You know, in in in in your most recent story, you know, you bought cladine that was broken’s probably the wrong word, but we’ll call it broken. You know, built it, sold it, started again with this project, and you’ve been accumulating experience from tuition, I suppose, is a simple way to say that.

Adam Feuerstein: Yeah.

Bob Roark: What do you wish you knew in the morning you signed the papers for cladine? And or Mendara that you now know. Is there a thing you said, Jeez, if I’d just known that then?

Adam Feuerstein: You know, when my when my first company went bankrupt,

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Adam Feuerstein: I I suffered tremendously over that. it was nobody’s fault but my own.

Bob Roark: Yeah, I think.

Adam Feuerstein: There was nobody to blame. I did the very best I could, but I made a series of decisions and that’s where I ended up. There wasn’t a victim. But I felt like I let my family down, I let my everybody. Just I just truly felt like that. And what I didn’t realize is

Bob Roark: Yeah, yeah.

Adam Feuerstein: looking back in my life, had I not Been through that, I wouldn’t have got the opportunity that I got afterwards, which is to turn around the next electric company. and then which springboards me here.

Bob Roark: Yeah.

Adam Feuerstein: So one of the things that I’ve kind of adopted is that I think it’s arrogant when we as people decide what is good and bad in our lives. And I mean that marginally, okay? There’s things that are very clearly bad, right? I’m not saying that we don’t from not and I don’t mean that necessarily from a moralistic perspective as much as a situational perspective. You know, I just pounded on myself for years it took me to get over that. And now at age forty-nine I look back at that and I say, If my entire life is owed to that. My my family that I have, my six children, my wife, and the life that we are absolutely blessed to have would

Bob Roark: Well yeah.

Adam Feuerstein: never would not have assembled this way without that. So while I spent years wasting time and and trying desperately to feel okay about a situation, the truth is that’s one of the best things that ever happened.

Bob Roark: Yeah, y yeah, nothing like getting compressed by events to teach you what you may not ever want to do again and then go like you know, always and nevers. Those seem to show up some in that environment. For

Adam Feuerstein: Yeah.

Bob Roark: sure. Well Adam, I I tell ya it’s it’s a joy visiting with you about what you’re doing and your your journey and the steps that you’ve taken along your journey, you know. big day for you and the family as well. And

Adam Feuerstein: Yeah, yeah.

Bob Roark: you know, and and thank you for taking the time out of that to come on the show and share. I do appreciate it. And so thanks again and and you know that’s kind of it for for this episode. If you know for the folks out there, if someone comes to mind while they’re listening to this that they’d like to share the episode with them and think it’ll help them, please do so. And otherwise we’ll see you next time. Thanks, Adam.

Adam Feuerstein: Ai que baba.