The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Doug Milburn CEO of Advanced Glazings Interview on Vision and Being an Serial Entrepreneur

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

Doug Milburn CEO of Advanced Glazings Interview on Vision and Being an Serial Entrepreneur AdvancedGlazings.com Doug Milburn Bio As a long-time entrepreneur and innovator, Dr. Doug Milburn thrives on solving problems. For more than 35 years, he has brought his vision and passion to manufacturing, engineering, software development and process engineering. Throughout his leadership, Dr. Milburn has aimed to create great workplaces by shaping a company’s success through corporate values and ethical guidelines. Born and raised in Nova Scotia, Canada, , Dr. Milburn earned his undergraduate and Master’s degree in physics at Mount Allison University, before finishing his studies with a PhD in mechanical engineering at the University of Waterloo. In 1995, Dr. Milburn and his wife Michelle co-founded Advanced Glazings, which developed and manufactures SOLERA light diffusing glass, which enables architects to create beautifully daylighted buildings that are incredibly energy efficient. In 2001, Dr. Milburn co-founded Protocase with Steve Lilley. Protocase helps engineers, innovators and scientists accelerate their project timelines by manufacturing custom metal enclosures and parts in 2-3 days, with no minimum order requirements. Lilley and Dr. Milburn took the entrepreneurial leap once more in 2014, with the start of 45Drives. As a new enterprise company, 45Drives helps companies manage and scale their data-storage needs with ultra-large storage servers and clusters that are powerful, flexible and affordable.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, this is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. 14 years, 1,400 episodes. I think we're getting to be one of those longest running podcasts ever.

We came back from the day when, you know, the only way we did the podcast was we lit a little fire and then we scraped some wood together. Or maybe that's how we created the fire. I never have gotten that straight, which is clearly why the fire department says I can't burn things anymore in the barbecue um but that's how we used to communicate we just send smoke signals and that was the chris voss podcast 14 years ago we just put them up in the air and people be like hey look what that dude's saying over there that's not what we did you know that anyway guys uh the greatest podcast in the world for the greatest audience in the world uh you guys are wonderful and we certainly appreciate you guys because without you guys we'd just be sitting here talking to ourself which is mostly what i do in the rubber room when they don't put me on the show

they just put me in the back there put the uh the old uh circular vest on me and they just let me talk to myself in the corner which is you know probably more appropriate than letting me loose on the public but this is the free time that I get to come out and do it. So be sure. This is how we set up the plugs every time with the ramble. Be sure to refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Guilt them into joining the show, subscribing. Go to youtube.com, Fortress Christmas. Goodreads.com, Fortress Christmas.

LinkedIn.com, Fortress Christmas. If you haven't subscribed to the big 130,000 LinkedIn group over there, the big LinkedIn newsletter. Holy crap. That thing jumped by another 500 people this week. I think it's up to almost 6,000 or something. And we've just been doing it for a short while. So really smart people over there on LinkedIn and successful people.

One of them is not me, but, you know, the rest of the people are. And we're also on TikTok. We're trying to be cool. So go over there. We had an amazing gentleman on the show. He's going to be talking to us about his entrepreneurial journey, about the companies he built, and everything he did. We're going to be talking about Advanced Glazings LTD,

and it was founded in 1995 by Dr. Douglas Milburn to develop, manufacture, and market sustainable and commercially viable technologies related to sunlight. Sunlight's one of my favorite things. I'm into that sunlight stuff because it's good for your vitamin D. I should tell people about the journey we're doing lately, but I'll get around to that on different podcasts. Doug Milburn is a longtime entrepreneur and innovator.

He thrives on solving problems, and for 35 years, he has brought his vision and passion to manufacturing, engineering, software development, and process engineering. Throughout his leadership, he has aimed to create great workspaces by shaping a company's success through corporate values and ethical guidelines. and raised in Nova Scotia, Canada, and he's earned his undergraduate and master's degree in physics at Mount Allison University before finishing his studies with a PhD in mechanical engineering at the University of Waterloo. In 1985, he and his wife co-founded Advanced Glazings, which develops and manufactures Solera light diffusing glass, which enables architects to create beautifully daylighted buildings that are incredibly energy efficient. And they have efficiency.

So there you go. I flunked second grade. In 2001, he co-founded Protocase with Steve Lilly. Protocase helps engineers, innovators, and scientists accelerate their project timelines by manufacturing custom metal enclosures and parts in two to three days with no minimum order requirements. And he took the, him, Lily and Dr. Milburn took the Entrepreneur Leap once more in 2014 with the start of 45 Drives, a new enterprise company. 45 Drives helps companies manage and scale their data storage needs with ultra large

storage servers and clusters that are powerful, flexible, and affordable. Welcome to the show, Doug. How are you? Thank you very much, Chris. You know what? I was a lot younger. You said 35 years, and I'm going, I'm a young entrepreneur, right? And not anymore. It's kind of an interesting journey to look back on though, isn't it? It absolutely is. Lots of stuff to do with all three companies, just really in growth mode. So it was a really dull moment. But every now and then, it's advice I got from my late father. He said every now and then, show up on the weekend and he'd pour me a glass of rum at the cottage and I'd be talking

about all the problems going, hey, do you ever sit back and look at what you've already done and i said no not really so anyway good thing to do though yeah might be good for a book you should put a book down uh my memoirs i keep talking about them but someday yeah it's hard to get the time for them covo is like a great time for stuff like that so doug give give us a.com where people can find you and stuff about your company on the web. Sure. I, you know, hoping today we'll talk lots about advanced glazings limited. Uh, it's advanced glazings.com. Okay. Glazings.com. Uh, and you'll find, uh, about how to create better buildings with natural light in them on their, uh, proto case, uh,

we're infrastructure for people in engineering and science and innovation who need to get their ideas turned into reality. Very, very quickly, uh, proto case.com. There you go. Is the.com for that.

And 45 drives.com for enterprise storage servers and new enterprise model open source open platform there you go now let's tell you a little bit to the audience tell us about a little bit about your origin story what got you into entrepreneurism building companies etc etc uh yeah sure uh i grew up in a small town in nova scotia and uh i you know i don't know i'm kind of an eclectic person i'd say i uh you know did all kinds of sports music uh and and academics i uh i wasn't a studier but i just i was good at science and math and stuff and i liked it because i didn't have to really work on it um and kind of drifted my way, having fun, enjoying life. I got to university, loved it in university.

And I loved, you know, I loved the academics. I got into physics. That was my place I went. I played rugby in university. Great, great fun. I enjoyed it so much that I did a second degree. I graduated and said, hmm, do I have to work? And I said, nah, I can keep doing this.

So, uh, yeah, I, I did a master's did my master's actually did it in some chemical physics. It's called laser spectroscopy. Holy story. Yeah. Yeah. It was cool. Made extreme ultraviolet laser light and studied super cool, simple diatomic gas molecules. Ah, there you go.

So, and then where did you go from there? Well, you know what? It kind of, it was a formative experience. I loved the research I was doing. I love playing around. I love the university environment. Went off to my first conference and there's three people. It's the Canadian Association of Physicists conference and

there's three people in the whole conference that I could really interest the work I did you know it's so specialized so obscure great work love pure science but it was just a little too off on my own you know I just had a little bit too much social in me I think so I decided to go off and study with a guy at University of Waterloo who was a pioneer in solar energy back when solar energy wasn't popular. I think all the cool kids go into solar energy now, but not when I was there. I was like swimming against the current. So I did my PhD in solar thermal energy with a guy named Terry Hollins, who was a pioneer in it.

There you go. So how does that lead you into advanced glazings? Well, so Waterloo is kind of, you know, I don't know, maybe some people listening know the University of Waterloo. It's sort of Canada's MIT, maybe you'd call it. It's math, science dominant, and no disrespect to my friends who are in liberal arts there or whatever else, but really known for that. And it's a place that, you know, it's Canada's place of spinoff companies. RIM and Blackberry came out of there as one example.

Oh, wow. Yeah. And there's hundreds and hundreds of companies come out of there. So it was a spinoff environment. And I think in entrepreneurship, you know, it's kind of like a genetic disease. I think, you know, people are entrepreneurs. You just have to do it and i looked i finished my phd and i actually had a job offer one of my external examiner

committee you know you do this this phd defense one of my guys uh my examiners actually university chicago prof uh he was had a startup going and he offered me a job which would have been a dream job but i i had this technology in our in our lab that i was looking at and going you know somebody could do something with that and it was called honeycomb transparent insulation it's the roots of our our product our solar product advanced glazings and i just looked at it and said yeah i i just have to tackle that so i i skipped all the uh sort of normal career and working stuff and jumped right into entrepreneurship for better or for worse. It's been good.

It turned out good. It turned out good. It turned out good. And it sounds like you hit on your first try though, right? Well, you know, it was a long run. I, you know, the way I did it, I'm sure, you know, so we started in, you know, it was 95, 96 when we started. And we had a very raw technology in the lab. And we had to make this material before we could really prove it in application.

And it took years to figure out how to manufacture it. There's big materials research problems. So I ended up, you know, on a shoestring, you know, managed to get money between, you money between research funding and equity investment and everything else. And in a way now, the whole venture capital world is so evolved now. And it really wasn't back then. Back then, it was shit. So as the pioneer of the arrows in the back, it was long, slow, hard, went a lot slower

than it should have. But we got a product developed and we were originally going to use this material as an insulation for commercial greenhouses oh really yeah and and commercial greenhouse uh you know energy is the biggest bill heating is the the biggest bill you write out as a i mean it's called northern latitudes let's say you know if you're in middle u.s north or or in Europe, northern Europe, or whatever else. And it's these huge buildings that are unheated. And your dollars per square foot you get out of growing tomatoes or flowers is not that big.

So the natural gas or bunker oil bill that you have in a 10-acre greenhouse is pretty ugly. And we can save 75% on their heating bill. Wow. That's quite significant. So we did some test projects, and we even found that plants grew better inside because of the way it diffused light. Uh-huh. So, but we just, there's a little glitch in feedstock material that we had to solve.

And we had people knocking on our door, came knocking on our door from the building industry. And they had issues. You know, the problems that we solve now were brought to us from the industry. And we ended up doing a pivot. And I don't know, but it probably would have been a lot faster in the greenhouse industry.

It turned out there's a lot I didn't know about the building industry. But the problem that they had was a fundamental problem that it's real and needed to be addressed. It's something people just live with in buildings. As I said, the rest is history. We've got about 2000 architectural projects up now with our materials, so pretty mature company. It's one of these things that, i said i was ahead of my time

uh the solar energy and natural lighting kids weren't cool back then and it's it's now the coolest thing in the block so uh you know the all of a sudden we got these tailwinds behind us and it's just uh it's just really really fascinating and we're you know and we're sort of a startup because we never really grew it i went and spent my time on the other businesses and it incubated and we got better and better. The product got more and more mature, got better at helping people design buildings. And so we're just,

yeah, it's really, really cool time for us right now. There you go. So explain, you guys build something you call the impact engineered daylight diffusers. We'll get into some of the product names, but what is,

what is, what does that mean? What is the, for the layman out there or person who doesn't understand what diffusers are, how, what is that and how does it work? Yeah.

So, so like diffusion. So, okay. So here, here's the problem. Let me, I'm going to go just back a step on that.

So you think about buildings, right. And you know, and again, a lot of science and engineering sort of put forward as gobbledygook with guys in white coats and you're supposed to be really smart and understand it. I just don't believe that's true. Right? So you look at buildings, uh, let me get two bookends here for us. Uh, get into a walk into a Walmart,

Costco, whatever big box store. You got no, only a little bit of glass in the doors, right? Like I said, it's all artificial lighting and we call them dark boxes. They're just not very, you know, and they're quite adequate because the paying customers come in and leave. So it's not that big a deal, right? But if you have to work there,

it's a miserable place to work. They're just not nice buildings to be in. Cost effective, but miserable. The other bookend and the other side, work there it's miserable place to work they're just not nice buildings to be in yeah cost effective but miserable uh the other bookend on the other side uh you go downtown a big city and you see the all glass towers and they look great go by at night that looks cool you see the bones of the building inside there and all the life in it and everything else and uh and they look cool uh you got all this view from inside but they're not necessarily nice buildings to be in either because it's either a solar oven or you darken the glass down so much that it looks like it's

like late november yeah right which is gloomy if you're on the inside you're like this is you know absolutely gloomy uh excessively tint the inside you're like this is you know absolutely gloomy uh excessively tinted glass it actually studies show that makes people depressed wow it's it's not good well it's you know same as people live in way up in northern latitudes of the six month winters they don't see the sun it's basically the same thing so anyway there's this happy place make a great building you gotta've got to connect to the outdoors. You need view. Okay. And you need daylight. And the problem with glass as a material,

it's great for view, but when that sun is beating down in one direction, it does nothing for you. And you end up with glare and people go, damn, it's too hot. Oh, let me get some window tinting or let me put blinds down.

The study that uh national research council of canada did in uh on commercial buildings it said 65 of all window areas in commercial buildings were permanently occluded by blinds so it kind of defeats the whole purpose yeah somebody talked into spending a lot of money on glass you're paying for your heating bill because glass doesn't insulate well other glass doesn't. Ours does. Other glass doesn't insulate well. And yeah, but you got to protect yourself. So this happy space in the middle,

what we do is help people make that connection, help you design buildings. If you use our light diffusing glass, so when you use it with vision glass, it doesn't replace it. It might replace wall and it's translucent. You can't see through it you have privacy but it takes that direct beam sunlight converts it into soft gentle daylight

and pushes it out into the space up onto the ceiling out into the walls rather than coming down and overheating you know hitting the floor and overheating the zone in the uh in the side so it controls glare backlights everything so it creates great lighting patterns for it makes buildings that are just beautiful to be in. Wow. And I mean, beauty of a building and, you know, the whole atmosphere makes all the difference to employees that work there and people that work there. I mean, you feel better when you're in that space.

There's more feng shui. Is that what it is? I mean, you just feel better about the whole thing, especially in the light, you know. It's, you know, look, getting down to the thing of being in a daylight building. I'm sitting here in a daylighted building. I don't have the lights off on the office here. Oh, wow. And I'm building an envelope up there.

It's a translucent envelope, and I have vision glass, and I've got a view in front of me. You know, I go back to my PhD in solar energy. A little bit of a paradoxical or the solar energy lab. I was in at university of water. There used to be a combustion lab that was built for, so they had, it was all brick walls.

Cause I said, if we ever blow anything up, we can't have windows shattering on the poor students walking by. Yeah. Nice thing to be in a lab like that. But anyway, so I go in there, you know,

I get in there eight 30 in the morning, you know, in the winter time in Ontario, Canada, it's, uh, you know, it go in there, you know, I'd get in there 8.30 in the morning, you know, in the wintertime in Ontario, Canada. It's, you know, it's just light. You know, you might have had half an hour, an hour of light at that time. And you walk in there and I'd usually been there at 6 or 7 in the evening and it's, you know, it's getting dark at 4.30. So I see a half hour of light. You get disconnected, you know, fluorescent lights back then.

It's LED, it's a little bit better, but it's still artificial light. You get disconnected. Fluorescent lights back then, LED, it's a little bit better, but it's still artificial light. You get disconnected from the world. Now, I sit here and I live under natural light. There's study upon study that shows people are healthier, happier. They buy more in retail stores. They're more productive in office

and blue-collar situations. Hospitals, people heal better. That study, but as I sit here, my own. And, you know, that's the study. But, you know, as I sit here, my own personal experience, you're in here and I just feel that, you know, year round, the connection. You know, you feel the sun early in the day. It's got a different character. It's got a different spectrum, different direction.

It changes through the day. You get the intensity changes, the color changes. You just live with it. It's just great. It's the way we humans were meant to be. Yeah. Boxes or caves've you know let's put ourselves in glass buildings eh and uh i think sometimes our bodies are just not quite uh retrofitted for it very well

i just started a weird thing i don't know if it's a weird thing but i call it my morning centering procedure and i've been seeing all these people talk about how vitamin d from the sun is really important and it's also important for starting your, um, Oh, what the hell is it called? It's the, uh, uh, it's, it's a, it's a cycle in your body of melatonin and different things. Um, that starts a cycle of where you, you can sleep because it'll help you sleep better because it tells your body, Hey, here's the start of my day. And so I just started doing a thing four days ago where every morning when I go have my coffee, the first thing I do is I go sit in the sun for 15 minutes to get my natural vitamin D. And I probably suffered some depression

over the years and different things by not taking enough vitamin D. And so I'm trying it and I'm not sure if the results are psychosomatic at this point, but I'm really enjoying it and I feel better. And so just, just having that light makes all the difference in the world. Cause I spend most of my time indoors in a, in a, in a rubber room, like I mentioned before,

tied up in a corner talking to myself. So. You know, I, I totally agree. I, you know, my house,

I got a nice sunroom in the back end of my house. It faces East. I get morning sun. I come to work. I have, I go through the full cycle of sun and you know, and get morning sun i come to work i have i go through the full cycle of sun and you know and vitamin d is one aspect of it you know there's a our whole physiology is built around that it's both you know ramping up in the daytime uh and and ramping down

uh you know pineal gland your whole hormone system it's really oh yeah and it's all and it's it's the light level and it's also the spectrum of light the light is reddish much more red you know it's going down the atmosphere you know you see sunset is red the light that comes through the blue light gets scattered out of it so when the sun's coming straight down overhead we're getting much bluer light and then morning and evening it's much redder light. Our whole body's tuned to that. You know, we've got to go through these cycles. We have to sleep as humans, and we need to be awake when we're awake.

And, yeah, going through those natural rhythms, our whole physiology is tied to it. And, you know, our whole well-being. And it's really amazing. I look at it. You know, it's subjective. Yeah. being and it's really amazing i look at it you know it's subjective yeah but i know i feel different in in naturally lighted buildings and i know at times when i'll go somewhere and i'll be in a regular building's got a little window or the blind shot or not seeing the sun i just it

just feel different i get out of touch and i'm just i count myself as lucky to be in a building that's you know fully naturally lighted. But anyway, incredibly important to us. Yeah, definitely. Circadia rhythms. That's the thing I was thinking of. Now you guys have two, I guess, major products that you guys have on your website. You have what's called the Solera and the Solera wall.

Tell us about those. Sure. You know, so building a great building that has that connection it's about mixing light diffusing and view glazings on your building right proportions right placement right design of the spaces so you gotta get right back into the architectural side of it to do that so uh you know and we've gained actually a 2 000 projects worth of expertise on undoing that so when you figure that out you figure out where you want opaque where you want And we've gained actually 2,000 projects worth of expertise on doing that. So when you figure that out, you figure out where you want opaque,

where you want translucent, where you want vision, you figure that out. Then you're bound by practicalities, right? And I mean, one of the reasons we think about buildings the way we do is because we've had two materials classes. We've had opaque, we've had transparent. Glass actually goes back to Roman times. They invented window glass back that long ago so you know we cut holes we you know use stone or wood or whatever else cut holes in it put a window in it uh you know and and yeah it just didn't uh yeah and you know i mean hey it got our species here right it got us through that first part

what it's worth i've seen us lately, but good, good point. So anyway, you move ahead and you move to this new paradigm. You understand how to build an envelope, but you got the practicalities you got to face. So that glass has to get on a building. So most of the buildings in the world use either window systems,

punched openings, and it's called window systems on it the other big category of framing is well it's framing we use in conventional glass a big type of framing that we use is called curtain wall so if you look at a building downtown and it's an all glass building or big sections of glass it's almost certain that's curtain wall that we're using and what we do and and that's an industry you know it's been around for forever you know modern curtain wall evolved you know going back 50 75 years you know and its roots it's mature this contracting it's a huge industry it's you know

40 billion dollars a year in north america or something like that so our first product that came out is called solera and it's most of what we sell today. Solera is glass units, so it's got two pieces of glass. It's got all our magic light diffusers and insulation. We'll talk about insulation in a bit. It's got that inside it, and these sealed units come and they go into curtain wall. So that's the Solera product.

And we custom configure it. So we'll design a building, look at what direction it's facing, look at how much glass we have on it, how big the space is, how light the finishes are inside. The lighter the finishes, the more light bounces around. And we tune it in and we configure the glass to be just right for that application. And then the architects, along with the engineers,

have figured out how they're going to build the building envelope. And it's, you know, curtain walls, majority of what we do. And Solera goes in Windows systems, curtain wall. There's another thing called storefront it goes into. And it's all designed to be compatible. So it's completely seamless to get on the building, going through a building design process and get it built. And you mentioned insulation, I think.

And how does that work? So insulation, you know, walls can have great insulation. You know, typically, you know, once upon a time, southern climates didn't bother insulating very much, which was a little bit of a mistake because, you know, you come in to get out of the heat, you know, if you're in Texas in the summertime. You know, if you're in, I don't know,

if you're in Chicago, you come to get out of the cold, but you have to deal with both. Insulation helps you deal with that. So great buildings are thermally comfortable. And if you have poor insulation, they're not that comfortable. So you need insulation in buildings. Glass, so you build walls today and you can build typical houses that they build in middle to northern latitudes

might have a 2x6 walls. Build them out of 2x6s, put fiberglass in that. That's about R18 insulation. The glass you're buying for your window, probably R3. Might even be R2 if you're in Florida in the old paradigm might be r2

single glass is r1 it's got no insulation right so um we make glass and and we can go from r3 and we can configure the glass depending on what customer wants what they're trying to achieve we can go all the way up to r25. So it's best insulating glass in existence. So what you do on it, and you can do that separately. We can tune the light properties when we build the glass to get the lighting you want. And then you can choose, fairly independently of that, you can choose what insulation you want. And if you're trying to build a building that is, say, net zero energy usage, you might

go up to R25. If you're trying to lead leadership and energy efficient design, if you want certification, you're building green certification, you may go up to the top end. Another end, we actually have another company have we have one of our manufacturing plants, we use R3 in it. Why? Because it's got a bunch of process manufacturing process in there that dumps extra heat into the building so we don't need thermal insulation so the point in it so yeah you get what you want don't you don't have to pay for it if you don't want it but if you do want it you can get the best in the world there you go and and it's really you know the

other thing that's happened uh you know as we talk about new buildings, building codes, the other thing when you build a building, you got to meet code for better or for worse. I mean, overall, the intention is to get you better buildings, right? And it's got to get a base standard. But, you know, it gets pretty restrictive. Interesting things happened just the last few years. There's an engineering standard called ashray 90.1 that's the air conditioning and heating engineers so they put together standards for building envelope insulation so but what it means is to strictly follow the code uh you can only put 30

percent window area on your building the other 70% has to be wall. Effectively, and most places are adopting this into their building code. What it means is you can no longer build an all-glass building. You get some pretty dull-looking buildings when you get down to that. What it means with us, with R25, is it means you can

totally build an all-glass building at that point. With the Solera wall, you have what's called a cladding system. What is a cladding system? I'm going to learn something new today. Yeah, okay. Yeah, and it's interesting.

You know, you have a fundamental problem, and you dig into it. You get all these other problems you have to solve. So there's a whole category of buildings, metal buildings we use for it. Factories, the other big box stores kind of fall under metal, generally under metal building and the like, you know, steel structure cladding over them. And they're often, you know, they're built to a lower price point than your downtown building or your corporate head office. So, but that whole world has been climbing upstream and making nicer looking. You know, the old ones go back 30 years ago,

it was all, you know, Butler building. Butler makes great steel buildings, a lot of corrugated, you know, then it was corrugated steel, you know, bag insulation inside, rough and ready industrial buildings. Well, that whole world is climbing the food chain in a huge way. And we get something called insulated metal panels now that they use to clad. A bunch of other ways you can do it, but insulated metal panels is a really cool way to do

it. Great insulation, look way better, really fast to build. If you try to break into a glass system as you start building up, build a wall in the bottom, the top, and then try to put a strip of glass in it, go into curtain wall or something. It breaks all the elegance and all the fast building and the whole cost paradigm. It's just way more expensive. So we developed something. It's called Solera Wall and inspired by that. And it is glass in a panel system. So the glass does not require framing.

And they come on as panels. There's a little strip, aluminum strips go on underneath it. And you basically, it tongue and grooves into insulated metal panels or any adapter strip into any other construction you want. Tongue and groove the panel in, toggle bolts in the side, next panel tongue and grooves in, directly over primary steel structure. Or we got our other structure,

actually got a building in Montreal, Canada, that's going up in an engineered timber frame, like a large town hall library building that's going up. So it goes over any primary structure and it's just tongue and grooves without framing. Leave the cost, Leave that thermal break. Framing goes from the outside to the inside, conducts your heat out to the outdoors or in from the outdoors. That takes way longer to build, way more labor.

So this stuff is lower overall installed cost. So you can put glass into buildings. Looks great too. It's absolutely trim. You don't have all this ugly framing sticking out inside and outside and it's just this flush wall of glass tree and lean trim uh scandinavian look you know minimalist look to it so uh yeah pull of the direction that we that we have there you go so you work on a lot of new buildings. We talked before the show in the green room, you know, there's Los Angeles downtown and San Francisco downtown,

and I'm not sure about the other cities in America, but I imagine they're suffering as well. You know, COVID, people went to remote work and remote work people aren't coming back for the most part. So there's about 30% in both of those major cities of empty office buildings right now. And my understanding is in like San Francisco,

they're looking to convert those into some sort of living space, everyday living space, like condos, apartments, et cetera, et cetera, and turn them from office buildings to people who will live because maybe they would work downtown or support the downtown economy there. Do you guys have products that can fit that and help with maybe some of those retrofitting? Because some of the buildings are really old. They're 30 or 40 years old.

Yeah. Two comments to that. I mean, one is retrofit. Yeah, we do all kinds of retrofit. It's really, really common. Somebody comes in and does a full, I i'd say probably 30 of our work it's taken you get good bones in a building and you rip the envelope off and and and retrofit it and uh yeah and you're doing that your energy upgrades natural light upgrades etc so so we do lots of that uh The other thing you touch on there is residential. And most of what we've done, we do, you know, office, you know, white collar workspace.

You know, and the push there, it's productivity and recruitment. Trying to make great workplace for employees. Blue collar workspace factories absolutely works great in it. Sports facilities. Sports facilities, large in it sports facilities uh sports facilities large spaces uh sports facilities uh you know performance spaces uh you know concert theater spaces uh can daylighting in them spectacular rinks uh sacramento king's practice facility toronto raptors practice facility have natural lighting that we've done in it. Wow. So that school is education.

Students learn way better under natural light. Oh, I bet. That's most of what we do. But residential, we have a few really cool residential projects. On the value proposition residential, we don't do like single residential. It's, and it's where we are right now. It's just a lot of work to sell a single residence. We have some architects houses and things we've done. And I'm building a summer house right now that has's just a lot of work to sell a single residence. We have some architects' houses and things we've done.

I'm building a summer house right now that has our daylighting in it, but it's not a line of business for us, really. We have some projects that one of them comes to mind. I think it's 10 Chelsea is the address, New York City. Highline District, New York City. It's small

apartments. They're not cheap in Manhattan, if you know what I mean. Well, you know, small apartments, right? Wow. And, and they're not cheap in Manhattan. If you know what I mean? Well, you'd know that better than I would. I live out in the middle of nowhere in a small place, but you'd understand that. Uh, and, uh, put natural light in a small space. Uh, privacy issues. You're, you're crammed in downtown.

You got privacy issues. What happens is, uh, you build small rental space. Uh, you know, it's gotta be small. You're inammed in downtown. You've got privacy issues. What happens is you build small rental space. It's got to be small. You're in a city. It's just got to be. And what happens, the blinds will go down for privacy reasons. You lose your natural light. You start feeling pretty crammed in.

So architects designing these multi-unit high-rise residential and learning how to use natural light in the right spaces and your active spaces in them. And just it's a whole difference. And natural light, you know, look, when people go, you go look at real estate, you go, oh, great. Look at the natural light in it. This is natural light. Just, you know, a study I saw, you know, good natural light in a residential space. It sells or rents for 10 to 15% more.

And it doesn't cost you 10 to 15% more to put it in there. So it's a huge value proposition to developers. Yeah. A good investment for the longterm. What do you see the future of your business going to? I mean, obviously green and solar technologies and industries are going to keep excelling.

It seems like, you know, we're moving towards that thing where they're just becoming more and more popular. What do you see the future of your industry or your business going to here? We are, you know, big tailwinds for us right now, business-wise, right? So, you know, building code, you know,

can't build an all-glass building envelope unless you use our glass. That's cool. You know, more and more architects are catching on to that. Architects and developers, building owners catching on to that. So there's a tailwind for us. The whole drive towards green, I'm a big believer. My PhD is in solar energy. I'm a big believer in green.

Now, let me qualify that uh the greta thunberg let's screech and say there's panic green no thanks building better buildings natural light lower energy bills you know sensible renewable energy that's cheaper than other energy right so we got that those tailwinds well we got the other you know the other one i don't mean to be too disparaging about people that that believe in or think it's emergency but it's not the way i see the world but either way our solution is good for them uh natural light uh you know the other tail wind for us is more and more organizations well the world's more competitive you want to build a building and you want to build a sports facility, that's great. Uh, a university, you know, basketball facility.

You don't want to build a school. It's good. It works better. Uh, give that human side, go back 40 years ago. People barely cared. You know, they just put up buildings the same way we built them. They threw a bestest in and they're like, yeah, it'll be fine. Yeah, absolutely.

We're good. She's all good. As long as you get in there, uh, that expectation that when you walk in a building it's gonna be a great building you got employees in a building you know when you walk into a building you know the building i'm in which is i'm actually sitting here and uh in in 45 drives computer company's head office here uh and uh recruiting it's everything it's all about your people they walk into our building and they go wow this is nice and it's not nice because you try to impress by putting in marble or gold leaf it's nice because it's a truly nice building we have actually two secrets to it natural light is number one

number two is fresh air we do four to five times the normal amount of fresh air there's all kinds of research that says if you let people sit in a normal amount of CO2 with normal ventilation rates, you dumb them down. They get sleepy. They get slow. They don't work as well. We pay people to come in here and be smart. So we don't want to dumb them down. So natural light, fresh air, you create a better building. Employees are more productive. They appreciate working there. It gives you a competitive edge. So yeah, and it's a really large potential market. We're a pioneer in it and we're an interesting pioneer because I said, we've got this long incubation period. We got it right. So it's just a really cool time for us. So I'm going to grow this thing

and we're just having a blast. It's like great fun, great industry. Buildings are exciting. You see these buildings, you walk into them and you go, wow. And when the owners and the occupants go, wow, it's really nice. In a world where we have this big revision that's been done with people staying home or what I referred to earlier, it's Tuesday, the brain's gone. But people doing their working for home and remote work. That's the word I was looking for. Getting people back to buildings and buildings that they're going to enjoy and they're beautiful.

And that sunlight. Like I said, I'm tuning in with my life is how important sunlight is because with the rework, or technically I've been working at home since, what, 2004, you get dark and sometimes I think I've probably suffered some depression for not having enough vitamin D. And it just makes all the difference in the world. And if you want to get people back from the staying home and doing their remote work thing, building good buildings and having healthy buildings can make a difference.

When I had most of my companies were brick and mortar back in the day, I was notorious for rating C-class buildings because they were cheap and we could expand through them very quickly because they were usually empty. But there are employees that sometimes suffered and got sick. I think there's a thing called

getting sick from building syndrome. Sick building syndrome. There you go. Yeah. And I think it's a combination of light and light and air or the two dominant things in it. You know, and we,

that's funny. You talked with that when I started advanced glazings, we're in pretty third world space. You know, I'm entrepreneur, I'm poor church mouse and, uh, and,

and, uh, you, you do what you can. And I, I just think we moved into our first daylighted building. Uh, you know,

first well daylighted building would have been 2007 when we moved in. Oh, early 2008. And it's just dramatic what it did to our employees and how much better I felt when I was in it. We've got to get you some material. You've got to find your own contractor for it,

but we'll get your house, we'll get your studio naturally lighted, and we'll get you it fixed up, Chris. There you go. I mean, I had a couple of employees they were getting sick from the fluorescent light uh and probably some other things in the building i mean i remember one building around it was sold had a giant huge lead wall that i think a dentist's office had put in and i remember going downstairs looking this lead wall and they were removing it for all the obvious reasons, but it was crazy, you know?

And I'm like, that's been in this building. Okay. Whatever. Explains why the rent's so cheap. But no, it's, it's, I've seen employees get sick. I've seen them, you know, they hate the lighting on the wall. You know, the, you know, some rooms are darker than others, or, you know, they always want a windows office. Everyone's always for those so this is really important stuff um what what are some advice to uh to other entrepreneurs out there people in the audience that are uh aspiring or uh struggling or just entrepreneurs like myself what's some advice you give to entrepreneurs on how to you know you

clearly had a vision for this company and stuck it out through a long time before it finally became popular to be green. Well, you know what? It's a couple of things. I mean, everyone, you have to have a vision of something that's – you got to solve people's problem. There you go. And that's clear. I won't go into that because everybody talks about that and they know that. You got to solve people's problems.

How you do it. You know, if you're just driven by money, it's a tough road to hoe, I think. Because I'll tell you, a real business, and, you know, we're in one, we're creating our own market segment, right? And do a change in the world the way people think of buildings and whatever. It's hard, but it's a people thing, right?

And you think of what you do as an entrepreneur. The way I look at it, it's bringing people together. There you go. It's understanding and having empathy for people in your market segment. What's their working life or other life as a consumer or whatever else? What's their life like? How can they get better understanding that and figuring out how to communicate with them? On the other side, you have your workforce.

And you look at that and you go, you need people to do the work. Otherwise, you're self-employed. You're not an entrepreneur. Yeah. And you look at that and you got to set up a true win-win situation that works for everybody. Everybody needs to come out of it feeling like they got a fair deal thing and your employees have to want to come to work and your customers have to want to come buy from you. Your investors want to have to come or want to come invest in you. Your suppliers, you know, don't be too hard on your suppliers. They're a partner in what you do too.

It's a partnership and you can get it if you do it right. And this is the word culture. And it's become really big as we grow. And I wish I, you know, everybody says, I wish I knew what I knew now when I started. But it's about culture, and it's setting it up. And we do something. We call them DNA documents.

Oh, really? And as we grow. And DNA, the idea that there's a code that determines all the decision-making. The decision-making determines the material. We have something that's ethical guidelines is our people DNA. It's everything you need to know to make a decision in these organizations that's aligned with everything else we do, aligned with the health of the organization,

and aligned with your best interest. We have a bunch of other things. We get down to very specific things. We've got something called project dna you know the projects development projects marketing projects anything that's not operations it's projects how do you get projects done and get them done fast and effectively and have fun doing it and want to come back and do another one we have our set of guidelines went through best practice extracted we train people very very heavily in that. We are also, I talk about working at home. And again, everybody has a different view on it. And I started working at home when

I started Advanced Glazings. My first six months were, well, it was before I started, it was market research and financing and everything else. And I worked at a home. And I'm just, I guess I'm a social person or something like that. I couldn't wait for my wife to get home from work. The isolation I felt was just awful. We hire people who see the world that way. And our people, we want people that want to come to work.

We love the synergies you get. I mean, people got to learn how to sit down, shut up, get their work done, right? Yeah. You got to be productive. But there's this inspiration you get as a group and this alignment you get, this reinforcement you get when people work together and they get common values. And those common values are part of what we codify.

We hire for it and we write it down and keep people aligned. You come to work, the group runs up. The other thing we teach. A great workplace is you know it's great to have good building and all and that good to have good work to do you know decent paycheck but it's it's determined by the people around you whether you like coming to work or not so it's no fun working with assholes so don't be an asshole we teach everybody that they do an orientation set to two hours with me don't be an ass the

company is you so i paraphrase don't be an asshole but it's basically that's basically it it's like having good people around to treat you just treat with respect you don't have to like everybody treat them with respect you come into a workplace where everybody has treated respect people will get to like the workplace there you go i love that concept the dna of a company dna of projects i i've never really thought about it from that angle but it kind of gives it that central formation by which everything uh evolves or or expands from that and there's no micromanagement you you know there's nothing worse you bring people in to make decisions and drive the company forward nothing worse go back and say uh i know you worked your arse off and you did everything

you could to make the best decision, but that was really stupid and it sucks. Give them the tools so they can make great decisions. Then they get autonomy and then the place just runs great. They're happy. They got autonomy. They got respect for the people around them. It just clicks and it just clicks. And it just, it works great. We're between the organizations. We have about 450 people now.

And it just runs the vast majority. We do our surveying and everything else inside. We got scorers that beat all the tech guys that got the foosball tables and everything else. We beat them by a long shot in most of our surveys. So there you go there you go so uh quick speed round here of just some fun stuff which is better rush or nickelback yeah rush rush this is canadian thing folks for those of you who don't know uh and it's there too way there you go i'm a big rush fan too. Huge Rush fan, actually.

But I just want a confirmation of my own bias. There's the setup. And then, is Trailer Park Boys not the greatest TV show that Canada's ever produced? Oh, Trailer Park Boys. I love it. Let me just throw you a little thing in here. They're a production company. They produce on our computers

from 45 drives. Oh, do they? Yeah, and they're down the road. Nova Scotia, Canada, for people who don't know Nova Scotia, we're those old flat earth things where the elephants hold up the earth and water comes over the edge. That's where we are in North America, right? We're right on the edge. but uh trailer park boys is halifax and which is about

yeah it's about four hours drive from here and uh it's nova scotia culture and i i you know we we love it i just absolutely love the show i love the show too they kind of run in their own thing i think right now they're kind of keeping it going on i think on the internet or something on tiktok i see it so yeah it's uh it's great i used to have people that my some of my friends back then they used to call me ricky and i'm just like seriously am i that bad there you go um all right well thank you very much for coming on the show doug uh give us your.com so people can find you on the intros please sure advanced glazings dot com there you go protocase dot com and

45 drives dot com there you go there you go well it's been wonderful having the show and very insightful and inspiring for other entrepreneurs that want to take their vision and go on a journey that you've definitely been successful on thank you very much Chris it was a pleasure there you go. And a pleasure

is all mine, sir. Also to my audience, our most pleasurable, brilliant audience that I can't suck up ever to enough. Go to goodreads.com for just Christmas. YouTube.com for just Christmas. LinkedIn.com for just Christmas. And check out that TikTok. We're trying to be cool

over there. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe and we'll see you guys next time. And that should have it.