The Founders
Are you a bit nosey like us? Whenever we visit a website we’re interested in, we always click to the ‘About Us’ page pretty quickly. Why? Well, we want to get a feel for what sort of company it is, and you can often get a feel for how it’s run even if the people behind it are a bit cagey about giving information on themselves.
Thankfully we are all far too ugly to attract stalkers so we’ve ‘laid ourselves bare’ in order to give you some insight into what our motivations are and what we’ve done so far in our careers. Of course, what we really want to say is that we are a bit like everyone else – we want to make a difference (but also have a livelihood!) – and we think that with the skills & experience we have in bringing other new products to the mass market, this is the best way to achieve it.
(p.s. Please don’t get the wrong impression about Patrick’s jerry-built contraptions – we use fully trained professionals for our installations!)
Johnny
I spent 15 years at The Carphone Warehouse, one of the most amazing growth stories of the last two decades. I started ‘on the shop floor’ and by growing with the company I was given wonderful opportunities for management experience at a relatively young age, as well as the experience of working in a number of European countries. My main disciplines have been in marketing and sales but I also had responsibility for purchasing & logistics, customer management and insurance along the way in various countries or in Group roles.
We moved house in 2005 to a property we hope to stay in for a long time and this triggered my research into options for renewable energy, as I would like to be as green as possible, partly driven by altruism & concern at the legacy our generation is leaving for our children if we don’t act now. I did however have another fundamental requirement: it needed to make sense financially!
I was disappointed to find that the ‘media puff ‘ was much greater than the renewable sector’s ability to serve consumers in terms of product, advice and service. Sure, if you were a business there were plenty of companies selling various renewable technologies that were happy to take your money, but very few companies that would take a private householder seriously or even, it seemed, speak the same language as it was mostly jargon heavy gobbledegook.
To make things worse, those that were targeting the consumer seemed more often than not to be the sort of ‘hard-sell’ merchants we like to think had been put out of business back in the 1970’s by “That’s Life”! Indeed in the last few years, the solar hot water industry has regularly had its name tarnished by the appearance on “Watchdog” of companies with pushy sales practices and shoddy service.
So, we want to be different. We believe that if we really are going to make a difference to carbon emissions in the UK we need to get serious about installing renewable energy solutions on the houses we have now.
Eighty percent of the houses we will have in 2050 (when Kyoto targets need to be achieved) are already built. Forty percent of UK CO2 emissions come from our homes and other buildings.
Therefore we HAVE to make it easier for individual homeowners to have renewable energy solutions installed if we are to stand any chance of achieving our national goals. But no-one is happy to spend money unnecessarily, and at It Won’t Cost The Earth, we are trying to make the whole process more efficient and cost effective.
It really shouldn’t be made any harder than it already is to save the planet, and it certainly shouldn’t cost the earth!
Patrick
I have brought a strong entrepreneurial focus to all my previous roles, joining MessageLabs Group in its 1st year, and being instrumental in its global growth to 800 staff in 8 countries. I was a member of the Group Management Board throughout, fulfilling senior roles as Head of Product Management and Head of Business Systems. My experience is typically business-to-business, spending 10 years in the Lloyds Insurance Market, as well as 6 years working within the large-scale Agricultural Commodities world.
For the last 3 years, I have also been involved in a number of CleanTech opportunities, including commercial rapeseed biofuel production as well as launching the consumer portal ‘ourpower.co.uk’. My strong experience in the operational management of fast-growing companies compliments the profile of my two co-directors.
I am passionate about renewable energy – and I’d like to take this opportunity to publicly apologise to all those people I’ve bored with it at various parties over the last decade! It Won’t Cost The Earth is a natural progression for me. I grew up in a large family where we shared and re-used everything we could. The 1970’s Oil Crisis brought a large biomass furnace to burn wood and waste to provide hot water; our swimming pool was heated with a sequence of huge homemade solar water heating systems; small wind turbines charged batteries and a year travelling abroad in 1990 was enjoyed to the soundtrack of a ghetto blaster powered by a 10W PV solar panel!
The ebb and flow of the Climate Change debate is almost insignificant – it just makes sense that we should move beyond burning carbon, and for each household to live as sustainably as it can is surely a key component of this. For my wife and 3 children, like all households, right now this is not easy to do – It Won’t Cost The Earth’s role is to make it easier.
I think the time has come for us all to make a huge difference – the technology exists, the imperative is clear – lets take sustainable technologies and home cleantech into the mainstream.
Andrew
After starting on the shop floor at Carphone Warehouse and working my way upwards I moved to Glasgow and became a Director of DX Communications, another mobile phone retailer.When the business was subsequently sold to Cellnet (now O2) I became Managing Director of Tiny Computers, at a challenging time for the business and over saw the sale of its ISP to Tiscali and the eventual sale of the business to Time Computers. Despite the ‘rough and tumble’ it was great experience that really gave me a lot of insight into retailing especially in the fast-growth technology sector.
However, after these experiences I wanted to move away from traditional retail with shop fronts and large numbers of retail staff and so turned to the internet. I set up the Flat TV Company in 2001 with a colleague Vince Tang and by 2007 this had become the 7th Fastest Growing Company in the UK according to the Sunday Times Fast Track Monitor. On turning 40 and with 3 young boys in tow Lucy and I discussed a move away from the Home Counties towards Devon and the Coast. This move finally happened in 2008 and with the sale of The Flat TV Company allowed me to indulge my passion for alternative energies.
I have had an interest in this since reading Geography at Oxford Polytechnic and a visit to Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales. My aim in Devon is to prove that an Historic Grade II* Listed House can become Carbon Neutral. This is enabling me to ‘trial and test’ the products that we supply at IWCTE in the real world.
Having met Johnny at Polytechnic it was with great excitement that we set about IWCTE; with Patrick coming on board it has made the team complete. We now have a team of passionate people with a product that can make real changes for our kid’s futures.