The thermo-dynamics of entrepreneurship
Hard work is practically forced upon Aaron Patel but he is determined to make it work
THEY say youth is wasted on the young. But not on Aaron Patel.
The 25-year-old has fought his way through every challenge that has come his way and has come out firmly grounded.
He founded iHandal Energy Solutions Sdn Bhd right out of school but started running a business long before that.
Aaron was thrown into the deep end of entrepreneurship at the age of 15.
His father, who was running a solar panel trading company, had suffered a severe stroke and was left disabled. Overnight, Aaron and his mother had to take over the small setup and were forced to figure out how to run a business to make ends meet.
Aaron, an only child, juggled between taking care of his father, managing the business, handling school work and dealing with all the other stresses of being a teenager.
While completing his International Baccalaureate programme, he took particular interest in theories and applications related to heat as they were relevant to his solar-based company.
However, he soon discovered that there were other opportunities in the thermal heating industry.
He saw potential in supplying energy solutions that recycled waste heat back to boilers. This would reduce energy consumption and help businesses make significant savings on energy cost.
Aaron purchased waste heat recovery units from Europe to test it with potential clients.
Fortunately for Aaron, a family friend opened the door for him to test out his heat pumps on two Tune Hotels’ properties, one of which was in Penang.
Aaron would leave his class at 3pm to drive from Kuala Lumpur to Penang to make the installation and drive back to KL to assume his usual responsibilities at home. But it was worth the hard work for Aaron as the business with Tune Hotels turned out to be a boon.
“They were the ones who gave us the idea for our business model. We had a fantastic idea on how to save energy for their heating needs. But how many CEOs would take a chance on a 17-year-old right?
“So basically the business model is this: you install the system, if it works, we pay you. If it doesn’t work, you take it back. And that was how we started our entire business model, which was guaranteeing the performance and efficiency of what we do,” he explains.
With the success he had with Tune Hotels, Aaron started to tinker about with different components of the heat recovery units in his car porch to make his own heat pumps, often earning the ire of his neighbours.
But Aaron continued to grind away noisily to put together his own heat recovery device that is smaller in size, performs better than the industry average and is more suited for Malaysia’s tropical climate.
“My key study was in thermodynamics. From there, I found applications that were related to my field. I put the two and two together and we came up with our first system in 2009,” he says, rather nonchalantly.
Aaron graduated high school at 17 with a new venture, iHandal, on his hands to sell his own proprietary energy solutions.
He started cold-calling various hotels to offer them his solutions.
But note that while he had engineered his own product, Aaron’s heat pumps had yet to be used in an actual installation.
“I knew the performance of how it could work in theory. We just had to get it to work. So we tested it on-site. We actually informed our clients that this was something brand new and if they would like to test it out,” he explains.
The heat pump basically absorbs waste heat in places such as car parks in shopping malls that is usually around 30 to 40 degrees celsius. It then concentrates the heat into higher temperature at 80 degrees celsius to make it useable for applications like heating water.
Aaron had no reservations about diving in with his product and was confident that it would work. He reckoned that his solution would give businesses an average savings of 60%-80% on their heating cost.
A little young and foolish, perhaps? “Thinking back, you’d think it was quite risky but I’d call it calculated risk,” he replies with a grin.
iHandal’s big break came when the company secured a deal with IGB Corp Bhd to install the heat pumps at their property.
The group became their largest promoter after iHandal completed the project. It was their most valuable form of marketing. Business started picking up. However, not everyone was behind Aaron on his ideas.
“There was a lot of negativity along the way from family friends because people didn’t believe that this business could scale and with someone like me at the helm especially, with no background in engineering whatsoever and at my age,” he recalls.
But Aaron was determined. He was fully
invested in the business as he couldn’t continue his studies due to his family commitments. He had no choice but to make it work. The support of his parents was good enough to keep him focused.
Aaron remained a one-man show for the next two years, building his own products, making his own installations and servicing his clients.
But Aaron sold an image of a company much bigger than just himself.
“People think we are a huge company because of the number of projects we’ve done. When they call our phone line, there’ll be a ‘dial 1’ for this department, ‘dial 2’ for this department and so on, but all the lines are channeled back to my phone,” he laughs.
“That kind of put us on a different level with our clients. But we had to back it up with service, of course. We serve them as if we had a 100-man team,” he adds.
A lot of iHandal’s clients also paved the way for the company to go regional.
“Our entire business up till now, we have about 60 different properties using our system, is all through references after IGB,” he says.
Aaron started hiring people in 2011 to grow the company.
Now that he was no longer a one-man team, he had to learn how to deal with employees who were older and more experienced than him. But as with every other challenge, he found his way around it.
Today, the company’s headcount has grown to 25 people over offices in six different countries including Singapore and Indonesia.
After many years of having to go it alone, Aaron got a boost when iHandal was among the 10 companies selected by Endeavor, an international non-profit organisation which accelerates high-impact entrepreneurs, to gain access to its network of top business leaders and entrepreneurs from across the globe to help them scale their businesses.
Aaron is excited about the prospects of such an opportunity.
He is gearing up for bigger growth and is looking at revenue of about US$1mil this year.
“There is so much more that we can do with our business. We started with hospitality but we are now looking to expand into other sectors such as the industrial space and food manufacturing companies.
“Our expertise is in being able to switch over to our system live. You don’t need to stop your operations for us to make the installments. We are focused on efficiency. And we are also looking at offering different energy solution soon,” he says.
It has been quite an amazing journey, says Aaron, but at 25, he has many more years to go and grow.
Are his parents proud of his achievement? Certainly.
In fact, sometimes, they are overly proud, he says, a little sheepish.