POCATELLO — Trent Clawson, president and chief engineer of Titan Power, and his team have blown the top off the battery-manufacturing industry by challenging the status quo and asking one question over and over again: “Why not?”

The business has made a name for itself with its revolutionary lithium-ion batteries for drones and airsoft guns. Now Titan is making radical changes in an area that hasn’t been reimagined for decades: golf car batteries.

Like many businesses, Titan Power began with an idea — and a workshop in a basement.

In 2015, Clawson was stumped. He wanted to fly a drone across the country, but there wasn’t a battery on the market that would support that.

So he took the problem into his own hands and began building batteries in his basement in Bentonville, Arkansas — a space Clawson describes as “literally a 70-square-foot unfinished basement with a single lightbulb hanging down from the ceiling.”

Soon, the hobby took over his basement and began overflowing to other parts of the house, so Clawson left his job and began making batteries full time in 2017.

In May 2019, Clawson and his family decided to move to Chubbuck, where they have ties: He attended Brigham Young University-Idaho in Rexburg, and his wife is from Inkom.

Then world events threw a wrench in the process: The Trump administration imposed tariffs on China, where Titan Power did all its production.

“Three days after we moved here, our next product arrived from China, and we were hit with a 25 percent tariff,” Clawson told attendees of Bannock Development Corp.’s Southeast Idaho Economic Development Summit last April. “That was a hard day. … It was at that moment I had to decide what we were gonna do. We started looking at other countries, … and I thought, ‘Dang it, I’m gonna do it here. I’m not gonna take it anywhere else. If I’m gonna do all this work, I’m gonna do it in Idaho instead.’ Everyone I told this thought it was a horrible idea. Well, dang it, we did it. It took a lot of work, and we grew so fast that for about three and a half months, we hired one person a week.”

When they first began production in Idaho, Titan Power was located in a 2,500-square-foot building on Industry Way in Chubbuck, but the company quickly outgrew the space.

In February 2021, the business — which now employs 17 people — relocated to the much larger former Brady’s building at 3309 Highway 30 W. in Pocatello.

Titan Power has come a long way since its humble beginnings in a basement. Now, the company exports batteries around the world and has experienced exponential growth, especially in the last two years — despite COVID-19.

When other companies struggled to maintain the status quo, Titan pivoted.

'RIPE FOR INNOVATION'

The crew at Titan Power is obsessed with perfection and finding ways to bring old things into the modern day and beyond.

“We like to joke that it needs to be so good that the customer thinks it was delivered by aliens,” Clawson told the East Idaho Business Journal. “We want to leapfrog whatever is out there. What we’re especially looking for is industries or products that have been status quo for a long time. That means that it’s ripe for innovation, I suppose, and that always gets us excited.”

The company has gained recognition in the drone and airsoft industries already for that exact mindset.

“The airsoft world was using lithium polymer or Nickel-metal Hydride technology, which just means that it was either kind of unsafe or it was really a lot of maintenance,” Clawson said. “So we took the Venn diagram of those two and made them really safe and really low maintenance and really good performance.”

Clawson said the company is much more focused on putting out good products than it is with making money. However, in 2019, Titan did close to $1 million in sales — more than it had done in all previous years combined — but broke even in profit.

“Money’s not important, but maybe we made it a little too not important,” he said.

The easiest option would have been to increase the prices of their products, but Titan doesn’t do easy mode. Instead, Clawson asked himself, “How can we double our sales and cut our production time in half?”

And how do you do that without making your employees work twice as hard?

You make the process more efficient.

“This is the beginning of what we’ve been able to apply throughout the company is that as we spent time to make something more efficient, it always made it better and made it cost less,” Clawson said.

But then, in 2020, the ultimate anti-efficiency disaster hit: the COVID-19 pandemic and the March 2020 stay-home order issued by Gov. Brad Little.

The decision was made to move about 90 percent of Titan's production into its employees’ houses. Instead of a production line, each person took batteries home, did their part of the assembly process and then dropped it back off at Titan Power for the next person in this unusual assembly line to pick up.

It turns out that COVID-19 flipping production on its head had unexpected upsides for Titan.

“Working from home forced our team to be independent enough that they could complete all their tasks without any external input,” Clawson said. “It was a confidence (booster) and we’ve been able to maintain that. Our people are able to come in, know what they need to do, get it done, be really efficient about it.”

And, consistent with its history of shattering the norm, 2020 was the first year Titan turned a profit. By the end of September 2020, the company had done more sales than all of its previous years, including 2019 — the year when it broke $1 million in sales. Plus, in the airsoft division, Titan now holds about 30 to 40 percent of the market share.

“COVID, in a way, actually helped us, because our competition wasn’t able to stay in business or be as productive as we could,” Clawson said. “… Because of our loyalty and because we were able to keep our supply, our dealers and distributors were able to order from us. We were the easy button. We’re always available. Our prices were steady. Our market share grew a lot in 2020, especially, and (2021 has) been good as well.”

Titan did increase its prices once in the last two years, but it’s important to the Titan crew to keep prices flat despite inflation and supply chain issues, and they’re able to do that because of increased efficiency.

“Our customers have been loyal to us, so we’re going to be loyal to them,” Clawson said. “We’re going to keep our prices where we can afford to be successful and pay our people right and take care of our future, but we can keep our prices where it makes our customers’ lives better because that’s part of our goal.”

‘ONE BATTERY TO RULE THEM ALL’

Speaking of things that will make their customers’ lives better: Titan has officially launched a new business under the Titan umbrella. It’s a golf car battery named Uno, and it completely reconceptualizes a product that’s been the same for a very long time.

Uno’s tagline is “one battery to rule them all” — and, well, it does seem to match that description.

Uno looks a bit like an alien out of a Pixar movie. It’s just a simple white box with two sets of short green cables coming out of the top.

“It looks dang cool. It’s a little sugar cube,” Clawson said. “… It’s supposed to be clean, just simple, just Uno.”

If you’re not an avid golfer, you might not know that golf cars traditionally run off of six lead acid batteries — the kinds of batteries that will burn holes in your clothes. They weigh an average of about 65 pounds each, or 390 pounds total. That’s about 40 percent of the total weight of a standard golf car.

With Uno, you only need one battery, and it’s safer, easier and more high tech. Plus, since it only weighs 45 pounds — or 7.6 percent of the total weight of the average golf car — your car will now have a lot more zip behind it.

“Going up hills and acceleration is so much faster because it weighs less and the voltage of this pack is higher than those lead acids and they don’t sag as much,” Clawson said. “All batteries when you put them under a load, the voltage comes down a bit. (Uno) only comes down about a volt or so, where (the lead acid batteries) drop a couple of volts, meaning you can just punch it. It’ll go screaming up a hill.”

It’s been a long and expensive adventure for Clawson and his team to get Uno on the market, but he says it will be well worth it in the end.

“We’ve been working for like four years off and on. It’s been this insanely long journey, partly because of how (Titan’s other businesses) were growing but also just because of how much experience and technology we need to make it right,” Clawson said. “We want to make it so that when the person gets it out of the box, it’s like, ‘Whoa, this is so different! Oh my gosh!’ It’s almost like we want people not to believe us. … We want the customer to be like, ‘No way is that real. You must be lying to me.’”

So why did Titan decide to take on golf car batteries?

“For us it was like, ‘What’s the biggest battery we could make? What’s the biggest electric vehicle we could take on without taking on Tesla?’” Clawson said. “And it was like, ‘Well, golf cars.’ That’s a relatively big electric vehicle. It’s not an electric scooter. It’s not an electric skateboard. Then we started looking at the status quo — these lead acid batteries that have been around since the 1800s. Then it’s like, ‘Wait a minute. How come this hasn’t happened yet?’”

He says that Uno has the potential to add 20 to 30 jobs in the next couple years because the market is so much bigger than what they’ve tapped into before.

“We could basically take over the world of golf cars because it’s such a difference in what the existing technology is and what we can offer,” Clawson said.

While Uno costs more — $2,500 compared to about $1,000 to replace traditional batteries — it will save its users money in the long run.

The average electric golf car battery gets 30 miles out of a single charge and has to be replaced every four to six years. Uno gets about 60 miles out of a single charge and will work for up to 100,000 miles. That’s three or four decades of use.

Uno is also completely recyclable.

“Whenever it dies — which I might be dead by then, I don’t know, it’s going to last so long — these companies will be able to disassemble them and return them to their basic elements — copper and nickel and whatever — so that we can have a closed loop there,” Clawson said.

While there are other companies making lithium-ion batteries for golf cars, Clawson says Uno is an improvement on anything similar available now.

“People are starting to do a little bit now, but I still think they’re going about it really in the wrong way,” Clawson said. “They’re still requiring their own chargers. They’re still requiring a lot more batteries because they’re using a technology that is only about three times better than lead acid, where ours is eight times better.”

Plus, if you accidentally drop Uno, it’s not going to be the end of the world. Clawson said that when they were testing it to see how much damage it could take, they eventually had to start throwing it like the Hulk before it broke.

And, he added, “with our packs, there’s no exposed terminals. You can’t damage it. You could lick the ends and it won’t hurt you."

Uno is also Bluetooth enabled, which helps both customers and the people manufacturing the battery.

Uno will notify users via an app about things they can do to get the battery to run more efficiently — things like saying its charge is low and it should be plugged in or suggesting it should be emptied more before being plugged back in.

“Or you could charge it to full, leave it plugged in and walk off, forget it for like a full month,” Clawson said. “That’s not really good for the battery either, so it could recognize that it’s just been left sitting there and it could empty itself slowly down to a safer like 80 percent state of charge and then stay there rather than be hovering at 100 percent all the time.”

Then, the data collected helps the Uno crew understand how people are using their batteries and in some cases let them know when something is wrong.

“We can advise a customer that they need another one because they’re pushing it so hard that they should have two of them. Or we could also advise the customer that they’re draining it too low,” Clawson said. “Or in a really crazy scenario, we could actually call the customer and tell them, ‘Your battery is really, really hot. I don’t know where you are or what you’re doing but you need to get it out of that environment.’ Bluetooth is just so exciting because we could see how they’re using this battery and we could improve our designs based on what they’re doing.”

Right now, it takes about 10 hours to make a single Uno battery. Clawson predicts that it will be down to two hours by the end of this year and at less than an hour by the end of 2023.

“We’re changing things constantly,” Clawson said. “The customers are giving us feedback. What’s really important right now is to remain really flexible. We want the cost of innovation to be really, really low.”

The applications for the technology behind Uno are far reaching.

“If we nail this golf car thing, then it will be such a different scale of business,” Clawson said. “It’ll be greater than our little shop here.”

One more thing about Uno. Because there’s only one battery, it frees up a bunch of space under the seat of a golf car, leaving room for something nearly essential for a game of golf: a cooler.

'BECOMING LESS WRONG EVERY DAY'

“Why not?”

That’s a question that comes up a lot at Titan Power. That and another question: “What can we do better?”

“We have a saying: ‘We only do it this way because we don’t have a better way yet,’” Clawson said. “If you have the humility to admit that you’re probably wrong on something that you’re doing, something isn’t perfect, and if you have the humility and willingness to get better, then you can, and that can have all these impacts on quality and cost. One (airsoft) battery used to take 48 minutes, and it takes us nine minutes now a year and a half later. It’s way faster and the cost is probably 30 percent less than it was, and the performance is way, way better.”

For the people at Titan, criticism is always welcome.

“We’re wrong somewhere. We messed up something,” Clawson said. “I don’t know what it is yet, but someone’s going to say, ‘I hate this about your thing,’ and then we’ll make it better. It’s just a matter of becoming less wrong every day.”

He continued, “It’s sort of like if an idea is good enough to do, it almost doesn’t matter what it costs or how much work it’s gonna take, we’re going to do it because someone will and it might as well be us. Because we feel like we’re the only ones that care enough to make it right — every time.”

Titan Power’s success at breaking the status quo has not gone unnoticed either.

Clawson has been asked to speak at various events in the area — plus, Titan received a surprise visit by Gov. Little in September.

The governor had an hour between visiting the open house for the Pocatello Idaho Temple and the ribbon cutting for the new Chubbuck City Hall, and a staff member called Clawson and asked if they could stop by.

Clawson said he was impressed by how engaged Little was.

“He asked really good follow-up questions, which made me kind of nervous because I knew he was genuinely listening to everything I was saying,” Clawson said. “He was so prepared. We had made some posts on social media over the last couple months and he or a member of his staff definitely prepared him. He knew some of the manufacturing changes we had made. He had questions about how it affected our profitability and I was like, ‘Whoa.’”

The employees at Titan Power come from all walks of life — none of which include a background in electrical engineering.

“No one here graduated with a degree in any of this,” Clawson said. “Some people here were cake decorators. Some people here were driving shuttle buses. Some people here were doing construction, some people were doing concrete. Some people worked at pizza places. We were just looking for really good people because the skills to build a battery are really unique and unlikely to be something you graduate in.”

What a person has done with their career before isn’t the thing that gets someone hired at Titan. Instead, it’s their personality.

“More important is the person’s character, their personality — if they’re willing to be obsessed about quality, if they’re willing to be constantly learning and constantly teaching because we’re always changing,” Clawson said. “I hope that everyone feels like an owner, like they were part of the improvement, they were part of the change, and when they look back at the finished product, they were like, ‘I made that. It has my DNA in it. It has my mark on it.’ Leveraging all those people, all that passion and that interest and excitement about it has made the product really good. Ideas don’t come from the chief engineer. Certainly, my job is to help do that, but more importantly my job is to listen and to be open to anything and any idea.”

Clawson has big plans for his company — but never at the expense of sacrificing quality.

“Our goal is to grow so big so fast that we either are a market player indefinitely or some company wants us gone so bad that they make us an offer we can’t refuse. Even then, to be honest, it’s not about the money,” he said. “It really is about seeing the future, seeing that this is the answer. If that (potential buyer) isn’t willing to make that happen, then it wouldn’t be an option.”

Clawson and his crew strongly believe that lithium-ion batteries are the future, and they’re happily leading the charge to widespread change.

“We believe that golf cars deserve clean, powerful, simple, enduring power. That should be a thing,” he said. “And if you had a crystal ball to look 100 years in the future, that’s probably what you’d see. Someone needs to do it and it just needs to get done, so we’re just gonna do it.”

For more information, visit unobatteries.com or gettitanpower.com.