Right place, right time, with an eye for opportunity, a commitment to economic growth for all, and the will to get things done. That's entrepreneur Camille Terry, co-founder of ChargerHelp, a startup in Los Angeles.
It addresses a modern problem – the deplorable state of public charging stations for electric vehicles – while training an often overlooked workforce for jobs in a growing sector of the economy.
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Billions of dollars are pouring in to build a national electric vehicle charging network, with billions more in California. However, outside of Tesla's Supercharging network, equipment deployed by many charging companies has proven unreliable, with more than 20% of chargers overall down at a given time.
Without reliable public chargers, convincing people to buy electric vehicles to combat climate change and cut pollution will be more difficult.
Chargers say they are working hard to fix the reliability problem, enhancing their repair and maintenance capabilities, doing more training, and turning to third-party companies like ChargerHelp.
The charger sector is full of startups hoping to find success in a fast-growing market. ChargerHelp, with $21 million in venture capital funding, develops software to maintain and repair chargers. Unlike many competitors, the company also trains workers in network operations and field repair, focusing on people and communities that have long been overlooked during previous periods of economic and technological change.
ChargerHelp “creates great jobs, with a focus on overall and racial diversity,” said David Epstein, CEO of Unreasonable Group, which connects startups with investors. ChargerHelp is not just a do-gooder organization, he said. “They have a great business model from a cash flow perspective.”
Like many entrepreneurs in what has come to be called “clean tech,” the opportunities came as somewhat of a surprise. Terry's story is an example of the good fortune favored by the prepared mind.
I grew up in South Los Angeles. Her large family places strong weight on commitment and hard work. It paid off. I rose quickly in any organization I became a part of. Motivated by the idea of financial success, she took a job at a bank near Philadelphia. He started working as a part-time teller and ended up as a business bank manager.
She loved Philly. “One of the greatest things is that there are a lot of Black people,” she said on the Founders Unfound podcast shortly after founding ChargerHelp in 2019. She visited her cousin Ray, who was working in Washington, D.C., on Capitol Hill. “Everyone was like nerds, and it was weird to see black wealth concentrated like that,” she said. It was inspiring.
Her mother's recurrent cancer brought her back to Los Angeles in 2016. She put her energy into caregiving, taking on the relatively easy job of handling customer support calls at EV Connect, a small company that makes software for charging stations. It wasn't long before the growing company asked her to set up a call center and customer experience department.
“Charging stations are going to have these wonky issues,” she said. At the time, shipping companies relied heavily on expensive electricians to fix what turned out to be software problems, on equipment they were not trained on. In practice, there was little awareness of the need for a job called “electrical charger technician.”
“It would be great to have a workforce that wants to do this,” she said.
She left to work as a consultant for a clean technology incubator in Los Angeles. Its CEO, Matt Petersen, encouraged her to set up a company to train and employ people who could provide technical services to the shipping industry. Its first contract was with Southern California Edison to work on electric school bus chargers. The company took off from there.
Petersen said Terry is “a star who is able to share a vision for people to rally around and make things happen.” “Her story and Yvette’s story is a hero’s journey for us.”
Yvette is Yvette Ellis, a workforce development expert whom Terry met at LACI and felt an instant connection with. After watching Ellis in action, Terry brought her to ChargerHelp, and was so impressed that he made Ellis co-founder of the company.
ChargerHelp's founders are Southern California natives — Yvette Ellis, left, grew up in Compton and Camille Terry in South Los Angeles
(Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)
Ellis, who grew up in Compton, wasn't sure at first. “These white people with clean science are good people, and they're going to save the world, but I didn't necessarily see myself in that space.”
But it was a perfect fit. In the podcast interview, Terry said that cleantech executives “talk a lot about equality, and it's really cool to be a part of it.”
Ellis remembers that when she was a young teenager, she saw a woman behind the counter at a daycare center in Pool Park, who was clearly in charge and told others what to do. “That was my first introduction to the idea that there is a job, and then there are the people who provide the job.” She asked to be hired and by the end of the summer she became the program coordinator.
Ellis got her job training skills at the federal Department of Labor's Job Corps program, whose historic mission is to train people who don't plan to go to college to get jobs in the trades. Like Terry, she joined LACI as a consultant.
At ChargerHelp, Ellis set out to create a certified training program for charger technicians, working closely with SAE International, the standards-setting organization for the automotive industry. Training takes approximately six weeks before field deployment.
Beyond the technical material, Ellis emphasizes the importance of the situation. Graduating from a training program to a new job is a big step that affects not only new employees, but future graduates as well. “If you don't give it your all, you're really burning a huge bridge,” she says.
The field technician does not need to know the software code to do this work. What we need is a basic understanding of how electricity works, how EV chargers work, how EVs work, and how to handle software on a computer or smartphone in coordination with remote experts in the network operations center. Ellis said federally approved safety training is an important part of the program.
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The type of job that ChargerHelp trains for — a combination of familiarity with computer software, basic knowledge of electricity and electronics, and a reasonable degree of manual dexterity — will become increasingly common as software continues to infiltrate devices in everyday life, from Ring doorbells to personal robots to Applications on the car's dashboard screen.
High school graduates can do this; So do those who graduate from college but may lack skills that match what employers are looking for.
Heaven Holmes of Fresno graduated from Cal State Dominguez Hills in psychology and criminal justice last year and was returning home to look for work when her mother saw Terry being interviewed on the local TV news. “There's an African-American woman who works here on TV,” her mother said. Something about repairing the charger. Holmes applied, trained and became a technician at ChargerHelp.
“I didn't know what to expect, but I'm curious and will always want to gain more knowledge,” she said. She said that every day represents a new challenge.
She is happy to be working in an industry that has a future and the opportunity to move up the ladder. “The world is changing, and these jobs are not as low-key as you might think. People are thrilled when they see that a charger that has been broken for months is working fine.”
Electric vehicle charger field technicians earn $20 to $60 per hour, concentrated in the $35 to $40 range. Certified electricians make more. To date, ChargerHelp has trained 1,000 workers and recently began a train-the-trainer program for other companies and workforce development organizations.
Of course, ChargerHelp is not the only company developing charging software and training workers to use it. Charging network companies like Flo, ChargePoint, and Electrify America are expanding their training programs.
So do charger manufacturers, including ABM. “It's important to build awareness about careers in general across America,” said Mark Hawkinson, head of technology solutions at ABM. “We're seeing a drain on skill sets on how to maintain critical infrastructure. Our schools aren't teaching shopping anymore. We need to get back to those basics.”
Even companies that have relied for decades on fossil fuel distribution have been moving quickly toward electric vehicle charging, including gas pump installation and maintenance company Owl Services. “We have seen an uptick in calling for technicians, especially in the Los Angeles market,” said Owl Vice President Dave Patrick. Los Angeles represents the company's “highest growth potential” at the moment.
Detroit's Marcus Glenn was recently coached by ChargePoint but is keeping his options open. He was working for an automotive heating and air conditioning supplier when he signed up to learn how to repair a charger. He has successfully completed the course but is sticking with his current job – for now. The auto industry is undergoing dramatic change, and layoffs are a constant threat. Glenn likes knowing he's prepared for the future. “It's nice to have some form of stability. I'll look for those opportunities and see where that leads.”
He recommends moving on to others. “If you're curious about this, be a curious cat. Go find out. There are a lot of ways to get into this industry. There will always be work.”
