Richard W. Rodriguez
Edward Morgan’s company, Revitalize, which builds electric vehicle charging equipment — commercial and residential chargers, accessories, and components — has an office upstairs that looks like something out of Victor Frankenstein’s home office.
Edward Morgan and our readers are well-acquainted.
We met him several years ago as he was building a business that manufactured electric vehicle chargers. He is still building them. In fact, he’s building so many that he’s bursting at the seams at TechFW’s base of operations in the old gymnasium of the historic James E. Guinn School on the South Freeway.
Morgan’s company, Revitalize, which builds electric vehicle charging equipment — commercial and residential chargers, accessories, and components — has an office upstairs that looks like something out of Victor Frankenstein’s home office. Components, parts, screws, boards, and all sorts of other things that are a total mystery to a tech layman like me.
One office downstairs serves as an assembly plant — another as a storage room.
Morgan, 54, knows that it’s time to leave the nest.
The timetable remains uncertain, but Revitalize plans to construct a 30,000-square-foot facility in Arlington. Morgan is collaborating with the Arlington Economic Development Corporation to identify a site and developer.
Revitalize is currently building, moving, and storing chargers in something like 1,500 to 1,800 square feet, Morgan estimates.
“Believe it or not, we do a lot of volume out of these spaces,” Morgan says.
Morgan, a New Orleans native who relocated after Hurricane Katrina, started Revitalize in 2013, well in front of the curve on electric vehicles.
“This is when people were saying, ‘What is an EV?’” he says.
He started the company part time, remaining at his job at AT&T. When he left there to take on Revitalize full time in 2015, he had 18 years at the company.
He’s designed every component of his chargers, commercial and residential. The business he bootstrapped for about five years grew very quickly. He got involved with TechFW, the business incubator, starting in a very small office. The business continued to need more space.
His clients have included the city of Arlington, Oncor, Hillwood, Cook Children’s Medical Center, and apartments in a number of states. His residential products, which he sells direct-to-consumer, are in every state.
It’s the kind of story industrious storytellers on TV wanted to tell. And they have. Morgan and Revitalize, which employs five but with plans to ramp up to 60 once the new facility in Arlington is built and the business scales, were featured this season on PBS’s “START UP,” a national television series that tells the stories of American small-business owners. Emmy nominated host and writer Gary Bredow travels across America interviewing a wide range of diverse small-business owners to hear their personal stories and find out what it really takes to start a successful business from the ground up.
Morgan qualifies.
He left New Orleans after high school for Prairie View A&M in Prairie View, Texas. He planned to study biology on a pre-med course. It didn’t work out.
“I was partying like a rock star,” he says with a smile and a laugh.
So, it was back home to New Orleans and the harsh lessons of the reality check of forced retreat, the disappointment of not meeting expectations, and, gasp, a job.
“I didn’t want a job,” he says laughing.
So, in New Orleans, he went back to school and got a job, a full-time job.
Morgan’s new route was ITT Technical Institute. Electrical engineering was the new pursuit. He finished in three years — working during the day and going to school at night.
That’ll put a crimp in one’s beer consumption.
“That's where I kind of got my love for electronics,” Morgan says. “I had already been doing computers for a long time, but electronics kind of lived differently. I got to be able to sort things and really understand circuitry, how it works, how those things come together.”
After school, he began progressing and climbing the ranks of Bell South, having moved into upper management by the time AT&T acquired the company.
His original concept for the electric car charger — “The Beast,” as he calls it — still has a home in his TechFW “warehouse.”
“I'll never forget this,” Morgan says, “so, we're working on a design … we have this great design on what it's going to look like you. We still had challenges on how to put it together, because this was new to me. The concept of electric was no big deal. It was more of understanding the protocols and those kinds of things. So, we're sitting there, and I'm creating in my mind this super complex piece of equipment.
“[An associate] goes, ‘Dude, you can make that right now. Just go and buy something off the shelf and put all of this together.’ And sure enough, we come up with this thing.”
Mechanical engineers at the Texas Manufacturing Assistance Center at UT Arlington, which has a partnership with TechFW, helped them put it together.
The initial idea, Morgan says, was to build a charger with a big screen and sell advertising and “make all this money.”
“Until we actually did it,” he says. “We realized nobody wanted to buy advertising. We realized we weren’t advertisers. And then we realized it was super expensive to do it. We abandoned that very quickly.”
Back into retreat, he decided to focus on what he was — an engineer.
“Here's who we are, right? We're engineers. We build things. We're coders, developers, and we understand it. So, let's do what we do best,” Morgan says. That's kind of where we are. And we can create a product. We can come up with an idea now and have that product in full-scale prototype in like two weeks. That's how fast we can move.”
