From the Pool to the Pitch - James Tillman - Chief Endurance Officer with Greg McDonough

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From the Pool to the Pitch - James Tillman - Chief Endurance Officer with Greg McDonough - Episode #159

May 01, 2026

Can an endurance mindset built in the pool at age five fuel a clean energy revolution decades later?

Today’s guest is a visionary entrepreneur at the forefront of clean energy innovation! Introducing James Tillman, CEO and Co-Founder of EVlogic. James partners with host Gregory McDonough to share how more than 16 years in the electric vehicle infrastructure industry shaped his approach to sales, leadership, and building a business with staying power. He also delves into how the endurance mindset he developed as a competitive swimmer translates directly into navigating complex enterprise sales cycles, and how learning to fail fast became just as important as going the distance.

Takeaways:

James’s career arc from the City of Houston to NRG’s EV startup to founding EVlogic gave him a layered understanding of how large organizations, startups, and small businesses each require a fundamentally different pace and mindset.
His background as a competitive swimmer training 20+ hours a week shaped his approach to enterprise sales, where multimillion-dollar deals can take a year or two to close and require strategic patience and disciplined relationship-building.
One of James’s most actionable lessons is learning to fail early and fail fast. At his previous company, four out of ten deals he pursued to the bitter end were ultimately canceled, consuming seven to ten months and hundreds of labor hours for nothing.
In complex enterprise sales, identifying everyone who can say no is just as critical as finding who can say yes. Missing a key stakeholder late in a deal can delay the close by months and restart the entire sales cycle.
James founded EVlogic after recognizing that projects were taking four months and 160+ labor hours from creation to award. His AI-enabled platform handles design, engineering, and pricing of EV charging sites in real time, eliminating the costly two-to-three-week redesign cycles that used to follow every customer change request.
James lives by the hiring philosophy “hire hard, manage easy”: find someone with the right skillset, relevant experience, and the personality to weather the hard days alongside you, then share the vision and trust them to execute.
The US currently has one public charging port for every 30 EVs, compared to one-to-nine in Europe and one-to-two in China. With charging utilization economics already working and deployment growing 30% year over year, James sees a massive and still largely unbuilt market ahead.

Quote of the Show:

“Everybody kind of sees in business the overnight success and they don’t really see the 10 or 14 years, however many years you put into it before you get to that success.” - James Tillman

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