When Power Professionals Learn Faster, the Renewables Revolution Moves Faster

It’s after 5pm.  You find out that your rookie project manager failed to get the information needed for that $30,000 change order.  Now it’s too late for it to be submitted today and too late for it to be approved until at least next month.  In fact, you’re not sure that the owner will accept the change order at all given the delay.  It’s a blunder that’s potentially worth almost half of your project manager’s annual salary, and the third major mistake by someone on the team this month. 

Is your company on its way to death by a thousand cuts?  

Sitting in your weekly debrief meeting, you know it’s a matter of time before someone says “Well, there’s no substitute for experience” and everyone nods, accepting this statement, which amounts to “sh** happens.”  But you know that the fault lies with you. You’ve simply failed to prepare your team, and they’re making expensive mistakes as a result.  

Scenes like this play out every day in the solar industry.  Earlier in my career, I was (often!) the one failing to prepare my team.  As a COO, charged with training a rapidly growing and inexperienced solar developer & EPC, I started questioning the “sh** happens” explanation as to why my team was making unforced errors that led to stress, burnout, and lost margins. 

I was charged with leading our team through a major business pivot into commercial and utility solar work after our core residential business effectively ended overnight (courtesy of the Louisiana State Legislature).  We’d already attempted two unsuccessful pivots, once to commercial demand management and once LED lighting, flailing around as we searched for traction, and had barely pulled out of several death spirals.  Multiple company owners and other senior leaders had already jumped from the ship that seemed to be sinking.  Multiple rounds of layoffs had hurt morale.

We’d finally found a new business line that seemed to be working, but as a team we were starting from close to scratch.  A year earlier, one of my construction managers had been our head of social media and marketing.  Another had been an intern.  Our engineer had been a residential service technician.  Our lead estimator had been designing LED lighting. I doubted that my inexperienced team could develop skills and judgment fast enough to keep us from going under.  We didn’t have the budget to hire without more layoffs.  Instead, my plan was to personally backstop the team until we became profitable.  So I did.  I worked very long hours, grew the business, and patched things together as needed.

Eventually, we accumulated the resources to hire.  I thought we could simply recruit experienced managers to help mentor and manage our team.  I was wrong.  Pickings were very slim for senior solar team members. There’s simply not enough talent to go around in our growing industry, and the candidates that applied were on the job market for a reason.  Time in the industry alone turned out not to equate to competence.  The first few “experienced” hires that we made against our better judgment quickly revealed themselves to be disastrous.

At the end of this long sprint, it felt like the finish line was being moved.

We considered our options.  Keep taking chances on the standard recruitment process?  That had just led to additional problems and wasted resources.  Hire headhunters?  We were profitable and growing but still not at a place to win a price war for talent.  Keep backstopping the company operations personally?  After a couple of years of working long days and weekends, I knew that I was approaching my limit.

So I decided to believe in my existing team.  Instead of bringing in outside experts to run the company, I turned my focus to developing expertise in the people we already had.  I started by giving everyone something pretty close to a blank check for a training budget.  And it helped!  But while the available training options were a good start, they were rarely directly relevant to the challenges the team faced every day.  

Our team was capable, talented, and hungry to improve - they just didn’t have access to the resources they needed, no matter the budget I gave them.  So over the course of several months, I shifted my own priorities to put more emphasis on developing our team through internal trainings.  I made sure that I coached every management team member every single week, on everything from value engineering sites, to building relationships with clients and vendors, to leading their own team’s successfully.  I squeezed what I could out of all of our schedules to conduct intensive internal workshops and trainings - sometimes it was only an hour a month, sometimes I was able to find a half day or full day or more.  Within a few months, I see the whole team start to level up as a result.   

Prioritizing professional development made a huge impact on everything we did as a company. People began to come to me with solutions they had identified instead of problems they needed help with. Morale improved.  But it was still a balancing act. As we had the capacity to take on new challenges as a company, we were barely making enough time for training to keep up with the growth.   

As an executive with a broad docket of responsibilities, I was never able to give training the undivided attention it deserved, but believing in my team paid off over time.   The team developed and the company grew.  We expanded from a struggling, local residential solar installer to one of the top 50 solar companies in the country in just a few years. 

I left that company several years ago, feeling successful but totally exhausted.

Many of those “inexperienced” team members now manage their own growing solar teams. Overall, things worked out.  But I’ve never shaken the feeling that we could have grown faster, without the sleepless nights, near miss disasters, and with more long-term sustainability if we’d simply had access to better training resources for our team.

When I began offering management consulting for others in the solar industry in 2019, I saw that it wasn’t just my team that was suffering from a lack of preparation.  I’ve watched some version of this phenomenon play out in almost every solar company I’ve ever worked with.  While I’ve been able to help companies find a path toward growth, manage acquisitions, reduce risk, and scale, I’ve also been in a position to watch them lose hundreds of thousands, (sometimes even millions), of dollars a year due to lack of internal capacity to execute on their current opportunities. 

Dig down far enough, and many of the problems my clients come to me with as a consultant have a single root - they are trying to operate and grow their business with under-skilled teams.  Some of these clients are heroically and almost single-handedly running businesses making tens of millions of dollars in revenue with dozens of employees.  They personally operate every aspect of a large business with what amounts to a big group of “assistants” - employees who lack some of the skills and the judgment necessary to take on decision making roles. They know they need to distribute responsibilities.  But they don’t know how they would train their team to operate at the high standards that their clients expect. 

Better professional training isn’t just a nice thing to have - it’s the key to stabilizing our tumultuous industry and unlocking the clean energy revolution.   Companies are faltering, and projects are stalling, due to a lack of ability to develop talent.   As I took on more coaching and training projects as a consultant, I realized how deep the problem went, and how tantalizingly close to solutions we are as an industry.  I came to believe that the saying “there’s no substitute for experience” is just an excuse for bad training systems.

I realized that the challenge of training the next generation of solar leaders deserved a lot more of my time.  Generation Solar is the result.

My core goal with Generation Solar is simple.  I want to be able to provide you with the type of solar training that I wished I had for my team.  I want to remove the biggest obstacle to renewables taking over the energy grid - our own lack of expertise, imagination, and willpower.  I want to train the next generation of solar leaders, and support them as they lead the clean energy revolution.

The challenges aren’t small. In a series of articles over the coming weeks, we’ll dig into exactly what we’re up against, and how we intend to take solar training, and solar companies, to the next level.  

We live in an era defined by potential.  Abundant clean energy, transportation, and a solution to climate change are possible.  But we are in our own way.  To capitalize on this historical moment before it passes, we have to find a force multiplier - a method to build clean energy leaders, faster.

In the next article in the series, we discuss how the solar industry’s growing pains are putting the energy transition at risk, and why better solutions for supporting solar teams aren’t already available.  Or you can skip to the third article in the series to understand the specific issues with traditional training approaches, and what problems we’re working to overcome so that our training approach can build real-world judgment, knowledge, and skills in less time.