It’s a behavioral and operational improvement plan, set up for an organization – in this case school districts,
to engage everyone in the organization, everyone in the school district, to save energy on a daily basis.
We want hundreds of people to do one or two things every day; day in and day out, year after year.
Rather than relying on three or four folks in the facilities department to have to do everything.
So along the way we developed our Schools for Energy Efficiency program with really just three simple goals
Reduce energy usage by 10%, engage students and staff, and achieve energy star recognition.
Powerfully Green is a solar installation company, we don’t resell product so much as we design and install full solar energy systems
for homes and small business. We do both solar electric systems,
and solar hot water systems for space heating or domestic hot water.
We spend a lot of time educating the general public and individual home owners and business owners
how solar works, what it might do for them, what might be feasible at their location, and then it’s up to them if it works for them.
I’m a visionary kind of guy. I like to figure out what’s possible. I don’t like doing the same thing twice.
My wife gets mad at me all the time because I always take different routes when I go from point A to point B.
I just don’t like to see the same territory twice… and that’s what I like to do in business.
I like to see things that maybe nobody else has seen, and then bring the right people to bare to get us there and then get the heck out of the way.
The goal right now, another big thing, is be a net zero building, where you are not really buying or using any external energy.
It’s all basically generated or used on site, and the only way to get there is to really to be very very efficient
and then buy minimally to supplement whatever it is you can’t produce yourself.
So we basically along the way said this is our vision, this is what we’d like to do as a solar business, what will it take…?
And then we figured out how to get those certifications. So I became a general contractor and I’m still the
license carrying person for our business.
We learned a lot about state license requirements, state insurance requirements and all that.
You could look at them as obstacles, or you could look at them as opportunities to learn. And so we figured out how to do it,
we figured out how to be our own accountants, and just kind of went from there.
In the process though, always our underlying reason for doing this was sustainable living.
In our energy business for example, we know that customers and organizations want to buy new equipment.
We know that they want to buy solar collectors and wind turbines.
But really, the biggest bang for the buck right now is to squeeze what they’ve got.
In other words, make their systems and their buildings run as efficiently… And the way you do that is through the people that run them.
So we always try to teach people first, how much electricity are you using? Is there anything you can do about that?
Can we help you learn to use less electricity? Have you tried this, have you tried that…?
So we were able to reduce our bill by 50% even before we installed solar. That can be inspiring to people,
to save money, and save their impact on the planet…
So we first teach them how electricity works, then we talk to them about what solar can do at their house.
Why do you come to work in the morning? What is it that makes you do this sort of thing?
The best advice I can give someone is that, don’t look at things you don’t know as barriers, they’re opportunities.
Either opportunities for you to learn something new and accomplish what needs to be done,
or opportunities to network with someone else who has those skills, who knows how to accomplish what needs to be done.
Learning who you are and what you’re good at, and having the patience and perseverance to kind of stick it through.
We’re very passionate about what we do, and we love what we’re doing.
And I think we’re not worried about how many hours we spend a day doing it
or what all is involved in accomplishing our goal because we love what we do.
For me it’s working with people. It’s all about the people I work with… whether they’re clients, employees, peers…
It’s surrounding yourself with people that give energy to a process or a problem.
To find people that bring life to things, that see everything as an opportunity, that the glass is always half full, it’s partly sunny.
I think if you have the vision, and you know it’s a good thing to be doing, and it’s a necessary work to be doing,
that you’ll figure out how to make that happen.
There is a need for energy products. There is a need for energy businesses.
And really, small businesses I think are the birth place for a lot of these ideas.
Because people are smart. They can figure things out; they can be nimble to create something… they don’t …
I’ve worked in large corporations and it’s very difficult to get things to happen because companies are just so large.
Smaller companies have a great advantage of changing and matching… finding out what the needs of the customers are,
and then creating a product or service to fill that need. It’s truly not that difficult.
You just have to identify what the need is, and what you’re good at doing, and then bring the two together.
Good things can happen.