Episode 11
· 36:10
I will say that our business is stronger than it has ever been.
Amanda:The success of growth and where I see companies growing consistently really is your people.
Hervé:I mean, the story is not does it make power? Because they all make power. The story is what does it power? This is what solar installers need to know with your host Herve Billie and Joe Mahamati. Hi there.
Hervé:It's Herve and Joe in what solar installers need to know, where we interview solar CEOs and experts on how they run their business on the solar cluster. We ask their private revenue numbers. We give actionable advice and learn about trade secrets so you can run and grow your solar business. Joe and I built a solar company from 0 to 12,000,000 sales and got successfully acquired. If you'd like to do the same or do better, go to sungo.com/blog to get actionable behind the scenes lessons on running and growing your solar business.
Hervé:And now without further ado, let's jump right into the next episode. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of what solar installers need to know. We welcome Amanda, CEO of Amicus o and m cooperative. Hi, Amanda.
Amanda:Hey. Thanks for having me, Herve.
Hervé:We've known each other for several years, and you've been instrumental in getting Amicus o and m off the ground. And you're a big advocate and voice in the o and m solar o and m industries. Maybe we start with all the items that you've done over the years in the soy industry. You've been part of Namaste Solar, part of Amicus, part of the Clean Energy Credit Union, Amicus o and m You've been at the center of all of them.
Amanda:Well, that might be giving me a little too much credit. But, yeah, I've been in the solar industry since 02/2003. So I have had an opportunity to do a lot of things in that time. As you mentioned, I was part of Namaste Solar. I joined when it was just a little baby startup back in o six.
Amanda:And Namaste Solar is a regional EPC and o and m provider in Colorado. It's a very cool company. It's an employee owned cooperative, a certified b corp. And when we became an employee owned cooperative in 2011, we spent over a year researching cooperative business models, and we became very enchanted with what cooperative stand for because they are fundamentally democratic organizations in the way that they are governed. Because in a cooperative paradigm, whoever your members are, whether that's your employees or member companies or in the cases of, like, REI, like a retail cooperative, every member owns one share.
Amanda:So all the members are on the same footing. And then when it comes to matters of governance and decision making, each shareholder is entitled to a vote. And so it's a very egalitarian form of governance that we feel like right some of the wrongs in the conventional corporate society. Plus, it gives a lot of those members an opportunity to participate in the risk and the reward of company ownership, including profit sharing or, potentially, loss sharing. And that allows, like, employees and member companies to participate in the wealth building that comes with corporate ownership.
Amanda:So we got really into that when we became an employee owned cooperative, and we learned about purchasing cooperatives. So in 2011, we also cofounded the Amicus Solar Cooperative, which is a purchasing cooperative. We call it our sister cooperative, and it has today over 85 member companies throughout The United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico that aggregate their purchases through a central point. So they get better volume based pricing, than any of them would independently. And then a subset of those companies got together in 2014 and said, you know, we're gonna need a good solution for residential financing forever.
Amanda:And so we investigated, starting a bank, starting a fund, and we ultimately settled on a credit union because credit unions are financial cooperatives. So we started the Clean Energy Credit Union. It is a going concern today. They are crushing it over there. I'm really proud of how far the Clean Energy Credit Union has come.
Amanda:And then right around the time that we hired CEO for Clean Energy Credit Union, we wrote a grant to start the Amicus o and m cooperative. And we were originally founded in 2016 with the help of a grant from the Department of Energy's SunShot initiative. And I moved over to run this organization full time in 2017, so I just passed my eighth anniversary in this chair. Right. Amicus o and m cooperative today has 50 member companies throughout The US and Canada that go out and provide the long term operations and maintenance or O and S services for solar PV and best systems.
Hervé:I see a trend there. Are you already thinking about the next cooperative to build? Is there not another play on this one?
Amanda:Well, I think our friend Steven Irvin has another one in the works. So he's he's incorrigible. What can we say?
Hervé:Well, if if it's a good trend, I just will keep going. I mean, every one of those organizations that you mentioned I worked with, and and all of them are just making an impact. It's it's phenomenal.
Amanda:It is. I used to joke. Whenever we encountered a business problem, we would say, is there a cooperative for that? So that is a part of it. But but, again, I would say one of the reasons why each of these organizations is so impactful is that they are built on a philosophy that when we come together as a community to focus on the common challenges that we face, we can solve them more effectively together than any one of us could individually.
Amanda:And that's that's built into the corporate structure to some extent, but has been reinforced culturally through the choices that we've made about how we've grown these communities and how we've chosen to approach the business challenges that we all do face.
Hervé:Yeah. Well, a business is technically a dictatorship. Right? Or it can be set up as that.
Amanda:Can be.
Hervé:Doesn't have to be, but that is kind of the setup we kinda take it for granted. But but at the same time, I remember very vividly walking in was in my first amicus retreat. Like, it was a big auditorium. You walk in, and you see all those other people dealing with the same problems as you day in, day out. And then it was a very democratic I know, like, the peace signs, like, when you agree when somebody's speaking and you agree with it, you just like that resonates.
Hervé:You make that sign. It's like it it happens. Used a lot, and it's phenomenal to be in a room like that. Like, it it's maybe hard to describe. It's a it's a feeling that you're not alone as a as a soldier CEO, and it gives you not necessarily leverage although through the purchasing company does, but it helps you move forward.
Hervé:Like, you're not the only one trying to to to do the right thing and feeling a support network is is phenomenal.
Amanda:I think you just described one of the really unique aspects of being part of the cooperative, which is that there are not very many spaces where you can come together with people who sit in the same chair as you, but in a different geography or a different company, and share honestly and openly what you're facing and feel that support and feel the solidarity. Conferences and trade associations are not necessarily places for that level of sharing. Yeah. And that's what makes the cooperatives a pretty unique space and unique community.
Hervé:Yeah. Yeah. So if you're a solar CEO out there and you're not part of Amicus, don't worry. You're the only CEO trying to figure everything out. And all the bragger brigawatts where you say, oh, I installed two megawatts last month and these and these and these.
Hervé:Not everybody thinks like that and acts acts like that. And especially at trade conferences, there's enough people there that you can find, like and and just get answers to you, some of your questions from HR to to financial to cash flow because cash flow is always an issue. But why don't we speak more about O and M? So what do you love about Amicus O and M and maybe O and M in general?
Amanda:I had a realization the other day, which is kind of a captain obvious realization, but it really solidified for me why operations and maintenance is so important. And a huge part of my why, why I have dedicated this many years of my life to this aspect of our industry is that I care very much that solar PV systems do what we said they were going to do. And I've been campaigning to change the name of our service and o and m teams to the integrity team.
Hervé:Mhmm.
Amanda:Because we are the ones that ensure that what we sold to a customer comes true. But the captain obvious realization is I was listening to a presentation by a very smart Stanford professor about how we could power the entire planet a 100% on renewable energy by 2035. And he was showing
Hervé:Five. Yeah. Alright. Well, we have we have some work.
Amanda:We have some work to do. But, you know, he was showing the graph of, like, what the resource mix would need to be. You know, that it it looks just like the sort of cumulative installed solar graphs where it just goes up into the right other way. And somebody leaned over and said, yeah. But that only works if all the previously installed systems are still working.
Hervé:Keep their yeah.
Amanda:And if the climate crisis is burning around us and renewable energy is one of the answers, it has to stay operational for us to truly solve this problem for our planet. And so the O and M technicians are the front line of making sure that the systems stay operational. And that's not to say that the installers and the developers aren't also important. Of course, they are. But O and M technicians and O and M as a as a concept has been a little bit overlooked in what we've paid attention to over the last twenty years.
Amanda:We've been in this building frenzy, and it's all about the new system and the cool, sexy, shiny new modules that we see coming out every year at the shows. O and M, by contrast, is not as sexy, but it is just as or more important at the end of the day than getting all the new systems built. Because if it falls apart and doesn't work, it will undermine confidence in the industry, and it will hamper our ability to save the planet. But So that's what I love about Owen is that it's a really important piece of this puzzle.
Hervé:So are you are you saying that solar is not like zero maintenance and all maintenance is free? Isn't that? Herve. How long do we have?
Amanda:Yeah. That's actually a huge part of the challenge that we have the hole we have dug for ourselves as an industry is allowing customers to develop the impression that solar is a maintenance free technology and that maintenance is free financially free for all time. These statements are not true. Solar sits out in the elements and is subject to, ironically enough, the harsh effects of UV and other forms of extreme weather, and it breaks. Virtually every system will need maintenance at some point in its life, and that maintenance is not financially free.
Amanda:So we need to change the script. We need to stop letting salespeople say things like, yeah. There's no moving parts. There's no maintenance. We need to start saying things like solar is generally a low maintenance technology, and we are very proud to share with you that our company is a full service partner.
Amanda:We have a dedicated service department. We will be here for you if and when something breaks to come out and fix it with responsible, efficient, and reasonably priced technician.
Hervé:Well, may maybe this is a moment where I apologize for my early customers. Although customers don't usually listen to what so installers need to know. But but, anyway, I'll I'll apologize because I made that mistake, but I didn't know better. In the early early days when when Ipsen Solar got started, maybe kind of a hippie part of me, I I was amazed by solar panels and what it could do and what it has done. But but I was telling people that there is no maintenance.
Hervé:That thing just keeps keeps working. No moving parts. We are the moving parts installing your system. Because there are no moving parts, there is low maintenance. No maintenance.
Hervé:That's what I said at the beginning. So Yeah. I apologize. But I think as an industry, we matured. And running Ipsen Solar and making it go, at some point, I start like, oh, wait.
Hervé:It might just go down. Well, maybe that's a known issue, but then the actual inverters of a solar is the main inverter actually goes down. I saw firsthand that my what I promised customers wasn't true, so we had to adapt and change. Once I learned that wasn't true, after crying a little bit, wait. What do mean?
Hervé:Like, solar is not just working for forever. Then, yeah, you you say that you say solar is low maintenance. So all every solar CEO listening to this podcast, you raise your hands and take the pledge, say that from now on, you will say it's low maintenance. There we go.
Amanda:You stole my line. I love baking that into my presentations. But the truth is, Herve, in the early days, we had to spend a lot of time convincing customers that solar worked and was a reliable technology. And so I probably was guilty of that early in my sales career as well. And that it was because solar was so unfamiliar to your customers.
Amanda:Right? We were, at the time, at least in my case, in the early aughts, talking to customers who'd never seen it in action. Mhmm.
Hervé:Yeah.
Amanda:Customers today are much more acclimated to seeing panels on roofs. Right? That's not as much of a novelty as it was back then. And so we were we spent a lot of our time explaining how it works, why inverters are reliable, why these weren't gonna harm your house. And so it was understandable at the time that it was we didn't wanna introduce the potential that it could break because it was hard enough to get people to buy it when it was this relatively new or, you know, seemingly untested technology.
Hervé:And and I think it's also just showing how the industry has has changed. First, I just didn't know. And then once you know is like like you mentioned, like, the friction between do you see it in the sales process, how do you how to adjust it. Maybe we talk about that later on. But one of the first systems I installed as as a as an installer, there was no fall protection.
Hervé:It was not a thing. Never heard of it. So I was on the roof. You know, we put, like, a two by four at the end of the roof on the edge so that all the screws because it was a UniWacker. It like, a lot of little bolts and nuts at that time.
Hervé:And so, you know, all of that just came down, and you had like, at the end of the day, you just scrape everything together. So the industry has changed. We know it's low maintenance, so let's adjust. Let's adapt. And so maybe we can speak about how in the sales process, how do you make o and m how do you make it sexy?
Hervé:How do you, as a company, I think the sexiest part of o and m is like, it's a revenue maker, not just a pure cost to your business. Yes. I think cash flow wise, that is sexy. So
Amanda:Yes. Yes. The bean counter is like recurring revenue. Hey. Hey.
Amanda:But, actually, this brings up two important points. One is, you know, if you're thinking about this as an installer, as an EPC, I think another common sin that a lot of us committed in the early years was we didn't know how to correctly account for our workmanship warranties. And what we learned over the years is that when you sell a system that comes with a workmanship warranty, let's say it's a five year workmanship warranty, there is actually an accounting best practice that you should strive for where you allocate some money out of the initial sale price to a liability account on your balance sheet. Because when you promise that your work will be intact five years later, the accounting world regards that as a liability. You are promising future work.
Amanda:And if you don't set aside money for it, they call that an unfunded liability, and they don't like it. Mhmm. So GAAP accounting rules says that you should put some money aside anytime you're promising future work. And then when you actually go out to perform that work, let's say you do a truck roll to and you determine that it is a workmanship issue, you can bill against that liability account on your balance sheet and pull it over to your profit and loss statement. So in a way, it's like a deferred profit from your EPC sale that you recognize at the time the services are rendered.
Amanda:And there are a couple of different ways to do it. This is the gap accounting rules, but there are different ways to account for it. But this concept of having a source of revenue that is attached to every service call that you perform is revolutionary because for so many EPCs, they follow a pretty conventional trajectory. You open for business. You start installing systems.
Amanda:You get a service call. Something's broken? Weird. You pull somebody off the crew to go fix the thing. They go back out.
Amanda:Eventually, you start getting enough service calls that it becomes disruptive to the workflow of your installation crew. So you dedicate a person
Hervé:to handle the infrastructure. Keep going. I have good memories of of what you meant.
Amanda:But, yeah, this is this is how it goes for everybody. Eventually, you start if you've been in business a little while, you also have competitors go out of business. So then you start getting calls from orphan systems that need service that you did not install. And you're like, I can charge those customers money to go out and do those service calls. But up until that point, you may have been recording all of that service work just as costs on your profit and loss statement.
Amanda:And if you look at the service and o n division as a pure cost center, you are not capturing the full picture of that work. So when you have this balance sheet account set up that you can bill against for your workmanship work or your warranty work, it allows you to recognize that revenue for your service department. And now you have not only the cost, but you have a corresponding revenue, and it should make you money. And this is true for your workbench of warranty items. Then you have your customers that you did not install.
Amanda:Those are pure cash customers, and you should also have a revenue item for any OEM stipends that come in. If you have to go out and repair, you know, a manufacturer failure, many of them will offer a labor stipend. So, really, all the service work that you perform should have a form of revenue attached to it so that you're correctly accounting for the very important work that your service teams are doing.
Hervé:So if I recap, you have two types of O and M. You have O and M that you've not installed. Like, somebody that you've not installed, another customer calls you. Can you come fix this? You say yes.
Hervé:You send somebody that's pure revenue, to the profit and loss just as a on a profit statement there. Revenue comes in, cash flow, done. The other side is every time you sell a solar system, you should put some money aside. Now that's not on the profit and loss as the other side. That's a balance sheet.
Hervé:So that's a liability. You say, for example, what we did at Ipsen was, I think, $50, I think, we put aside assuming that we would have one truck haul per project of its lifetime. That was the assumption, which later on, I I believe, was a good strong assumption that got verified by others. But, basically, you put 250 aside. Okay.
Hervé:There's been some inflation, so maybe now it's more than 300. Anyway, around $250, you put aside per project, and you put that as a liability on your books. Now if a customer of yours calls you a year later, so like, hey. You know, something is missing. Your conduit is off or is getting detached something.
Hervé:Come check it out. You send some dedicated O and M people, but then who pays for that type of maintenance? Because right now, it's just a liability. There is still no cash coming into your company. So where is that cash coming from?
Amanda:So this isn't a cash transaction. This is an accounting transaction. Right? So you've already sold the system and received payment from your customer. But in lieu of recording that as profit when at the time of the EPC sale, you move some of that onto your balance sheet.
Amanda:So when you go when you dispatch that truck, they go do the work. You actually instead of billing it to the customer, you bill it to your liability account.
Hervé:So do you
Amanda:It's not a cash transfer. It's a profit transfer in your accounting system. That's what's a little tricky about it. You know, to your point about is it 250 or 300 There's not one established means of calculating how much that should be. It's really a function of looking at if you've been in business some time, you can look at how many service calls have we needed to send out on average during our workmanship warranty period.
Amanda:The length of your warranty is also going to be a factor in that. So if you offer a one year warranty period or three or five or ten, you're gonna have to set aside a different amount of money. But the important thing is that you apply the concept consistently to all the systems that you install.
Hervé:Now what about every time you sell a system, that $250, you cannot recognize it as profit, or do you keep that cash? Does it need to be on a on a separate account, on escrow account, or that's unrelated?
Amanda:I think that's unrelated because most companies don't have a separate cash account that they're putting this money into.
Hervé:Right. So let's speak about, like, the duration of the warranty. I remember at first, you start with five years, seven years, and then some competitors move it to ten years and then fifteen years, and then one was, like, a twenty years. It's like, yeah. We're not we're not doing twenty years.
Hervé:So all those numbers were, like, kind of like as long as you kind of get a ceiling and you match your competitors, you're good. At some point, we we we stopped at twelve. I had competitors at fifteen and and twenty years, but twelve was plenty. It was more than the people offering 10, so we could kind of win the sale in that way. But it was not, like, fifteen and more years.
Hervé:So we thought it was a good good balance there until we exited. We sold Ipsen. And then suddenly, that twelfth year became very, very real to me about the liability and the cost. So, what do you see in the industry, and what do you think is, like, the the right number if that if there was a silver lining?
Amanda:I think for a lot of companies, they see the duration of a workmanship warranty as a cheap way to improve customer confidence in the product. But I also think that it's poorly understood what the accounting liability is when you continue to extend the duration of your warranty. Yes. We see companies out there offering twenty five or thirty year warranties, but I think that in general is a bad idea. That's that's a lot of solar companies haven't even been in business that long.
Amanda:And the other thing is that we have we are not very good as an industry at predicting what risk will arise in that horizon of time. So when you say guarantee something for this long, how do you know what liability that truly represents, especially if we haven't had systems in the field that long? But the other thing I wanna distinguish here, Herve, is what is a workmanship warranty? What is a warranty wrap? And what is an o and m agreement?
Amanda:Because I think these terms get mushed together when in fact there are really important distinctions that I wanna just call out for a second. Most of us have offered workmanship warranties that are a backstop for a homeowner if a problem is discovered that is attributed to the work that will be fixed for free. That does not include manufacturer failures. Right? And so some people will offer a warranty wrap that basically says to a homeowner, you won't have to pay for anything for some number of years, and that includes any warranty work that is done on behalf of a manufacturer.
Amanda:Those are dangerous, though, because as we've seen over the years, not all manufacturers make it in the industry. And so if you sign yourself up to be the backstop on an OEM warranty, then you're taking on a potentially significant amount of liability if their products fail. And so if you're going to offer that, then you need to bake in more cost to protect you from that risk. Right? But the other thing is that warranties and even in many cases, warranty wraps are reactive agreements.
Amanda:If there's a problem, if the roof springs a leak, if the conduit pops off the wall, these are problems that we then react to and come out to address. O and M agreements, by contrast, are proactive agreements. They typically include active monitoring. Is the system performing as expected? Is everything still online?
Amanda:And for larger scale systems, it may often include annual or even more frequent than annual preventative maintenance inspections where you go lay eyes on the system and ensure that everything is still safe and performing as expected. Workmanship warranties and wraps don't include any of that type of proactive work. And so if you think that your system is being actively monitored because you have a workmanship warranty, that is usually a misconception because active monitoring does not come in a standard workmanship warranty for most of us. Now active monitoring is a great idea, and I do think that's a service that installers should offer for during the duration of their warranty period, but you need to charge money for that. That's not a free service.
Amanda:Somebody has to watch a system. Somebody has to be prepared to respond to the alerts and alarms if the inverter trips off or something goes down. And if you're offering performance reporting, then you need a tool that can help you assess whether the system is meeting expectations for its KWH production. These are not free services. Someone or some software has to do that for you, and these things typically cost money.
Amanda:So you need to be contemplating that and helping your customers understand the difference. Because I think this is what's led to that presumption that service is free for all time. I have a warranty, so therefore, service is free for all time. But that is not the case, And we need to do a better job of getting into the nuance of that education so that homeowners don't come to this unrealistic expectation that everything will be free forever.
Hervé:But I think it's also the sole installers that start with the wrong expectation. I think I think a homeowner, if you ask them what's the warranty on your dishwasher or your car or your phone, I mean, nobody's gonna say, oh, twenty five, thirty years, whatever happens, it's gonna get fixed for free. So when you ask homeowners, they know that it's not gonna last twenty five years, thirty years without any additional cost. Like, they are usually the ones ready to pay to open their wallet and get it fixed. It is the sole installers like that that that has that mentality, I think.
Amanda:Well, we might have to agree to disagree on that. But I think it helps when we point out these adjacent industries and trades to say, when your air conditioner broke last summer, did the HVAC guy come fix that for free? Of course not. We have a lot of great precedent to point to in other adjacent trades. But for whatever reason, we have allowed this perspective to persist in solar, and that's just what we need to work on.
Hervé:Well, I hope this podcast is, putting an end to that. There we go.
Amanda:Everybody held up their right hands. Problem is solved.
Hervé:Problem solved. Well, besides, raising your right hand, I think if you are, interested in the O and M business, you also need to know more about training and how to funds. Well, we just spoke about how to funding your O and M business, especially if you have some active monitoring plans that you wanna sell. That brings in money for the company. You can grow in departments, buy the vehicles, hire, and keep going.
Hervé:But what about training?
Amanda:Well, there have been some very exciting developments in the last year. In 2024, Amicus O and M Cooperative started working under another federal grant to address standardization, training, certification, and workforce development for solar and BESS O and M technicians. And as part of our grant work, we convened a large group of stakeholders throughout the asset management and O and M aspect of our industry and worked really hard to build consensus around an O and M technician professional development trajectory. So we came out of that with a four level technician framework, starting with tech one as an entry level, truly entry level technician going up to an advanced level four. And we also wrote a sample curriculum outline if a company wanted to build an in house training program.
Amanda:And when we were done with that piece of work, we shared it with our friends at the Solar Energy Industries Association, and they used that as the basis for the forthcoming ANSI standard of the American National Standards Institute, ANSI standard. It's called the SIA three zero one Solar PV and BESS ONS Technician Training Standard, and it is due to be published any day now. We're recording this in late May. And so, hopefully, by the time the podcast is live, the standard will be available, and we can include a link to that in the show notes. This standard is so exciting to me because it's the first time our industry has tried to coalesce around a common framework and a common set of definitions for our technicians.
Amanda:Some companies have had frameworks, but their terminology and the way that they draw the lines has been different. So it's been difficult for a technician to apply for another job and say, I'm a tech two or I'm a tech three when that had no meaning to the new company that they were applying for. But now we are working really hard to get everybody on that same page. And then behind that, Amicus O and M Cooperative has also been working on a training program that corresponds to the new standard. And our training program launches in just a couple weeks on the HeatSpring platform.
Amanda:So far, it's just the tech one training, and it it'll be available to the public starting June 2. And what we're what our training program really is, the formal classroom training piece of the picture. To train a great O and M technician, obviously, you need a lot of hands on training as well out in the field. But this this is the formal classroom part that fills in some of the gaps on theory and sort of the background that they need to know so that as they go out into the field and learn how, they also learn about why. And for tech one, it's you know, I mentioned it starts at an entry level.
Amanda:And while all of us prefer to hire highly experienced installers and electricians to be our O and M and service technicians, the truth is we don't have enough of them. And so if we are going to expand that workforce, we need a way to bring in truly entry level people and train them straight into this work. So if you're going to hire entry level folks, you also have to have a good training program because this work can be dangerous, and they need to know how to do it safely as well as efficiently when they get out into the field. So our program for tech ones is about an eighteen to twenty four hour time commitment. It covers eleven modules.
Amanda:Many of those are core activities that any O and M technician would need to know regardless of what scale system they're working on. And then at the end, we have a section that dedicates attention to residential and C and I work, utility scale work, and battery energy storage systems. So in addition to that, for the field training components, we are also offering a set of what we call guided field practices that the trainer out in the field could use to train a junior technician and have some structure to it. I think for a lot of us, you know, training consists of, hey, new guy. Go shadow the experience tech.
Hervé:Yes.
Amanda:But it's it's expected to be this learning through osmosis kind of thing. And we're trying to help elevate the game and introduce some materials that give each of the participants a step by step process to walk through and make sure that the junior technician really understands. How do you choose the correct PPE? How do you conduct this live dead live test? You know, make sure that they know that process so that you can sign off on their competencies before they would ever be expected to do work on their own.
Hervé:It's also fantastic for for safety too. And, well, it if it's available on HeatSpring, we previously had a Brian Hayden, CEO of HeatSpring on a podcast. And so to me, that's more like a rainy day for the O and M team. If there is a rainy day, like, make sure that they go through that HeatSpring course.
Amanda:Yeah. I think it can be used in several cases. You know, if you're hiring that new tech, maybe this is part of their onboarding, honestly. But, also, if you wanna start cross training your installers and getting them ready to make the jump into the service team, you can have them do it on rainy days and start with the cross training before you even have the openings.
Hervé:Yeah. That's even better. That's way better. Well, fantastic, Amanda. It's been a real pleasure, talking to you about the different structures of the ONA, about how you were at the start of of Namaste, Amicus Clean Energy Credit Union, and Amicus UN, and more cooperatives to to come.
Hervé:And then we also spoke about the workmanship warranties, the manufacturer warranties, also the the wrap, but also how O and M agreements are proactive, not just reactive measures. We also then spoke about, like, the new, ANSI standard coming out. I said thank you very much for leading this for entire industry with with CS. So thank you for all the work you're doing, in in O and M, Amanda. And, as I know you speak French, why don't we end the podcast?
Hervé:I would like to thank you. So it's fantastic. Well
Amanda:and thank you. I I also wanna be sure to say clearly, like, those standards are the work of a lot of people, and Sia has also done a great job of leading the charge on the ANSI front. American Clean Power, our other trade association, is also issuing an ANSI standard for O and M technician training for utility scale systems. So there's been a lot of work done in that arena, and it's exciting to me. I really do think this is a turning corner.
Amanda:The standard may not be perfect. The training may not be perfect, but, you know, we are not letting perfect be the enemy of the good. And I think for your listeners, I would really encourage you to look hard at this as a way to diversify your business within your area of expertise and to reference these new resources through the standard and through the training programs to see how you can best position your technicians to go out and do this work safely, efficiently, and ultimately profitably. Because at the end of the day, I really want companies to see service and own as a part of their profit picture and not just as a cost center.
Hervé:Yeah. Good saying at Amicus. Right? No money, no mission. So
Amanda:True. True.
Hervé:We need to be profitable to keep growing and make the industry better. Yeah.
Amanda:Well, thank you for having me, Herve, and chatting, talking shop about O and M.
Hervé:Thanks, Ahmed. If you'd like to do the same or do better, go to sunvoy.com/blog and get actionable behind the scenes lessons on running and growing your solo business.
Listen to What Solar Installers Need To Know (by Sunvoy) using one of many popular podcasting apps or directories.
