E is for Engage: In the solar industry, it’s important to be as engaging as possible

Having the right attitude toward interpersonal relations can go a long way toward nurturing a great working rapport. This installment in the ongoing series of blogs excerpting my recently published book, Building a Brilliant Tomorrow, talks about the second of Inovateus’ five PEACE core values: engage or engagement. Although it took us awhile to nail it down, engagement turns out to be something that actually comes pretty easy to the Inovateus team. We like people—and apparently, people like us—and believe that active communication, ongoing education, and consistent involvement with our customers and our community are essential to our way of doing business. With that, I’ll let the excerpt from the book share the who, what, why and how behind our second core value: “engage.”

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In the solar industry, it’s important to be as engaging as possible. Engagement is a core value that Inovateus had from the beginning. It was actually the one core value that other people were trying to describe to us when they talked about why they liked working with us, but it took a while to define it, to come up with just the right word.

Soon after we kicked off Inovateus Solar LLC in 2008, we began making presentations to companies and setting up relationships with vendors. Some of the feedback we were getting from people then was that they really liked working with us. They found us to be genuine and fun, the kind of people they felt comfortable being acquainted with beyond the working day. I remember a customer in New Jersey, in 2010, telling us how different we were from people on the East Coast, where it was a “fast-paced, in-your-face mentality.” “You guys are, like, freaky nice,” he told me. “It’s almost uncomfortable at times how nice you guys are.”

Obviously, he was joking—or maybe not—but we began to realize that our attitude was a strength. Still, we couldn’t quite put our finger on a word to really describe this concept we were hearing from the people we worked with.

One day, Brian Lynch, who now works for SolarWorld, said, “You guys encompass the Hoosier values.” When I asked him to explain, he repeated what others were saying: we were nice, but also, we had Midwestern values, which differentiated us from most people in the solar industry. The West Coast, he explained, where most of the people in the solar industry live and work, has a progressive but sometimes edgy and a little materialistic lifestyle. A smaller percent­age of solar people were on the East Coast, and they were very mat­ter-of-fact, putting their feelings out there and not holding back, for better or for worse.

After scouring a dictionary and thesaurus, I came across the terms engagement and the act of engaging. One definition read, “to pledge oneself.” I realized that was pretty close to what they were talking about. We are engaging. We talk to people, we educate people, we get out of the office and visit clients, and we invite them to our office. We go out of our way for customers, we go out of our way to teach people about solar, we give presentations at colleges and high schools, and we bring grade-school students in to learn how solar energy works. We go to industry trade shows and meet with vendors. And we get involved in after-hours activities including attending football games, basketball games, and so on.

We engage with customers, vendors, and with each other, and when we do so, we have a high level of communication. That’s important in an industry in which many customers are unfamiliar with the product. They don’t understand exactly how solar works, and it’s up to us to explain it to them throughout their projects.

This attention to engagement and education is atypical of most construction projects. People have been building houses and skyscrapers for years, but they don’t necessarily question the way in which such projects are undertaken. They don’t need to know all the ins and outs of how a structure is going to be erected, and they often don’t spend a lot of time wanting to know all the details as a project progresses.

But because solar is an emerging industry, customers usually have a lot of questions and a genuinely elevated level of interest. So we need to be engaging in order to pique and continue to hold their interest throughout a project, from concept to reality. And that involves a high level of communication at all times.

We’ve discovered this to be true because of those few times when we haven’t engaged as much as possible. The hurdles, we’ve found, arise when we haven’t engaged with each other at the company and we haven’t communicated at a consistently high level to ensure that information flows to everyone involved in a project. It’s a challenge to always be engaging, but we work at it every day because we see the value of it in every aspect of our work.

In the next blog excerpt from Building a Brilliant Tomorrow, I will talk about the “A” in the middle of Inovateus’ PEACE core values: ambition.

By TJ Kanczuzewski, president/CEO, Inovateus Solar