Last October we celebrated the 10th anniversary of Inovateus Solar with team members, partners, customers and family in downtown South Bend, Indiana. At the event, I was asked about what I’ve been most proud of regarding our team’s accomplishments over the years. After reflecting for a moment, my answer was centered around our dedication to educate and engage with prospective customers and the general public on solar energy. I firmly believe that we’ve been achieving our company purpose and mission of “building a brilliant tomorrow” through our portfolio of nearly 400MWs of projects. Our staff also interacts with anyone we come into contact with in accordance with our core values of passion, engagement, ambition, creativity and esprit de corps (“PEACE”). In fact, as I write this, we just honored our 10th PEACE award to team member Jason Alphenaar, as voted by his fellow teammates for best exemplifying our core values. While we are driven by our mission and purpose, and deliver through our core values, many have continued to ask “how” we turn that into a product that delivers ultimate value to our customer base. This spring our Board of Directors challenged our team to clearly define our brand promise to our customers so that we could articulate our value proposition to the energy marketplace. This blog is a breakdown of how we delivered on that challenge.
Whenever we have an initiative that we need to tackle throughout the various focus areas of the company, we create what my good friend and business scaling master, Verne Harnish, calls a “rock”. It’s called a rock because it takes the team pushing from many sides to get it rolling. After presenting the above mentioned challenge to our team to define our company promise to customers, it quickly became a rock. A brand promise in general is a statement made by a company to customers on what they should expect in terms of products and services. The “brand promise rock” team that we assembled included team members Nathan Vogel, Tyler Kanczuzewski, Danny Nussbaum, Mauricio Anon, Kaylin Chandler and myself along with board member, Gary Gigot, and even a customer/partner, Sergio Carillo, from Chesapeake Utilities. Together we collected information from our team members, customers, vendors and partners that encapsulated each of their thoughts of the service and value that we’ve provided throughout the years. We also studied brand promises from companies that we are familiar with and are fans of ranging from Apple and Nike to Tesla and even Geico (Save 15% on car insurance in 15 minutes or less). Once we filtered through the information we collected, the rock team began a series of exercises focused on dialing in on our brand promise. After a month, we had nailed down 4 potential brand promises with further engagement from additional team members including Mike Pound and Melody Callendar.
The final brand promise that we ended on was “Investing in Your Energy Future”. As we studied the history of our company and interactions with customers and even potential customers that we have yet to do business with, it was clear to us that we spend a great deal of time educating, consulting, visiting and engaging with our customer base. Once we see a potential fit with a particular customer where we have determined that we can add value, we immediately begin investing our time and money to impact their energy future. Looking back through our sales pipeline through the years, we have made a tremendous investment into so many companies’ energy future. There are a number of companies where we never ended up closing a deal, but a significant amount of our energy was invested in trying to improve their energy future, which is our promise. In fact, we can say that we are Building a Brilliant Tomorrow™ by investing in our customers’ energy future. It was also evident to us that solar energy itself was not the actual final product that we delivered to our customers! What Inovateus delivers is a long term energy supply or management plan that businesses can use to forecast their energy future both from a financial and a sustainability perspective.
After we defined “Investing in Your Energy Future” as our brand promise, the rock continued to roll internally at Inovateus. We found that lean sustainability practices within our company operations could also improve our delivery to customers, further enhancing our ability to deliver on our promise. Our sustainability team lead, Tyler Kanczuzewski, has begun efforts at Inovateus to provide zero-waste job sites in order to implement sustainable practices in the field. Our ownership and Board have become more focused on investing our own capital into the projects we are developing, which is a true testament to our confidence in Inovateus’ EPC services. In fact, we have invested nearly $4 million directly into two Indiana and Ohio projects in the past two months- how’s that for investing in our customers’ energy future? We only see these efforts scaling up throughout the end of 2019 and beyond. Our marketing efforts have begun to focus heavily on our promise to invest in our customers’ energy future. What’s most important to us however is that we deliver 100% on this promise, and we play our role in helping our customers make smart energy decisions for the future that will have a positive impact on their own operations. In doing so, we are confident that we can continue to Build a Brilliant Tomorrow™.
