 Okay, we're back. We're live, I'm Jay Fidel. Happy Monday morning. It's 10 a.m. We're talking about Hawaii, the state of clean energy today with Josh Powell. He's the CEO of Revolution, a very important company in the energy firmament here in Hawaii. Welcome, Josh. It's great to have you on the show. Thanks, Jay. Great to be back. We're gonna catch up with you. You know, even if we say that the pandemic didn't start until February, we're in at six months now. Now that means Revolution has had six months of experience in dealing with it. And I'd like to know today how that's been for you, how you've changed your systems, what your customer base has done, and then how's business, if you don't mind talking about it. So tell us first, how did it affect you going forward, starting maybe February, whenever it hit Hawaii? So I think the real impact on us was really, like most businesses was sort of late March and into April. And then, you know, as we got into the lockdowns, that really started to have a big impact. You know, we're lucky to be considered an essential business, so we were able to operate through it. And I think we were able to deploy processes that kept our workers working and working safely. I would say the biggest challenge right now is still testing. So we all wanna hear the leadership of the state and the leadership of the country here and out, but that's still I think the biggest uncertainty for most businesses is when you have somebody that's come down with something, finding out what it is is still a challenge. And that was, we found that early on, it was taking two weeks. For a little while, it got down to a few days and it's gone back again into sort of longer intervals, which, you know, for us means that if somebody's symptomatic of anything, they just, they're gone for two or three weeks in a, you know, semi-quarantined quarantine, essentially, until we can validate that they'd have anything or it's clearly been enough time. So, you know, and then of course, losing anybody in your workforce for two or three weeks is a challenge for any business. So, I think the other challenge too is if you find that somebody is sick, test positive, then you have to look around and see if do your own internal tracking, don't you? Tracing, tracking, finding out who that person had contact with. This could be really damaging to your business. Absolutely. You know, the hundred and a little over 125 people at Revolusa now, we've been incredibly lucky to not have any positive tests. That's great, Josh. You know, I want to knock on all the way around me. One thing you'd be interested in knowing about is, you know, Oceanit, the tech company downtown run by Patrick Pat Sullivan is coming on the show tomorrow. And they have publicized a spit in the cup test, which way you can get results almost immediately. And I'm very curious to see how that works and how far along they are, whether they have the necessary approvals and whether it can be available in Hawaii because it would change the paradigm for all of us. I think it's fundamental to business being able to operate safely through this is, you know, so the other big thing that we've done that I think has been helpful is we, you know, our installation work is in teams and those teams essentially isolate themselves from other groups. We have some new processes in our warehouse to keep people, you know, limit the number of people, obviously, you know, masks, cleanliness, we mandate 100% mask wearing in vehicles together. So if they're in vehicles together, you're wearing a mask. If you're up on the roof, don't have to wear a mask, but they, all of our employees have access to the materials, they have options, they have, and they have options that they like, like we got the, you know, the neck, orange neck covers that the guys like to wear those sometimes when they're installing anyway, cause it's so sunny. So, so those kinds, you know, making it easy, giving them the tools, they all have some spray bottles, you know, diluted bleach on board their vehicles. But we've actually, you know, believe it or not, we've grown through this. We expect revenue growth this year, year over year. We had a soft patch in April and May and, you know, but I think overall, you know, we'll be able to recover from that. And, you know, we sales have been very strong. You know, one of the things that... You were in the newspaper recently. One of the reasons I want to talk to you, you've grown by really a significant percentage increase in business year over year. And that's really remarkable at a time when the economy is down in the tank. Obviously the Hawaii business article that you're, I think you're referring to had us like number two in the state. And that's great. It's exciting. You're obviously not going to do that every year. And I think the context is really important there. That was 2019 growth. And, you know, perhaps a week, we kind of are projecting a similar growth trajectory this year. You know, I'm a little hesitant because we're still only a little over halfway through, but we certainly have the bookings to keep on that kind of pace. That's a tough pace too. You don't want to run that hot too long, but a lot of that was recovery from about three years where Hawaii was transitioning into energy storage and we had a very flat market. And for some folks, you know, a really negative market. So I think that growth is a manifestation of us really recovering from that last year. And, you know, certainly got some more this year. What I would add is that not in Hawaii, but nationwide renewable energy and particularly what we do, which is distributed energy and distributed storage, where it's really site-based, that market has grown a lot across the country. And I think part of people being confined and thinking about what they're doing with their lives and how they use energy, all those things, you know, it just happens that renewables and creating, you know, resilient, reliable energy systems at home has definitely been a way that public has responded. You know, you've probably heard, like bicycles has been a real, you know, bikes or bike sales are sort of doubled this year over last year. And that's another place where people really clearly, you know, had some downtime and thought about what they want to do with time and it's popping up. Well, lifestyles, lifestyles have changed. They have changed and, you know, I think people are really getting into that change and many elements of that change are probably going to be the new normal going forward. And I like to explore with you some of the changes that have happened around at least lifestyles in Hawaii. For example, I spend my time at home. So I'm interested in how my home is doing. I want to improve my home. I want to do all those chores that I never had time to do. Assuming I have the money to do a solar, this would be a really good time to do that because I'm at home and I can watch, I can see, I can, I know your guys may not like this, but I can supervise, too. I can stand. Oh, we love it, we love it, Jim. So there's a kind of hands-on thing going here. And I think a lot of people who didn't have the time or didn't have the flexibility in terms of their hours and schedules now do and they can do this kind of thing. It's not only this, but other things like this. The other thing that strikes me is confidence. I know that most of the time your guys will be on the roof and outside. And PS, an asterisk to that is that it's healthy to be outside. It's healthy to have the sunlight on you. You probably reduce the chance of infection and of the onset of the disease if you're outside. I mean, everybody, all the medical, that's how you say that. So your guys are in great shape. They're probably happy to be outside. They're safer outside. But there's probably times when they have to come inside and wire up whatever else I'm not sure what. And at that point, okay, we get to the question of confidence. So I'm inside. I'm the homeowner. I want to do this installation, but I'm a little nervous about any tradesman coming in my house, because I don't know where that tradesman has been. He may have just come from a pizza joint or a bar and the recipient of all kinds of virus 20 minutes ago. Who knows what? So I have to feel confident of your tradesman or your worker that when he comes in my house, he's not gonna infect me. And somehow, I'd like to ask you how you have developed that level of confidence in your clientele. How do you do that? Well, I mean, we take it really seriously. So my business partner, Colin Yost, our chief operating officer, has throughout this whole thing, probably almost weekly cadence been updating the whole company on where we're at, what we need to do, what our safety protocols are, and we're dynamic. We shift it based on what we're learning and what we see in the outside environment locally. So right out the gate, obviously, cleanliness, I mean, the real basic stuff we've been hearing over and over again, wearing a mask, not touching your eyes and nose and mouth, cleaning your hands frequently, cleaning surfaces that you touch frequently. So all of our crews have been trained to do that. In terms of interactions with customers, we really try to minimize it now. We closed our salt office to outside. It's only available now to our, we have a showroom there. Obviously, we built that to share information with customers, but we've essentially banned customers from that office. It's only our workers that are in there. If somebody wants to bring a check by or something, there's a, I can slip it under the door or a box, but we really encourage customers to mail correspondence or use email. We've improved our, certainly our IT and our communication technology. A whole bunch of our workers have VPNs now so they can work at home. We really have a pretty good rotation going there in terms of work from home. And then the customer interactions in the field, as you mentioned, I would be concerned too. In fact, I am if I've got someone coming into my house and I don't know. So number one, they're following those protocols in terms of disinfecting their hands, before they do anything wearing a mask, if they're inside a customer's house, they will have done both of those things so that if they were somewhere or if they did have some exposure, at least they've done the things they need to do to abate transmission. And then they're, like we may need to get in the attic, for instance, we pull conduits in the attic, stuff like that. Somebody's gonna do what they need to to get access to the attic and go up there and work. We're not, is that we might have done before with customers, Hawaii, one of the friendliest places on the planet, right? And frequently our customers are offering our workers a soda or something they've been cooking or, so we're not doing those things. I mean, if they offer, we're gonna politely decline that and we're gonna avoid the social interaction and obviously employing social distance when we need to communicate. We haven't had any sort of negative reaction surrounding that. We've had customers sometimes that aren't wearing masks. We've had workers conversely where workers have been uncomfortable sometimes in a home setting. And we've given our crew leads the ability to decide, if they feel like, I think we talked about this last time, it implemented this in April, but on our scheduling calls with customers, we ask what they've been up to, where they've been, we try to pre-screen a little bit. If somebody's just back from the mainland, we're gonna wait a few weeks before we go do the work, that kind of thing. It's smart and it's really totally appropriate and people should completely understand about that. You have to protect your staff. So, you mentioned that you had changed a bunch of systems. I'd be curious about what systems you've changed on any and all levels. And I'd be curious about which of those changes will stick in the future. I think everything we've done will stick to some degree. I mean, obviously, presuming some six months, I don't know when, at some point, we get control of the disease and we can relax some of the social distancing and safety protocols. I would imagine those are the first things that will change, but I'll tell you, I haven't gotten a cold this year. I don't know about you. I'm like, maybe I'll just, and I've got some pretty cool masks now. So, I've got a Camo 1 with US Navy on it. I thought that was pretty much on a Navy Dutch one. So, I thought that was kind of cool. And I don't know how I might just keep using that stuff. But I think on the technology side, we've definitely found that our, you know, we lose a little bit in not, you know, when you're, for instance, we've made some new hires over the course of the pandemic and training, you know, in a crew setting, that's not a big deal because there's a team and they're still working together. But in the office setting, when our office workers are doing like, you know, one or two days in the office and the rest at home and they're alternating, so they're never all there at once. That's a more difficult training setting than a more collaborative setting. So, I think we still need to think about how we do that and how we get better at that. We do a lot of Zoom and or other, you know, with lots of companies. And I can attest to you've been doing this for a long time, but you know, the Zoom fatigue is a real thing. You know, you have enough of these meetings a day and it can be a little exhausting. And so I think figuring out how to make that collaborative and prepared and efficient and sort of not spending more time than you need to, I think even to where we have shorter meetings, just quick check-ins. I think it's something that we're, you know, we're not doing as much, but I think would be useful. But I suspect that we will retain some version of work from home permanently. You know, one thing we certainly discovered is that, you know, punching the clock is not, you know, we can tell, we can tell if somebody's performing or not independent of that. And I would say if anything, the office can mask that a little bit. You know, so I think those are positive things. On the IT side, you know, virtual private networks, very important for security. You know, we have hard server, you know, hard wired servers and cloud-based information and making sure that our people have access to those things has been important and, you know, can be a little challenging. You know, we're finding new ways to, we were, and we still are, we still deposit paper checks to the bank. We're finally getting the scanning equipment to be able to do that completely electronically. I think that will end up saving us quite a bit of time. And it certainly cuts down on people having to go in person to, you know, potential transmission points. So, yeah, you know, it strikes me that when those four big tech executives went to testify in Congress a week or two ago, and what was it, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, you know, it came out that they're doing really, really well at the time of COVID. Their stock prices are way up. Their business is way up. And as a, you know, a recipient of email, I get so much email, I get so much promotional email from them and others. But, you know, this is a great time for tech. That's why there's, why? Because people at home and in the office are relying more and more on it. I can tell you that Think Tech is, and our hosts and our guests, they're using more and more and our, you know, internal systems, we're using more and more. And I assume the same thing for you. And it's like an aha moment. It's like depositing checks off a scanner. That's an aha moment. All of a sudden you say, why don't we do this before? Absolutely. You know, I think, and I think there's a scale thing going on too. And I mean, I'm sure you've read some of this, but I think, you know, your businesses certainly are faring better. I, you know, and I'll, this is my, I think there were, you know, on the other side of that, this thing is disastrous for smaller businesses and particularly, you know, and particularly in Hawaii, hospitality, restaurants, I mean, and the cyclical nature. And I mean, I remember reading some epidemiological stuff early on in, you know, February, March that was projecting that we would, you know, we would see essentially these waves, cycles. Sure, you know, you look at the math so far, that's sure what it looks like. And, you know, that was drawn from obviously much earlier experiences the 1918 pandemic and stuff like that. And, you know, if we're going to go through several more of these where we have to sort of, I can't remember the name of the guy that wrote the medium article on the hammer and the dance, but that phrase has become very popular. And he wasn't even an epidemiologist. And, you know, that, anyway, that impact on small businesses is a straining. I would say for us, the one thing we're seeing that we weren't thinking about way back in February, March is the banks have gotten extremely tight. And so while we had some help on the federal side, you know, that help wasn't always, you know, I mean, who knows what your business plan was. Our business plan the last couple of years is we've been growing a lot and usually growth requires some capital. And we've found that what was available six months ago is completely different today. And so the way we go about funding the business the way we go about, you know, shoring it up, getting credit lines, all those kinds of things is different than it would have been were we back in, and I'd say more challenging. Just taking more effort. We have to look more to mainland resources right now, frankly. We're seeing the white banks really tighten up, you know, because they're concerned where the economy is headed. How about the CARES Act? Have you been a beneficiary of that? Yeah, yeah, we were. And I think that was helpful. But what I guess what I would say there is, is, you know at our scale, like, you know, the CARES Act is helpful for the slump, you know, especially that April, May timeframe, but it's not necessarily what you need, you know, if you're growing your business or you're, you know, doing other things. So, you know, and not that the CARES Act should be, you know, it was obviously an emergency measure just to keep the economy up. But I think one of the things that's really important for the government to be looking at is, you know, you have a lot of concern out there in the market. What's the long-term impact gonna be? And if you lock credit up, you just, you know, you just make it worse in some cases. So, and I think that my point was bigger businesses are much less impacted by that than smaller businesses are. Interesting. When credit tightens up, it's much harder for small businesses to get what they need. You know, and I see you, I mean, as an observer from the outside, is in the hub of the wheel of your business and you are dealing with, of course, your staff, both operational and administrative, and you're dealing with, you know, your customers, however you can get them. And of course, you're dealing with suppliers because you have to have all those panels and, you know, all the equipment, all the accessories that you need to do your job. And I wonder, I look at every business now and I say, hmm, how sustainable are these supply lines? I mean, the economy is hurting in ways where anyone can be affected. Right now, thank God, revolution's done doing well, but if you're a supply line, we're to get constrained in some way at some point in the future because of a continuing drag on the economy, that would affect you, wouldn't it? What do you worry about in that regard? Well, we've been at it long enough and Hawaii's a unique enough environment. We've had supply issues with specific products, probably every year we've been in business somewhere. And part of that is part of that's new technology, part of that can be product issues, part of it can be supply constraints. So right now, nationally and probably globally, the demand for energy storage products is like, you know, it was already high and it was already accelerating quickly and the pandemic has only served to accelerate that. So fortunately during good shape on supply, but it's definitely a constrained environment nationally. So, and customer demand is certainly increased as a result of the pandemic. So, you know, EV sales on, you know, while all other car sales are down, EV sales remain, you know, on an upward pace. So I think that's indicative of, you know, how people are thinking about these things. We have an air conditioning business as well as a PV business. That's, you know, appears to be doubling this year. There's really more people at home thinking about that. Yeah. What about China? You know, I mean, we've been covering this in a number of our shows. How China is changing internally and look what happened in Hong Kong, it's awful. Look what happened with the Uyghurs in the West. It's becoming more authoritarian and it's very scary. At the same time, Trump is taking draconian steps to cut China off and make it hard for American businesses to buy from China on all levels. So query, has that affected your supply line? Has it affected, you know, we know that China is into manufacturing and especially high tech manufacturing like, like solar and systems and verters, what have you. Has that affected your supply line? So we're pretty well isolated there. And, you know, probably, you know, we, as a business, we tend to sell, we've always focused on high efficiency panels which work really well in Hawaii because of small rooftops. And, you know, I think at the same time, we, you know, we pride ourselves on delivering quality. And that means we also are picking brands that we believe are high quality. So our primary supplier, Sunpower Panasonic, energy storage, it's Tesla. Tesla's all manufactured in the U.S. And, you know, what I see, you know, so none of those products are centered in Hawaii or centered in China in terms of manufacturing. There's plenty of manufacturing in Asia but not necessarily China. I think the other thing, and this gets missed sometimes in the big, you know, the bigger discussions on China, but, you know, over the last at least three or four years, a lot of manufacturing is sort of, you know, a lot of the stuff that was in China has moved to Vietnam, moved to India and other countries. So it's not as concentrated as it was, but it's never been a big supply point for us. So we're just, I guess we're just kind of lucky that way we didn't get ourselves in the crosshairs of that. The other thing I've, you know, and I'll just say, we've had some supply issues, and the supply issues we've had aren't centered on China. They're centered on the U.S. We've got steel manufacturing that comes out of Arizona for like carports, things like that. That has slowed down because they have workers out with COVID. You know, I think on the battery end, it's more demand related than so much as supply thing, but in both cases, they're U.S. issues. They're not external issues in terms of our supply risk. Well, that takes me to my last question today for you, Josh, and that is, you know, of course, everybody awaits a vaccine, but there's no certainty that's gonna work. There's no certainty that we'll be able to, you know, take rational steps and reopen the economy in general, or that it will be done quickly. And there's a fair chance that the economy will continue to decline. And those homeowners that we talked about, the ones who, you know, need to be and are confident of your guys and, you know, what you're offering, they may lose the confidence. They may get, what do you wanna call it, depressed. You know, I don't see the end of this tunnel. There's no point in me improving my house. There's no point in me, you know, taking the low-hanging fruit, however attractive it may be. I'm just gonna wait this out and not do anything. I'm gonna go into suspense, you know, to follow the decline in the economy. That's gotta be something you think about. How do you see the future unfolding, both in the economy and, of course, derivatively in your own business? So that absolutely happens. And obviously, you know, in an economic cycle, if it looks dark enough, people do lock up, they stop making decisions, even good decisions. And so the first thing I always say about, you know, PV, you know, in Hawaii, we can save everybody money. We can give you, you know, PV and storage and still save you roughly 25, 30% on your electric bill. So really, it's about financing. And as long as we have a financial product that helps our consumers, then they're gonna save money on electricity that they would be buying anyway. So to me, that it should be counter-cyclical. You should have more people as long as you have good access. But I think, you know, along with that, that those doldrums are real. And so you have to figure out how you're gonna communicate that to people. And obviously you have to have the products. So, you know, we look to find financial products. We have a local credit union product right now that has a two-year no payment option for the customer. So they can if they want to, but if they wanna amortize on the back end, they, you know, kind of like, you know, like I don't wanna sound like a mattress salesman, but, you know, it's that kind of thing. And I mean, what's better when you've got uncertainty than to, you know, save money for a year or two and then, you know, start your repayments. So, but I think at the same time, there's other, you know, there's other products out there that where a third-party investor takes the tax value, we have a, Revolucent has its own in-house a power purchase agreement that's, you know, takes advantage of that. So the customer, again, is gonna get a monthly payment that's less than their normal utility bill. And so to me, that's the chief value play that we have in a downturn, is that we're gonna save you money right now and you don't have an out-of-pocket expense to get started. So that's pretty fundamental. Obviously there's people that are gonna take advantage of these systems for the tax value themselves. And right now, that's still the majority of our customers. So there's plenty of people in Hawaii that have been motivated to get things done to get their own tax value out of it. And like you said, I think we're still experiencing a lot of people that thought a lot about what they needed to do and maybe things they had been setting aside for a while and now they're wanting to get them done. Josh Powell, CEO of Revolucent, a successful solar company and a testament to how smart business moves can help you in the time of COVID. Thank you so much, Josh. Thank you for coming around. Thanks, Jay. No problem. Belloja.