 Okay, I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech. As a matter of fact, this is Hawaii, the state of clean energy. And we're starting, you know, one minute late because it took me one minute to wash my hands. I wash my hands. I may wash my hands in the middle of this program. I hope you don't mind. In any event, we have an energy show. But, you know, all the shows, including the energy shows, are all related to coronavirus. So, I warn you, it's not just about energy. And it's Josh Powell. He's the CEO of Revolut Sun. And we are so happy to have him on the show. Hi, Josh. Hey, Jay. How are you doing? I'm good for now, you know. I mean, every day, every moment is another issue. You have to ask me again later. Anyway, so very interesting. Say again. Stay healthy. Same to you, man. So, here we are in a crisis, in a crisis. And it's not only a public health crisis. It's an economic crisis. And you say, well, I got to go home. I got to change my way of living. And then you look around and you realize you're the CEO of a significant company with significant employees. And, you know, you're the hub of the wheel. There's all these things happening. And you built that. And the result is, you know, you've got this very complex mechanism. And when everybody, you know, reacts to the crisis and they go home, they must go home and change their social distancing and all that. It affects the wheel. It affects the hub, the spokes. It affects every moving part of every business organization. So I wanted to visit with you about how it affected Revolut Sun. Because Revolut Sun is an organization that at least theoretically would be profoundly affected by this kind of crisis. How is it affecting you, Josh? You know, it's, I mean, great observations. And obviously it's very serious for any business owner in the state. You know, it's a global crisis. And, you know, we have our, you know, we've been, I would, I've personally been looking at this thing pretty closely since early January, since the first news was coming out of China, just, you know, just with natural concern. And I would say we started making serious considerations internally in the business in mid-February as we started to see it spread more. And, you know, just started planning my partnership. We have three key active partners, Colin Yost, our COO, Eric Carlson, co-founder with me, and David Gorman. And, you know, we've been meeting together frequently, you know, a couple of times a week on this since probably mid-February, and started having much more detailed management level meetings as we got to the end of February. Operationally, you know, our first concerns is can we do work and can we do work safely? To that end, you know, we kind of pulled information together and created our own, you know, sort of new safe working practices for our employees. We started vetting customers probably four or five weeks ago. We started just doing interview questions when scheduling to make sure that household members hadn't been traveling, things like that, just to keep our workforce safe. But, you know, as the media, you know, as the media, but as the information has gotten out there and intensified in the general public, there is more fear, more concern for employees, for customers. We actually see probably more with employees than customers right now. Our feeling is that the best way to address that within the framework of the business and with our employees is, you know, really get good information out there into their hands. So Colin, you know, our COO has been kind of had the job of doing, I'd say, two to three times a week communication to the whole team with just the pragmatic stuff. Hey, what's going on? You know, this is what you should be aware of, you know, filtering information, a lot like we do for products with customers where we're, you know, trying to bring the best things to our customers so they don't have to, you know, diagnose everything themselves. We do the same things with our employees right now. We're having a lot of Zoom meetings. We actually had the office staff start working from home at a 50% level about two weeks ago, and then we went to 100% last week. You know, we're lucky enough to be considered an essential service. So we're allowed to continue working under Hawaii's shutdown rules. I think that's especially acute in Hawaii, given the fact that, you know, sometimes 20 to 40% of our electricity is coming from renewable resources. So, you know, keeping the renewable elements of the grid functional right now is very much critical to Hawaii. And, you know, companies like Revoluceno are the companies with the skill sets to keep those residential and commercial systems running and running right. So we feel that makes sense. It's justified. And, you know, but at the same time, you've got concerns. You got, you know, imagine I've got employees with elderly parents at home or elderly, you know, great-grandparents, and they want to be cautious about exposure. And we're trying to be really flexible with that kind of thing so far. We've been able to just manage that inside of our normal PTO. We have a generous PTO policy. We have healthcare for all workers. And so we're trying to keep that managed internally, obviously making ourselves aware of what the government's doing. And, you know, we started to see some impacts. I think in Hawaii, you know, as a construction business, we're not as directly impacted as, say, tourism. I mean, I think if you're running a hotel or a tour business, you know, you started seeing real impacts several weeks ago to cash flow, things like that. We've definitely seen an impact. And I think, you know, we've also seen some sales declines. You know, it's getting much harder to sell. But we actually, you know, we came into the year in pretty good shape. We had a very productive Q1 and trying to keep our pace. But I think the real key message to our employees and our customers and really the general public is keep picking up the knowledge, doing the right things. You know, the hygiene, the social distancing, you know, knowledge is your resource to abate the anxiety and use that knowledge to kind of assuage the fear. We also, you know, the mantra that we're putting out to our team is just, you know, be kind, be generous, you know, give people space, be patient. I think those are really important things, you know, just broadly right now because people have that little bit of extra fear. Well, boy, it follows the proposition that I always feel is central. And that is, if you want to solve a problem, bring your brain trust into the room and solve it together and come up with ideas and options. And then look at the implications of each one and then pick one and steam ahead. And it sounds like that's what you've done. It's good business. It's good professional conduct as well. So just a couple of thoughts come to mind hearing you say that. It sounds like, from what you say, that your field team, your field human resources are still out there doing what they do. Installing, repairing what have you, solar installations, am I right about this, on the on the roots in single family homes and maybe other structures as well. And so you have threaded the needle. That's my reaction. You've found a way to make that work even when a lot of companies, you know, have pulled the plug on that. They don't want to deal with the detail. They don't want to thread the needle. Just stop. But you haven't stopped. What was the decision? I mean, it's an interesting decision. And I mean, obviously, there's there's a lot of complicated elements. I mean, there's the ethics of exposure of your workforce, exposure customers. I think we put in place a lot, you know, we thought about it a lot. We put in place a lot of additional behaviors. You know, for instance, we supplied to extent that we could get it, you know, personal protective equipment, PPE. So all of our entire workforce have reusable nitrile gloves, you know, so and they have disinfectant on board all fleet vehicles. You know, we just, you know, we got simple there. We did it. We were doing a big bleach solution, which is safe and effective. And, you know, clean ground clean work surfaces before use extra precautions if we're working indoors and a lot of, you know, filtering customers to make sure that we think the household is safe. A little more latitude for field. If a field lead feels like the situation they're going into isn't safe, then they, you know, they can choose to pull out. And we've had, you know, we've had one or two instances of that kind of thing too. Customers, I think in general have been very understanding and we have, you know, we have a few, we probably have probably about 10% down on the workforce. So we have some people that are deciding to stay home, you know, where we are determined to avoid a furlough internally. I mean, that's, it's our objective to take, you know, to really try to keep ourselves in a position to not have to do that. We believe a lot of confidence that business will bounce back pretty hard. You know, we're, we're focused on a mix of commercial and residential as well. So some of the commercial job sites, it's mostly a big roof. You don't have a lot of public interaction. Same thing on a residential roof. We don't have to get too close to our customers for that. And obviously shifting a lot of things. We've closed our showroom at Salt, all the office, everybody's working remotely. So more laptops, VPN, you know, but thankfully we've got a pretty adaptable, you know, maybe being a PV company for 10 years, we've, we've dealt with more than our fair share of bumps and changes. Yeah, more than, more than anyone I know in that business, you've been completely adaptable. So let's look at some of the some of the things you've mentioned. Number one is the staff that ultimately went home, the staff that is working, arguably 100% of the time at home. How's that working out. It's always a kind of interesting experiment, because I don't you know I don't think Hawaii or the US is really used to that. And there's a certain risk of feather bedding and, you know, a failure to perform at home. How do you, how do you manage to deal with that? And how is your staff doing about that? I'd say, so I'd say number one, I mean, number one, we have a pretty mature mid tier management team at Red. And, you know, as you know, having been in the business for 10 years, a number of key employees that have been with us for, you know, seven, eight plus years. They've grown a lot with the business and, you know, tremendous trust there. And obviously, you know, very reliant on them managing their teams in a time like this. And I would say that trust rolls down. And I don't, you know, right now I'm not seeing that we're having issues. I would say with anything, we've probably seen some increases in office productivity, you know, given the greater flexibility in life. There's definitely a few places where we've had little challenges like moving reception offline and things like that. There's some technical stuff. Some people, you know, maybe a little more challenged adapting to the remote interactions. And I mean, the lack of social interaction, obviously people, you know, the office is a place where, where, where there's a lot of social interaction too. So I don't think we're seeing, you know, I'd say it's too early for us to see that have seen the impact of any of that kind of stuff. In terms of working remotely, but in terms of getting our basic jobs done, moving the projects along, you know, all of our operational technologies are, you know, essentially online software. So it's stuff you could do anywhere. On the software question, Josh, what, what new software and systems have you brought online, you know, to deal with the administrative issues or the staff issues working at home? I mean, surely you didn't have it all in place and maybe you had to find something off the shelf or from some, you know, custom provider to facilitate this and get around any challenges. Have you adopted new systems and software for that? I don't think anything new. You know, all our operational systems were already web-based software. So some of what we've authored on the sales side, some of which is subscriber-based. We use a Zendesk product called Base for our back-end operations, CRM, and we use a software we authored for the front-end sales. pseudocrew helped us on the development of that. We hired them for the development of that. We'll plug there. But local software company. So we're pretty well equipped there and we're pretty well equipped to work anywhere with that. So you already had it in place, didn't you? We already had that in place. So that's a measure of planning and resilience and all. But the other question that falls out of this is, okay, so now for a while, I wish I could tell you how long. If you put the two of us in a room together, we could figure out how long. But anyway, for a period of time, you know, you're going to be doing this because you have to. But at the end of that period, you know, and we can all go around shaking hands again, but not. Do you think that you will be more online than you were before? Do you think this will make changes in the way you manage the administration of the firm? Without question. Yeah, so so I was going to say the other software that that we're using a lot more of that we had, but you know, didn't use quite as much will be zoom for for public meeting, you know, for me group meetings and you know, we were probably using zoom mostly as a free service. Now we're doing some subscription stuff. You know, we had already VPN through our IT guys. Hi Tech Huey is our local IT company. And they've been supporting us with VPN for certain certain personnel for a long time. And so we just expanded that. You know, picked up a few more laptops, things like that. But you know, all that stuff was already there. We just had to expand some of it. It brings up some obvious questions. You know, we spend a fair amount of money on on offices and showrooms and on a monthly basis. And you know, if you can do more of that remotely, I think the biggest question for us right now is our sales process and interface with customers. And I'd say we're we're still early in making the adaptations that we need to make there. And we are definitely treating this like this may be an adaptation we're making permanently. Maybe an adaptation we're making for six months to a year. We're not thinking of it like it's an adaptation we're going to make for six weeks. Right, right. But you leave open the possibility is when the smoke clears, you'll have a system that works as well as anything that worked before and maybe even more efficiently or cheaper. Yeah, I mean, I mean, this is, you know, this is a pretty typical entrepreneurial attitude. But and I think given the dynamics of our business in solar energy in Hawaii, you know, we have, you know, we're approaching this like any other change. We think we will learn and improve and get better. We're trying to recognize that we're probably going into a recession coming out of this. And at the same time, you know, this is a I'll make one another local plug. You know, one of the, you know, one of the advantages of Hawaii's renewable energy market is we have, we've had local banks and local credit unions engaged for a long time in developing financial products for customers. And one of the products we have is the Hawaii State FCU loan that in a local credit union. And that loan is a two year no payment your amortization and and you can do PV plus storage. So, you know, you can get Tesla power walls with a loan like that. And generally that eight year amortization is still lower than the customers original electric bill was. And we think at a time right now where, you know, your taxes are a little unclear, your income is a little unclear, you know, assuming your credit is still good enough to go get a loan, you know, which is generally the case for Hawaii residents because equities usually pretty strong and has maintained strength the last decade. You know, you can go get a loan that essentially eliminates a three to $500 a month electric bill for two years. I mean, that's, you know, if you think about the government talking about sending, you know, $1,200 checks out to everybody. I mean, you know, 500 bucks a month for two years, that's 12,000 bucks. And, and that's, you know, you can eliminate that from your budget by pretty quickly, you know, in a matter of like, you know, 60 days. So we actually think that, you know, if we're, if we approach it the right way, we get the right products in front of people and and help them understand the things that are beneficial to them. There's no reason to assume we can't be doing more renewable energy outside of this. Yeah, but there's factors, there's factors in play. I mean, for example, oil, and the utility is largely dependent on oil and oil prices is way down. It's the last time I looked it was $20. And then people say it's going to go further down to given, you know, given the dispute between Russia and Saudi Arabia. So right now, oil is way down. But one of the big question is when we come out of this, you know, when it's back to normalcy of some sort. Are you going to be more or less competitive with the utility? Have you made this analysis, more or less competitive with utility at this time, at that time at that special time when we bounce back. And, you know, how, what's your plan for that? Are you going to be in better shape relative to the utility or worse? You know, if I were to put on Scott's you or Connie Lau's hat right now, my, I would be a thing that oil prices aren't going to stay down too long. But then, you know, if we look at the last global recession, you could see oil prices down for a year. That will bring energy prices down at the wholesale rate. At the same time, you know, HECO has approval from the PEC to hike rates about 40% over the next seven, eight years just for infrastructure. And they've also decoupled from, you know, infrastructure from the energy price. So, you know, it's a smaller component of your build than you think. It certainly will, it has the potential to bring bills down. But there's other things that are increasing them because of infrastructure needs in Hawaii. And, you know, I would, my sense is that we may see a flattening or a slight decrease for a little while. Commercial customers certainly are likely to see some increase or decrease in their pricing, you know, maybe the next six months. And it depends, you know, don't get me started on Russia and Saudi Arabia. If I hear another president about all good Russian, Saudi Arabia are for the United States, I have to wash your hands. Those guys are throwing a grenade into a global crisis. Perfect. So, you know, the other thing I wanted to ask you about was, you know, you alluded to it earlier, it's this relationship with the customer at a time of crisis. And, you know, everybody, everybody, no exceptions, is affected by the crisis psychologically in terms of making business and personal decisions and all that. And you spoke about the situation where perhaps your installers would find something in questioning a particular customer or prospective customer that concerned them about where he'd been, you know, what level of risk he had in terms of the virus. And they would be then inclined to say, you know, how about later. So what's the conversation like when you go to some customer, a prospective customer and say, you know, I don't really, I don't think we should do this. What do you say? That's a hard conversation, isn't it? So we try to avoid having that conversation at the install, right? Because that's, you know, we failed somewhere if we're having that conversation at the installation. We had an incident come up last week or I think early this week with one customer unexpected arrival kind of thing. But in general, we have a series of questions we're asking at scheduling and we schedule, you know, a couple weeks out and then a few days before the visit. So those conversations are frequent. Our schedulers are asking those questions, you know, have you traveled? Has anybody been outside the state? And it's really simple. If they need any of the criteria or is anybody at home already self-quarantined, et cetera, we're just going to kick them out 14 days. And, you know, our customers are happy to support that. I think, you know, like anything in government, any civil rights, you know, we rely on the, we rely on society to want to follow the rules, right? And I think in general, everybody in Hawaii wants us to get through this safely and is supportive. And, you know, a couple weeks delay in your PV project to, you know, make sure everybody's safe is a very reasonable thing. So I'm not going to need any customer pushback on that. Yeah, no, that sounds reasonable to me. Instead of just putting it off for an indefinite period, you know, and people will wait. They've sort of been inculcated, you know, in our system, wait for a couple of weeks. The other thing I wanted to ask you is that you mentioned furloughs, okay? And I know you don't want to do that and no employer wants to do that. But, you know, in a worst case analysis, you may have to do that. Well, how do you do that and what effect does that have? And what I'm thinking in my mind is, gee whiz, if you furlough a valuable employee, you may not get that person back again. And then you're hobbled, you know, by the lack of a very valuable human resource, at least in a number of the cases I can think of. So how do you deal, how would you deal with the question of furlough if you, hopefully not, but if you got to that point? So, I mean, suffice to say, you know, we have to think about it. So we also have a plan. We thought it through. We thought about how we would handle it. I'm not going to disclose my plan on free tech. I mean, if it becomes appropriate to do that or we come to that point, we'll share that. But you have a plan. The point is you have a plan. Yeah, we have to. Like, you know, we have to think through, you know, I mean, just like our, you know, just like the National Guard in Hawaii has thought through many, many different types of plans to come up with scenarios where they might have to support the government. You know, we have to think through different ways we're going to do things. You know, we're actively pursuing all sorts of things. We've got, you know, all sorts of new support coming from the government potentially. You know, we're certainly looking into those things where the financing makes sense or would be helpful. You know, the bill that was just passed by the Senate that's going to be before the House tomorrow has some payroll help for businesses. I think, you know, it seems pretty clear to me that the government's intent there is it would be a lot more effective to keep people getting paid through companies than to try to push them through an unemployment system. Will that be a substantial help to you? The bill, the $2 trillion bill, would that be a substantial help to you? We'll see. I mean, the stuff I've read, it looks like there's definitely some good help for small businesses. And, you know, I think like any business where we've been impacted and, you know, we'll try to see what we can do there. I think, you know, I'm slightly skeptical. I mean, that stuff can be bureaucratic and challenging. So I think our first approach is to continue to function and to continue to function safely. And so we've worked really hard on that first. And, you know, and we're also being accommodating if an employee is concerned or wants to be at home. You know, we're trying to support that too. You know, that's probably, you know, you get into sort of a crescendo where you might do some part time partial unemployment, things like that to preserve somebody's PTO preserve their health care. But, you know, we're really, you know, as you said, all of our employees are really important to us. You know, it's really hard to bring on new people and get them to the level where they're where they're successful. You know, we don't want to lose that. One last point, Josh. You know, you're talking about the federal government and, you know, this $2 trillion plan. And I certainly agree with you, you know, it's not enough to say the check will be in the mail. It is what it is. You know, you don't know exactly what's going to happen here to any given business. But I'm going to talk about the state for a minute. The energy industry always has expectations of our state legislature. Sometimes those expectations are not meant for years and years and years to go by. And it's like the legislature, you know, really doesn't address it. And I'm thinking of, for example, the credit on storage, that bill that keeps on rolling along without being passed. But, you know, now the legislature has gone home. And this session is not coming back. How does that affect you? Is there anything in the pipeline that you were hoping for? Anything in the pipeline that would have improved the, you know, position of the industry that is now like dead at least till next year? What's your reaction to this recess they just took? I, you know, I think everybody in the financial market and the resident, you know, everybody understands the current state credit and how it works. You know, it's not, there's, you know, nothing terribly wrong with it. It would be nice to have an explicit inclusion of storage. I'm not necessarily an advocate for a separate credit. I would just say put it in there as it is and leave it alone. I think great, you know, having no sunset and not attacking it every year would also be great. You know, I think even more so, that will help to, you know, shore up this industry. I mean, solar industries employs roughly 3,000 people in the state of Hawaii. Revolution has about 150 staff between sales and our field workforce, about 100 people in the field. You know, obviously we contribute a lot. We're probably the single biggest impact on, as an industry, you know, taking the state off of oil. We've seen the progress. I mean, in the decade we've been doing this almost 20, 25%, I mean, pretty amazing. It's an enormous amount of energy that's not being produced by fossil fuels. So, you know, I hope that this crisis is also a wake up call for people regarding climate change. Climate change is not such an immediate thing, but it needs the same kind of global shared sense of we got to do something. And, you know, a short term oil war is purely, you know, it's an economic tool. It has nothing to do with this broader issue. And if anything, we should prove to ourselves that we don't want oil at any price. Last question, Josh, last question, and that is, you know, looking down the pike with all of this and trying to see into the future as every entrepreneur should try to do. What are the possible, you know, improvements in your business world that might come out of this crisis once it's done? How do you see yourself emerging and will it be better in some way? Not only in the business context, but in the community context as well. I mean, I think there's, I can't see this not enhancing our ability to communicate and using more tools. And so it seems natural that we're going to make some adaptations that improve that. You know, we're going to also continue to expand other services that make sense. So, you know, air conditioning, you know, as an obvious one, we've been providing air conditioning for about four or five years now. That business has continued to grow. You know, we're looking at more complexity there, filtering systems, air quality, those kinds of things obviously becoming more important. So, you know, adapting our business to customer needs and, you know, what people want right now. I think, you know, there's no way you don't come out of this thinking about that. We've already had some adaptations in our workflow. Everybody used to congregate at the warehouse in the morning, get ready, get their stuff early and then dispersed to jobs. We're limiting that now to just a handful of people. The rest of the workers go straight to job sites. And we already see some better efficiencies out of that. So, you know, there's lots of opportunities and we'll just watch that. I mean, you're always looking at another unique thing about the PV industry is because we have constantly decreasing product pricing instead of inflating product pricing. We kind of have to always be looking at gross margins pretty rigorously to try to improve efficiency, you know, stay competitive and to maintain profitability. Yeah, and that works in favor of everyone really. Well, Josh, the CEO of Revolution has been great to talk with you. I hope we can catch up again. It's great to see, you know, that there are companies out there that are planning and Akamai about the future and weathering the storm, so to speak. Thank you so much, Josh. Thanks a lot, Jake.