Can I Sign Hawaii Banking Last Will And Testament

Industry sign banking hawaii last will and testament myself

[Music] [Applause] [Music] okay we're back we're live i'm jay feidel 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 um welcome josh it's great to have you on the show thanks jay great to be back we want to catch up with you uh 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 um how you've changed your systems uh what your customer base is base has done um and how's business if you don't mind talking about it so tell us first how did it affect you uh going forward starting maybe february whenever it hit whenever it hit hawaii so i think the real impact on us was really like most businesses was 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 we're lucky to be considered a an essential business so we were able to operate through it and i think we were able to deploy processes that that kept our workers working and working safely i would say that the biggest challenge right now is still testing so we all want to want to hear the leadership of the state and leadership of the country here but that's still i think the biggest uncertainty for most businesses is when you 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 um 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 uh you know you know semicolon in a quarantine essentially until we can validate that they they have anything or it's clearly been enough time so you know and then of course losing anybody in your work for two or three weeks is a challenge for any business so um the great 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 abs absolutely you know with a hundred and a little over 125 people at revolusa now um 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 knock wood nothing around me you know one thing you'd be interested in knowing about is uh you know oceanit the tech company downtown run by patrick pat pat sullivan is coming on the show tomorrow and they have uh publicized a uh a spit in the cup test which uh where 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 i think it's it's fundamental to be business being able to operate safely through this is you know so the other big thing that i we've done that i think has been helpful is we you know our our installation work is in teams and those teams essentially isolate themselves from other groups we 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 to get 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 the guys like to wear those sometimes when they're installing anyway because 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 um but we've actually you know believe it or not we've grown through this we expect revenue growth this year year year over year um we had a pretty soft patch in april and may and you know but i think overall you know we'll be able to recover from that and um you know we sales have been very strong you know one of the things that you were you were in the newspaper recently uh 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 is is down in the tank obviously the the the hawaii business article that you're i think you're referring to had us it's like number two in the state and that's great it's exciting you're obviously not going to do that every year and and i think the context is really important there that was um that was 2019 growth and uh you know perhaps we we kind of are projecting a similar uh growth trajectory this year um you know i'm a little hesitant because we're we're still only a little over halfway through but but we certainly have the the bookings to keep on that kind of pace that's a tough pace too you don't want to you don't want to run that that hot too long but um 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 um and for some for some folks you know a really negative market so so i think that growth is a manifestation of us really recovering from that last year and and uh and you know certainly got some more this year um i what i would add is that not in hawaii but nationwide renewable energy and particularly uh what we do which is you know distributed uh distributed energy and distributed storage where you know 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 that renewables and creating you know resilient reliable energy systems at home has definitely been a way the public has responded you know you've probably heard like bicycles has been a real you know bikes are bike sales are sort of double this year over last year and that's another place where people really clearly you know had some of the some down time and and thought about what they want to do with time and and it's nothing well lifestyles lifestyles have changed they have changed and um you know i think people are really getting into that change and and many elements of that change are probably going to be the new normal going forward and i'd like to explore with you some of the changes that have happened around these lifestyles in hawaii for example um i spend my time at home so i'm 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 to do uh solar um this would be a really good time to do that because i'm home and i can i can watch i can see i can i know your your guys may not like this but i can supervise too i so so there's a there's a kind of hands-on thing going here and i think a lot of people who didn't have the time or um didn't have the flexibility in terms of their hours and schedules now do and they can 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 um i know that most of the time your guys will be on the roof um and outside and ps and asterisk to that is that it's healthy to be outside it's healthy to have the sunlight on you uh 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 why you say that so your guys are in great shape they're probably happy to be outside they're safer outside but you know there's probably times when they have to come inside and wire up whatever else i'm not sure what but and at that point okay we get to the question of confidence so i'm inside i'm the homeowner i i want to do this installation but i'm a little nervous about any tradesmen 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 you know i've been the recipient of all kinds of virus uh you know 20 minutes ago who knows what um so i have to feel confident of your tradesman or your worker that when he comes in my house he's not gonna he's not gonna infect me and somehow i'd like to ask you how uh 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 you know probably almost done weekly cadence been updating the whole company on you know where we're at what we need to do uh what our safety protocols are and we and we're dynamic we shift it based on what we're learning and what we see in the outside environment locally so you know right out the gate obviously you know 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 our salt office to outside it's only available now to our you know we have a showroom there obviously we love you know we built that to share information with with customers but we've we've you know essentially banned customers from that office we it's only our workers that are in there if somebody wants to bring a check by or something there's a you 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 our i.t and our communication technology a whole bunch of our workers have vpns now so they can work at home we 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 you know i would be concerned too in fact i i am if i've got someone coming into my house and i don't know so number one they're they're following those protocols in terms of of disinfecting their hands you know 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 you know 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 um and then they're you know like we may need to get in the attic for instance we pull conduits in the attic stuff like that somebody's gonna you know do what they need to to get access to the act and go up there and work we're not uh things that we might have done before with customers you know hawaii you know one of the friendliest places on the planet right and frequently our customers are offering our workers a soda or you know something they've been cooking or you know so we're we're not doing those things i mean if they offer we're going to politely decline that and we're going to avoid the social interaction and you know obviously employing social distance when we need to communicate um we haven't had any sort of negative reactions surrounding that we've had customers sometimes that aren't wearing masks um we've had workers conversely where workers have been uncomfortable sometimes in a in a home setting and we've given our crew leads the ability to to uh decide you know if if they feel like um you know we i think we talked about this last time we had implemented this in april but you know we on our scheduling calls with customers we ask what they've been up to where they've been you know we try to pre-screen a little bit um you know if somebody's just back from the mainland we're going to wait a few weeks before we go do the work that kind of thing that's smart it's smart and it's really totally appropriate and people should completely understand about that you have to protect your staff so you know what you you mentioned that you had changed to change a bunch of systems i'd be uh 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 you know in the future i think everything we've done will stick to some degree i mean obviously you know presuming that you know some you know six months i don't know when at some point we get control of the disease and we can relax some of the the uh 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 one with us navy on it i thought that was i'm a navy veteran so i thought that was kind of cool and i don't know i might just keep using that stuff um but i think i think uh on the 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 um 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 um that's a more difficult training setting than 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 um we do a lot of zoom we or and or other you know with 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 um you know you you you have enough of these meetings a day and and it can be a little exhausting um 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 um i think it's something that we're you know we're we're not doing as much but i think would be useful um but i i suspect that we will retain some version of work from home permanently um you know one thing we certainly discovered is that uh you know punching a clock is not you know we can tell we can tell if somebody's performing or not uh independent of that and i would say if anything the office can mask that a little bit um you know so i i think i think those are positive things on the i.t side you know virtual private networks very important for security um you know we have uh hard server you know hardwired 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 um 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 um yeah you know it strikes me that um when those four um big tech executives went to testify in congress a week or two ago and what was it google apple facebook and amazon um you know it came out that uh they're doing really really well at the time of kovit 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 like i can tell you that think tech is um then 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 and it's like an aha moment like depositing checks off off a scanner that's a aha moment all of a sudden you say why why do we do this before absolutely i 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 i think you know businesses certainly are faring better i you know and i'll this is my i i think there was and on the other side of that um this thing is disastrous for uh 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 in you know february march that was projecting that we would you know we would see essentially these waves cycles but sure you know you look at the math so far that's sure what it looks like and um and i you know that was drawn from obviously much earlier experiences like the 1918 pandemic and stuff like that and you know if if we're going to go through several more of these where we have to sort of who i can't remember the name of the guy that wrote the medium article on the hammer and the dance but that that phrase has become very popular and um and he wasn't even an epidemiologist and you know that anyway that impact on small businesses is a straining i 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 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 years is we've been growing a lot and usually growth requires some some capital and we've found that that what was available six months ago is completely different today and and so the way we go about funding the business the way we go about you know shoring it up getting credit lines things all those kinds of things is different than it would have been um 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 hawaii banks really tighten up you know because they're concerned where the economy's 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 cures act is helpful for the slump you know especially that april uh may time frame 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 it you know and not that the carers 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 going to be and if you lock credit up you just you know you just you just make it worse in some cases so and i think that that my point was bigger businesses are much less impacted by that than smaller businesses are interesting when credit tightens up it's it's much harder for small businesses to get what they need you know one and i see you i mean as an observer from the outside as um in the hub of the wheel of your business and you are dealing with course your staff both uh operational and administrative um and you're dealing with um you know your customers however you can get them and of course you're 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 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 is hurting in ways where anyone can be affected right now thank god revolution is doing well but if your supply line were 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 you what do you worry about in that regard we've been at it long enough and hawaii is a unique enough environment we've had supply 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 uh supply constraints so right now nationally and probably globally the demand for energy storage products is like you know it was already high it was already accelerating quickly and the pandemic has only served to accelerate that so unfortunately you're in good shape on supply but it's definite it's definitely a constrained environment nationally so and there 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 a on an upward upward pace so i think that's indicative of you know how people are thinking about these things um we have an air conditioning business as well as a pv business that's you know appears to be doubling this year certainly more people at home thinking about that yeah what about china you know we've been covering this in a number of our shows uh how china is changing internally um and look what happened in hong kong it's awful uh look what happened in with the uyghurs in the west uh uh 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 an effect you know we know that china is into manufacturing and especially high-tech manufacturing like like solar and systems inverters what have you um does that affected your supply line so we're we're pretty well isolated there and you know probably you know we 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 um and you know i think at the same time we we you know we pride ourselves on on delivering quality and that means we also are are picking brands that we believe are high quality so our primary employer uh sun power panasonic um energy storage it's tesla tesla's all manufactured in the us um and you know what i see right 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 um 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 um the other thing i you know and i'll just say i've we've had some supply issues in the supply issues we've had aren't centered on china they're centered on the us um 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 kovit um you know i think the the in on the battery end it's more demand related than than so much a supply thing but it you know in both cases they're us issues they're not uh external issues in terms of our supply risks well that takes me to my my last question today for you josh and that is you know um um of course everybody awaits um you know a vaccine but there's no certainty that's going to work there's no certainty that we'll be able to you know take rational steps to reopen the economy in general or that it will be done quickly and there's the there's a fair chance that the economy will continue to decline and those homeowners that we talked about uh the ones who you know need to be and are confident of your guys and you know what you're offering um they may lose the confidence they may they may get what do you want to call it depressed uh 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 going to wait this out and um not not do anything i'm going to go into suspense you know to follow the decline in the economy um that's that's got to 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 that absolutely happens and obviously you know in an economic cycle if if it looks dark enough people do lock up they stop making decisions even good decisions so the first thing i always say about you know pv you know in hawaii we can save everybody money we can we can give you you know pv and storage and still save you roughly 25 30 on your electric bills so so really it's it's about financing and as long as we have a financial product that helps our consumers then they're going to save money on electricity that they would be buying anyway so 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 going to communicate that to people and obviously you have to have the products so you know we we look to find financial products we have a local uh local credit union product right now that has a two-year no payment option for the customer so they they can if they want to but if they if they want to amortize on the back end that you know kind of like you know like i don't want to 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 um 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 the tax value we have a revolution has its own in-house uh power purchase agreement that's you know takes advantage of that so the customer again is going to get a monthly payment that's less than their normal utility bill and so to to me that's the chief value play that we have in a in a downturn is that we're going to save you money right now and you don't have an out-of-pocket expense to get started so that that's pretty fundamental obviously there's people that are going to take advantage of these systems for the for the tax value themselves um and i right now that's still the majority of our customers um 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 um and and like you said i think we're still experiencing a lot of people that thought a lot about what they needed to do maybe things they had been setting aside for a while and now they're wanting to get them done josh powell ceo of revolusun a successful solar company and a testament uh 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 you