Green Giants – Episode 74

Wes Ashworth (04:35)

Yeah, that’s incredible. Really cool journey, and just hearing how it all unfolded and how you ended up getting to where you are now. I love it. A little bit of intentionality, a little bit of just kind of luck and chance and it happens and you’re right there at the right place, right time. That’s awesome. I think most great careers happen just like that.

You mentioned starting out early under that airport terminal project. I think that was probably a 2.5-billion-dollar project. What lessons may be learned from those massive infrastructure projects that ended up shaping just how you manage solar projects today?

Andrew Moles (05:07)

I think the thing I learned the most there was that it’s less about the actual construction and the knowledge of the actual construction, and how things go together when you get into leading projects of that size. It’s all about people.

And I don’t think I appreciated that until I started in the construction industry, just how important your ability to lead, to motivate people is, and to make sure they’re inspired and developing at a quick pace. And we had some of the best leaders in the industry building that flagship project.

Those individuals really rubbed off on me and how I managed the people side of the business and how you put people first, their development first, and also how you can challenge. I was challenged at a very young age on that project and given way more responsibility than thought I should have been given but I embraced it and I worked my butt off and I made sure I was successful and that taught me that you can if you have somebody who’s made of the right stuff you can challenge them earlier on and they’ll be much much better for it for the long term and they’ll be able to do better things for you and your company.

As they will have developed earlier and be able to share those lessons learned with people faster and also have the courage to trust people with more responsibility earlier in their careers, too. So, it’s kind of each one teach one and each one teach one early or give someone responsibility earlier than naturally what may flow in a company like us that’s been around for 115 plus years. It really inspired me to be able to do the same thing with our team and to stretch people, overload them with responsibility, and rapidly develop their skill sets and their leadership capability is something I learned on that first project.

Wes Ashworth (06:44)

Yeah, I love that. I love that point of just giving the opportunity early. Obviously, it happened to you and you saw the success there. But then, duplicating that now, as you’re in that leadership seat, is really cool. And I think there’s a trend of I think really successful companies doing that versus the well, you got to wait 20 years, you got to put in your 15 years before you get a lot more trying to give that like, yeah, if you’re made of the right stuff, you got it rise of the occasion and give some of that challenge early. So, I love that, and we’ll get more into the people stuff as we go. I think that’s a big piece of it.

So, that foundation you built, so early career, big infrastructure experience, guiding principles. It’s clear how that shaped your approach. In solar, especially in recent years, the pressure to scale fast has been enormous. And I want to zoom in on how you’ve managed that tension because others have rushed to grow. Your team took a slightly different path. So, you’ve talked about resisting the temptation to grow too fast.

Was there a specific deal or project, maybe you had to walk away from or one that was especially hard and because why did you decided to say no ultimately?

Andrew Moles (07:47)

Yeah, and there’ve been multiple projects that we’ve had to walk away from or say no to. And I think there was one year where we actually declined a bit, about 80 % of what we were asked to bid, which is crazy to think about.

To be able to sort of temper my expectations and my desire to grow because I generally lean on the optimist side of realist, and I generally want to grow and build this up to the biggest empire I possibly can, right? So, to be able to check that, check that backswing and make sure that we’re making responsible decisions has been tough at times. And there are a few projects.

There was one project that came to mind where months after we had bid on a project, it went kind of silent on us, and then the owner came back and said, all right, here’s an LNTP Go. And we had written this one off as we weren’t successful on it, and we had picked up a bunch of other work or made commitments to other clients. And we had to call them up and say, we’re sorry, but we committed our resources elsewhere. And that was a tough call to make because it was a new relationship and we’re starting with a new client too, but it was really that it’s a busy market right now, and if you want resources assigned to your projects, open communication is huge.

We’re finding the most success with our clients with whom we have that relationship built. We’re dedicating resources to them early. We’re working collaboratively through projects, through permitting processes, through getting their financing arranged, knowing the projects are gonna come, which is a double-edged sword for us because we do have projects that get deferred and I have these resources that aren’t working, so we got hit with deferrals this year, which hurt our financials quite a bit. I have a lot of people sitting there that should be building work that aren’t, but I feel good about myself because I didn’t overgrow. I have the opportunity to train people and develop people for an extra six to nine months before they’re deployed to projects for the new ones that I brought on. And I’m staying true to my commitments to my clients and they’re getting the resources they were promised. I haven’t sought extra work to try to push them out somewhere else. And I wrote a capstone assignment for a leadership development program I was in, PCL, it must have been five years ago now and it was called the Growing Solar Responsibly the Next Decade and it really talked about how to make sure you’re not jumping too quickly at the top line and sacrificing the bottom line and the people.

And the bottom-line sacrifice businesses can get their heads around that. I can never get my head around sacrificing the people. And if you come too quickly, you’re gonna burn out your people, your leaders. If they’re not on board with the pace you’re growing, you have to slow down, or you’re gonna lose your leaders by and underneath you and you’re gonna burn them out, or they’re not going to feel responsible or tied to the results. And you’re gonna lose that buy-in and that’s so critical to success, is having that support all the way down.

You want them to be nervous, you want them to be uncomfortable and you want them to have productive paranoia. But you don’t want them to be past that line where they really struggle with motivation and feeling bought into the plan and bought into the success.

So, it’s that fine line and I’m constantly checking in and taking stock with all of my leaders to make sure they’re still on the same growth path and growth aspirations and still on board with the plan and when I find that they may be slightly over that line, we dial it back. And that makes sure that we’re responsible with our clients and we never give a project to a team that’s not ready to deliver their project.

That’s the reputation is worth more than anything to us. And staying true to that is how we’ve continued to have success. And I think it’s no secret some of our competitors have struggled in the last three to five years with overgrowing and some of them have made the conscious decision in the last 18 months to slow down and to say, we don’t want to grow anymore.

We want to fix our bottom line, we want to fix our execution, and we want to get back on track to the success we were having before we went through this growth spurt. We haven’t had to do that and that’s because we’ve taken lessons learned from a 115-plus-year-old company and all of the board members and the CEO and the COO that I interact with who oversee this business and sharing their sort of experiences they’ve had over time and we’ve managed to find that balance so far and I’m very optimistic and confident will continue to find that balance.

Wes Ashworth (11:57)

Yeah, I love that. And there’s a lot of wisdom in what you just shared there to just to stop there for a second. But I was going to ask you, kind of like, how do you tell? Because it’s always a moving target. It’s hard to really know if we are stretched too thin or not. But you mentioned that of just that just those common sorts of weekly check-ins, check where they are adjusting on the fly. And I think that’s what it is, it’s always fluid. It’s always changing. But continuing to check in and have that real pulse from your people, sort of where they are and what’s going on.

Andrew Moles (12:25)

Yeah, I’ll say in this business, I go to sleep every other night with something completely different on my mind. And one night it’s, we don’t have enough work, what are we going to do with our people? And the next night it’s, we’ve got too much work, how are we going to get the people on board with delivering it? And it’s that fun lumpiness and roller coaster of construction in general, but specifically solar is even more sort of up and down and lumpy general construction that we normally do and PCL.

So, it’s one of those ones where it makes me smile just how many times I’ve went for a period of time. I’ve been like, wow, we’re in huge growth mode. Then, a couple of months just get deferred and it’s, no, we were overstaffed. How are we going to keep everybody busy and motivated and enthusiastic when they’re not as busy as they’re used to being?

So, it’s that fun up and down that really keeps us on our toes. But to make sure that I’m checking in on which side of that are all of our leaders are on. It’s helpful.

Wes Ashworth (13:09)

Yeah, I love that. That’s kind of a day in the life of a business leader in the space. What do you do exactly? Going to bed one night, you’re like, we’re stretched really thin. The next, you’re like, my gosh, we need to go pick up more work or what have you. I guess it makes it fun and exciting, right? Challenging.

We talked before you used this kind of elastic band metaphor for sort of stretching people without breaking them. You started to touch on that there. Can you share a time, maybe when either you sort of misjudged the balance of someone or a team, and they got overstretched? What do you do when somebody does get overstretched? What do you learn and how do you adjust?

Andrew Moles (13:56)

Yeah, and it’s interesting because if you open a band of elastics, good quality elastics, they’ll all break around the same point. People aren’t like that. So, the elastic analogy makes sense to a certain point, but people are like a mixed bag of elastics, where some of them can stretch a lot further and will come out way better. And some of them can’t.

So, making sure we’re doing the regular check-ins with those people we are stretching, assigning them the right mentorship, assigning them the ability to, or giving them the ability to put their hand up and say, I’m struggling a little bit. I think the times when we’ve fallen on our face with respect to that is when we haven’t done the regular check-ins, or we haven’t got that information out of them in those check-ins where they have too much pride to say they’re struggling or not managing and we’re not verifying what they’re doing enough to notice some of the faults and then it comes out later with some challenges.

So, it’s really making sure that we’re showing them we trust them, but verifying what they’re doing on a regular basis and making sure that we’re emotionally smart enough to pull that out of them in those conversations when we’re stretching them. Another analogy that was used on me when I first got stretched into a position was we’re gonna put you on an island and you’re gonna be on this island and you’re gonna be doing your own thing and managing your world but we’re going to be over there with a life raft, just sitting off the island and anytime you say you need help we’re gonna rush over there and we’re gonna deploy some people to help you out or we’re gonna take you off the island and move you somewhere you just gotta you’ve got to send the flag up.

That one I’ve used with a few of our staff, too. I’d say the amount of times this has been a challenge for success it’s probably 98 % successful in the times that we’ve identified people who we thought had the potential to be stretched and stretched them and it’s probably 2 % where they overstretched. That’s a pretty good success rate. I would go down the road and not change anything at that success rate.

Wes Ashworth (15:47)

Yeah, absolutely. Huge just lessons there in culture and the people side of it. And I will spend some time on that. Part of the say no to growth, especially when the market’s going well and it’s booming, it takes a lot of discipline. Again, what really stood out to me in your story was that it was incredible, but also just not just about capacity or numbers, it’s about really protecting something deeper in your culture, the people side of it. And I want to talk about that because the way you’ve prioritized culture, PCL feels like a core part of how you built long-term success and as you’ve scaled from roughly 80 salaries staffed over 260 and counting.

What’s one moment where you realized your culture was being tested and then how did you handle it?

Andrew Moles (16:28)

Oh, just one. Culture gets tested as you’re growing all the time. Culture gets tested even when you aren’t. I think there was a point in time when I was traveling around a little bit and I would say things or make comments that were generally aligned to how we manage ourselves and how we make decisions. And I would see people’s reactions like a light bulb, where I hadn’t thought about it that way, I realized a bit of the disconnect where I used to lead, and culture used to just be spilled out of me because I knew everybody personally in our team.

I started with a much more localized team and then expanded to two continents and three countries and a much larger team and our people are scattered on all remote projects all over the place. So, I think I realized it needs to be a more intentional approach and we certainly took that back and made a much more intentional approach. We brought in all our senior leaders and we said, what does good culture look like? What is so special about our culture at PCL Solar that we want to make sure everybody understands this is why we’re special, this is what’s important, this is what good looks like.

We created a culture mission statement and a dos and don’ts document. So basically, here are the five pillars of our good culture and why we’re so good from a culture perspective, and here are the do’s that accomplish it and here are the don’ts and it said do’s and don’ts. We didn’t try to make this overly educational or overstated. We put it in layman’s terms and it was simple. And then we trained everybody on it. We put a training course together. It was an online course. And then we had the teams meet.

Last year, we had a meeting with the middle-level managers. So, one down from the senior managers and brought them in to do a whole session on where they believe their different silos are not hitting all of those five, or where they think that those five pillars are two that need the most reinforcement on their teams. And then they went away with action plans on how to get those pillars up to where they need to be or how to reinforce the positive culture in those pillars. So basically, finding the two weakest of the five and then reinforcing it through those different silos and they weren’t all the same.

The silos were missing different things, or the leaders thought that they needed to work on different ones and then continue to follow that up. So that was the last 24 months and the next 24 months will continue to reinforce this in different ways and ultimately, I’m very, very, very proud of our culture. It’s something that I think if you ask me what I’m most proud of, it’s how quickly we’ve been able to develop young superstars into fantastic leaders and it’s our culture.


Our culture is a big part of that development opportunity for individuals and maintaining that is paramount to our success and I think we’re well on our way and we have 260 plus people who understand what our good culture is, understand the benefits of it and are singing it to everybody as they’re coming in the door or to people who we’re looking to recruit in as we continue to grow. So, it’s really doing well, but it was that intentional push that was needed.

Wes Ashworth (19:22)

Yeah, absolutely. And I say that a lot internally in our team, just the power of intentionality, right? You can put posters on a wall, or you can tell people what the values are. It doesn’t make a difference, but until you’re really intentional and everything that you do, filtering decisions through that, through those values, making hiring decisions through those values, sometimes when you need to coach somebody or you’re going to move on from an individual, doing it through those values, through a very intentional process, as you just said, that’s when that real magic comes to life.

You hear it, like a lot of leaders say they have a great culture. And so, I know that you do, is I’m curious to hear what this looks like in real life. So, if a stranger, say, walked onto one of your project sites, what would they see or hear that proves your culture is different? What are some of those threads that they would actually witness?

Andrew Moles (20:12)

I wouldn’t say a stranger as much as I would say a new hire is how I would explain this. And we’ve brought people over from the industry and they’ve come in and they have their own views of how things are normally done. And quickly, within the first 30 days, I’d say they’ve drank the Kool-Aid and they feel the difference. And it’s just the more positive environment, the more focus on people development training.

Everybody is there to help everybody. We’re 100 % employee-owned. We’re almost all shareholders. There is no, I don’t want to help you because that’s not my job. It’s everybody wants to help everybody to make the project more successful. And everybody wants to help everybody develop and grow their careers as fast as they can because there’s no competition for. I don’t want to help you because I want that role.

There’s enough growth, there’s enough excitement, there’s enough development and role opportunities that everybody can move up and continue to prosper. And I believe that that mindset is held all the way through our ranks. And as people come in, they start to really notice the difference in the focus on people. And when we go through these down periods, like what we did this year, we’re still growing, we’re still hiring.

And a lot of companies would be doing the opposite, but we know we’ve got a mountain of work in front of us and we build our plans out, we build our company around people and developing and investing in people. And when you have these little periods, you want to make sure that you’re investing in the development even more and bringing on other people to learn when it’s not so busy, so that when we get busy again, everybody’s off to the races and not trying to make penny-wise, pound-foolish decisions and cut overhead in this scenario, right?

So. it’s a really nice position to be in when we can show them this early in our careers that no, this is the time when we’re gonna work on your development even more than normal, and here’s what we have in front of us and we constantly communicate. We have a massive amount of work that’s signed up right now, but hasn’t started. So, this deferral period is just a little lump before the big spike again and making sure people are excited about that and see that that growth equals opportunity if they want it. And I speak about that all the time, every chance I get to get in front of our people and I know some of our other leaders are speaking about that every chance they get to get in front of our people.

The more we drill down into everybody’s head, the better. People feel that, people share that they feel that when they start on their job sites. That was a difference from their previous role.

Wes Ashworth (22:39)

Yeah, I like it. I like it a lot. And so, you do see, we’re talking about growth and culture, and I think it is easy, as you said, you protect your culture when you’re smaller, and like you touch every person you’re there with them. It’s a lot easier, but then as you grow, it gets harder and harder to keep your arms around it.

What’s the most common mistake maybe you’ve seen other leaders make when they try to protect culture during periods of rapid growth?

Andrew Moles (23:04)

I think not being aware of A, two things. How quickly it will start to degrade as you grow and have fewer touch points with people, when it was a culture that was more built by your leadership. And B, just the subcultures that exist from project to project, from region to region. There’s an Australia subculture, then there’s an Australia office and an Australia field subculture. And there’s a Texas subculture versus an Ohio subculture versus an Alberta subculture, right?

So, you have to understand, embrace, and accept that you’ll have a subculture, but you have to reinforce what’s critically important to maintain and that’s what we’ve tried to do by establishing those five pillars is this is what’s critical to maintain everything outside of that has a bit of flexibility but these don’t these are non-negotiables and that’s that was paramount for it but recognizing that it’s not it won’t just continue to grow without the right leaders and I’ve got the benefit of a fantastic senior leadership team and a team underneath them who model our culture and reinforce good culture day in and day out. And that’s special and that helps a ton.

But we also had the benefit of myself and others recognizing that there was a risk of degradation and then putting being more intentional with actions on how we go about maintaining it and improving it. That’s what we spend a lot of time on this now, right? And I think we could have easily missed that. And we’re so busy with everything else we’re doing. We could have very easily overlooked that in 260 people deep and 180 of them don’t model our culture. And how do you get it back? I don’t even want to think about how much effort that would have taken if it were even possible.

Wes Ashworth (24:26)

Yeah, and that’s what you see happen, right? I think as people grow, it’s just like they pick up a lot of new projects, new clients, whatever. Things are going really fast and it gets exciting and they’re like, culture, it’s almost maybe not even intentional, it’s just subconscious. You don’t even think about it because you’re just doing all the work that’s coming in and trying to grow and expand and hire people. But the fact that you kept it at the forefront kept thinking about it, and course correcting.

And then, as you said, you even have some internal champions where you’ve got other leaders that are really championing that and believing it, and you’re hiring based on that, which is incredible. It is fully worth it and not worth it to just sacrifice culture while you grow and expand and hire. There’s a little bit of flexibility there, but yeah, keeping the main things, the main things in this course, is critical for sure.

Andrew Moles (25:32)

I’d say a lot of times these things get missed when you have such strong results, right? When you’re very profitable, when you’re growing at a fast pace, it’s easy to lose sight of something like culture because nothing’s wrong, right? Your results are great, so that means nothing’s wrong, so I don’t need to worry about that. Same with change. It’s so easy to overlook the need to change and to look at new ways of doing things when your results are strong.

It takes discipline and leadership and a good understanding of the results doesn’t really mean that everything is good. And you should be looking at things and seeing that they could be better. And I think I explained to you before a gross loss analysis that we ran, where we looked at even our most profitable jobs line by line and saw where we lost money. And we continued to do that on every single project. We go line by line.

Even projects that made more than they were supposed to and we study the losses. People would say well, why are you studying losses when you did great last year and it’s well because we could have done better, right and that’s kind of the mentality that’s driven through all our people is good is not enough good plus is not enough if you can do better, we want to be focusing on that continuous opportunity for improvement.

Studying where we’ve missed opportunities, even on our best jobs, has led us to find different trends than what we found by only studying our poor jobs. And some of the stuff we saw in our poor jobs wasn’t actually a big deal, because maybe that balanced out to a win on eight of our last good jobs and two of our jobs had big losses in this category, but you balance it out, we’re in the plus there and it goes, okay, then that’s not so bad. We’re actually bidding these responsibly.

Wes Ashworth (26:51)

Yeah. And you mentioned that I know you’ve pioneered this gross loss analysis on every project and I love this. I want to dig into it a little bit more. and even the profitable ones, as you said, even studying the wins.

So, can you share maybe a specific story or project where this analysis uncovered a hidden problem, maybe no one expected or saw prior to.

Andrew Moles (27:27)

That’s a good question. I kind of, because there’s just so much, we’ve studied in there. I think one of the big ones was probably cut and fill.

And cut and fill on the jobs that were losing money looked like a major issue. And if I looked at just studying the jobs that lost money, we need to add tons more money into all of our bids for cut and fill. We’re going way too tight on cubic yards of cut fill. We’re not being responsible. We need to get more design done ahead of time, so on and so forth.

And then when we brought in all of our jobs that made extra money or made were supposed to make, what we found was a lot of those had wins in them and the wins actually completely balanced out the losses. So, when you look at it in a bigger sample set, we actually were making a bit of money on our cut fill analysis and the way that we were bidding our projects, not losing money. It just so happened that we lost big on a couple of jobs, but we won incrementally on a handful of others that wiped out that loss.

So that was one, well, the approach doesn’t need to drastically change. And maybe there’s some additional studying we can do to try to avoid the lumpiness here and also try to avoid overpricing here to make it less these winds wipe out these losses to bring it to the even line. It’d be nice if it were just even, right? No story required.

So, we did tweak a few things that we do, but it was one that looked like it was on fire and something drastically needed to change and the sky was falling and it turned out that no, nothing’s broken. It’s actually balancing out to a good spot. But can we get better? Yes. So, we put some plans in place to get better. But will we still have a loss on the cut fill once in a while? Yeah. Will we have a win on it once in a while? Yeah. But we’re a little tighter on those bands now. But yeah, that’s the one that comes to mind is it was eye-opening when we got the results in.

Wes Ashworth (29:15)

Sure, it’s a good one. It definitely tells the story and you can see the value of doing that and kind of digging into it that way. a lot of people probably just see the first signal that you said and react off of that and maybe make some not great decisions.

Has your team’s willingness to study the successful projects, has changed your forecasting or bidding strategies at all? Or do you remember that first kind of big aha moment that proved like, this works, we need to do this. We always need to do this.

Andrew Moles (29:44)

It changed a lot of the way we approach things. it educates our estimating and educates our operations teams. But we basically pull out of there. We take our 10 biggest losers, that’s what we do. 10 biggest losers, and we say, what’s our action? And then after the next wave of projects, we see, they are still in the tent? And what we see is a lot of those fall out of the top 10. Some of them will always be in there. Some of them are just those scopes that are riskier where you’re going to have those bigger swings.

But what we do find is we are moving stuff down and it continues to move down and we basically put an action plan to each of those we put a champion to each of those and some of it’s just developing training specific to it and pushing all of our operational staff or all of our staff through the training some of its developing new procedures again putting it through a training that auditing a procedure that it’s being done on site as soon as the work starts.

Some of it’s just having a conversation during the kickoff meeting with all the parties involved on how they’re going to manage this risk because it’s now identified, it’s now tracked, it’s now a top 10. You need to have a conversation or a plan around it. But every one of those top 10 gets an action plan that gets re-studied and we’re seeing the total percentage gross loss on an average coming down significantly since we implemented this.

 Our goal ultimately is to get to zero, but probably not achievable. But we are seeing a trend down quite a bit and it’s making us more competitive. Our results are more; no results are ever guaranteed in EPC. It’s just too risky in business. But we have more certainty around our results and more confidence around our results. And we’re able to price stuff a little bit tighter than we used to because there’s just less lumpiness in our results. And as we continue to study and learn and grow from it, we hope that that trend continues. And it just continues to make us super competitive without having to sacrifice our profitability.

Wes Ashworth (31:12)

Yeah. Thinking about those, like the top 10 sort of loss buckets and taking action items and action plans to address those. I love the simplicity and the brilliance of that. Is there an example of one that was just like was on there and then what did you do about it and kind of like to just eradicate it or fix it, fix it all together? Just curious, like a real-life example.

Andrew Moles (31:55)

I think we were losing a very simple one. We were losing money on trenching and cable sizing for the underground cable. And we were losing it on a handful of jobs. Some jobs we would win, but it was too lumpy. We didn’t like the lumpiness of it. We spent more time during the bid phase or the LNTP phase going and studying the soil conditions and running our own studies and working with our design consultants to run their studies and working with our suppliers to make sure that we’d dotted all the I’s and crossed all the T’s and fully understood what that trench detail needed to be.

What that cable sizing is needed to be and optimizing for the losses that are in the performance model. And that was just one where we used to let that happen much later in the process and we used to get it lump sum and what you won or you lost, right? And now we just brought forward some of that engineering, and we have in-house capability to do it and run those studies and bringing in our suppliers and our consultants when we need to just gives us that extra certainty.

Now instead of assigning a contingency to that we can just go with certainty and say no this is what it’s going to take so that was really just why not just bring that forward yes it costs us more money early and if the job goes away we’re gonna be upside down a little bit of money but if I look at how much we’ve been lumpy lost on this over the last 10 jobs that’s such a tiny investment the odd time we might have to write that off because we don’t build the project at the end of the day, let’s just do it, right?

So that’s an easy one to talk about. That’s just one example of one that we’ve eradicated that’s well down below the top 10 list now.

Wes Ashworth (33:24)

Yeah, no, it’s awesome. There are a couple of threads throughout that we’ve talked about and part of it is obviously really driven in that culture. One, when you’re sitting down with people and they’re open and honest about where they are, if they’re stretched too thin, kind of all those things. And then you’re looking at successes, you’re looking at losses. I think the one thread that has to be there is just really open honesty, open communication, vulnerability, getting, being able to admit mistakes, knowing that that’s okay as well. And I think this goes against sort of the human hard wiring of self-preservation, and kind of like, we want to protect ourselves and I don’t want to look bad. I don’t want to admit mistakes. But when you create that, it is a truly magical thing.

How do you create that psychological safety? So, your team feels comfortable sharing their biggest errors, talking about it openly, anything that comes to mind, or just like, how do you make that happen?

Andrew Moles (34:16)
I’m direct, and I can be emotional at times because I’m passionate. So, I have to check this a lot with the team, but I don’t like hearing bad news late. Reminds me of, I think it was Godfather 2, when he says, my employer insists on hearing bad news immediately stands up and just leaves a meeting mid-meeting, and he’s like, where are you going? That’s kind of me. I want to hear it right away. And I try my best not to not to overreact or shoot the messenger. But even if I do feel like I overreacted, I try to follow up with a conversation with the person, say, hey, just want to let you know mistakes happen. We understand that. And ultimately, what we do about this moving forward is what’s important, and how do we avoid this from other people? I think somehow and I tried to be intentional with this and frankly, we’re a solar EPC business that’s got a lot of developing individuals in it.

Construction in general there’s always going to be mistakes there’s always going to be challenges it’s how you overcome them and how you learn from them that’s important and we’ve got a culture of people who will put up their hand and say this went wrong because of this I want to share this with everybody in our division and people get the lessons learned from a project in Texas on a project in Australia I’ll say hey guys we just screwed this up this is why this is what we did to fix it this you can avoid it on your next job.

The people in Australia will reciprocate back with one going over to the rest of the team over here and saying well, guess what, guys, we screwed this up, we’re even worse and this is what we did about it and here’s how you avoid it and we’ve got that culture now where our people are not afraid to say I screwed up. Here’s what I did. Here’s what I did to fix it. Here’s what I do next time. And that’s so critical. But I mean, it’s insane when people lay their people off or let their people go when they make mistakes because you’re letting them go at their most valuable time.

Before they made that mistake, they were less valuable to you because they hadn’t learned that hard lesson. And those mistakes are what build great people and great leaders and responsible people because that’s when they learn the hardest lessons in their lives, and that’s when they you’ve basically paid for their education now because those mistakes probably cost you money and then you let them go. That’s crazy to me. Right?

No, you should be making sure they learn from it and making sure they use it to educate all of their peers and everybody else on your team, so you’re getting the most bang for your buck on what that mistake cost you. I always laugh when someone gets let go in that situation because they were more valuable than they ever were before working for you and now you let them go it’s it just makes no sense to me.

Wes Ashworth (36:45)

No, I agree. But it’s crazy how common that is, right? That companies do that and they operate that way. So, what you’re describing is not the average experience that people face inside a company. And so, it is incredible. I love just the, and I think that’s part of it, right? The vulnerability transparency, but also just the reciprocity of it. It’s like, well, if I tell you mine, then you’re more comfortable coming and going, hey, we screwed up too. And everybody’s learning from each other and learning together. I love this.

It’s just sort of a company culture masterpiece. Great.

Andrew Moles (37:17)

I made more mistakes than anybody on our team, right? And more costly ones, probably, right? And I’m open about that and I’m open about the mistakes I’ve made and the storytelling of how I’ve learned my lessons is something I try to make sure that everybody hears and has an opportunity to learn and grow from too, right?

I don’t want anyone repeating my mistakes. But certainly, I didn’t come into this role with a clean record. I made plenty of mistakes and I continue to make mistakes. And you learn from them, you grow from them, and you make sure that everybody gets educated from them and then we’re all better off.

Wes Ashworth (37:48)

Absolutely, I feel that, agree completely. Obviously, we talked about managing data, culture internally, that’s one part of it. I do want to talk a little bit about what happens when you cross borders. So that’s a whole different level of complications. So, you’ve taken PCL solar into entirely new regions, each with their own complexities. And I’d love to kind of hear more about that, how you approach the expansion and what those moves taught you.

So, you told me, sorry, kind of like expanding into the Caribbean, which was fascinating. What were the most important lessons you took away from that experience that have made your future expansion stronger?

Andrew Moles (38:20)

I’d say we expanded in the Caribbean by opening a few operating an operating entity and a couple of holdcos. And we never executed any work under those operating companies. And we were banking on a few projects coming our way, which had ended up falling apart.

Frankly, it didn’t seem like it was above board on how everything was going to be managed if they did go, so I was getting cold feet in any way. And those islands can be a bit tricky to navigate ethically in compliance with how I and we at PCL manage our business. So, I was happy to close those down and look for other places, but certainly, I put a much higher priority on the stability of the government, their track record with doing honest and open business when we were looking at our next place of expansion. And we ultimately landed on Australia, which has a legal system, helps Canada, which helps a ton for us.

We had built a hospital there years before, so we already had a little bit of experience in Australia, which was great. And the people fit fairly well within our sort of core values and our culture.

What I found was expanding was everybody thinks they’re different everywhere you go, but the differences aren’t that great. When you get into the details of things, they’re actually very minor differences and people want to be treated the same way. People are motivated by the same things generally in the three countries we work in. And people want to feel recognized for their efforts and they want to feel a sense of purpose from the job that they’re doing. And those two things, I believe, are true globally. And those two things, if you focus on that above anything else, everything else kind of falls away because you can find success with people management anywhere you are.

What we found was that the things that were so drastically different over time kind of leveled out, too. We’d be in Australia and they’d say we do it this way because that’s how we do it in Australia. We’d kind of shake our heads a little bit and say well we used to do it that way and that could be true in the US or anywhere else. I’m not picking on Australia, but we used to do it that way too and we changed because we thought this was better.

We let that evolve over time. And ultimately, if I look across the board, we’re all executing our work in very, very similar ways now and when we first expanded to the US, to Western Canada and to Australia, which was all within a two-year period, we had people approaching things from a much wider variety of ways to approach the construction and the sequencing and how they set up projects and a lot of that is kind of went away as we’ve shared those lessons and people have learned from each other.

We have people from Australia over here visiting our sites all the time. Some of us we self-perform our work in the US, we don’t self-perform our work in Australia, so some of our subcontractors come over here, some of them have given presentations to our teams here on how they do things there so there’s a lot of that knowledge sharing that’s been happening and I think generally we’ve been a benefactor of being in different places and learning from the best of the best in different countries and the best approaches.

So, I think the more we expand and touch different people, the more we’ll learn and the more we’ll grow.

Wes Ashworth (41:24)

Yeah, and I think so much of it, too, is just the openness and willingness to learn as well. You see some companies expand to other countries, other regions, and they’re just close-minded. They’re like, this is what we do, this is how we do it. I don’t want to learn what you do or how you do it. But just that willingness and openness to hear it, hear all the ideas, compare, and then kind of take the best road from there. And to your point, the people, like, yeah, there are some differences for sure, but as they say, we’re more alike than we are different. And those tried-and-true things really stay true. And when you build a culture around that, that’s cool.

Obviously, ending up in Australia, one of the most innovative things happening globally right now is coming out of Australia. And you’ve had a front row seat to something most people outside the region haven’t seen up close, which is renewable energy zones. I want to spend a little time there, and some of the other trends that you’re tracking. So, tell us about Australia’s renewable energy zones, especially for those who don’t know.

And then do you find them so exciting, and what’s one lesson other countries should steal from the model, or could steal from the model?

Andrew Moles (42:23)
Renewable Energy Zone 1 was just awarded, so you can go in and research and find out who won the battery storage and wind and solar projects that tie into that zone. it was the building of a dedicated transmission line with the sole purpose of developing new solar, wind, and battery storage capacity that should have 24/7 capabilities of a massive amount of export with the combined technology to a single dedicated transmission line that’s designed to take it.

The big hurdle for the developers in this was the letters of credit or bank guarantees, as they call them in Australia, that they had to post to secure their spot to bid on this. And now if they’re successful in keeping their spot, because the utility has to build up a massive transmission line, so that has to be secured by developers with the bank guarantees and LCs. That was the big hurdle to overcome.

Outside of that, this just makes so much sense and it’s an area that’s already got a lot of solar and wind and some battery storage in the area. It’s an area that’s more friendly than others to renewable energy. Australia, generally as a country, is very friendly towards renewable energy compared to other countries in the world.

And it’s just one of those things that I think other areas will be watching it closely as these connect, as you see the capacity and how much of that they’re actually able to produce on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis from these three different types of assets connected into this line and monitor that closely. Because I think the idea really works. I think combining those technologies gives it that extra stability that you need to safely and reliably operate your grid and I really think there’s something there.

So, it’s going to be neat, we’re going to be part of building some of it, I’m sure. We haven’t secured any of it yet; it’s still early days, but really excited to track how that does and how it performs over the first call in five years. Some we’ll be monitoring really closely just to see how they really figured it out.

Wes Ashworth (44:22)

Yeah, obviously that’s a cool emerging trend happening. Any other sort of trends or issues in the solar industry you feel may be flying under the radar but will have a huge impact over the next five years or so?

Andrew Moles (44:35)

You’ve got grid-forming inverters starting to come out now, which would be the first time we actually have the ability to start the grid with renewable energy technology. So that’ll be really interesting to see how that plays in. Traditionally, they’ve all been grid following, right? So that, when you get these big renewable energy zones and things of that nature, that’s going to help a lot. So that’s one of those ones I don’t hear a lot of people talking about.

That’s a big change to how these systems are connected and their capabilities to interact with the grid or start up the grid. The DC coupled BESS that we’re building a couple of projects in Australia right now with DC coupled BESS versus AC coupled BESS. That will be interesting to see how that plays out. There are lots of pros, lots of cons on both sides of that. And we’re happy to build either. But I’m really interested to see how those, again, maybe the first three to five years, how do those perform? Were the pros that they were expecting, all pros still? Were there things that they missed? And what is the best solution? Or does it depend on where you are and what your assets are, and how your financials work, because the DC coupled isn’t a separate asset, the AC is.


So, there’s a lot of stuff like that that we’re following closely right now. We have the benefit of building both and really being behind the curtains to take a peek and see what works. But that’s an exciting new trend with the DC coupled for sure. It’ll be our first project with DC couples in construction right now. It’ll be the first large utility-scale DC-coupled BESS project in Eastern Australia. So really excited to be part of that sort of flying ship project.

Wes Ashworth (46:08)

Yeah, that’s cool. Beyond just kind of tech and those sorts of things, what’s your overall sentiment when you think about the industry, solar industry, renewable energy as a whole? When you’re looking at the next five, 10 years plus, like what are your thoughts, what are your feelings, what are you telling your team?

Andrew Moles (46:22)

I mean, we’re going to have to continue to change and continue to focus on what’s next. The industry has gifted us with new technology, better technology, better approaches for the last 15 years, 16 years, and it’s going to continue into the future. We’re testing out robotics on a handful of our sites. We’re working with some AI developers on some AI technology that should help enhance our efficiencies. And we’re going to continue to go down those paths to find ways to make this more efficient and more capital efficient and basically find ways to drive the cost down without sacrificing the electricity output and ultimately speed up the construction in any way we can.

In the US, things are going to get more competitive as the ITC falls away, but I still believe this industry will survive a world where there is no ITC. I don’t believe the ITC is needed to have companies still interested in buying the power. I still think it’s the cheapest, fastest deployable solution. If we can find ways to drive that cost down and deploy it faster, that’s going to keep us ahead of gas and other technologies. So that’s big for us. Big focus on storage. Repowering is the focus of ours right now. We have a couple of clients where we’re studying some of their older assets, looking at the opportunity to repower them.

So, there’s a handful of things we’re looking at that are right in line with the solar and renewable energy industry. And then there are other things that we’re looking at that are maybe adjacent markets that could make sense for our team to jump into as well.

Wes Ashworth (47:51)

Yeah, it’s good stuff. Always good to hear that perspective in your outlook, just firsthand. Kind of final question here as we’re at time, but any other parting words of advice, things you didn’t get to talk about that you wish you had, any things you want to leave with the audience.

Andrew Moles (48:03)

I think the only thing I’d say is I’m in a service business or a people business. I’m not in a product business. People are first and foremost the most important asset we have and the most important resource we have. All of my success I’ve had is completely attributable to the great leaders I’ve had underneath me and the great people we have underneath them and our ability to trust and rapidly develop the people who join our team.

So, without that mindset and without the great people who come in, drink from the fire hose and learn and develop as quickly as they can and want to bring their best every day and each day outperform the day before and outperform everybody, they’re working against on our competitor side. Without that, my career means nothing and that’s what’s made me successful, made us successful, and will continue to make us successful in the future.

Wes Ashworth (48:56)

I love that focus on people. A great way to just wrap it up. But honestly, just a huge thank you to you, Andrew, for coming on the show and joining us today. Just if you’re building in the renewable space, whether you’re leading teams, scaling projects or expanding across markets. I do hope this conversation gave you a deeper look at what real sustainable leadership looks like when the pressure is high and the stakes are real, and you can still get it done.

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We’ve got more conversations coming your way with people shaping the future of clean energy. And with that, we’ll see you soon.