Premium content from Pacific Business News (Friday, October 7, 2011).
Sunetric CEO Alex Tiller believes he and his management team have created a culture of accountability, which he says has helped lead to the company’s success over the years.
“If you create a culture of accountability, you’ll have a bunch of team members who own the product and want to be a part of its success,” he told PBN.
As proof, Tiller points to these numbers: The company’s 2009 revenues topped $13.1 million and nearly doubled in 2010 to $24.2 million. Because of its huge growth, Sunetric prides itself on helping its employees succeed and giving back to the community.
It tries to do this by offering its employees incentives to further their education, launching a recognition program, partnering with a local nonprofit to create green jobs and providing opportunities for nonprofits to cut their energy costs.
Its tuition reimbursement program gives each employee the opportunity to increase his or her professional skill set.
“The company believes this enhances contributions to the organization and ultimately provides maximum benefit to the employee no matter where their careers might lead them in the future,” Tiller said.
Earlier this year, Sunetric launched an employee recognition program called the Energy & Impact Award. It was designed to reinforce the core values of the organization and recognize employee actions and behaviors that promote clearly defined, well-known, key results the organization seeks to achieve.
“We use it as a way to monitor success in getting staff to all move toward the same, well-defined goals, and as an extensive set of key performance indicators to measure and monitor core activities of the business,” Tiller said.
In January, Sunetric partnered with the local nonprofit Kupu to create a green job work-force development program for underprivileged youths called “Urban Corps.”
As part of the program, Sunetric educated participants about each department within the company, how it operates and what opportunities it has.
Toward the end of the program, participants spent several weeks helping the company install PV systems on residential and commercial projects.
According to Tiller, the hope of the program is that disadvantaged youth would gain the skills needed to join the solar industry work force. “As we’ve gotten to know Sunetric and its staff over the past year, we’ve been so impressed by the kind of character that the company embodies,” said Kupu Executive Director John Leong. “I can tell there is a sincere desire to help out the community, and I am sure this pervades into their relationship with their customers.”
Another community program Sunetric has been involved with includes helping nonprofits go solar for free through an internally designed, one-of-a-kind power-purchase program.
Sunetric pays for and installs a solar system on the roof of a qualifying nonprofit for free, then sells the electricity from the system to the nonprofit for less than it would have paid for electricity from the utility. In essence, Tiller said, they go green for free and save money.
To date, it has installed PPA-funded projects on 12 nonprofit buildings. “The work that we have done over the past couple of years has been focused on tightening our leadership and accountability, and we believe we have succeeded in created that type of culture,” Tiller said.
