Awarepreneurs interview - Owen Barrett

Hi. This is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help you increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could go to your favorite podcast app and hit subscribe, do a review. It helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Today, I am thrilled to introduce you to Owen Barret.

And our topic is solar on multifamily, good for owners, good for tenants. And let me tell you about Owen. Owen is a former global energy manager at a Fortune 500 company, implemented 60,000,000 in clean technology before founding Lumeo, a niche Yasiel that hit 8 figures in three years. After a successful exit, he launched ZNE Capital to decarbonize commercial real estate, acquiring 654 units worth 75,000,000. Frustrated by solar deployment challenges, he founded Shine, now a leading turnkey solar solution for multifamily properties. Shine is set to decarbonize 200,000 apartment units with on-site solar by 2030, accelerating clean energy adoption where it's needed most. Owen, welcome to Awarepreneurs.

Yeah. Thanks for having me.

That's some pretty exciting background you've got. And this whole idea, Owen, of multifamily and solar. Like, you you've done some really cool things both in the commercial real estate and, you know, real estate at scale, And you've done some things in clean technology and clean tech. Why do you think it's important to bring these two things together?

I think it's important to try and deploy clean technology where it makes economic sense. So, you know, I have an under degree undergrad degree in finance. I spent the first part of my professional career in finance. I come at environmental problems from a financial lens. I don't think it's realistic to expect solutions to be implemented if they don't make monetary sense. And so when I look at sort of all of the opportunities across the universe of where you can deploy clean technology, solar on multifirm family, I don't know if it makes the most sense of all the opportunities. It's, like, top five, top 10, and it's wildly untapped. So if if you look at sort of the opportunity combined with just how wide open that opportunity is, it's gotta be one of the, you know, one of the best opportunities in terms of where we can deploy clean tech right now.

And one of the things that I found interesting is a lot of people are building startups, and they have an idea. They're looking at the numbers. There there haven't been robust experiments at scale. Is that fair to say? Yeah. When it comes to clean tech. Right? And one of the things I found fascinating with Shine is that you have the $75,000,000 portfolio, and you're using your own property as a guinea pig. That was your language. Right? Yeah.

Tell us a little bit about that. Like like, how did you decide you wanted to try this? And what did you find? 654 units. I'm not sure every single one of them has solar, but a lot of them do. Like, what are you finding as you're experimenting on your own properties looking at it through a financial lens?

Yeah. I mean, the original hypothesis was pretty simple. It was that if done correctly, solar will increase the project level return of a multifamily investment. So if you take the overall investment and say it's a five year hold and you have a 15% IRR, if you layer on top of that solar done right, it should boost the project level return 100 to 200 basis points, which is very significant. So I try you know, I spend my life in Excel. You can model as many things as you want. And in Excel, it's, you know, it it justifies what you're trying to accomplish. But I found that commercial real estate is the oldest, least innovative industry that I have ever come across.

And owners, operators, property managers are not all that willing to implement new solutions. So rather than try to convince other owners to try something new, we decided let's figure out how to buy the real estate ourselves, and then let's decarbonize it, and then let's show the effect on the pro form a. And, hopefully, with that approach, we can then convince other owners to adopt solar too because it is truly accretive to the overall deal. And I think that's a really important part because oftentimes, the environmental movement gets sort of sucked into this. We're doing good for the environment at the cost of investors, and that's not what we're saying. That's not our sort of fundamental principle. We're saying you can do well for the environment and do better for the investors. And that to me is just an incredibly powerful business model.

So I wanna ask you some questions about that portfolio in just a second, Owen. But you've said you use the phrase solar done right. Before we get into solar done right, tell us about solar done wrong.

How much time do we have?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. We got at least forty five minutes. Right? Like, what would it look like to miss the opportunity by not checking certain boxes? Give us, like, give us an example of that.

Yeah. I mean, I think anyone that's owned a home or owned real estate and has had to deal with contractors knows that there's good contractors and there's bad contractors. We are a solar contractor, and I like to say that solar contractors are the worst type of contractor because there is a wildly different range of costs, types of equipments that are put into proposals. So it's really hard for a homeowner or an apartment owner to get an apples to apples comparison. So oftentimes, they're either go for low cost, which is always a terrible idea. But when I say solar done right, the opposite of that is either installing too many panels or too few panels. Right? So too few panels is sort of the old way that apartment owners install solar, which is going after the common area meter. So it's the meters that control the leasing office, the fitness center, the pool, the exterior lights.

That is just completely it has no impact on the overall emissions of a property, so it's really not worth anybody's time to go after that. It also doesn't have any impact on the returns of a property. So overall, it's just kind of a waste of time to to think about that. But the flip side of that is you work with a contractor that doesn't really care about are you optimizing for your returns. They just wanna sell you a bunch of panels because that's how they're making money. So you kinda have to find someone right in the middle where, first and foremost, they're honest. And then they're looking at your property holistically, and they're trying to figure out what's the best style of installation for what you, the owner, want, not what I, the contractor, want. And, you know, unfortunately, solar has been around for a long time, twenty, thirty years.

It's still the wild West. There's still good contractors, bad contractors, good equipment, bad equipment, and it it's just at the end of the day, it just confuses customers, and oftentimes, it's hard to make the right decision.

Yeah. I've seen things. We live in New Mexico. It depends there's a fight between New Mexico and Arizona who's the best, in quotes. So their state, Arizona will tell you they get more sunshine. New Mexico will say we're higher, so it's cooler. So we actually get better performance. But are we number one or number two? That's not for

I'd say New Mexico is number one if you take into account how utilities factor into the equation. Right? So Arizona's probably right. It there's higher solar radiance.

There's more sunlight, but the other factors when you add them. I would say New Mexico is number one. But, anyway, we're up there. Right? Yeah. Yeah. We see a lot of what you're talking about. We see folk you know, people who sell panels that delaminate, equipment that stops working. You know? Yep.

And it doesn't tie into they'll tell you it ties into the grid, you know, functions that you already have in your house, and then it doesn't. And then when you try to, like, fix it, there's nobody who knows what it is. We've seen solar companies go out of business, so they sell you, like, however many thousands of dollars of equipment. And then something stops working, and you go to, like, say, hey. My solar panels aren't working, and nobody's answering the phone because they're out of business. Right? Yep. This this can be a problem in the solar industry. Right? Yeah.

Yeah. No.

And now, you know, now the problem the same problem is happening in the storage space for batteries.

Yeah.

Exactly. Batteries and store and solar are often sold together. And so you have the same problems now that are just widening because of this new technology. So it's challenging and frustrating, but, you know, the best way to make sort of your name and your reputation as a contractor is just doing what you say on time and on budget. It's really not a high bar. So it's pretty easy to be a good contractor in the space because there's so many bad ones.

Absolutely. So that's a little flavor of the this sort of ecosystem that you're operating in. And in that ecosystem, you built this portfolio. And a few things that we talked about when we were getting ready for this, You know, one of the things you said, Owen, five years ago, solar only made sense in a very few markets. Right? Maybe New Mexico is one of them. But but that you've all you've one of the things you did is land on a few markets. You're not buying properties in Seattle, Washington. Right? It was a very cloudy place, and solar just wouldn't make it'd be hard to do well and get the kind of returns you're talking about.

Right? So there's things about the equipment that have changed. There's things about you learning the markets. Tell us about yours for specific portfolio and what you've landed on that makes a multifamily property. This is one of ours. This is a good place to buy and bring solar to this particular property. There are some things about the actual properties themselves you told me about, for instance. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're not buying properties anymore, but but when we were, like, first and foremost, it has to be a good real estate deal. Solar is not gonna make a bad real estate good, but it will make a good real estate deal better or great. So you have to rely on on real estate fundamentals, population growth, job growth, crime, etcetera. The most interesting thing that we've kind of learned after analyzing hundreds of deals for solar is electricity prices have increased on average 6.2% per year since 2019 across The US. So, you know, I don't care what the starting point was in in 2019. It could be 6¢.

It could be 10¢. If you compound that growth at 6.2% per year for five years, you land at a place where now almost nationwide electricity prices are high enough that they're cost effective for multifamily owners to evaluate solar. That's point number one. Point number two is the solar industry is really used to again looking at common area meters. Common area meters are commercial meters. Commercial tariffs are cheaper than residential tariffs. So when we install our solar, we're installing into the tenant meters, which have residential tariffs, which have significantly higher cost of electricity. So you take the same size system, it doesn't it could be $500,000, a million dollars, 2 million dollars, whatever.

It's gonna generate the same amount of electricity. And then the question is, are you multiplying those kilowatt hours, that amount of electricity by commercial rates or by residential rates? And if you focus on the residential rates, then the projects pencil out way better than they would have if you focus on commercial rates. So it's been, I mean, it's been a journey of sort of best use case analysis to figure out, like, what makes the most sense. But on average, every market in The US is game. And when I say game, I I mean, are you delivering at least like a 14% IRR over a ten year hold? The returns are strong. From there, it really just depends, you know, group to group, company to company, like, what are their internal return metrics that they need to hit? And then you can figure out if a project makes sense to those those specific parameters.

Super helpful. One of the things you said on when we were talking earlier is that the actual property itself, there's some design considerations, like a high rise building that's got a hundred stories might not be the best application that you're talking about. Give us a sense of what are some of those physical design elements that you're looking for that might make these kinds of installations have higher returns. Yeah.

Yeah. So garden style is definitely the best. You know? So one to two story. Little to no shading issues. It works better if you have an asphalt shingle roof than you do, like, a flat TPO roof. There tends to be more roof work with a flat TPO roof, so it just adds cost. But aside from that, I mean, it works in mid rise. The challenge with mid rise is there's just not enough there's not as much roof area per apartment unit as there is in garden style.

So you either end up with a smaller system size, solar system size per unit, or you just end up installing solar in fewer units than you would have if it were garden style. So garden style mid rise are the best. High rise, like you said, is is challenging even if there's large surface parking. You know, if you start focusing on these multiple interconnections where each apartment unit is getting its own system and you have, like, a long conduit run from the carport structure to the meter bank, you get a lot of losses and it's just not it's not optimal. So, garden style is definitely the best.

Anything else that you've learned about what makes it work in terms of the actual property or, like, are there particular kinds of engagement? Like, if if I'm living in an apartment like this and, you know, me personally, I'd be super excited if I lived in an apartment and they said, hey. Your energy is coming from solar. Does it require anything from the tenants? Does it require anything from the larger community in terms of tying into the grid, the utility company? Is there any other sort of intangibles that would help a particular multifamily owner say, yeah. I think we could check a lot of those boxes?

Yeah. I mean, the best part is there's net savings to tenants. So tenants' electricity bills go down when you do this, and owners make more money. So it really is a win win from a sort of a landlord tenant perspective. I think the one level of engagement that's sometimes required on the tenant level is depending on the utility that you're in, some utilities will let owner tap into their continuing service agreement to sign the interconnection agreements. So say you have a hundred unit property that that landlord has usually has a continuing service agreement with the utilities so that when a tenant moves out and the unit's vacant, the owner now pays for utilities to the vacant unit. Some utilities will let us use that continuing service agreement so that the owner can just sign the interconnection agreements across the board for every tenant. Some utilities will require a little bit of tenant interaction where they're either signing a like, they're giving us the ability to sign the interconnection agreement on their behalf, or they actually have to sign the interconnection agreement themselves.

And so when that happens, we'll usually have a pizza party at the leasing office a couple weekends a month trying to educate tenants that, look, if you sign this, your utility bills are gonna go down. And so it just takes a little bit longer.

So you've got this capital company that has hundreds of units. You piloted the model. You're really able to talk with some degree of nuance about here's where it works, here's what it doesn't. Help me understand if I'm a multifamily owner and I'm saying this is really getting my attention. Maybe somebody listened to this podcast and they said, hey. You own a bunch of apartments. Right? They seem like they fit. This gets forwarded to them, and I'm like, this is good.

This is getting my attention. I like where Owen's going with this. He's not just saying, hey. You should do this and be a good green hearted person and be a sustainable but that this is actually it makes sense financially, and you get to support something that's really good for the climate. What would be some of the first things that an owner or a group that owns multifamily properties would do to go from, this sounds a little interesting, but I don't even know where to start, to, like, installing them on the roofs and starting to have this be live. What what would be some of those steps?

Yeah. I think the easiest step is for groups to start putting solar into their underwriting prior to an acquisition. So we talk to groups a lot that, you know, own a thousand units, 5,000 units, a hundred thousand units, what however big their portfolio may be. And the challenge that they have if they wanna implement solar post acquisition is they have to get a capital committee of some sort to approve, you know, 1 to $2,000,000 of solar per property. Even if the returns are strong on that sort of incremental level of CapEx, you still have to convince a capital committee to do it. And what we're seeing is that it's challenging. Like, apartment commercial real estate companies cannot decarbonize as quickly as they're making acquisitions. So they tend to be buying apartments faster than they can figure out how to decarbonize, which is a problem from the decarbonization perspective.

So what we're trying to educate owners to do is let's work together. And as you're getting close to acquiring a new property, we will do the site visit. We will visit it. We'll put together hard numbers of how much this will cost, how much income this will generate. In that way, the owners can plug it into their pro formas, then they can raise either more equity or more debt or a combination of both to pay for the project, and it's built into the business model from day one, which is lifetimes easier to get the project implemented than it is if you try and tackle it post, like, post acquisition. So that that is the, I would say, the biggest the biggest thing anybody can do is just start underwriting it into your deals moving forward.

And when you say we, this is what Shine is all about. This is what you're doing, Michelle. Right?

Yeah. I mean, we recognize this is real estate companies are not solar companies. They're not energy companies. This is not this is novel for them. This is new. So we're trying to be, you know, the best support staff that we can because since we own properties and we've bought a lot of properties, we understand how quickly these deals move once you get something under contract. You know, it's it's similar to buying a house. You get something under contract, you have sixty days to close.

That means you have to figure out your debt and equity in those sixty days. You gotta get all these reports done. The last thing that anyone is gonna have happen is let a solar project get in the way of closing. You know, let a $2,000,000 solar project get in the way of closing an $80,000,000 apartment acquisition. It's just never gonna happen. So we have to move at the speed of our customers. And I think the fact that we are owners and have done a lot of acquisitions sort of puts us in a position to better understand what they really need when they're getting closer to acquiring something.

So let's do this. In a minute, I wanna unpack a little bit more what that looks like when you work with owners and also where you're going as a company yourself as Sean. We have some very granular entrepreneurs here. I'll ask them about, you know, how many customers and how they raise their start up funding and all that stuff. Before we do that, I just wanna take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor. Are you passionate about making a difference but feeling stuck on how to take your mission driven business to the next level? You don't need a lengthy coaching program. You need targeted advice from someone who understands the unique challenges that social entrepreneurs face. With my strategy session package, we'll focus on your most pressing decisions, whether it's clarifying your value proposition, optimizing your marketing strategy, launching a new product or service, or adjusting your pricing to align with your mission.

These sessions are perfect when you know the direction you wanna go, but you need someone with the experience to help you get there. If you're ready to unlock your potential and amplify your impact, book your strategy session now. The link is in the show notes. Welcome back, everybody. I am here with Owen Bart, and we are talking about solar on multifamily, good for owners, good for tenants. And, Owen, in the second half of the show, we'd like to get into a little more of the granularity. I think people understand the idea. This is super exciting.

I've never done an interview of anything quite like this before. It's a great business model you have. And the idea of helping owners of multifamily move in those acquisitions so that solar is baked in. Like, what would that look like? Help me understand a little more. Like, I would assume there'd be some kind of assessment, you know, how much energy is being used, how many apartments are there. Right? Like, what are some of the things that go into the algorithm that you're asking or you're assessing with owners when they're looking at an acquisition before you can say, here's the system we ultimately recommend. Yeah.

I mean, it's it's actually fairly easy to estimate virtually. So what trips up a lot of solar contractors intends to add cost to projects is when you have to upgrade the electrical service because of how much solar you're installing. And that generally happens when you're trying to to back feed more power than the service is rated for. What's really interesting about our model is, you know, we're installing, basically,

on

a hundred unit property, we're installing five or a hundred small residential systems. So we almost never or to date, we never have gotten into an instance where we have to do any service upgrades. So when we give a cost estimate virtually, there's almost nothing that we're gonna experience in the field at the site that's gonna make us change the the estimate. So that part's really, really nice. The first thing that we'll do is kind of a high level pass. Someone says, hey. You know, we're investing final or we have the soft market deal that we're going after. Can you can you put together a high level estimate? So we'll do, like, a high level estimate just based on all the underwriting that we've done to date.

We sort of have a good idea of how much solar we can install on any given property depending on how many stories it is and what the kind of roof it is. If they get the property under contract, we'll do what's called the helioscope design. It's just like an actual layout of solar on the property to really dial in the size, the cost. At that point, we'll we'll start looking at utility data to figure out what the cost of electricity is and give owners a a much more dialed estimate of what the system is gonna cost and what's what it's gonna generate in solar income. If that looks good, we'll do a site visit to verify any assumptions that we may have made just to confirm that if we say the system's gonna cost, you know, $1,230,000, it's actually going to cost $1,230,000 because the last thing we wanna have happen is is have the actual project cost more than what we've estimated. So we'll do the site visit. We'll confirm the assumptions. Owner closes it on the property, and we can start installing, you know, day one.

And I would assume, but maybe I'm wrong, if you're if it's a hundred systems, maybe there's two different size, one for the one bedrooms and one for the four bedrooms or whatever. But I assume there's some economy of scale. You buy a hundred solar systems, and there's a lot of similarities or there's two different kinds. You'd be able to get some cost reduction per system installed as opposed to me going to a company and saying I want one on my house. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. No. There's definitely definitely economies of scale. You know, it's hard to say, like, when exactly those kick in, but it's usually at, like, a hundred units or so.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it's it's it's helpful to do more installations at the same time from a labor and from a materials perspective.

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So talk to us about the actual startup of Shine. Like, when did it start? And, like, people always wanna know, okay. What was your initial startup capital? Like, how did you get this thing going?

I mean, so so Shine itself has only been around since 2023, but Shine is really the, you know, it's it's the journey of me trying to decarbonize a multifamily, which I've been trying to do since 2015 or have been doing since 2015. So I sold a company in 2015 that gave me some personal liquidity to start investing in multifamily real estate. I started doing that. That's when I recognized that the industry really doesn't know what they're doing with energy. So then we bought apartment buildings and that was done through syndications. So we raised money from investors. And then in 2023, what we sort of determined was that at the time, we were buying what's called the master metered property. So it's built like a hotel.

It has one electric meter and, you know, 200 units. And that is very easy from a solar installation because it's just one big system, one interconnection. The challenge was we wanted to start buying individually metered properties, which is the vast majority of apartment complexes. They have one utility electric meter per apartment unit. And the problem that we're running into is if you want to install solar on that solid property, you have to install one small solar system per apartment unit. So the installation is more complicated. Once installation is finished, you need some type of automated system to build tenants and to monitor all these systems. Otherwise, it's manual and no owner's gonna sign up for that.

So we spent all of 2023 building the software platform. And then 2024, we really, like, launched the the EPC and said, alright. We have the software platform. We know how to install solar. We've been doing that for ten years. Let's go get some customers. We got one customer in 2024. We have anywhere between, I'd say, four and eight customers in 2025.

So we're going from, like, 500 in revenue to probably close to 10,000,000, and it was all bootstrapped. Well, it was bootstrapped until earlier this year when we did our our our seed round.

Congratulations. And it was built on a lot of hustle and a lot of willingness to experiment with your own properties. Sounds like.

Yeah. I think yeah. %. I think, I was lucky in having sort of early entrepreneurial success that gave me the freedom to explore problems that I thought were interesting. This particular problem has just taken, you know, seven plus years to to figure out a solution for

And you had the you had the entrepreneurial kind of that good sniffer of, like, wait. Here's a group that's really risk averse, and here's a really there there's a lot of revenue. It's recurring revenue because people pay for their apartments every single month, and there's a lot of people paying for them. And mostly, there's a lot of aversion to experimenting in the realm of energy, which keeps getting more and more expensive every year. You you you had some pretty good entrepreneurial kind of bloodhound genes sitting over here, I would say. You skipped out a big a big problem with a lot of money attached to it. Right?

Yeah. I mean, it takes a you know, any anyone that's tried to start anything, even a podcast, you hear more no's than yes in the beginning. And so you need a certain type of personality to push through that because, I mean, certain days are crushing on your ego, crushing on your stress. Just you gotta be able to push through it.

Absolutely. Any any tools you have? Because it's so many ups. I I started my I've been telling this to a lot of entrepreneurs. I started my business in 02/2008 way back before social entrepreneurship was one of the fastest growing meters on college campuses around the world. Yeah. It was a it was a economic crisis of, like, yeah. Let's start a business. Right? Now I did I did have a contract, a federal contract in my previous career, which was community mental health, and that helped me bootstrap.

But it was it was not an easy time. A six year old kid was getting divorced and was launching a business in the middle of an economic crisis. Right? Deep breath. Right? Any any resiliency practices that helped you all and kinda stay, you know, with it when you had some of those crushing days?

I mean, I wish I could say that, like, yeah, I meditate or I don't look at my phone at night or the stuff that, like, is trendy now to say, but I don't know. I think for I've always been told by girlfriends, parents, now my wife, you're stubborn, which is not necessarily a good thing in day to day life, but I think it's an incredibly important characteristic if you wanna start your own business. So I think a little of it is just genetics, you know, what my personality happens to be. I've also found that, you know, I've been a lifelong athlete working out in exercises there or exercising can at least temporarily get rid of that or whatever stress you're experiencing. But I there's probably more that I could be doing on that front. It's just, you know, it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks.

Holy. Appreciate it. I'm a trail runner, and we talk about trail therapy saves our lives. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. %.

And that's not an exaggeration as an entrepreneur.

No. And especially if you go for a run or you do something without your phone, you you start your business, you're the guy that or girl that has to answer all of the emails. Yep. And it that alone is an overwhelming feeling. So I feel like going for an hour long trailer run without a phone is just like the the it brings so much mental clarity.

Were you watching me at 06:30 this morning? It's literally what I did this morning. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a good way to start your day.

So I know that environmental impact isn't necessarily the the the lead part of the story, but you care deeply about decarbonization. Right? That's not that's not invisible part of the story. And you're somebody who tends to quantify things. In your own words, you spend a lot of time in Excel. Any sense of the environmental impact of what happens let's say it's a hundred apartment property, and that a hundred apartment property is now getting its energy. They sign up with Shine. You guys put it on the roof, and for the rest of time, they're getting their energy in a sustainable way. What does that mean in terms of environmental impact as you start to scale that one property, two property, three property, you know, 300 units, 500 units, a thousand units.

What does that mean in terms of environmental impact?

Yeah. So every installation we do, each unit gets about two and a half kilowatts to three kilowatts. And the average residential installation in The US, I think, is about five to six kilowatts. So every two apartments we install solar on is about the same size as one average residential system. That's

the same as a house. Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. So if you install solar on a hundred unit property, that's effectively 50 houses of solar that you just install that you just put solar on, which I think is an easier metric for people to kinda connect to. We've run the numbers on, you know, our goal of decarbonizing 200,000 apartment units by 2030. And if we do that, it'll be it'll have the same impact as taking Kauai off the emissions map. So, I mean, it's significant. Like, there the the built environment is responsible for 40% of all emissions. So there is no decarbon decarbonization strategy or net zero goals or, you know, whatever ESG buzzword you want that can leave behind the built environment.

It will not work. It's the biggest emitter, the biggest contributor. So that's always been the reason that we've focused on existing buildings exclusively.

Makes a lot of sense. One of the other things again, not the primary reason you do it, but I would say very impactful. You You talk about being good for tenants. It reduces their utility costs. And when we think about who rents, the demographics are oftentimes who lives in an apartment and rents, it's gonna oftentimes be different than who lives in a single family house. Right? So Yep. There's the financial benefits, which I wanna get your sense on, but also the sense of making solar available to families that oftentimes wouldn't have access to clean energy. What's your sense of the impact there?

Yeah. No. It's spot on. I mean, I don't know the exact percentage of LMI individuals that live in single family houses versus apartments. You know, out of wager, it's close to 90%. So I think especially during the last administration when we were talking about the Inflation Reduction Act, there was a huge amount of focus on getting the benefits of clean technology to there's a lot of different buzzwords or acronyms. There's there's LIDAC, low income and disadvantaged communities. There's LMI, low moderate income individuals.

There's workforce tenants. Whatever you wanna call it. It's it's folks earning, like, 80% or below area median income. You cannot do that if you don't figure out how to get solar on apartments. There's just there is no way to do that. People will say, well, we can do, you know, community solar, and I would kinda push back on that because people have to opt into that. You want on-site solar interconnected into people's electric meters so that it's stabilizing electric costs and taking off that inflationary burden of what we've seen, that 6.2% per year of of utility cost growth over the last five years. I mean, that's that's unsustainable.

Yeah. Like, every ten years, your electric's gonna double. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. You they just people can't. Wages are not keeping up with that. They're not keeping up with rank growth. They're not keeping up with utility.

Most of us are not getting double our income every decade. It'd be nice. It it just doesn't work that way. Right?

It doesn't work that way.

Yeah. Yeah. Cool.

Yeah. So there's a huge societal impact that, again, we don't often talk about because it doesn't tend to lead the conversation on our customer's side, but we can't ignore the the the societal impact that these projects have.

So going back to the business model for Sean, you have the assessments and installs, the kind of one time part. Right? We're gonna help when there's a acquisition. We're gonna help the owners figure out, can they do solar? And if so, hopefully, they'll do it with us. Right? You guys know what you're doing. And then now there's a platform, which I assume is kind of a SaaS product that they pay a monthly to use. Is that kind of the business model for that part of the business?

So used to be.

Used. Okay.

Used to be. And, hopefully, our investors are not listening to this podcast. But, you know, we pitched Climate Tech SaaS product for a long time.

Uh-huh.

Because as a founder, as a as a human, you wanna get a company exit based on a SaaS multiple. It's a lot higher than a solar multiple.

Absolutely.

What we started to see, though, it like, in practice was a couple of things. One, the multifamily industry has what I call SaaS fatigue. There are so many SaaS providers out there Some that are charging $2, 5 dollars, 8 dollars per unit per month. Multifamily owners are starting to say, like, what is the value of all of these, you know, death by a thousand cut SaaS providers? And in a lot of times, there is no value. We also start to see that on the coast, California and New England, where electricity prices are high, those projects can support, like, a $5 per unit per month SaaS subscription, which is what we were charging.

Yep.

But once you start to go towards the middle of the country where electricity is a lot cheaper, we were starting to erode all of the solar income that was going to owners from a software subscription fee, which then removes all the motivate motivation from the owner's perspective to move forward with solar to begin with. So, you know, a little while ago, I don't know, six months ago or so, we decided, like, we are a solar company. We're not a software company. We don't need to charge for software. Our software is necessary to do the solar installation. So it's actually from our perspective now, it's unfair for us to charge for software, the basic software. If someone wants access, what's really interesting about our software is because we're interconnecting into every single apartment unit we get fifteen minute interval data of energy usage at the apartment level both energy from the grid and energy from solar And so that's really important for a lot of institutional apartment owners for their scope three emissions reporting. And if somebody wants access to that or, like, a dashboard for that, we'll charge them for that, but we won't charge them for the solar billing because we just we don't think it's fair.

Wow. I'm I'm a trail runner as we already established, and, one of the big names in running watches is called Garmin. And there's a big fight ordered one. Yeah. There's a big fight in the Garmin community because Garmin, it used to be you know, you might spend a thousand dollars for a backcountry solar Yeah. Garmin watch. And then they just Garmin plus is now and now they're going to a subscription model. Like, you get the base level of being able to read your data and then go to that.

And the push back and the like, we're already paying a thousand freaking bucks for a watch, and now you wanna do $3 a month. And we know that's just the start 2 or $3 a month, but it's gonna wind up to be 15 before you know it. And it's, like, been this incredible pushback. It's the biggest pushback on a SaaS product I've ever seen, right, partially because that's who Trail Runners are. But it's fascinating to watch it just from a pure like, that fatigue that you're talking about. People are like, every single area of my life, people are trying to seduce, you know, whether it's my car or Apple TV, you know, my watch. And it was the most robust fight I've ever seen about this. It's happening right now.

Anyway, long story short, I'll put a link in the show notes about that. But you're going the other direction, which is fascinating. Very

But I think I mean, and Garmin could too. I think, you know, like, you think like a Strava. Right? That would be the analogy. They're software only platform, so it makes sense that they charge for software. Sure. Garmin is making a fortune on every watch that they sell, and their quality is not that good. I switched to Coros because they last a lot longer. But now I'm switching back to Garmin because for for something unrelated to this podcast.

But Yeah. You know, if you're gonna charge a SaaS subscription, at least have a watch that lasts, like, five plus years. There you go.

And if

you're the manufacturer of the hardware, you don't need to charge a software fee.

That's you're you're I like where you're going with it, and I just wanna acknowledge that's not the that's not the typical point of the norm. Yeah. Yeah. No. Good good for you. I really appreciate you having that kind of thinking. That's that's out of the box thinking for sure.

Yeah. Appreciate

it. So, Shine, is up and running. Last year, just got up and running. This year, 2024, you got up to five customers. Is that what I understood? Or did you

get 2024, we had one customer. 2025, we probably have four to eight.

40 eight customers. Cool. Like, three years from now, what do you think Shine looks like?

$50,000,000 a year in revenue?

50,000,000 a year in revenue. Yeah.

I mean, it's really not that. Like, it's a big number to talk about when you but our average installation is $2,000,000. So it's 25 installations a year.

25 installations a year. It's not

that Yeah. It's, like, not that far fetched.

And what's your team like, how does it work? Do do you, like, have a team that goes to whatever city that travels, or do you contract for the installs? How does it work in terms of who's on the ground? We're trying

to build out, like, a similar model to Sunrun, which is, like, the leading residential solar installer. So Okay. You know, they have a pretty robust corporate office, but then they rely on local installers to do the the physical installation. And so that's the that's the model that we have right now. We'll do design, engineering, permitting, material material procurement in house. And then once we have a permitted set of plans, we'll hand it off to a local installer that we've used in the past to do the physical installation. You know, that could change down the road. We could hire our own crews if it makes sense to, but I think we really wanna have the ability to scale nationwide sort of quickly.

And if we're starting to hire our own crews, it it makes it a little there's trade offs. It makes it

harder. Yeah. Cool. What what are you observing? We're as we're recording this, it's April 2025. We've seen some changes in the clean tech industry. Is that fair to say? Am I am I It's

probably an understatement.

Am I being dramatic in saying we've seen some changes? I would We've

been some changes.

What's you know, the clean tech industry is still robust. Solar is growing as are other alternative energies. I'm going back and forth today with putting a solar founder in touch with somebody who's been on this show, Chuck Hall from GridFlow. Shout out to them. They're next generation lithium battery. Like, clean tech is robust, is exciting, is moving. The numbers make sense. At the same time, at least in The US and in other countries I'm talking to, there's less institutional and governmental support than maybe any other time in my eighteen years of doing this work.

What's what would you say to cleantech founders who are fairly early on in trying to navigate this whole system of, like, the market is getting more financially viable, but those early stage supports that we'd want for clean tech are not as robust as they've been. Any suggestions of how to navigate any of that as a clean tech founder?

Yeah. I think I mean, there's definitely changes. I think had AI not become sort of more to the front of all conversations, I would be a lot more worried about clean tech. I think what's interesting to me is, you know, you have someone leading the EPA who's a climate denier. That's not good. But you have America that's sort of coming together to win the AI race against China, Russia, whatever. You, like, name the the adversary. You cannot have AI without energy, and you cannot have energy without renewable energy.

FERC put out a study, I think, for 2024. '90 percent of all new electrons that came online were renewable. So if you wanna win the AI war, the AI race, you need more energy. And right now, it is far faster and cheaper to get new energy online with renewables than it is with the fossil fuel. So I think what's gonna happen is even though you see this sort of backlash, like, with how people are talking, I think the pragmatic Republicans that want to win AI are going to have to come to terms with, we can't slash all the tax credits. We can't, like, rip out all the guts of the IRA because if we do that, we'll we won't have enough energy to support the sort of the AI goals that we have.

Yeah. It's almost the way we started this podcast is to stay with the market forces, and the market forces are really strong for renewable energy. And we're certainly seeing that here in New Mexico. Absolutely robust interest in the innovations that are happening here from all over the world because New Mexico's quickly emerging as a clean energy hub. And exactly what you're talking about for AI, the amount of energy that AI is using is off the charts, and there's a lot

of insane.

There's no way to power it. They literally cannot work without clean energy.

It doesn't work. Yeah. So I think I think we're just lucky, honestly. I think had AI been ten years back and and we're we, you know, we're living with Trump two point o, I think the renewable energy world would be in big trouble. But I think thanks to AI, it's not gonna be so bad. And I also think it's really easy to get sucked into sort of the negative press releases and negative publications about everything that's going wrong, but, like, none of the governors have changed their mind. None of the public companies have changed their ESG goals or their mission goals. And so, like, yeah, the administration is saying one thing, but that's just that's just one part of the ecosystem.

There's so much more demand for clean tech and and ESG related things outside of the, you know, who's the president.

Great. Oh, and I could hang out with you all day. You're doing such great work. I know you're busy. I know our listeners are busy. As we start to say goodbye, is there anything you wanted to cover, question number one, that we haven't talked about yet? And number two, anything you would leave our impact oriented founders, not all, many of whom are in clean tech, but we have people working. You know, if you think of all the UN sustainable development goals, helping youth, you know, gender equity, water tech, growing food in sustainable ways. Those are our listeners.

So they're starting businesses that have that sort of dual purpose and impact focused, and they're not chasing grants down. They're building real companies that are generating real revenue. So anything about Shine and where you're going and anything you'd wanna leave our listeners with as we start to say goodbye.

I mean, I don't think I think you did a great job. I don't think you missed anything. I'm always happy to to connect with people, other folks in the clean tech space or the multifamily space just from an educational perspective. So, you know, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn. I think the one the one piece of advice that I'd give, it would just kinda echo the last thing that I said. It's just it's so easy to get bogged down by by negative news. It's not all bad. And so I think everyone just kinda needs to take a step back, take a break from CNN or Fox News, whatever they're watching.

Go on and leave your phone alone.

Long trail run. Yeah. Exactly. Just remember, like, the world the world is not burning yet. Like, we still have time. There's still a lot of good work happening.

Cool. And you mentioned LinkedIn. Is that the best way for somebody to get ahold of you?

Yeah. I yeah. I am. That is one thing that I've done maybe good for the the mental clarity that earlier the podcast. I'm not big on social media. I just don't it's it's not it doesn't have the draw on me.

Yeah. Cool. So, listeners, the shine site will be in the links as well as some of the other resources we mentioned and Owen's LinkedIn profile. All that'll be in the show notes. Owen, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Yeah. Thanks for having me.

So, listeners, let's do what we do. Please tell your friends about the great work that Shine's doing. Go grab somebody you know who has a multifamily project and tell them to reach out to oh, and then let's get more apartment buildings decarbonized. If you have an idea for a show, I just booked somebody today that one of our listeners sent in. We love when that happens. If you have an idea for a show, go to the Awarepreneurs website. And on our contact page, we have three simple guidelines. Take a look at those and if you feel like it's a fit, send your ideas in.

And lastly, I wanna say thank you so much for listening. Please take really good care in these intense times and thank you for all the positive impact that you're working for in our world.