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 of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much. Today, I'm really thrilled to introduce you to another New Mexico rock star, Megan Bott.

And our title today is Be the Solution, Building Community and Sharing Resources. So anybody doesn't know, the word soul means sun. And Megan is the community and business impact manager at Positive Energy Solar, a certified B Corp here in New Mexico that's been selling and installing solar systems for many, many years. Today, Positive Energy employs over a 120 people, including over 75, according to your website, Megan. We're gonna find out if this is true. 75 employee owners, and has completed over 5,000 solar installations in New Mexico. And if you go on Google, which I do, and you look at the reviews, you will see that there are 73 reviews with a 4.9 out of 5 star average. In other words, New Mexico loves positive energy.

Megan, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, Paul.

So you and I met because you were a panelist at a recent event here called Business For Good in New Mexico, cosponsored with the Social Enterprise Alliance. And you've been thinking about impact in quite a few different configurations of your life. Before we get into positive energy and somebody didn't know who Megan Bott was, like, tell us a little bit about, like, who are you from a professional standpoint and a community member standpoint, and what would a listener need to know about you before we get into unpacking what positive energy

does? Yeah. So throughout my career and really just throughout different areas of my life, I've been searching for ways to make a positive difference and and contribute positively, you know, to our communities and have impact on social and environmental issues. And I've sort of just spent my career searching for different opportunities in order to, you know, put myself in the space, in the position to be able to do those things. And so my background largely consists of working in journalism, writing. I did radio for a little while. I worked in broadcast news behind the scenes there. Just sort of learning and meeting people and and networking in that regard. And then I'm I moved from there to, sort of working in a public education sphere, working with people who had special needs, people who have autism.

And that was really meaningful to me just sort of having an an impact and being able to reach lives in that regard and and support families whose children, you know, were on the spectrum. And then from there, I sort of fell into the marketing world. I was I was just looking for different avenues to work in communications, and I fell into marketing. And what I what I feel that I gathered most from my time, which I still work in in a marketing positive energy as well, is that brands have power. And through seeing the the sort of power that a brand can have, especially when they speak, you know, to some some sort of issue going on in society or in the environment, people listen. And so when I came across positive energy searching for another, you know, job that was more on the marketing side of things, I discovered that, you know, through searching their website that they're a b corporation, employee owned. And I was just reading about all these different areas within the community that Positive Energy cared about and wanted to be present for and was involved with. And I was like, I've never met a company, you know, that that, you know, really put itself in that sort of role in the community and sort of having that kind of presence.

And so I was really interested in that. And as I started to learn more about b corporations and benefit corporations and social enterprises, I was like, this is an entirely new way to have an impact. And so I sort of took on this job more in marketing, but I was always very interested in what they were doing when it came to social and environmental and, like, even, like, you know, the governance aspect of the way positive energy operates. And I wanted to have more to do with that, and it became very clear because I was like, hey. You know, here's some organizations we can work with if we wanna have, like, more impact in this area. What if we got behind this sort of policy? And I was just bringing up all these things constantly. And so they actually created a role within the community outreach as a community outreach coordinator for me to sort of slide into and still have my marketing responsibilities. It really chased what it was I was passionate about at the same time.