Inside CPS America's Innovation Day: A Conversation with President Bryan Wagner

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What I'd say is, inside of our renewable energy space, we would love to be considered as one of the best brands out there and one of the most loyal followings. And we feel it's mutual with our customer. We want to feel the same way with them. We've had 1000 customers buy from our brand, and we want to keep all 1000. In fact, we want all those 1000s businesses to flourish.

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There's a huge business out there in solar and now energy storage, and we're working even beyond those two categories with with other things, and we're really excited.

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Are you speeding the energy transition here at the Clean Power Hour? Our host, Tim Montague and John Weaver bring you the best in solar, batteries and clean technologies every week. Want to go deeper into decarbonization. We do too. We are here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get to it together. We can speed the energy transition

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today on the Clean Power Hour Innovation Day with CPS America. My guest today is Bryan Wagner. He is the president and GM of CPS America.

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Welcome to the show, Bryan.

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Thank you. Tim. Great to be on again. Welcome back. It's great to have you. This is a long time in the coming and here we are in 2025 putting 2024 to bed. 2024 was a great year, but I think 2025 will be an even better year for the solar industry. And you're welcome to make any prognostications you like. The core of this conversation is going to be about an event that you guys organize in Dallas, Texas, known as Innovation Day.

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But before we do that, Bryan, let's set the table a little bit. Give my listeners a little more background on yourself and how you came to be the president of CPS.

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Yeah, sure. I would basically say that I've been in I first got in the renewable energy field in 2008 so it's been a while, I think, mainly been power electronics and more manufacturing side since about 2010 or 11. Yeah, just a long history inside of energy. I came to CPS, actually as sales in early 2016 and really just graduated throughout the the organization, as a few of our our leaders back then had moved on to do other things. And yeah, I've been in this role since, I'd say, sometime in 2020 around COVID.

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And tell us a little bit about the team that you manage at CPS. It is a team that has been growing by leaps and bounds. But where are you in early 2025

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Yeah, so I'd say right now we are still about 100 people. Probably, when I got to the role we were about, I would say about 1/3 of that size. So we've grown quite a bit the last couple years, and we've, I don't want to say, taken a pause in the hiring, but we've gotten a lot more methodical, deliberate, strategic on what we're hiring for and how it's really making an impact to the business. At some point you gotta catch up to to handle the growth that you're expected. We've done that now we're going into kind of the next phase of our growth, and being, again, just a little bit more deliberate and methodical on how we hire and where we hire, that kind of thing. Yeah, it's exciting right now I'm in charge of the US operations. I'd say we also are working in places like Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America, Mexico, those kind of markets are also now starting to get in our wheelhouse as our responsibility, and that's really what we're focused on.

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I'd say 90% plus is probably the US market, and we've historically been as a company, mostly distributed. Generation has been our main commercial, industrial has been our main bread and butter over the years.

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So that's been a lot of East, eastern US projects, although we're starting to do a lot more out in the west with a larger project. So I'd say in 2025 we're probably looking at a more even split than any other year in compared to previous.

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The string inverter space is changing and the market is changing, and our solar industry in the US lags behind other markets like Europe and Asia simply because they grabbed onto solar faster than we did. We invented the stuff.

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They popularized it and but one of the main trends is that string inverters are now being used in utility scale projects.

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I think the DOE defines utility scale as anything above five megawatts AC, but historically, you would have used a five megawatt or 10 megawatt inverter on these utility scale projects, and now you can use a 250 or 350 kW string invert. Inverter. What other changes would you like to highlight before we get more into the team and this very special event known as Product Innovation Day? Yeah,

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I think changes with regards to the industry. I think you're going to see more and more skidded string projects, more and more the blend between what you call a traditional central inverter architecture, or stringer inverter architecture, meaning what they could call like a virtual Central or we call centralized string architecture, where you're able to land an entire say, block size, three megawatt, four megawatt type, block size at the facility, and lower your labor costs. That's been one of the main advantages or disadvantages for string main advantages for Central and I think those two worlds are starting to collide. We have a little bit of advantage as we manufacture transformers at the high voltage side, and we also do medium voltage or lower voltage, but we're focused mainly in supporting high voltage applications for transformers. So we have a little bit of advantage in our skill set as a company, and owning the designs of skids and of skidded string gives us a large part of the plant that we're bringing to the project.

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Why

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is it that transformers make people's ears prick up?

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I think over the past few years, really, ever since COVID, I think there's been long lead times. There's been inconsistencies in supply, even quality concerns. I think we help shore up the help stabilize that a little bit. And I think our high voltage applications somewhere in the six to nine month lead time.

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Yeah, six to nine months versus 18 plus months, many times, yeah,

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that's right, yeah. And our skids are about, I would say, depending on the season, depending on we have a number of configurations now where we're building, and we have us skids that we build now.

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So we probably are between 1620, or 24 weeks on those skids, depending on the application. So that's also very aggressive, and even a central inverter platform tends to be longer than that.

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And of course, we if you don't have to get everything from us, and you're just sourcing the inverters, it could be very efficient, because those are typically in stock. Cool.

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Let's talk about April 2. You have a very special event coming up in Dallas, Texas, where you invite partners, customers and a whole suite of people in the solar industry. What is happening April 2 in Dallas, Texas, yeah,

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we will have our fourth annual Product Innovation Day this April. 2 is the main day we actually call Giga week, where we have a couple other days where things are happening there as well, typically around what you traditionally think of team building inside a company.

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We almost feel that way with external stakeholders, and it becomes a a really fun couple days. I think the the last year we had Larry Johnson, who was famous, I think, for his, his days at UNLV, we had a March Madness theme to it. And he also played here, closer to where I live, is in New York, Knicks. So it was surprising to see how many people knew him, and also surprising to see how many people didn't know him. But I thought that was a kind of a nice thing last year that we did. So we're always trying to bring new fresh ideas. So if you've come for the third or fourth year, you're not just thinking it's going to be the same old thing you've heard before. We do like to showcase some of our partners will have their own section, but also showcase our new products.

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Really, it's about a new product release. It's about new product updates. Almost every product that we offer we have on display, some of the big battery containers or 8000 pound machines are there, where we have our skid we have our own Innovation Center, which features our CPS labs, where customers are able to see firsthand, where we work on the inverters for warranty purposes and getting inverters back out in ura, as well as our NOx Center, where we monitor sites, the roughly 20,000 sites we have in our fleet, and, yeah, just all kinds of fun. It's always great to see if, say, nowadays I'm super busy, or some of the leaders at other companies are super busy. Years ago, we used to see each other, I'd say, several times a year. Maybe now it's once a year, but we look forward to seeing them at the Innovation Day every year. Some of them fly in for the morning.

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They're, you know, for the morning session. We usually have presentations and things we do, and then they're gone by. If they couldn't stay for the dinner, they're gone by the afternoon because they had something busy going on the day.

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We have all kinds of schedules that we're managing. And yeah, so it's a lot of fun, and we just have. A a really dynamic team, like you said, Tim, if you go and meet us for the first time, I think you'll be blown away with the energy of the team and the knowledge within the team. I think it is the best team in solar. But if you go on, if you're going for your fourth time, which we will have some people that have been every year, I think you'll be blown away with how many new people are on the team, or the new dynamic of the team, or maybe even new shirts or new swag that they receive. So is a lot to it.

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And I think we get really excited to to plan it. We do spend a lot of time, I think working on the plans. We have tremendous marketing teams, Brian Clemente, Pasquale, Joe tavaroni, Jocelyn is they're all contribute to working on it. And many of our leaders are involved. Certainly our product team, Z Anton are involved.

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James basically has to shut down parts of his building. So that whole team is getting busy for a couple weeks. It creates a little bit of chaos, little bit of havoc. But I think every year it keeps growing. Last year, we had over 300 people in attendance. This year, I think we're closing in on about 200 signed up already, and we haven't really done much in the way of getting things out there and in messaging. So appreciate your helping with that.

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Yeah, I like to say it's both, and it's a great time to get to know the team and the products and have dedicated time with CPS, but it's also a great time to rub shoulders with your colleagues. There are many developers, EPCs and asset owners, as well as engineers, O and M specialists and even other manufacturers who are there. And so it's it's very dense, it's very collegial, it's a lot of fun, but you can also really grow your network in some substantive ways. So if you're listening to this, check out the link in the show notes. There'll be a link to that event on Eventbrite, where you can just register. It's free to register.

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Who's invited and what is it that you're offering them? Yeah.

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So basically, Tim, every year we've had it grown. I think the first year we only had, we thought of the concept and could we really pull it off?

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We only had about four weeks. We had our innovation center that we were opening at that time, and we said, Okay, let's do a little bit of a grand opening.

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It's how it started, just as a small little concept where maybe we can get some of our key customers to come. And I think the first year we've had it over two days, we had about 80 people, about 40 each day, give or take. And we were blown away by how many people, back then with COVID and things, people were like itching to get out and itching to go see manufacturers and things. We were a bit lucky, and year two was even more momentum. But what we typically look for is the ones that are really our partners, the ones that can benefit from hearing from our engineering team, our product team, our service team, get those detailed meetings and discussions with the key stakeholders inside the company.

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I think you were saying it the networking that happens is a natural thing that happens because it's not an advertised trade show where you're hoping to find blended people. It's folks that are some develop projects, some build projects, some own projects. Some are financing projects or approving projects in a utility there's we've even had end users that come that own, the real estate and things. So it's been all kinds of different groups that come whereas a lot of our third party engineering firms that are partners with us, they would certainly say they're agnostic, which they need to be, but a lot of our customers work closely with them, and it just becomes this natural thing where, I think a lot of like minded people in the same room in a short period of time, we would say that product innovation days the main event. It's the day to come. It's the first day we're down there, which is Wednesday, the April 2, and that's the day where, I think at night, we have a dinner planned, where it's like, really a welcome reception, and we thank everybody for coming. And it just becomes one of these things where people really get to know each other. I've seen some groups that are coming multiple years now. It's like they know each other. They know it's somewhere they could even get together, maybe one's in California, one's in the southeast, or something, somewhere they can meet there, and they know, hey, I can work that in and know, I'm going to see so and so there. So it's been, I'd say, taking off in a number of ways, from the way we think about it and the way the customer thinks

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about it. The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one three phase string inverter with over eight gigawatts shipped in the US. The CPS product lineup includes string inverters ranging from 25 kW to 350 kW, their flagship inverter the CPS, 350 KW is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts. CPS is the world's most bankable inverter brand, and is America's. Number one choice for solar plants now offering solutions for commercial utility ESS and balance of system requirements go to chintPowersystems.com or call 855-584-7168, to find out more.

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Yeah, one of the things that has really been impressed upon me in the two days that I've spent there, as well as spending time in your booth at various trade shows, is how passionate and loyal your customers are. I liken it to the loyalty among Apple customers. 95% of my colleagues use an Apple phone, an iOS device, and I'm an Android user. I don't know what's wrong with me, Bryan, but I don't like iOS, but the loyalty among Apple users. I do have an Apple device. I have an iPad, and I use it for entertainment, listening to music, watching movies, that kind of thing. But the loyalty that you see there is truly stunning, and I witnessed this, especially with folks like CJ Colavita from standard solar, who we captured a little video with. Check that out on our YouTube channel. It's guys like that who are on stage at Innovation Day as well, talking about what they see going on in the industry, and how CPS is responding to that. And it's just pretty cool how you as a company, as a team, have built these relationships with individuals and with organizations, it's a both and right. Every company is a group of people, and that's the bottom dollar is we have to figure out how to serve one another and get things done. In this case, the energy transition and sooner is better. But if you're listening to this and you've never been to a a private event at a manufacturer's facility, I highly recommend that you check this out, because it's just a wonderful time. It's a great way to see behind the curtain and get to know the company even better than of course, CPS is the number one three phase string inverter manufacturer in the US. And now you're going to get to know a bunch of other people who also know this, and it is a bit of a surprise. And, yeah, I just think it's a very special thing. So Bryan, this also reminds me of this relationship oriented way of doing business that you have developed. You refer to customers as partners, and you refer to vendors as partners.

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And it's much more than just words. But I'm curious where does this come from, because it is quite unique and very special. I

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would say we were just together with a few of our team members, some new, believe it or not, interns that are really wanting to join us full time, and we we took them out for a bite to eat and just getting to know them a little bit better. We're telling the story where I would say, like me starting in sales, one of the one of the folks we're telling, and I chimed in. But me starting in sales, what I think that gave me such a big advantage for and I've even worked with colleagues that said, hey, CEOs have to be engineers in this business politely heard their point of view and definitely can see their point of view. Didn't exactly agree, but I felt knowing the customer and what the customer's needs are, and trying to marry with companies have needs too, I think a lot of times, what happens is some sales teams can get so weighted down by the customer is always right and the customer is always right from the customer service lens. But there's also the reality of you have to run a successful business. You have to offer the right price, and you have to have a profit, and all those business basics that I think between the customer being right and the company being right, but your partnership has to always be right. There are times when we've walked away from partnerships because it just wasn't the right fit. And I think that had more to do with a feeling and a vibe that you get with the customer than than X's and O's or pluses and minuses. I do think, though, that we come from the service side of how can we improve ourselves? How can we improve our light speed system?

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We call it our Light Speed Concept of speeding projects up and the energy transition. As you say, speeding up the energy transition together. How can we do that better? How can we come out with our newest product, the 350 kilowatt, 600 volt. We have some designs right now. North of 200 300 megawatts, plus even more. And at the same time, we didn't stop with that, like some of the companies did. We actually released the 250 600 volt that recently got UL and that product, I think, is going to be equally as exciting. And so when somebody comes down to the event, they're going to be blown away by the fact that the company's not only thinking about their one need over here, if they're a really large utility, they're also thinking, hey, if I still building one or two megawatt projects, we have products for you there. We're not to give too much away, but we're giving. We're coming up with a new 208 volt product that I'm sure we'll talk about in April. I'll be overseas in in the R D facilities early in early 2025 and I'm excited that some of the stuff we'll be talking about in April 2. I don't even know all the detail yet, because we're still working on some things like timing was that we'll have so certainly, between now and April there's can be so much that happens in the product development suite inside our company, that it'll be impossible for anyone to know all the latest and greatest, but when you come to the event, you learn all the latest and greatest. It gives you advantage in the market. It gives you the edge in the market. And that's what we feel our partnership is, is we're here to give you an edge over your competitors, right? And we feel like, if you're buying one from one of our competitors and you're not as close with us, we feel like you'll build less projects. You might win for a year or two, but we don't think in the longer term, you'll be as successful as if you were buying us now. Now me being an apple shareholder, I have to be careful how I respond to probably what you're saying about being in the 5% that doesn't buy Apple, I would say maybe buy one share. No, I'm just kidding, but I'm saying I'm loyal not because I'm a shareholder. I'm loyal because of the serviceability of the product. The way the service team is. There's all these metrics that go into me as a happy, loyal Apple user. I don't foresee me ever leaving, and I was one of the ones at the end of the cycle before all my other friends had I was towards the end. I was BlackBerry back then, and yeah, I'm super, I guess, humbled by what you said about us being similar to an apple. We would never compare ourselves to an apple, but what I'd say is, inside of our renewable energy space, we would love to be considered as one of the best brands out there and one of the most loyal followings, and we feel it's mutual with our customer. We want to feel the same way with them. We've had 1000 customers buy from our brand, and we want to keep all 1000. In fact, we want all those 1000s businesses to flourish.

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There's a huge business out there and in solar and now energy storage, and we're working even beyond those two categories with other things, and we're really excited.

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Another thing we talked about was the launch of our CSPs service brand. So I know we probably haven't gone over that too much in the market yet, but that's something else we'll be putting on display in

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April. CSPs, I know it's a little funny,

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but Chint smart power services is, is basically the service offerings around our inverter.

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Okay, can you tell me more? You have to come to the event. Oh, gotcha. Gotcha. Cool.

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I love the teaser. Yeah, we would need

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a lot more time for that right now. But yes, that is, there's a lot of things like that going on behind the scenes, behind the curtain, as you say, that if it's ready and and we were hoping that would have been ready to talk about this past Innovation Day in in 2024 it was not. So we moved it to the next year, and we had a kind of a soft launch at re plus, where some folks have heard about it, and we'll have much bigger launch at our Innovation Day,

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cool, I liken the string inverter to the heart of the beating heart of a solar array. And as you mentioned, you established your beachhead in the DG solar market. This is CNI community solar, and now you're spreading out. You released a single phase string inverter this year. So that's targeting small CNI, and you've released several products targeting the utility scale market with your 250-370-5253, 50. Sorry, yeah.

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So it's, again, it's a both and right? You're growing down market, you're growing up market. What else should our listeners know about CPS? And in particular, I think it would be useful for you to speak to what types of people are you looking to attract to the company.

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Yeah. So I think with regards to to the CPS brand, I think what is funny is you're talking about Apple, we have actually said our product is like the iPhone, meaning there's a lot that you know, or you said the heartbeat inside the array. If you turn our product off, obviously there's.

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Uh, there's no revenue, there's no there's no conversion to make your plant usable. And so it's very important that those systems stay in line, that there's very little downtime.

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And I think what's funny is we, we take that very serious, that our job is really once we get onto the project and we turn the system on. Maybe sometimes it comes in a little bit earlier as our job, but once the system's on, that's really when our job starts. That's where we really spend a ton of time and focus.

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And James Oswald, who, you know, Tim really was here in my office last week, we're always talking about what improvements we would like to make and what challenges we're having during the day or the week, and yeah, very much.

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We have to think of the customers that aren't buying, and why not? And where do we go wrong, in our in our value chain, in our value like our service offering to them, or our our overall company offering to them. So we can get if we lost them, we can get back on track, or if we have never attracted them to our brand, I'd say typically, once a customer has bought once they tend to be pretty loyal. So that's usually also a very hard thing for companies. Is their customer acquisition cost is something they track a lot. It's something that we do okay with. I think we we focus relentlessly on acquiring the customers versus the cost, because I think we're certainly not like Amazon, who I think is famous for going 10 years without making money.

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We've been making money for years. So we do care about marketing as a percentage of revenue and all the business basics, but we do I probably spend a lot on customer attention, meaning, hey, we don't have to go do that according to our warranty and our warranty procedure. And think of your your cell phone provider. It's like that you call in and you're like, that's not in our scope. We don't take that approach as much as well.

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We see that it's not in our scope. But let us go the extra mile and help get things smoothed out here. So

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your team is growing. The team has tripled in size in the last, what, five years. And I'm curious, when you're talking to solar professionals, what is it that differentiates somebody who is a good fit for CPS versus not

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You mean for a potential CPS recruit?

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Correct? Yeah, I want to, I want you to, yeah, to tell us what differentiates the team at CPS compared to other places.

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That's an interesting thing, too, and we never really look for that. But with our Innovation Day, there has been some folks coming that were looking for a job, and typically not with us. But do we know anyone? And or they just left their company? We've had people come that weren't even at a solar company, but we've known them over the years. So we can lend a hand with some of our network. A lot of what we look for, I like to ask a question that I think I don't know where I came up with it might have been my own, which usually is not true. Original ideas are hard to come by. But like I usually ask the interview question, Can you define ambition? Because ambition so very funny thing. I think I always feel like at CPS, we really may just care more than every company. That's what we feel is our special secret sauce, or in our DNA, we really care to go the extra mile for the customer. I think that comes from our ambition, wanting to grow, wanting to become number one across all product categories, to become got our sites in the next three to five years, and all these other things that are well known inside the company. And maybe we're a little bit more ambitious than some. I think it's hard to teach that. So I definitely look for that. We want someone that's going to be creative, innovative challenge.

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People like they say, like a healthy debate internally. You don't want just people that are more saying yes all the time or don't have too much to contribute. We like to say, let's say we have five things to get done. We don't want five people working on one thing. We want five people working on five different things. And then if you need to collaborate on one of them, do that, but don't collaborate on the first one as five and then the next one is just too slow. Our job is really to speed up the energy transition, and our job is to really speed up our customers transition, and how many projects we hope they can build through 235, times the amount of projects by working with CPS that they could with the other brands. And one of the benefits to doing that is is we have to think internally, okay, will this person coming inside the company speed us up, or just keep us on par, or even slow us down? Because we got to teach or or whatever, and we're happy to teach. And usually that happens through in the game, learning, through coaching and things. But we very much look for people that can focus on speed. You need accuracy and speed, but we really like speed. If you could pick one, you certainly would probably go with accuracy, because you can't have you.

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Speed with without accuracy, you probably could have accuracy without speed that won't hurt you as much.

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I think about my conversation with Dr Barry Davis earlier in in 2024 and he he knows the CPS team quite well.

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One of his specialties is helping teams create a culture of winning. Obviously, some teams win more than others, and ultimately, if we're going to be successful in business, we have to create a team that is going to win more than it loses. But what I'm driving at here, Bryan is, as customers, we're dealing with a group of people. You have great products, and the products have to be stellar, but you're mostly going to be dealing with people when you're Whether you're buying, installing or servicing an inverter, right?

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And so that's what I'm getting at here, is think about the types of people that you're going to be interacting with, and that is a unique experience.

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In my experience talking with dozens of installers that work with CPS, installers, developers and asset owners. It's the people that really set CPS apart, and that's why I pushed you on this. I don't know if there's anything else you want to say about I was going

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to mention, yeah, I think when you ask about what types of people come to our Innovation Day or our gig a week. It's really funny that I think a lot of, even folks I've worked with over the years, but a lot of, I think folks probably we compete with, you're very much focused on, let me get to the 1% engineers, and then we'll be designed in on a project, and the rest is history, and I just gotta spend time with that 1% now, don't get me wrong, the 1% or even top 10% of engineering folks in our field, in my opinion, probably helped drive a lot of our industry to the success we've had. But we very much feel like, yes, that person that's out there, not even as a lead foreman or as a lead project manager, but that person that's installing the product or servicing the product or technical support at the companies, we hope that a company can bring five people or 10 people from their company, because that's the value they see of their company Coming to get educated on not just our brand, our company, our culture, but it can even rub off on their company's culture a little bit in the sense that those five that came they're a little bit more in tune with some of the concepts that we review when we're together. And I think we really care about whether it's that person one or 100 in that company. We're not just looking for, say, the top five or 10% of engineers to come from a company, or your number one project manager, your top procurement manager. There's probably hundreds of types of people that come. We think we want them all to be interested in coming. And I think what's funny is, every year this one has something that happened with the family, we got a birthday, or this one has a birthday, there's always things that happen and they're like, we'll be there next year. And you actually know they will be, and we mark that on the list, and you're excited to then meet them in person somewhere, probably more in their office or something. But yeah, I think that's the other thing is we have a lot of well rounded types of folks, not just solar gurus.

00:33:43.869 --> 00:33:54.880
We have folks that have worked in other industries, other parts, that can make that, I think experience for them really, really nice.

00:33:55.240 --> 00:34:00.250
Said, I don't have any other questions about Innovation Day. I'm looking forward to being there myself.

00:34:00.369 --> 00:34:18.400
Check out all of my content at cleanpowerhour.com Give us a rating and review on Apple and Spotify, and check out the link in the show notes to get an invitation to CPS Product Innovation Day. Bryan, how can our listeners find you?

00:34:18.579 --> 00:34:24.489
I'm on LinkedIn, or if you probably send in an email.

00:34:20.860 --> 00:34:38.440
Bryan.wagner@chintpower.com is fine. We also have an events at Chintpowersystem.com if you're interested in coming to the event, you can also send in to there that pings our team and get you signed up. Yeah, we'd love to see you there. Great.

00:34:38.920 --> 00:34:51.309
Check out all of chintz products at chintpowersystems.com and again, thank you for listening. I look forward to hearing from you on LinkedIn or at Cleanpowerhour.com with that, let's grow solar and storage.

00:34:51.309 --> 00:34:52.690
Thank you so much. Bryan Wagner,

00:34:53.619 --> 00:34:55.059
thank you, Tim.

00:34:53.619 --> 00:34:55.059
Appreciate it.

Inside CPS America's Innovation Day: A Conversation with President Bryan Wagner | EP253

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