Show notes
Allen and Joel catch up with Will Friedl, CEO and co-founder of Prometheus Wind, based in Colorado. The company has been growing rapidly in the industry, conducting maintenance, blade repairs and more. Will discusses his experience as a business owner in the wind industry and the lessons he has learned along the way. To learn more, visit https://www.prometheuswind.com/ or call 1 (800) 487-4460.
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with Joel Saxum. We're here with Will Friedl, who is the CEO of Prometheus Wind. And if you're not familiar with Prometheus, they're based in Colorado and they do a ton of turbine work from blade repair to foundation.
Torque and tensioning, pretty much anything to do with wind turbines they're involved with. And Will is a graduate of the Air Force Academy and is a veteran, and this is their third year in operation. And we wanted to touch base with Will. Because when we get an update of all the things that have happened, and there's been some tremendous growth at Prometheus Wind, so Will, welcome to the program.
Will Friedl: Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it, sir.
Allen Hall: Let's start off with I think the most exciting development, on top of everything else that's happened, is the training center. You've now built out a training center. Yes, sir. Can you tell us about it?
Will Friedl: Yes, sir. Yeah. I think there's a fundamental difference between companies that, are hiring for talent and then going out there and doing work.
And of course we're a bootstrap company that's what we had to do for the first two years of our operation. But it was quickly apparent. It's Hey, we need to get a training center so we can upskill our guys so they can grow, they can earn more money. But also so that we can check people coming through the door to make sure that they have the skills that they need.
And so that was a big initiative, a huge lift this winter time, during the. Quote unquote off season we built out a a small training center here in Greeley, Colorado about two hours away from where I live. And and we've had great success with it. So we've had, we've run all of our guys through that.
Everyone who's new goes through that training center. We get, we able to do a thorough evaluation of their skill sets, put them on the correct, educational track, and when they graduate, they they get the appropriate skill level identification and the qualifications that they need.
That we provide. So it's been a huge success. It's not something that, immediately, you flip the switch and it comes online. There's growth to it. You learn how to train, you learn how to change your curriculum to be more effective. But overall just right out the door, we've seen a lot of success with it.
Seen a lot of extra buy in from guys who are appreciative of being up skilled. We've seen better retention. We've seen, higher quality and more, a better production rate of guys in the field. So it's been a, it's been a huge blessing for us.
Joel Saxum: Will, I know you and I were catching up at ACP and earlier than that in the year, I think O& M as well, over in San Diego with your team, we were talking about the build out of the training center and what it looks like for you guys in the future and what that was going to do for your program.
And it sounds like, it's been a success, right? Like better quality in the field, better buying, you're able to impart your company culture, which I know is really important to you guys. From the early stages before people hit, yeah, before people get out to the field, they've already got that base of this is who Prometheus is.
This is how we operate. This is what goes on in our company. And I know that this is this is your third year in business. Like you said, so you went year one, year two, and talking off air, you've two X your business every year. So congratulations on that as a bootstrap business. That's tough to do.
Will Friedl: Yeah. Thanks. Appreciate that, man.
Allen Hall: With the training center and the organization in which you run and being a former military veteran through the Air Force Academy and organizing all kinds of activities that which you can't describe to me, I'm sure it does seem like one of the things you notice about Prometheus is you're very well organized, like you have, Systems in place to make sure that the customer gets what they've asked for.
And the technicians are doing what they're supposed to, and the technicians have the proper tools and that, and getting every, that organizational piece is really important to Prometheus, which you don't always see in all the ISPs, especially at your size and at year three, a lot of times you just don't see that kind of organization.
How, what does that air force training bring into Prometheus? What do you think it brings to the aspect of Prometheus?
Will Friedl: Yeah, that's a great question. I really appreciate you asking. Working in the air force, the military is, unquestionably the biggest bureaucratic organization in the world.
As part of the U S government, the biggest the most systemized entity that you've ever seen. And so when you learn to work through that system, you really learn, all the different process controls that are in place to produce certain results, in, in the military environment is one of extreme risk, and so you have to manage this risk and it's also one of extreme chaos, there's always things popping up.
And so you have to be able to manage and communicate through those issues that pop up. And what's been really cool about us is that, my background isn't in wind and it took me a long time to learn the technical aspects of the business, through and through. And I'm always learning more, you can always talk to an engineer, you always find out how much you don't know.
But but what's interesting is that, what the strength that I do bring in and I was, is the vision of okay, this is how a good organization works and works every single time. And as we've gone through the process, we've had these, we've had mistakes and we've had, things that are suboptimal, additional expenses here and there.
And what we found is that what's made us really resilient is our ability to say, okay, Hey, this doesn't work. We need to change it. And then have the exact. Yeah. Know exactly what lever we need to pull to change that outcome, and, maybe next time it's a little bit closer, but it's not always there, but once you figure out what we need to do, we've been really good at taking the same systems that I've been working with for over a decade in the military and applying them into the company and saying, okay, Hey, this is how this is going to run.
And if we, in the future, we need to change it, this is the process for changing it. And that's made us really adaptable. We, you talk to a lot of small companies and they'll say, I'm super adaptable because I, and they have that attitude because they can change what they're doing in the moment.
But what I think is really important in order to be able to scale and do that well, is that not just change what you're doing in the moment, but also almost immediately implement a system that will allow you to shut your brain off to that side and every single time it goes that way now that doesn't always happen, right?
And there's always errors and you're always adjusting it. But at least we, like I'm, my team now is very familiar with, okay, Hey, this changed. Okay. I need to update this, this procedure, I need to update this process. I need to inform this person and then boom, we make that change and then we just roll in a slightly different direction.
It's a little bit more on target. So I think that's been the thing that's allowed us to grow and to learn from our lessons and do such a ineffective job and basically de risk our operations. It's interesting, for blade repair, we had a kickoff meeting yesterday and the client was, very experienced very experienced program manager for blade repair.
They'd been doing this for years and years. And we showed up and, most clients, they show up and they're like, okay, let's, what do we need to do? And we have a procedure that we do that leads leads them through the step by step conversation so that we cover all the bases, and they showed up with their stuff and we went through that and then we're like, okay here's our stuff what about this? What about this? What about this? And, and we had just, we had taken lessons learned and implemented it immediately into that, in that process.
And you could just see that they were just like, we've been doing this for a long time. We've never really seen this kind of thing. Like this is very, it just sets that precedent, and we still have to go out to out there and execute well. But in the military we say like a good plan makes a good execution.
So I think we're starting off. on the right foot and we're starting off the right foot because we did this very methodically.
Joel Saxum: So with that one in mind, like that client experience you had just this week, right? You are a part of the advanced and veterans advanced energy project.
And I know that we've talked about this in the past. We had Kevin doffing on,