Latest / Clean Power Hour / 4 Storytelling Rules Solar Pros Need Right Now #333

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4 Storytelling Rules Solar Pros Need Right Now #333 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Aaron Nichols: To answer your first question, why should solar professionals care? Because you don't have to just wait for the conferences to move business forward. Everyone thinks that they do. Everyone I talk to thinks that the only time anything is ever going to happen is at the conferences. But then you look at what those companies are doing and how they use LinkedIn, and they tend to just occasionally update their company page, and then they get a few reactions, and then they probably, internally are like it didn't work. But I'm here to tell you, as someone who's gotten 1.8 million impressions in the last year, it can work, but you have to be emotional.
• 1:36
  Aaron Nichols: The more technical you are, the more dry you are. Maybe people will respect you, but they're not going to be interested in your content. They're not going to follow along. They're not going to think about you.
• 1:48
  intro: Are you speeding the energy transition here at the Clean Power Hour, our host, Tim Montague, bring you the best in solar, batteries and clean technologies every week. Want to go deeper into decarbonization.
• 1:58
  intro: We do too. We're 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.
• 2:15
  Tim Montague: A lot of us energy professionals know that we should be good storytellers, or great storytellers. If you work in B to B, whether you're in sales, marketing, engineering, finance, I think we all need to be good storytellers, because we are on a journey as a species, and we are humans, and we evolved sitting around the campfire telling stories to one another. There was a time right when storytelling was everything. All of our knowledge came through stories, and so that is very integral to us as a species, but So today, we're going to geek out on storytelling and social media LinkedIn, especially my guest is Aaron Nichols. You might know him as the host of this week in solar, a lovely little podcast, and he is also a research and policy expert for exact solar based in Pennsylvania. Welcome to the show, Aaron.
• 3:18
  Aaron Nichols: Thank you very much. And for anyone who's listening, don't let the title fool you. I'm a marketing and sales guy 100% but we made up Research and Policy specialists because I handle PR. And so journalists kept telling us we don't want to talk to a marketing guy. And so we put up a little smoke screen with research and policy specialists.
• 3:36
  Tim Montague: Well, it's a good one. I like it. Yeah, I do. I like it. And these little angles matter how you how you frame things matters. And this is, this is relative to storytelling. And we were, we were getting into it a little bit in the pre show, some of the fundamentals. But before we get into storytelling, Aaron, what is your story and why are we talking about the solar industry?
• 4:04
  Aaron Nichols: Well, my journey in the solar industry started in Ecuador in 2021 when I met circus girls on the beach when I was surfing and I didn't know what to do with my life. That's the story I love telling everyone. It's 100%
• 4:20
  Tim Montague: true, and they recruited you into the industry.
• 4:23
  Tim Montague: It sounds like
• 4:24
  Aaron Nichols: they did. Yeah.
• 4:24
  Aaron Nichols: So I love telling this story.
• 4:29
  Aaron Nichols: And I did end up in the solar industry, after some circus girls recruited me to sell solar door to door. At the time, I was a burned out teacher. I was traveling to learn movements. I did a couple circus art camps myself. I spent a lot of time learning to surf. I did some yoga teacher trainings, and I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life and about a month before I met these women, I was I had sat down and just thought about what I wanted the rest of my life to be about, and just drawn out a bunch of Venn diagrams trying to figure out where I wanted to put the tremendous energy I have. And I ended up landing on renewable energy because it just solved so many it covered so many bases that I wanted to cover in my life. I wanted to wake up feeling good about the work I did. I didn't want to work for nonprofits or be a teacher again, because I didn't want to struggle with money for the rest of my life. And I wanted to be able to reach the end of my life sit in the rocking chair on my porch and feel like I had done something that mattered and had no idea how I was going to do it. And you know, I applied for some jobs back then that I was completely unqualified for, and then I met some women in the town that I was. Staying in ayampe Ecuador, who would knock doors sell solar the company they worked for, would go on what they call blitz trips, where they would fly them out.
• 6:01
  Aaron Nichols: They would knock doors and sell solar to homeowners, and then they would take the money that they earned from that and then go do circus arts camps, which was their passion. And then they would run out of money, and then they would come back and knock doors again, and they invited me on a couple of these trips, and I was terrible at it, and I didn't end up full time in the solar industry for another year after that, but that was the genesis,
• 6:27
  Tim Montague: and you speak Spanish well enough to door knock in Ecuador.
• 6:31
  Aaron Nichols: No, these were in the States. I do not speak Spanish well enough.
• 6:36
  Tim Montague: Circus girls. The Circus girls were American. They were American, yeah.
• 6:41
  Aaron Nichols: But there's a lot of, there's a lot of, like, hippie encampments of Americans all throughout Southeast Asia and South and Central America, sure. And a lot of people who are into fire spinning and circus arts in those places, and I, you know, hung out in a lot of those places when I was traveling down there, and that's where they found me.
• 7:01
  Tim Montague: For for our California audience, how good is the surf in Ecuador?
• 7:08
  Aaron Nichols: I don't know, because I can't compare it to California, but probably not as good as California, but it's still the Pacific coast.
• 7:17
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I've never, I've never heard of it being a hot spot, but I'm also not a surfer. I tried surfing a little bit when I was in college. I went to school in San Diego.
• 7:25
  Tim Montague: Some of the best surfing in the country. Black's Beach was just 20 minutes from my dorm room. It wasn't very good for my grades, let me tell you. So let's get into Well, fast forward. You, you, you now work for exact solar, and you also have spooled up this new show. It's a news end interview show to be fair and on on our industry. So what compels you to be a content creator and storyteller?
• 7:59
  Aaron Nichols: Aaron, I believe that I have a big role to play in the energy transition, and that might sound crazy because I'm very new here, but I have this energy to write on LinkedIn and summarize news on This Week in solar and, you know, interview people in the industry, because I'm very interested in this, and I believe that I have a big role to play, and that the the intersection of my skill set and what I can offer is to package what we're doing and make it interesting, take the technical and bring it down to earth so that the public can be more interested in the energy transition.
• 8:41
  Tim Montague: Yeah, it is kind of exciting that everybody is freaking out about their energy bill right now, even though it's hard on low income people, and that is frustrating for me, but as energy professionals now, electricity is in the news every day because power prices are going up, sometimes dramatically in some markets, and it's and for the foreseeable future, we're now adding a lot of load to the grid with data centers and electrification of everything, and so it's a little bit of a perfect storm, and that's basically good for our industry. As prices go up, it means that solar pays back faster, and we like that. We have enough headwinds with the federal administration right now, so some tailwinds are a good thing. But I guess I'm curious, what is the story that solar installers need to tell better? In your opinion,
• 9:41
  Aaron Nichols: individual stories are a great place to start. Last month, I published an article. I just put it on my LinkedIn. It's called Four Rules of storytelling that corporate America desperately needs, and rule number one is tell one story at a time. I phrase it in the article as lead with one story. Okay, but the thing a lot of people get wrong, and one of the reasons that we got our butts kicked in the lead up to the one big, beautiful bill, is that people in the clean energy industry especially tend to be more left leaning, which means they tend to have more advanced degrees, which means they've trained themselves to think in a certain way, and then the information they put out that's public facing tends to be very high brow. There's a culture where they're rewarded for over complicating things. They're not rewarded for simplifying things.
• 10:33
  Aaron Nichols: Now, when we're talking about facing an opponent that has no trouble using emotional misinformation to push people in the other direction talking about the fossil fuel industry, we can't afford to be that way.
• 10:44
  Aaron Nichols: We can't afford to be boring, but we insist on being boring.
• 10:48
  Aaron Nichols: And it drives me crazy. There's a there's a book I really like called Making numbers count by Chip Heath and Carla star. I don't know if it's gonna blur it out,
• 11:03
  Tim Montague: but there's a ruler and making numbers count.
• 11:07
  Tim Montague: Okay, we'll put that in the show notes. I haven't heard of this book. What's it about?
• 11:11
  Aaron Nichols: So making numbers count is about how we don't actually speak numbers, but we pretend to. And I'll bring it back to tell one story, but the human mind, like you said at the beginning, we have 200,000 plus years of sitting around campfires telling each other how to find the berries, and we have a couple 100 Years of pretending that we understand really big numbers, one is much more powerful than the other, because it's ingrained in us. Now, if we're talking about winning stories and how to tell winning stories in order to elicit emotional response that then gets people to take action, zooming in on one story is the way to go. There's there's a psychological study that's been done over and over again that shows that when problems feel really big, we tune out immediately, but when they feel small, we can take action. So this is why the Humane Society shows you one puppy at a time, not all 400 that they have in their kennels. They're offering you the chance to adopt one dog.
• 12:10
  Aaron Nichols: And this is something that drove me so crazy. When we were leading up to the one big, beautiful bill, we kept saying we're going to lose 10,000 jobs.
• 12:20
  Aaron Nichols: If this legislation passes, we're going to lose four gigawatts of pending projects, which, to the average person, is just big number bad. What some people do masterfully. And I think a great example of this was last year in the New York Times in Georgia, during the election where some public utility commissioners were dethroned and they got some fresh blood in there. They told the story of a single mother.
• 12:45
  Aaron Nichols: She had voted for Trump, but she was approved for solar for all right, before they pulled the funding, Georgia had some of the biggest power increases in the country, which meant that her energy bills were spiraling out of control. She was working three jobs, but she couldn't keep up. That story helped motivate that election in a way that saying, if we don't dethrone the public utility commissioners were going to lose X number of jobs or power bills are going to go up by X percent.
• 13:17
  Aaron Nichols: Never would have done so. Tell one story at a time. Connect what you want people to do to a face.
• 13:25
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. It's when we hear about suffering, it makes more of an impact if we can put a face to the suffering, a specific face. And this isn't easy, but when it's done well, it is good. And so I concur. I think this presents a challenge for our industry. Because, you know, in commercial solar, the world I travel in the most sure we can tell a company story where, you know, most companies, when they go solar, are happy to tell their story, so to speak, because it's a good story. It's good for their stakeholders, they're saving money. It's good for their employees. They're cleaning the air in the community. But when it comes down to the human story in CNI, sometimes I think it's hard to find that human story, and it is about the workers. It is about people's jobs in manufacturing plants. It's about, you know, the impact of lack of resilient infrastructure, right? We're sitting here today in January of 2026, and many, many people are going without power because of winter storm Fern that has really impacted Tennessee, for example, and maybe some people that I know, but I'm not, I'm not aware of a specific individual that is suffering right now because of the outage in Tennessee. But telling that story, of course, is powerful.
• 15:11
  Tim Montague: But how do you? How do you, you know, find your way, I guess, to those personal stories in an industry where it's not necessarily appropriate or accepted to tell that personal story.
• 15:28
  Aaron Nichols: Sure, I mean not appropriate or accepted just means no one else is doing it, which just means opportunity to do it in a way no one else is doing. I think people often conflate the fact that no one else is doing it with the idea that there's no reason to put effort behind it, but that's not true.
• 15:48
  Tim Montague: So what's a solar story? What's a solar story?
• 15:50
  Tim Montague: That you tell at exact solar that that motivates others to either, you know, become part of the solar tribe, or, you know, take action on policy, or whatever that is.
• 16:05
  Aaron Nichols: Yeah, we've got a couple really amazing ones. And I mean, if we're talking commercial, there's a refrigeration warehouse that we that we put solar on, that now saves hundreds of 1000s of dollars per month and can put that towards better use. I think that's that's always a great story is we were wasting all this money on electricity before, and now we freed up budget to do things that aren't wasting money on electricity every month. There's the school that we, we've, we've done a lot of work with nonprofits. So there's the school that we, we built a off grid system that is battery backed that's just a simple ground mount that powers a greenhouse on the school's property. It's in the middle of Philly, very close to the Kensington area, and it powers a hydroponic gardening system in a greenhouse that grows organic produce, and then the students harvest that produce and serve it to parents and staff in an on site restaurant, and then they sell the extra at a farmers market every month. Or there's the Habitat for Humanity, row homes that we did it as a commercial job, where we put them on the whole row of homes at once, and then all of the homes were donated to low income people in the community
• 18:14
  Tim Montague: and so but how do you go to that next layer down and tell the personal stories within those Bigger stories?
• 18:22
  Tim Montague: Those are, I would call those more traditional, commercial solar stories. How do you go to the next level and get permission to tell the story about the family benefiting from that garden project? Or, you know, you know? And I did have, I did have a couple of customers that came on the show.
• 18:46
  Tim Montague: Historically, Colin Murphy stands out in this regard. He's the CEO of Simmons knife and saw in Chicago land. And you know, so I'm a big fan of that, of bringing it down to a personal level. But sometimes it's not easy to get to those stories.
• 19:02
  Tim Montague: How do you, how do you get to this, get to that, and then, and then, let's talk. Let's talk about the elements, I guess, of what makes a good story, because that's also, I think, very important. Not only like finding the story, but how we tell it.
• 19:18
  Aaron Nichols: The school is the best example that we were able to do such a great job with. So we brought it down to the community level and suggested the idea of a ribbon cutting when we put together like when we finished the school project, we specifically focused on the man who had decided to do this at the school, and got everyone organized around him and excited. And then we were able to put together his story and how he had, like, gotten this project across the finish line and done it in collaboration with a local nonprofit where the executive director had just died, and, like, his legacy was involved. Then we reached out to local politicians, and we said, You guys are going to love being photographed in front of this solar energy system. There's there's kids in this story, there's organic produce in a food desert, there's all this stuff. And then we got politicians on board, and then we reached out to the reporters, and we said, You guys are going to love photographing these politicians in front of this thing. It's beautiful, and they're going to be all excited that you're here. And so we started, we zoomed in on the man who had gotten this across the finish line. And then was we were able to loop in local organizations, build around that, on that story, and then we got a lot of publicity after that. We got our congressman to come speak, who represents that local district, and then that story got us a relationship. So that story went live in quite a few local news publications, and then that story got us a relationship with a local NPR subsidiary reporter who introduced us to a national NPR reporter that got us into a story that went live all over the country. So this is the power of a good story,
• 21:16
  Tim Montague: and let's break that down a little more though.
• 21:20
  Tim Montague: What is it that makes a good story that we humans are going to remember and resonate with and be moved by. Yeah.
• 21:32
  Aaron Nichols: So rule one, like I said, is tell one story at a time, or lead with one story. So bring it down to one thing at a time, as soon as you build. Bury it in a statistic. No one cares.
• 21:44
  Aaron Nichols: Statistics should be buried, buried in stories. Stories should not be buried in statistics. Rule number two is, make me care before you make your case. As people who are like I said before people who are in the renewable energy world tend to be left leaning, which means they tend to have more advanced degrees. You have what's called like the educated middle of America, and those people tend to believe that they're logical. All of us believe that we're logical, but people who have advanced degrees tend to think of themselves as much more logical than the average person, and that means that they don't know generally how to like retreat back into the emotional world, and they try to lead with facts rather than leading with emotion. But people only accept facts when facts fit in a story they already believe, and facts matter in winning people over, but they're not in the entry point. So that's why you have to connect with people where their values are, and that's why every story we told in that greenhouse project was connecting with the values of people. We knew that politicians like to be photographed and like publicity.
• 23:01
  Aaron Nichols: We knew that reporters like to photograph politicians. So that's rule number two, make me care before you make your case.
• 23:10
  Tim Montague: The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one three phase string inverter with over 10 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. Okay, you know, I like being in the solar industry because it it resonates with people from across the political spectrum. For one thing, energy independence is something that's very popular across the spectrum, not being dependent on a grid operator, if that's possible. Wanting to save money.
• 24:21
  Tim Montague: Every human on Earth wants to save money, whether they're rich or poor. People like to save money. And generally speaking, renewable energy gives us that power wanting a safer, healthier, future or present for that matter. Okay, everybody wants cleaner air and cleaner water and better health. And by cleaning the grid, we are actually doing this. We are saving lives. We are reducing suffering from disease that's caused by air pollution. And that's a good, that's a public good. But you you mentioned these, these two fundamentals.
• 25:04
  Tim Montague: Are there others? How many fundamentals are there?
• 25:11
  Aaron Nichols: There's four.
• 25:11
  Aaron Nichols: There's, I called it the four rules of storytelling. Corporate America desperately needs rule number three is, if it's complicated, you haven't finished thinking. And then, in the article, I joke that there's way too many websites out there that say things like, we offer integrated, end to end, synergistic solutions that advance materials and advanced technology, like S, A, T, words that sound nice but mean nothing. I like to
• 25:42
  Tim Montague: keep it simple, stupid.
• 25:45
  Aaron Nichols: This is a line that always gets a laugh when I'm speaking on stage. Is I'll say, How many of you here have ever gotten in an argument with your spouse and then immediately showed them a graph to prove that you were right? And you know, like one people, one person will raise their hand, everybody else will laugh. I'll point at him, and I'll say, and how did that go? They'll say terribly, and I'll say obviously. But you think you can do that to strangers online and that they're going to be receptive, but so when I say, if it's complicated, you haven't finished thinking, What I mean is what I said before that, like for technical professionals in an industry like energy, there's no culture of being rewarded for simplifying things. It's a culture of being rewarded for over complicating information.
• 26:30
  Aaron Nichols: But the the four steps I put in that, in that story, for simplifying or that in that article, for simplifying things, which like, if you're sitting down to. Simplify the message of what your product does. Is the example that I wrote is just if you can answer the questions, what does our product do? How did we make it do that? Who has it helped by doing that thing?
• 26:53
  Aaron Nichols: And why should anyone care? And then you can answer those before below a fifth grade reading level, you are so much farther ahead than so many people in this industry.
• 27:05
  Tim Montague: And what's number four, put a face on it.
• 27:08
  Aaron Nichols: This is specifically for LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn personal pages get an order of magnitude more engagement than company pages, but people insist on continuing to post on company pages, and they're so reluctant to embrace thought leadership because they're afraid their employees will leave. But I can tell you from firsthand experience, from my own content, that leaning into what we call thought leadership and putting a face on the beliefs of your company will get you so much more attention than a company page like no one in the world wakes up and says, I wonder what Bank of America is up to. We follow people. We're interested in people.
• 27:53
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I agree.
• 27:53
  Tim Montague: Well, let's talk more about LinkedIn. I was an early adopter. I have 23,000 connections on LinkedIn. I like networking on LinkedIn. I don't like any other social media platform, particularly. I do occasionally post on other platforms, but I post regularly on LinkedIn, and it's a great way to grow your network. I and I can now I've gotten to a point Aaron, where I can tell how involved and engaged someone is in the industry by how many contacts we share in common. And you know, that's upwards of 2000 people that I would share in common with a very established veteran in the industry. And it is always concerning to me, honestly, when I run into somebody who is in a position of authority in the in the industry, who's very little connected, or we share very few mutual connections. And I'm curious also, and some people just are not on LinkedIn, and so that is a thing. They can be very established in the industry and actually connected without being connected on LinkedIn, but I digress. So tell us about your approach to LinkedIn. You are.
• 29:10
  Tim Montague: You're somebody who's very active and have to some extent cracked the code on getting people to pay attention to your content on LinkedIn. So why should solar professionals care about LinkedIn and what? When you say, thought leadership, what does that mean?
• 29:29
  Aaron Nichols: Yeah, good question. So to answer your first question, why should solar professionals care? Because you don't have to just wait for the conferences to move business forward. Everyone thinks that they do. Everyone I talk to thinks that the only time anything is ever going to happen is at the conferences. But then you look at what those companies are doing and how they use LinkedIn, and they tend to just occasionally update their company page, and then they get a few reactions, and then they probably internally are like it didn't work. But I'm here to tell you, as someone who's gotten 1.8 million impressions in the last year, it can work, but you have to be emotional.
• 30:14
  Aaron Nichols: The more technical you are, the more dry you are. Maybe people will respect you, but they're not going to be interested in your content. They're not going to follow along. They're not going to think about you.
• 30:30
  Tim Montague: Well, I have two immediate reactions to this, and I think we should explore those.
• 30:33
  Tim Montague: When I think of employees posting on behalf of an employer, or they see themselves as employees. Okay, there's, there's a couple of things going on. One, they don't necessarily want to outshine the company or the boss, and I think that is a real specter for a lot of people. And then two, so there's, there's a downside, there's a potential downside to being too visible on social media. Like, well, what are you doing if all you're doing is posting on LinkedIn? Tim, the other the flip side of that is, well, is anybody paying attention? And did you get any deals right? Like, at the end of the day, companies are trying to generate revenue, and that means deal flow. And so the the question that you get asked is, well, how is it, how is it generating business? You. Do you answer those two objections that people that these are individual people who would be posting and maybe they are, but they're dealing with these things. How do you how do you address that?
• 31:56
  Aaron Nichols: I can tell you what it's done for me, and we can go from there, if we're talking about business development, generating business building relationships, not at major conferences. I have yet to be to a major conference, and there's a lot of people who talk about me in rooms I am not in, in companies I don't work for.
• 32:17
  Aaron Nichols: In terms of business development, LinkedIn is pretty amazing, because you can message anyone. It's not like Facebook, where you are barred from messaging people that you that you don't connect with or follow or aren't friends with. Like you can, you can send cold messages to anyone in any ICP, I have used LinkedIn to launch a podcast. I've used it to get myself much further along in the industry than I normally would be at someone who works at a regional solar installer and has only been here for two and a half years. I've used it to connect with people like yourself to come on to this week in solar I've used it to launch events in my local community, where I invite people that I met on LinkedIn, who are high up in the industry, to speak at events to crowds of 40 to 70 local people who came because they were interested in my content.
• 33:22
  Aaron Nichols: Now I'm in a very specific situation where I work for a small company and no one is really that bothered what I do on my LinkedIn. So it has led to revenue locally by just allowing us to connect with some amazing partners, and by bringing us attention through this week in solar and giving us a platform where we can connect with anyone we want, and given us an amazing business development platform where I can connect with anyone who normally wouldn't talk to me and tell them that I have an audience and that They can come on my podcast, but I don't know if I have good answers for all the questions that you asked.
• 34:07
  Aaron Nichols: That's just what it's done
• 34:12
  Tim Montague: for me. It definitely resonates what you said about company pages versus individuals. And I do think this is a tragic mistake that companies make. They rely on their company page, and they see that as the voice, right? And they want that to be the unified voice. And I'm like, Nope, you need the team to be posting and presenting thought leadership.
• 34:37
  Tim Montague: We do business with people, even though a company is this entity that we're also doing business with. We're doing business with people that we like and trust, and so that's kind of how I see LinkedIn is a way to build like and trust and to offer valuable information, and not all of the information I'm offering in on LinkedIn is going to be perceived as value. And thank God I'm also a podcaster, right?
• 35:06
  Tim Montague: So I can present information about others that I'm bringing on the show, because ultimately, that's probably the most valuable thing that I do you know, is bring their content to the show, to the to the airwaves, right? And, oh, yeah, I may have some interesting, good ideas. You know, frankly, the best idea, the best awakening that I've had, Aaron, is that the energy transition is important, but it's not solving the climate crisis. And we as an industry are in denial about this, and we need to stare that in the face. We need to look in the mirror and go, Oh crap. And there is actually some affordable, accessible solutions for that that we should do in parallel. But so what else should people be thinking about when they think about LinkedIn?
• 36:04
  Tim Montague: One one other, I guess. Flag that you know I struggle with is the the personal journey, aspects of some of LinkedIn, like, I don't want LinkedIn to become Facebook. I like it that it is a B to B platform, right?
• 36:24
  Tim Montague: I like it that it's about about work and about industry and about the energy transition for me, and, yeah, it's there's also all these personal journeys. But I. Don't want it to be Facebook.
• 36:42
  Tim Montague: Sure.
• 36:46
  Aaron Nichols: I don't think, I don't think it matters. I think people are going to bring the people who love it the most are going to bring their unique voice to it. And I can tell you that the two things that have gotten me the most attention and represent a large part of that 1.8 million impressions that I've gotten, including a post that by itself had almost 400,000 were either about me or funny, and those were the ones that like got people laughing and interested and opened up discussions and got people to follow this week in solar and got them to tell me, like, what what an awesome job I'd done, and how much they enjoy my content. Because I think an underrepresented thing on LinkedIn is personal stories.
• 37:44
  Aaron Nichols: And it's if you're able to tie the personal stories of interesting people who work at your company to the values of your company, that's something that can get you a lot more attention, and it's something that is underrepresented. But like all of my all of my greatest posts are about like, camping with my who the woman who's now my wife, or proposing to her, or the wedding we did in the woods, or all of that stuff.
• 38:13
  Aaron Nichols: It shows that I'm a person who has values. It also shows that I'm a person, hopefully people would want to hang out with. And it represents exact solar Well,
• 38:27
  Tim Montague: yeah, I'm, I agree on some level. Okay, we do want to personalize the content, but I also don't want to wear every all of my beliefs on my shirt sleeve on LinkedIn.
• 38:45
  Aaron Nichols: Sure, any this, okay, this is something that anyone who has a public facing persona is myth making. You are choosing the things that you want people to see about you.
• 38:59
  Aaron Nichols: There's really only a small number of people who know you and those like there's a core group of people who know you and love you deeply and actually know who you are. If you are presenting any kind of persona to the world on social media or otherwise, you're a myth maker.
• 39:13
  Aaron Nichols: Whether you like it or not, you're presenting some version of the truth. You're not presenting just the truth, but you choose what beliefs you want to be out in the world. You choose what you want to be out there and what you don't want to be out there. And that's the dance, and that's the fun part of it.
• 39:31
  Tim Montague: It that is a that is a lovely thing about social media in general. We get to choose both what we what we post and what we interact with. So in our last few minutes together, Aaron, I mean, we could talk about this all day. It is a fascinating subject, but I want to bring it. I want to bring it back for energy professionals who, let's just say, I mean, I break the world into ones, twos and threes. The ones get it, the twos will get it with some education, and the threes are never going to get it. So for the ones and twos, okay, who get the importance of LinkedIn, say, and the importance of storytelling, how can we help them be even better emotion?
• 40:14
  Aaron Nichols: Lead with emotion and lead with emotional stories.
• 40:18
  Aaron Nichols: This is, this is another social science fact that I love, is that facts decay in the mind faster than stories do, and I can prove that by telling you that I remember that story about the single mother in Georgia whose power bills went up out of control. And I do not remember the amount of money her bills went up by, but the amount of money her bills went up by in the story, that was where the facts, that was the hard stuff.
• 40:43
  Aaron Nichols: Those were the numbers. I have no idea what that was, but I can remember that she was struggling, that she had kids, that she would that she voted for Trump, that she was approved for solar, for all that solar, for all funding was pulled, and that she was suffering as a result of that.
• 40:58
  Tim Montague: Yeah, it's very ironic that many people that supported Donald Trump are some of the most impacted people by his his administration,
• 41:11
  Aaron Nichols: yeah, well, you're, you're a student of history. You know that? I mean, the poor always suffer,
• 41:17
  Tim Montague: and it's the poor that suffer the most from climate change. And, you know.
• 41:19
  Tim Montague: So that's, that's a that's a big one, like, I get it on some level, why the elites in Washington aren't that concerned about climate change? Because they can drive away in their SUV or fly away in their private jet to some better place. But most people, ordinary people, just.
• 41:42
  Tim Montague: Have that luxury, and especially poor people.
• 41:46
  Aaron Nichols: But that's, that's what I'm talking about here. This is, this is the harnessing of emotion. Is when you talk about power. What is power? Power is meeting people where their values are at scale, and convincing them that the thing that they should do is the thing you want them to do.
• 42:05
  Aaron Nichols: That's what always happens in elections. That's what Donald Trump did so well. And emotion unlocks that. But sharing graphs a bajillion times in a little echo chamber is not what unlocks action by the public.
• 42:24
  Tim Montague: So in our in our closing, Aaron, I have, I have an important request, Tell us.
• 42:29
  Tim Montague: Tell us a funny story about you.
• 42:35
  Aaron Nichols: Ooh, okay. When I was 16 years old, I had just gotten my driver's license, and I had a little Mazda six to six that we paid my brother. We actually got it for $100 and we paid my brother an extra $100 to paint racing stripes on it with spray paint. So the whole thing was black with blue racing stripes, and one day, shortly after I had learned to drive, we were doing donuts in the snowy parking lot in Lyons High School, where I went to school, where my dad also happened to be a teacher, and I let my friend Ryan take the wheel, and he jumped my car off of snow bank in the school parking lot, and then we, like, did some donuts on the grassy front lawn of the school as well.
• 43:43
  Tim Montague: Parking Lot was good. Was safe territory, but,
• 43:46
  Aaron Nichols: yeah, this is, this is a sidebar, but this is, you know how Facebook occasionally will just remind you, hey, you used to be in Do you remember? Do you want to hear something dumb that you wrote years ago? It was, it was this same winter that I was just reminded a few months ago that almost two decades ago, I wrote a Facebook status that was like, some of that global warming I keep hearing about would be super nice right now, because it was February and it was cold and I was a teenager looking for attention, and I've obviously changed my perspective now. But anyway, so we're doing donuts in the snowy parking lot and on the lawn of the school, and then we go home. The next day, the school resource officer comes into comes into school, sees that there's tire tracks on the school lawn, and goes and checks the security cameras. And of course, it's me, and I took it on the chin from my friends, and I told him that I was just doing that alone for no reason, and then that no one else was in the car with me, but my dad was obviously very angry, and so he pushed to make me do some community service. He and the school resource officer and they wanted me to do community service with the janitor who we had become good friends with.
• 45:11
  Aaron Nichols: Her name was Mitzi. She was amazing, and me and my friend group had become good friends with her. She just really liked us. She would talk to us a lot.
• 45:22
  Aaron Nichols: So I had to do community service with Mitzi. Mitzi thought the whole thing was hilarious, and just made me mop in a circle a couple times just to be funny, and then she helped me steal a disco ball from the school.
• 45:42
  Tim Montague: Why did you want the disco ball?
• 45:45
  Aaron Nichols: Um, I don't I.
• 45:45
  Aaron Nichols: How could you even ask that?
• 45:48
  Tim Montague: Tim, it was, I guess everybody wants a disco ball.
• 45:53
  Aaron Nichols: It hung in the garage for years, and my parents would always ask where it came from. And I was always invasive about it. I was like, thrift store.
• 46:03
  Tim Montague: So Aaron gets busted for doing donuts and ends up with a disco ball. That's pretty cool. All right. Well, Aaron, I've enjoyed getting to know you a little bit. I appreciate Jenna Dunn is the person who introduced us.
• 46:18
  Tim Montague: Really, I was doing good now she's amazing. I was doing a good job ignoring you on LinkedIn, but, but I would not, I would not ignore an introduction from Jenna Dunn.
• 46:29
  Tim Montague: She's the real deal, and so thank you Jenna Dunn, and thank you exact solar for letting Aaron tell his story on solar this week in solar every week that's. That's really cool. Hey guys, are you a residential solar installer doing light commercial but wanting to scale into large CNI solar? I'm Tim Montague. I've developed over 150 megawatts of commercial solar, and I've solved the problem that you're having you don't know what tools and technologies you need in order to successfully close 100 KW to megawatt scale projects. I've developed a commercial solar accelerator to help installers exactly like you just go to cleanpowerhour.com click on strategy and book a call today.
• 47:14
  Tim Montague: It's totally free with no obligation. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate you listening to the pod, and I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage. Go to clean power hour and click strategy today. Thanks so much. Check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Tell a friend about the show. That's the best thing you can do to help others find this content. You can find it on YouTube, on audio and at cleanpowerhour.com, I love to hear from my listeners, so reach out to me on LinkedIn. Aaron.
• 47:51
  Tim Montague: How can our listeners find you?
• 47:51
  Tim Montague: You can
• 47:54
  Aaron Nichols: find me on LinkedIn under Aaron Nichols. I wish I could say you could Google me, but there's an Erin Nichols in Nashville, a country singer whose career is rising faster than mine, so just look on LinkedIn
• 48:06
  Tim Montague: with that, I'll say, Let's go solar and storage.
• 48:08
  Tim Montague: I'm Tim Montague, thank you so much. Aaron. Thank you, Tim.
• 48:11
  Tim Montague: You.