CFC Solutions Cast

Hello, and welcome to Solutions Cast. I’m your host, Christine Petchenick.

Recently, CFC’s own Charlie Gloeckner sat down to talk with Curtis Wynn, CEO of SECO Energy in Florida.

This episode, we’re bringing you the audio from that interview. If you’d rather watch the video, it’s on CFC’s Solutions website, and we’ve included a link to it in the show notes.

Charlie Gloeckner: Welcome to CFC. We're with Curtis Wynn, the CEO of SECO in Florida. And we're going to talk innovation. Curtis, thanks for being here.

Curtis Wynn: Thanks for having me, Charlie.

Charlie Gloeckner: I've known you a long time. You are an innovative guy. I mean, in your career, you're very comfortable with trying new things, I would say. When you think of innovation, how do you define it? What do you think about when you hear the word innovation?

Curtis Wynn: Well, I like to match innovation up with the challenges. And it's in this business which I've been in for a while. It's changing. And it just feels to me that the status quo is not where we need to be. We need to be thinking long term, being strategic about what we do. And that involves innovation. You have to have a long view of things, and have the chance to sit down and really analyze where you think things are going and make educated, calculated assumptions about where the future's going and building a strategy around it. So I think it's a combination of having a strategy, understanding the challenges and doing what it takes to meet those challenges.

Charlie Gloeckner: And when you look back at your career, like your time at Roanoke, a smaller cooperative, roughly 15,000m, right? And now you're at a large corp, but we're also in a different time in the industry, right? I remember meeting Jeff Immelt, the CEO of GE, probably in 2008 or something like that, and he was CEO. He said, "Hey, I'm literally selling the same turbines I saw when I was a salesman when I started in my first job at GE." And so innovation wasn't necessarily a big thought back in the day. Do you see that in your career? Has it changed radically?

Curtis Wynn: I think it has changed. I don't think there's been a time, at least in my time here in the industry, where it was never needed. You think about the challenges we had at Roanoke--relatively small to medium-size cooperative and our relationship to cooperatives across the country. No growth. Economic development was where we needed to try to innovate, try to stimulate growth. We had a very economically distressed membership who had challenges that were around energy efficiency, using more of the product than they could afford. So at that, in that location, we needed to be innovative about meeting the needs of the members. Now you shift and go. Fast forward to where we are at scale. We have just the opposite of that. We have tremendous growth. That is what has turned the challenge in to keeping up with the growth and making sure that we have everything it takes to satisfy a very demanding membership. So, it's just not so much of having the challenges and the need to innovate, but it's just different ways you have to innovate depending on the environment.

Charlie Gloeckner: Yeah. And I think co-ops, you know, have shifted from industrial type companies to technology-based companies. So I feel like today it's even more vital that co-ops innovate. Do you feel that way?

Curtis Wynn: I do, I do. And it really comes down to meeting member expectations. Well, you know, there's a...I've been told, I haven't experienced this, but there were times when if you had an outage, it was okay for it to be a few days before they got in touch with someone to tell them about the outage. Now, that may not be true, but I've heard it. Today, this is a real story. At SECO, we have a few members who can tell us when the lights blink exactly the time that it blinks. They have complained to us and we've checked the data. And they were right. They were right on to the minute. They knew when we had a blink on their circuit.

Charlie Gloeckner: Yeah. So they're technology people.

Curtis Wynn: They're technology. So we're keeping up with technology now. We have more sophisticated businesses who depend on a steady flow of power that is not tolerant to energy or flow of energy. It is not constant. It has to be on, you know. We have critical needs now that we may not have had back when the co-ops were started. Hospitals and emergency care facilities that need backup generation. So I think the demand for the product has driven innovation, and caused us to have to change with the times.

Charlie Gloeckner: Yeah. Makes sense. And so when you think about your organization and your previous ones, sometimes you see places in there's 2 or 3, a handful of people that just are naturally innovative in pursuing different ways of doing things. How do you get more and more of your team to think innovatively, rather than just doing the job they do every day and doing it the same way? They just think longer term? How can I make this job better? How can I impact the organization better or the members more effectively?

Curtis Wynn: Yeah, your inclination is right on point. It's very consistent with what we've seen, and we have done cultural surveys that seek out energy to try to dig in to that. And what our cultural surveys have told us is that one of the areas where SECO was lacking the most was employee involvement. And we found we've learned that employees want to be involved. They want to know where the cooperative is going. They want to know how they can impact the mission, the vision and the values of the co-op. They want to know the 'why' behind their jobs so that they come. So there's a meaning behind the jobs. So what we've done is really open that up. We've put the new Voices in Action program that we just implemented last year. We're empowering frontline employees to not only tell us what the problems are, but to help us come up with solutions to solve the problems that they're dealing with every day to satisfy the members. So we're driving that. We're very intentional about making sure that we pay close attention to how that is going.

Charlie: Give them permission, inspire them, let them know it's okay to really think about doing things.

Curtis Wynn: Differently. And not only that, incentivize them to do the same. So to give them incentives.

Charlie Gloeckner: And so you initiated somewhat of a Shark Tank-type game? I'll call it a game, a process for them to compete, put ideas forward. And that's working well for you.

Curtis Wynn: It is. We went through our first round, first year. Our board allowed us to put $50,000 up for innovative ideas. We had 10 very strong projects that were fully vetted, business cases created, budgets created by frontline employees with the support of consultants and our management team. And all of those projects are good, and they're going to be implemented. Not just the winners. All of them are going to be implemented. That's just how excited everybody is around those. And we're also just outside of Forces in Action, which is the name of the Shark Tank program you reference. Outside of that, we're seeing employees come up with ideas and just conversations that I have with small groups of of employees. We do something called, breakfast coffee with Curtis. And in those conversations, I give employees a chance to just open up. It's just me and 4 or 5 employees from different departments, and we talk about things and they're sharing, and I open it up. They share with me some of the things, some ideas they have.

Charlie Gloeckner: I love that I think if you can get people comfortable and it becomes part of the culture, then that, hey, we're allowed to think differently, how can we improve this? And some innovation can be quite impactful in costume. Nothing is just a different way to do that process. And or a way to digitize something that you're running around trying to get people to sign paper. You know, you just eliminate some effort by digitizing it and let the team figure those things out and let them.

Curtis Wynn: You know, Charlie, if it was left to me to figure it out, we'd never get it done. When we empower the team members, those frontline employees who deal with it every day, they're the best equipped, even better than consultants to come in and support and help you with these things. We feel we're totally convinced that they are the right ones to help us innovate. So we've created a mechanism that we can allow them to drive that innovation, and we feel real good about it.

Charlie Gloeckner: That's great. So when I think about it and we discuss it here at CFC, I get a little, shy. I'm using heavy metrics because I don't want people to feel like it's an obligation or a process where there's a ton of work. I want them to think culturally we're allowed to innovate. So how do you balance? How do you figure out this is working and we're becoming more innovative as an organization? Do you use metrics or is it more just you start to feel people are more engaged?

Curtis Wynn: And yeah, it has to be measured. There has to be a level of accountability and all of this. And that's why we go through a real process when ideas come forward. The team, which has to be cross-functional because we believe firmly that there's there's no project that we have to do at scale, where one department is solely responsible.

Charlie Gloeckner: Highly unlikely.

Curtis Wynn: Yeah, it's very unlikely. So one of the requirements of Voices in Action is that we have to have a cross-functional team. They have to work on the idea and build a business case and a budget as to why it will work and how it will work. And they have consultants to help drive them. We know that metrics is not something that our frontline employees deal with every day, but isn't it great for them to have to go through that process and what's also coming out of that? There's a growth process involved with this because they're now getting into some of the dynamics that they would have to do if they were in management.

Charlie Gloeckner: Right. So great training.

Curtis Wynn: Yeah. This is great training. And we feel like it's going to be training that will pay off. And we think, you know, it'll play into our succession planning, our professional development planning that we do to try to develop employees, to strive to go to that next level. So it's it's all encompassing in terms of where we're trying to go with our workforce.

Charlie Gloeckner: And do you think it's impacting them positively beyond the framework of the program? Just in general, every day. Engagement?

Curtis Wynn: I think it's engagement again. I think it goes to what I believe every employee wants to do. And that is going back to that word involvement. They want to be involved.

Charlie Gloeckner: Yeah.

Curtis Wynn: They want to understand the why. Why is SECO working so hard to reduce this wholesale power? Why and how do I play into that? What is my role? How does what I do every day impact us? Reducing wholesale power costs or improving business processes to save dollars? And it comes right back to cutting dollars so that we can maintain reasonable rates so that the members are happy. I mean, it all comes back to the member, right?

Charlie Gloeckner: Yeah.

Curtis Wynn: So it's, you know, I tell the employees all the time is as sophisticated and complicated as we try to get. Only two things that really matter to the member: reasonable rates and keeping the lights on. Yeah, it's just that simple.

Charlie Gloeckner: It is.

Curtis Wynn: And all we do is around those two things. And that's keeping the member happy.

Charlie Gloeckner: So when you think about a CEO and you know, a three, five-year future, what's your vision for CEO? I want to hear the positive. But you could have some challenging stuff you're thinking about too, that you know you're concerned about. So let's discuss what that future looks like.

Curtis Wynn: Well, the simple vision is to be a leader in innovation and member satisfaction and to be the preferred employer of that region. Now that has a lot packed into it.

Charlie Gloeckner: Yeah, it does.

Curtis Wynn: So with those things as a foundation, we can keep up with technology, we can improve our systems so that we can have multiple feeds so that if the feeder goes out, another one kicks on. That reduces outage time. We can have innovative ways to allow our members to save on their energy consumption. So really in the future we want to be at a place where that is commonplace and that we put the tools in place to allow all those things to happen.

Curtis Wynn: And that's that's where our strategy is leading us to get all of those tools in place.

Charlie Gloeckner: And when people talk about innovation, they also often think about technology, investing money on new technology. And that is innovation in their mind. But are you seeing the need to innovate, like engaging the legislature to innovate and business models in the way you work in the future? That type of thing as well?

Curtis Wynn: Yeah, I'll say all of the above. You mentioned engaging with our elected officials, but I think more important is engaging with our members. We talk about communications, which is very, very.

Charlie Gloeckner: Yeah.

Curtis Wynn: You're totally engaged with that as a communicator. But engaging with our members goes beyond communicating to them. That means that if you're engaging with them, they understand why we want them to let us use their smart thermostat to control our peak demand at a certain time. Engagement is when you have a member who really understands that they are part of the team, that this is their cooperative. These rates are going to be theirs. But if we're really engaging with them, we'd let them know how they can play a role by engaging in enrolling that smart thermostat or that water heater or that battery system or that electric vehicle charging station as a part of our overall effort to reduce wholesale power.

Charlie Gloeckner: That's one of your main things.

Curtis Wynn: It's right there in our strategy, in every employee session, on our strategy map. Now, when they can understand why we're the person who's calling to enroll that person--thermostat links to managing wholesale power costs--they know the purpose. So that is the kind of engagement we want to have, not only with the employees, but outside of the employees, with the members, so that they understand that they play a role as well, and helping SECO fulfill this mission.

Charlie Gloeckner: Interesting. So if you think about your peers out there, your fellow CEOs, they're looking to maybe shift the organization to become a little more innovative. What are your top couple of thoughts or ideas for them to get the ball moving toward a more innovative culture?

Curtis Wynn: Yeah, I think it all starts with the fundamentals. I spoke to your team today. It starts with establishing a strategy. And that strategy involves doing an external scan of your environment to understand what are the challenges. Because every situation is going to be a little bit different. So I think understanding the environment. I've had two experiences as a CEO, one where the the scan of the environment was no growth and shift gears. Now, the scan of the environment is all the growth you can handle. So you got to understand the external environment and then build a strategy around that. And that builds that. That will, I believe with everything in me will enhance the culture. Once you bring that strategy to your team members, to let them be a part of that strategy, and then that's going to help drive innovation once they understand the why that's best worked for us. That's probably oversimplified, but...

Charlie Gloeckner: No, that makes sense.

Curtis Wynn: That tidbit for those bright new, innovative CEOs that I see coming on now there. I'm totally impressed with the kind of talent that's coming into this program and very encouraged by it.

Charlie Gloeckner: That's good. Let's shift gears if we can, and talk about talent. CFC likes to help emerging leaders in the industry. Since there are a lot of retirements in the executive suite for the co-op industry, we want to make sure the emerging leaders are growing well and can walk into those roles. So you have had a remarkable career and literally Roanoke, roughly 15,000 members, great co-op. But to your point, the main function other than delivering, electricity was economic development, community involvement. You then went to see which is one of the largest co-ops in the country, roughly 250,000m. And growth is something you have more than you probably can deal with, probably like maybe a little less growth would be good. So how do you, make that transition from, a totally different business to one that is unbridled growth?

Curtis Wynn: Yeah. Goes back to the fundamentals. The fundamentals don't change. The fundamentals is understanding whatever that external environment is and building a strategy to deal with it. And that's exactly what we did. That was one of the requirements when the board hired me, is that they wanted someone who could come in and build a strategy. And fortunately that was something that I've been doing for years. So making that transition, was not that complicated. Really a lot of the things that we had to do at Roanoke just to survive, we're finding at a larger system, they're necessary because the fundamentals, again, the fundamentals don't change. You need to operate as efficiently as possible. We had no choice at Roanoke but to be as efficient as possible.

Curtis Wynn: But now we're finding that applying some of those same concepts at SECO, we're finding tremendous opportunities for savings. And just by doing the same thing that we did there. So the environment's different. But I don't think the fundamentals have changed very much.

Charlie Gloeckner: So stick to what you've learned in your career.

Curtis Wynn: Right.

Charlie Gloeckner: And pursue it. Yeah. There must have been a day or two where you're like, you got this courtesy walking into a big shop like that.

Curtis Wynn: Well, it was it was fun. I can say it has been a very good experience.

Charlie Gloeckner: Yeah. That's good. And let's also talk about your willingness to serve at the national level. You were president of an RCA or trade association. You served on our board here at CFC and that takes a commitment and also some confidence to pursue those roles. Can you give a feel for why you chose that and how it made a difference in your career?

Curtis Wynn: First, it was a very humbling experience, to be chosen. You are chosen by your peers. And that's the way it works in most states. Your peers vote you to be the national representative to serve on the national organization. So I was very humbled that my colleagues in North Carolina thought enough of me to say, hey, Curtis, we want you to represent the state on the national board.

Curtis Wynn: That was a great experience. And I have to give credit and give thanks to my board for understanding as well as my family for understanding the time commitment that it was going to take to do that. It's like having a second job.

Charlie Gloeckner: Yeah, it really is.

Curtis Wynn: It's really like having a second job. And to go further, to have the peers and the colleagues on NRECA's board to say, hey, Curtis, we want to choose you to lead this organization, to be an officer and ultimately eventually become the president of the National Trade Association. It was even more humbling. So the joy, the blessing that that was, that was that folks thought enough of me to give me that chance. But once the chance was present, it was a career-changing opportunity for me to serve in that capacity, not only taking on responsibility, but the honor of being able to do that. And then on top of that, to be able to serve here, which is another great organization where not only did I hopefully contribute, but so much at that level to be able to enhance my skill set and to better understand the system as a whole. It was a blessing and just an honor to be able to do that. Those days were a big highlight of my career.

Charlie Gloeckner: Yeah. You did it. Well, I mean, you did a great job. So, we appreciate you being here today. Anything further to add?

Curtis Wynn: I'll always appreciate what you're doing. This organization here, you're part of a great team. Just to be able to spend time here today with your employees. It's just been great. And thanks for having me.

Charlie Gloeckner: Our pleasure. Cheers, Curtis. Thank you.

As I mentioned at the top of the episode, if you prefer a video or want to share with someone who does, you can follow the link in the show notes or head to ncucfc.coop/Solutions.

Thanks for joining us today, and be sure to check Solutions for more interviews, industry updates and economic news.

Thanks for listening!