Prometheus Wind’s Industry Growth w/ Will Friedl

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. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update
on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored
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www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com 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,