Why Great Clean Energy Leaders Study Storytelling: Spenser Meeks

Show Notes:

Spenser Meeks is the Founder and Principal Consultant at Apex Presentations, where he’s helped more than 1000 clean energy leaders get everything they can out of their speaking engagements.

Going to be at RE+ on September 8th? He’s moderating a panel on storytelling. Pack the seats.

If you like today’s episode, DM him on LinkedIn.

Expect to learn:

* Why storytelling (not statistics) moves audiences, especially in B2B.

* How technical founders and engineers can break the “curse of knowledge” and make their ideas emotionally engaging to a wide audience.

* Why we should stay optimistic post Inflation Reduction Act.

You can listen to this episode here, or on:

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols:Hello everyone and welcome back to this week in solar. I'm your host Aaron Nichols, the research and policy specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania.And before we get to today's guests, I wanted to say that today's episode is brought to you by solar in a really interesting way.I'm actually on a road trip and I'm recording this from the back of my truck. And none of this would be possible without solar energy.I have a 200 watt solar panel sitting out in the field that's powering a battery bank that is powering a starlink.And because of that, I'm able to work on the road. So it really is. And let me lead in a little bit with today's guest.My friend, Spencer Meeks, who I'm very excited to have as one of the first people I'm interviewing on this week in solar, has trained more than 1,000 clean energy speakers.And we have similar opinions and we've commiserated together a lot on how we think that the industry leans way too hard on technical information and not hard enough on storytelling.And I'll let you tell him more or I'll let him tell you more about himself as we go on, but I guess the first question I want to ask you Spencer is the reason that we decided to do this series is because we're obviously going to be moving forward in a post-inflation reduction act world.And as someone who has worked with more than a thousand leaders in this space, What do you think clean energy needs as we move forward?

Spenser Meeks:Well, first off, thanks for having me. I'm really excited for the conversation in general today. But I think that there's a lot of room for optimism still.What the clean energy industry needs to realize more than anything else is that we were growing and thriving before the IRA was a thing.Now, that doesn't mean that it's not a bad thing the significant portions of it are under attack and getting repealed or otherwise being impacted.But what does buoy me here is that this industry is populated largely by grizzled veterans that have been up and down the solar coaster a couple of times.And this might be the first time for some people to run into this amount of antagonism from the federal level.But it is not unprecedented. Right? Yeah. So there there are reasons to be optimistic and there are reasons to double down and really boo yourself by the fact that there are a large number of people that are in a similar context as you are and there's every reason to continue to push into fight and to grow this industry because it is a necessity not a nice to have right there's economics driving this more than anything else, it's not just an environmental argument that's to be had.And that's really been shown through the fact that some of these portions, these repeals have been softened significantly compared to what they originally proposed to be.I know that that's, you know, maybe a little bit too much cup half full for some people to say that, but it can always be worse.And there are provisions that are still going to be able to support this industry and ways to fight back in a more meaningful way.So when it comes to application, just leaning off of my own subject matter expertise, I think messaging has a lot to do with how we recover from this and continue to grow the impact and influence of this industry.

Aaron Nichols:Yeah, man, it's really, it's been so amazing to me since I joined the solar industry just a little under two years ago, seriously, just how many veterans I've met that are basically like, they've been in it for more than 10 years, they're all best friends