Episode 26 - Scott McClintock, Chief Revenue Officer, Convey

Speaker A: Foreign. This is the decarbonization Disruptors podcast. I'm your host, Matthew Cohen. On this episode of our podcast, I am very pleased to welcome Scott McClintock who is the Chief Revenue Officer at Convey, formerly known as Message Broadcast. In his role he's responsible for leading a, uh, company's go to market strategy and execution that includes sales, engineering and marketing functions. Scott also has a proven track record of managing business operations in several consecutive startups by building sales teams across fast growing enterprises and leading organizations through periods of rapid growth. Scott, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker B: Thanks Matthew. Really appreciate you having me here. Excited for the discussion?

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm excited too. You know we, we go back a long way when we started to have some discussion, I think during your first fuel days. And that was uh, eons ago. I think anything post pre Covid is like kind of just a blur at this point. Um, so, uh, but I'm glad we were able to connect today and talk about some great, some great topics. So I always want the audience to understand a little more about you because I, as I understand it, you know, you really moved into sustainability in large part by getting your MBA in renewable energy. Talk about your motivation to do that and kind of what the catalyst was to getting into this space.

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. Uh, so yeah, m. Uh, after college, uh, I moved into really entrepreneurial endeavors. And one of those endeavors was working for a nonprofit community center in downtown Boston. Um, one of my favorite jobs ever. And um, it sort of awoken inside of me the service, a life of service and just feeling really good about the work you do, which I did when I worked there. Um, um, so when I went back to get a master's degree, I vowed to myself when I left the program, uh, that I would find a job I could always feel really good about. Um, and at that time it was 2000, 2008, uh, and into 2009, um, the solar industry was just in its infancy, so to speak. And it seemed like the perfect time uh, to get into that industry. And that's really when I jumped from nonprofit leadership before business school to uh, really commercial facing roles in the solar industry. Um, and it's really, I think at the core it's feeling good about what you do when you get out of bed in the morning. And I've continued to keep that ethos alive, uh, in my career, uh, in software and in energy and utilities too.

Speaker A: And what I'm always curious about is kind of how you entered that space because I know that you've been in sales and business Development, leadership positions for most of your career. How did you decide that the sales aspect of the business was going to be your focus in the clean energy industry? What drew you to it?

Speaker B: Yeah, I was pretty reflective. I realized I was blessed to have, uh, a couple years to get a master's degree and do, uh, a lot of thinking about what it was I wanted to do with the rest of my career and the rest of my life. I had not been formally trained in sales prior to that. Um, but when I was reflecting back on what really makes me happy, what I enjoy and where I get my energy, um, I get, I typically get that from people, right? And when you think about what functions exist inside of any business or organization, um, you know, I'm not an engineer, uh, I am not a marketer, although I lead a marketing team. I have a really, really qualified marketing leader. Um, but I love sales, I love people, I love solving problems. And it just, of all the functions inside a business, it's just a natural fit for me. So one thing I think I probably struggled with as I was reflecting about a career in sales, uh, it's got a bit of a reputation, right? And I think many people going through a graduate program, especially those considering an mba, I don't think they think about a career in sales, right? It's, it's, I think it's kind of looked down upon. Um, although ironically, I think the older you get and the more you progress in your professional career, sales ends up being sales and business development, um, they end up being kind of requirements as you become, um, as you become a leader, right? And so I just, I thought to myself, like, that's the function for me. I'm not going to be ashamed of it and I'm just going to go full bore. So I'm probably one of only a few people in my MBA class that took a traditional sales path right out of my MBA program. But, um, you know, now that we're a little bit further in our career, many of my peers and friends are now in commercial and sales roles, uh, as they've matured in their career. So.

Speaker A: And I'd be curious to get your take because, uh, you know, I get a couple of times a week, you know, people reaching out to me who are in finance and other areas of real estate, uh, maybe sometimes even oil and gas, who say, I want to get into the sustainability space. How do you recommend people go about doing that? Even people that are coming right out of college that see sustainability, uh, climate focused roles as something that they want to Do. How do you, what would be your advice and how they would, uh, navigate that world?

Speaker B: Yeah, there's no one answer. Uh, but you know, I really do enjoy, you know, mentoring and counseling people looking to make their way into this space. I, I kind of did it the old school way. I networked with a lot of people. Um, I remember in, in my lead up to finding a summer internship between my first and second year in school, um, I had to do a lot of driving. I did my MBA program in upstate New York and most of the jobs I was seeking were either in Boston, New York or California. And many of my peers would get companies to come to them. Recruiting happened on campus. And what I found was no one was coming to campus to recruit for sustainability or energy and utility work. So I had to go find the opportunity. It meant lots of six, uh, hour drives to Boston for like, for, for a five minute coffee, you know. And so what I always encourage people to do that are trying to break into the space is just do networking, get to know people, um, be curious, be interested to learn about the industry or industries you're considering, uh, about the functions you might want to pursue and then just reach out to people. Um, I think people often make it probably into a bigger deal than it is to send emails and to do cold outreach to people. But whenever I get a cold outreach, um, for somebody that's truly interested in making the transition, I'm always happy to engage. Um, so I guess that's the number one piece of advice I give is go find the opportunity. Um, it's not going to find you probably.

Speaker A: No, I mean that makes a lot of sense. And you've had a lot of experience in your career, um, specifically in the, in kind of the curbing carbon emissions and customer engagement with utilities and power producers. And I'd be curious to see because you've had a lot of different exposure to a lot of different areas of the business. How has the sustainability needs of utilities and power producers changed throughout your career, maybe even 10 years ago, to what are the demands now that you're trying to meet?

Speaker B: We've been through a few cycles. Right. So um, clean tech or climate tech? Uh, it really didn't exist in 2008 and 9 when I was making my way into the space. And by 9, 10, 11 we were riding the wave of, I think the First Clean Tech 1.0 craze. Right. A lot of investment being made. Remember companies like Solyndra, um, and other solar panel producers and there was just a buzz in the market in, uh, in the 201112 time frame, um, and then that more, the bottom more or less fell out of the industry at that point. And um, I think we saw another recent cycle with uh, with some of the policy that, uh, Biden passed and we saw another really nice inflection point. A lot of interest, a lot of jobs, a lot of investment. Here we are, uh, again, uh, through another down cycle potentially. So, uh, I've seen two cycles now. I've lived through both. Uh, I can attest to the fact that I've made a great living and I've been able to put food on the table for my family despite the ups and downs in those cycles. But it has been harrowing and I think, uh, you know, it's probably following any natural business cycle, um, is how I'm looking at it right now. But, uh, you know, if you weather the storm and you really, you create a good skill set, a good network, um, I think you can, you can stand the test of time. And uh, so that's, those are the two cycles. I've seen most of it through, uh, investment, you know, both venture investment and private equity investment in technology companies. Um, so it's a little bit more perspective on, on the ups and downs I've seen, sure. In sustainability and climate tech, uh, in general in the last 10, 12, 15 years.

Speaker A: And going off that. What I'd also be curious to know is, you know, I'm always interested because I'm in the, you know, I'm in the sales world, as you are, to extent, um, kind of how we can highlight the need for a better awareness and curbing carbon emissions, especially at the grid level. Because, um, you know, we, you know, the kind of, the bigger, uh, names coming, whether it's solar, whether it's wind, whether it's, you know, different, um, you know, battery storage, we're seeing a lot of that. But I feel like the grid optimization part of it is sometimes undersold. And so what can be done, do you think, to create that awareness, create that investment that our grid at the utility level needs to get to a place where it can have full sustainability and be able to literally weather the things that are becoming in the next, you know, 10 to 20 years?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it's, it's a pretty complex equation. I'm not sure I'm the best authority to speak on it, but, um, a few thoughts from my brain to yours, um, you know, fairly traditional economics and market forces tend to play a role. Right. And what, what I think we'll see Especially with the advent of AI and just more intelligence at the grid edge. I think you'll see, you'll just see a more of a proliferation of an uptake in individual consumers being able to play a role in curbing their own carbon emissions. Uh, or 15 years ago when I entered the space, we didn't have smart thermostats that you could communicate, that your utility actually could communicate with. Uh, so the advent of smart thermostats that can be controlled in massive demand response programs, we're just at the beginning of that. And as more smart and intelligent devices, uh, that can maybe even think on their own scarily enough, uh, make their way to the grid edge, I feel like uh, market forces can then take over because you've got massive adoption, you have more scale, um, and these are some of the macro forces I think at play that will, will make sustainability just natural. Um, you know, not something that everybody has to think too much about. Um, and that to me you begin to talk about mass adoption and really like large scale. I think that's when economic forces pick up and it just, it just happens naturally.

Speaker A: And given that you've been at uh, least for last few years on the customer engagement side of um, of analytics, where does customer engagement play in the overall decarbonization, uh, goals that customers have? I think sometimes, you know, my utility bills just get paid every month. I never really don't pay attention to it. It's automatic. But um, where are you seeing the wins in customer engagement to allow for greater sustainability? And then what, what type of technologies are upcoming that can really move that forward to being a bigger part of utilities becoming more sustainable?

Speaker B: Yeah, maybe to tie to your question to some of my previous commentary, um, you might not have gotten an SMS text message from your utility until recently, right? Uh, and you might still not get one. Um, so traditional means of utilities communicating with their end customers, um, have been email, have been snail mail, uh, have been, you know, traditional advertising like radio, billboard, et cetera. And you know, now that most of the world's population has an intelligent device in their pocket, uh, I think you're going to start to see a lot more interaction from utilities to devices in general. And that can be in the form of an email, kind of less sexy and forward thinking, uh, an SMS text message, um, which many utilities are now doing. Right. Uh, and then push notifications through handsets, uh, and then we've just debuted at convey, uh, a new application that functions like the wallet app you would get from your airline or your financial institution um, you know, again, that type of a channel of communication really didn't exist more than a few years ago. Um, and so all of these things, all these ways of communicating, um, of engaging customers and helping them either understand how they use energy, how to pay their bill faster, how to, you know, to take part in energy efficiency or demand response, uh, or carbon reducing programs will only increase. And you know, like I said earlier, the more people you reach, uh, through a handset or device, I think the more engagement you have and the more impact you can have on um, sustainability goals and just customer engagement writ large.

Speaker A: And where, I mean, I mean the part of that makes the most sense obviously is you know, being able to communicate with customers for outages, for bill pay. On the sustainability side though, like, where are you seeing the most effective communication to get customers of utilities to take more of an active role in decarbonization? I mean we've seen utility incentive programs for ages, right? And they work and then they, you know, they're 10 years and then they, they're done and then really don't, you know, we don't always see the long term payout. So what's kind of upcoming for you that you're seeing or what do you see as big successes when it comes to having customers take more that active role to make the entire grid infrastructure more, more sustainable?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a tougher one. You know, I think you and I are both uh, energy geeks. I'll call us. Right, like we, I'll take it. Yeah, we, we care probably a little bit more about our energy usage and our carbon footprint, um, than, than the average consumer in North America, I would say. And so the key I think to, to engaging customers in creating energy geeks like you and me is um, making it seamless, making it uh, unintrusive, making it simple. Um, I just got uh, an email communication from my utility here, uh, in Massachusetts the other day. I'm part of a demand response program. And um, you know what, the email arrived and because I'm in the industry, I was, I was scrutinizing the email a little more. You know, this utility did their best to remove jargon from the email, but it was, you know, it was still jargony and it's still kind of, uh, if I wasn't in the industry might lead me to a little bit of confusion. So I still think there's room too for uh, vendors like Convey for utility and energy providers to remember that while there are a lot of energy geeks like you and me, in the world, uh, there are far more people who don't really think that much or care that much about their energy and energy usage. So it's important for all of us to keep that in mind.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean it makes a lot of sense. I mean, I think, you know, customer engagement is something that um, I think will only get more uh, more important as we go along and making the grid more sustainable. So I think what you're, the work that you're doing is great. Um, in closing, anything else you want to share about what's going on now or upcoming with convey that our audience should know and get excited about?

Speaker B: Well, we just went through a rebrand so um, message broadcast, uh, now convey. Uh, we've been serving energy and utility uh, providers for over 20 years. So it's pretty exciting to take what was a well known brand, well respected and well regarded, uh, and well known and to reestablish a new name for us. And that's exciting, that's fun. I think um, what we want to convey with our new name is we're not just a messaging provider. Uh, we do plan to be uh, a bit more of a full stop digital customer engagement platform. And there's some really neat things we're working on on the product side that I think are gonna really impact the way utilities are able to communicate and engage customers. And I can't divulge much more than that right now. But there'll be some new products we're debuting soon that I'm really, really excited for. Never uh, thought I'd get excited about utility customer engagement, but here I um, am.

Speaker A: Well, yeah, I mean I think it's, I think it's an important discussion, right? I mean to have the technology you're talking about be used. I mean I think, you know, I talked to a lot of guests and I think the overarching theme is like there's no one solution. We have to do everything customer engage, we have to modernize our grid, we have to think about different fuel sources and everything has its place. Right. And so I think what you're doing is uh, is really important. So again Scott, uh, thanks for uh, doing this. Really nice to talk to you and I'm excited to see what happens in the future for you and convey and uh, again this is the decarbonization Disruptors podcast and we will see you next time.