John Berger on Otovo, AI, and the Solar Service Crisis

In this episode of Green Giants: Titans of Renewable Energy, Wes Ashworth sits down with John Berger, CEO of Otovo, to unpack one of the most important and under-discussed problems in distributed energy: the solar service crisis.

Otovo began as a European rooftop solar marketplace, but under John’s leadership, the company is being reshaped into an AI-enabled energy service platform for homes and businesses across Europe and the United States. The new model focuses on what happens after solar panels, batteries, generators, EV chargers, and other behind-the-meter assets are installed. Who monitors them? Who fixes them? Who answers the phone when something goes wrong?

John Berger brings a rare operator’s perspective. Before Otovo, he founded and led Sunnova for more than 12 years, helping build one of the most recognized residential energy companies in the United States. Today, he is applying those lessons to a different problem: creating the service layer that distributed energy needs in order to scale reliably. 

The conversation explores why installation and service are fundamentally different businesses. Berger explains why installation is a construction business measured in weeks and months, while service is a logistics business measured in hours and days. That distinction matters as more homeowners and businesses are left with orphaned solar systems, unreliable support, and unclear warranty paths.

Wes and John also dive into Otovo’s acquisition-led growth strategy, including the company’s expansion into the United States, its growing service footprint, and the importance of building density and scale in field operations. They discuss how Otovo is using its proprietary AI platform, Endurance, to reduce software costs, automate workflows, support dispatch, improve response times, and change the economics of energy service. 

This episode also looks ahead to the grid. As solar, storage, EV chargers, generators, and load management become more common behind the meter, reliability becomes essential not only for customers but also for virtual power plants and grid participation. Berger makes the case that service is not a side issue. It may be the missing precondition for distributed energy to become real infrastructure.

Topics covered include:

• The shift from solar installation to long-term energy service
• Why behind-the-meter assets need a dedicated service layer
• The difference between construction businesses and logistics businesses
• How orphaned solar customers became a major industry problem
• Otovo’s reinvention from European marketplace to AI-native service company
• How Endurance is changing the cost structure of field service
• Why AI matters only if it improves speed, cost, reliability, and customer experience
• The role of batteries, generators, EV chargers, and load managers in home energy
• What virtual power plants need before they can scale
• Why the future of residential energy may look more like Amazon Prime than traditional utility service

This is a timely, candid conversation about where the energy transition gets real. More solar and batteries matter, but the next phase depends on whether those systems actually work, whether customers trust them, and whether someone is accountable for keeping them online.

Links:
John Berger on LinkedIn
Otovo's Website

Wes Ashworth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weslgs/

• Email: wes@leegroupsearch.com
• https://leegroupsearch.com/green-giants-podcast/
• https://leegroupsearch.com/

Transcript

Wes Ashworth (00:25)

Welcome back to Green Giants, Titans of Renewable Energy. Today's guest is John Berger, CEO of Otovo. John is one of the most consequential operators in residential energy, and today he's leading Otovo through a major reinvention. Otovo began as a European rooftop solar marketplace. Now it's becoming something much bigger: an AI-enabled energy service company for homes and businesses.

Focused on solar, batteries, generators, EV chargers, field service, recurring memberships, and eventually grid participation. Otovo recently announced it reached 30,000 customers, including 20,000 enrolled in Otovo Care, and its proposed acquisition of SST would expand its US footprint to 14 states. This conversation is about what happens after the sale, who services the systems, who customers call when something breaks, how AI changes the economics, and whether a trusted service layer is the missing piece that allows distributed energy to scale. John, welcome to the show.

John Berger (01:19)

Thanks for having me, Wes.

Wes Ashworth (01:20)

Absolutely. It's great to have you. Great to have you back on. Before we get too far into that, I'll start just a little bit with where you are now. So you've spent your career just building around distributed energy, but Otovo is a very different chapter. What did you see in this moment that made you say, this is the company and this is the problem I want to solve right now?

John Berger (01:36)

Well, I've I've long believed that service for behind the meter for both residential and commercial was the place to be. And you you heard me talk a lot about that over the years with with Sunnova. And really Sunnova was three different businesses. It was financing, it was new build, we didn't do the construction, we didn't do the origination, we handled working capital and process, if you will, QA, QC. And then the last was was service and

That could be all the way from billing and collections and handling things as far as customer problems from a customer service center and then and then rolling trucks and fixing things. And so we it got to be quite large and it was very clear that that rolling trucks and fixing things and then helping customers is a big gap in this industry. And I wanted to see what I could do to solve the problem. and it's not just a US problem.

It's a European problem, it's a global problem. And so when you look at this, there was a really interesting opportunity to start a company and then start acquiring companies. And Otovo was basically the first merger that we did, the first acquisition. And and then from there, we've kept the name, kept the platform. It's been a great tenure company. Yes, everything's completely changed. Management's changed, strategies change, people change. I mean, everything's changed. But

as we add new companies, we're be able to take that Otovo name and brand that's been built over the last decade into many other places in the world, especially across the United States.

Wes Ashworth (03:01)

Yeah, absolutely. It's it's a useful place to start. And we'll get into some of those specifics you you talked about right there as we go. it does feel like a shift from selling systems to taking responsibility for the life of those systems and and feels like the evolution of where the industry is headed. So I think you're you're right on the money here. When you first looked at Otovo, I guess what did you see that made you think this could become something much bigger than a European rooftop solar marketplace? Like you mentioned Otovo kind of the first one. Like, what was it that you saw there?

John Berger (03:26)

Well, it it had a good name. you know, a lot of capital had been put into Otovo over the years and and so we were able to get a lot of marketing out. I thought they did a pretty good job on on marketing, getting that name out. obviously in Europe, but the name doesn't up until recently mean really much of anything to the US or outside of Europe. So that was one. I felt like the the brand name was there with regards to the end customers.

Second, they had done quite a number of installs, over 40,000 installs across the across Europe. And that was fairly unique to have that kind of footprint. There was very few there. The people were were good. I mean, not everybody is, you know, part of the in terms of when we acquired or we merged on December 5th of last year, still here. but a lot still are, and I expect them to really want them to be here. So that was another is the is the people.

A lot of relationships that we've had, whether it was a Volkswagen, whether it you know, it's some some of the financing relationships that we have and so forth. It's quite a bit that's been put into Otovo. So I felt like there was something here. It was like a a raw rock, if you will, that needed to be sculpted and put in the right spot and it was just the you know, the the artist sees that what could be. but to be fair to everybody else, EnergyAid

you know SSP and and now SST, you know, every one of these companies and founders is bringing something in terms of DNA to what is the new Otovo today. So that should not be overlooked either. There's a lot of other participants, prior investments, you know, dreams, hopes, you know, desires about what we can be as the new Otovo that's being brought with all of these companies.

Wes Ashworth (05:03)

Yeah, I like that. I like the analogy there, just the kind of the solid stone that you saw and and the creativity and being able to sculpt and become something great. so for those listeners who may know Otovo only loosely or may really not know them at all, what's the simplest way to understand what you're building now?

John Berger (05:19)

Simplest thing is what we're here to do is take care of customers. So if you have a power asset on your home or business, whether it's solar panels, batteries, EV chargers, load managers, generators, whatever it is, and the answer increasingly is yes, all of them. who's going to take care of it? And by the way, I built several businesses in this space. I built an installation business, been a part of doing the financing.

and service business built a massive service business spanned, you know, Sunnova spanned from near Japan to Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, over 500 men in trucks rolling around solving problems. And when you look at you basically, you know, what we've been able to do to accomplish is when somebody has a problem, and that's unfortunately far more frequently than anybody really thought there would be, say, rewind the tape even five years ago, let alone 10, 15 years.

Somebody has to be there to solve it. And the service business and the installation business is two very different businesses. Again, I built both of them. Why is that? And just in a nutshell, the installation business is measuring things in weeks and months. It is a construction business. The service business is measuring in hours and days. It is a logistics business. Those are two very different businesses. Whether it's a generator or a solar panel and a battery, two very different.

If you're going to run them both, they need to be separate. If you're really going to do a great job for the customer, what you find out is the vast majority of times that it's really an installer trying to do service when they can get to it. And that really is an installation business and that doesn't fit. So keep it separate, keep it focused, deliver the best service out there. And that's what Otovo has set out to be be the best in global service behind the meter power.

Wes Ashworth (07:00)

I like it a lot. It and is I think you see that in every industry, right? When you say it's this type of company trying to be this type of company, I think that's usually a recipe for disaster. And so these these solutions are where you really know where your sweet spot is in the market, where your best contribution can be and how you can bring the most value. I think that's really, really important. And I'm gonna come back to a couple of those things you mentioned, kind of comparing those two here in a bit. But now that we just have the company understanding kind of reset and

And let's I want to get into the market structure underneath it. So the key key point is that behind the meter services is fragmented, underbuilt, and increasingly important as homes and businesses add more energy equipment. So as I mentioned there in the intro, Otovo recently announced it reached 30,000 customers in under a year, which is incredible. 20,000 enrolled in Otovo Care. what does that tell you about the scale and urgency of the service gap in home and commercial energy?

John Berger (07:50)

It's extreme. in both whether it's residential or commercial, and some ways, you know, surprise to me, commercial's in a worse shape, especially in the United States. but it you know, it's also interesting to see, you know, when I started to put together what what is now the new Otovo, a lot of folks in Europe lay we don't have service problem. Turns out that's not true. here's another fact is I don't care what language you speak, I don't wanna care what country you you're from or in.

However you want phrase it, guess what's consistent? You want to have your power system back online within forty eight hours or less. Don't need to do any more marketing. That's the way it is, all the way through, globally, including in Asia and so forth. And so, you know, there is a lot of problem in this space in the sense of if you think about a lot of the bad reputation has come, yeah, from some maybe some aggressive sales tactics or

Not great sales tactics, maybe illegal sales tactics, but that's a small microcosm. The real big problem is the stuff isn't working. It's not delivering the power, it's not delivering the value, it's not delivering the reliability that the customer is sold on, and that's the issue. And that's whether true it's whether in Germany or California, it doesn't matter. That's the issue. And so that's a huge opportunity out there as you just focus on that, focus on making the customer happy.

The rest of the industry benefits enormously from that phenomenon.

Wes Ashworth (09:10)

Yeah, absolutely. Seeing that type of growth, obviously, extremely strong signal. you know, it's not just about demand for solar, it's the the demand for someone to stand behind the system after it's installed and and have that reliability and taken care of. And and I think those numbers make the service gap feel much more concrete. You know, that's not a future problem. This is a right now problem. so you've also described this behind the meter service market as just highly fragmented. What does that fragmentation look like on the ground across solar batteries, generators, EV chargers,

and load managers?

John Berger (09:40)

Well there's very few companies that actually can go over multiple regions, whether it's in the US and multiple states, or whether it's in Europe in multiple countries. And in fact, if you recall what I said a few minutes earlier, is that was one of the attractive points with Otovo, is that they were one of the few countr companies that actually span multiple countries. so you know that that is something that it's you know, in terms of the fragmentation.

There are very few that are actually of large size. In fact, with SST in the United States, that we think is about it, at least on the residential side. Commercial side, there may be one or two others out there, but there's not many. And then when you start getting into it, it becomes more of really around a city at most. and they're very small. But why is that important to a customer? Because when somebody gets sick, like a technician,

that owns a small business or wants to take a vacation or whatever it is, that's a gap in service when that person is out. So you need a lot of scale. And then we'll talk about AI, I'm sure, but AI is going to bring more and more scale to these businesses. And you're going to be able to be able and you're going to really need to serve to have that AI to serve the customers at the service level that they're expecting, which again is very quick and in response. So

It's very fragmented. It's really more based on municipalities or cities. And that's about as large as most of them are. Europe is particularly fragmented. I mean, you know, there the countries there, let's take the Netherlands. Yes, you may have somebody that spans the Netherlands. There actually is. but the Netherlands is a very small country. I mean, you think how many Netherlands can fit in the state of Texas. I'm I'm Texan, so I can use that, right?

it's actually it's quite a lot, all right. And if you look at Europe, what we need to do is be able to tie it all together because if you're trying to scale a problem or solve a problem that's so like for instance a manufacturer, you really want to have somebody that can span all these different countries. And right now there isn't anybody except Otovo.

Wes Ashworth (11:37)

Yeah, it makes so much sense and and why you're having success and seeing that as well. And I know as part of this strategy, so you're acquiring customer books and service businesses rather than, you know, winning every customer one by one. Tell us a bit about that. Like why does this market lend itself to a roll-up strategy and and what's behind that?

John Berger (11:53)

Yeah, I've been very skeptical of roll up strategy, particularly the installers. And I think that's been proven true. I know there's some others, you know, trying to, you know, trying to do that again, and maybe they'll catch the market cycling back up. I do think we're moving back up in the capital market side of things, namely because the power industry globally is just on fire right now. Not literally, but you know, figuratively. and if you if you look at you know

what we're what we're seeing is that it is a time where you're gonna be able to get into the space and you're gonna be able to take advantage of the marketplace as it is today. And then hopefully as I said, the market's moving back up, you're gonna be able to really not only take out the costs, and again we can get into the AI portion here later, but

you're gonna be able to put something together that has more value and the market swings back into a more valued or you know happy spot and you're gonna be able to reap some rewards that way. what I think gives a real value here is both AI with the service, but also again services logistics business and the

Bigger footprint you have in any logistics business, it's complicated to build, but it becomes more valuable as a result because it's complicated to build. So the moat is there, whereas you don't necessarily have that moat in installations, from my experience. So this is just a piece, again, why we're focused on the service, why we're not doing installations, is that this is where our scales is, but we're scale in the marketplace in terms of companies that have our scale.

is completely lacking.

Wes Ashworth (13:30)

It makes so much sense. And I know you're you're very active in this. We we talked about that the intro, but SST would mark Otovo's seventh acquisition since December. not a long time, but and expand the US footprint to 14 states. how do you keep that pace from becoming chaotic? And what has to be true for acquisitions to come to become operating leverage rather than just integration burden?

John Berger (13:51)

Yeah, so first of all you need to have critical mass. So if you're gonna bring some really, you know, professional management to to play, management that can, you know, be in front of Wall Street and and do these kind of deals and and really grow the business cap and allow liquidity for founders, for investors that invest in those companies like EnergyAid, SST and so forth. You're gonna need to have some scale.

i.e., a lot of customers, i.e., a lot of technicians out there. And so at some point you got to get critical mass. And the best way to get critical mass, the way to think about it, is you're on a time decay. it's kind of burn rate. And so the slower that you go in getting critical mass, the more money you're going to burn, and vice versa. The faster you get to critical mass, the less amount of money you're going to burn. And so what we want to do is we want to go fast, then you have to integrate fast. We do have a playbook.

candidly, we're getting better and better at it. that's the other thing is about a management team that can come in and we're assimilating and we're constantly, including today, we're constantly looking and saying, Okay, are they doing something better than what we're already doing? Okay, they are okay. Then let's stop doing what we're doing and copy that and then put it together and make it all the same process. it goes into terminology. There's so many companies that refer to the same thing different ways. Okay, we can't do that. That's called miscommunication.

and so let's call everything that is the same the same name. and then it's you know, who goes where? I mean that that's the hardest part is culture fitting, finding out who's gonna be best to put in that spot. What spots do you need? And guess what? AI makes that all the more challenging because now you're moving and you know, suddenly a role that had these certain tasks to it that's been there for forty, fifty plus years is all of a sudden, nope, now that

is now this number of tasks. And so then that role picked up what this role was doing because that other role dropped a bunch of tasks because of AI. So you're putting it together. Now who could do that? You know, so there is a lot of change that's happening very, very quickly. So you have to be on it. Frankly you have to be enthusiastic. You have to love doing this business. If you don't love working all the time in multiple time zones and countries and cultures and everything

John Berger (15:56)

Yeah, this is not going to be for you for sure. but I love that. And it's something that we're constantly always working how we're gonna get the next one. Now, will there be a point where we wanna digest for a little while? Yes. Where's that point coming? probably in the not too distant future. I think there's a set of certain acquisitions I want to do. A lot of this is opportunistic. Again, going back to the capital markets, it's in my opinion, at at the bottom.

And we wanna we wanna do as many of these transactions as we can, get a creative, consolidate, move forward. And in fact, a lot of our partners, the man global manufacturers, the asset owners, they want the entire geographic footprint in the US and Europe. We're almost there. We've got a few more deals to do, and then we'll be there and we'll have the footprint that no one else has. So that if if nothing else is kind of a a standard that says, okay, now we may some spend some time consolidating.

and figuring out exactly fine-tuning what we have. In the meantime, you just gotta keep moving quickly and making those tough, you know, tough decisions on personnel and processes, particularly with AI.

Wes Ashworth (16:58)

Yeah, it's really impressive in terms of that that pace and and all that goes into there. That there's layers and layers of complexity and making sure that that lines up and it's right. I love the emphasis on trying to find out like who's doing it the best in this area or that area and kind of learning and getting better from each of those acquisitions. and then obviously the things that you go like, hey, we need to be on the same page with. We're calling it this. We're communicating clearly and being on being on the same page and not miscommunicating on those sort of things. But I love I love it. ⁓ it again sort of

breakneck pace, but you're making it work and obviously a lot lot is going right there. so these are, you know, kind of smaller ticket service relationships, not you know big one time installation sales. How does that change the the kind of scale, density, and operating discipline that you really need?

John Berger (17:42)

Well, you know, first of all, it's a much longer term relationship. Okay. So that by itself is is, in my opinion, more valuable. but we could have that debate. and then what that means though is that brand is more important. And it means that your service that you're providing is more important because you don't want to miss that next, you know, and then the next one, then the next one with that customer. so you know

A lot of people understand that density is important here. And so what I mean by that is you would love to take all those thirty thousand customers and put them all in, you know, Munich, for instance. Okay. that's not practical and it doesn't get you the kind of footprint that you need with your partners, whether they're manufacturers or whether asset owners, right? Because they're like

I don't want to do one deal with Munich. I want to do everything, right? Across the world. In fact, if you could take all countries, that'd be great. Like I've heard that several times. we're not there yet. but you know, that it is a difference in terms of that you really need both in this business. And that's not well understood. You need density and scale. So you can scale your overhead, particularly as you're crushing it down because of AI.

John Berger (18:51)

So you're displacing your SaaS software, your SaaS software support staff, your other your other types of back office, admin and and so forth. So that's helping you. and then where your people are sitting, they may be better countries to have certain functions in, like call centers and so forth. so you know, in Spain, Madrid, that's a that's a good office for us.

It's a really nice country. It's got a lot of young people that are coming in and out from all different parts of Europe and frankly South America. And so that's a really low cost but great center for us for talent for the back office. So we want to try to act, you know, push that across Europe as much as we can into Spain. And so scale gets us that ability to be able to do that. At the same time, you're right, you want density. The reality is you just need to get really big in terms of number of customers.

That's what you need. So if you can get there, I mean, you know, a lot of people, particularly with the membership, is called as like it's Amazon like for the the behind the meter and resi and commercial solar. Yeah, that's true. I mean, we have the membership, Amazon Prime, and then we have if we need to get big, very large in the customer base, that's true too, to make to make quite a bit of money. And so but those two go hand in hand in the sense that you really need both. You need density and you need scale.

And so balancing that, easier said and done. And you know, when you we say, I really want a deal that looks like this, well, that's not exactly the way life works. And so some deals come up really fast and you're like, This is a great deal, I'll take this on, even though I didn't want to take this on just yet, but this is a really great deal overall. So even when some things go wrong, which things always go wrong, and anybody tells it's like, no, this went flawless, it went so well, I can't believe it.

You know, that that's not truthful. There's always something that goes wrong, but some deals go better than others. There's no tr there's no doubt about that. and what we're trying to do is again take advantage of the marketplace, build up, get that kind of scale, and then densify as fast as we can in areas around our our footprint.

Wes Ashworth (20:48)

Yeah, I like the focus there, scale and density, finding the right balance. I think that's always the that's always the challenging part. let me ask this. So when you acquire, you know, a customer base and thinking about that and bringing them in, like what's the first ninety day playbook? Like what has to happen immediately to turn just a list of names into a trusted customer relationship?

John Berger (21:04)

What we found is first of all, we want to welcome the people, right? And we want to say, okay, here is let's try to figure out as fast as we can, this is where you fit and so forth. for our technicians, we we're always looking for new technicians, right? And and then we have independent service providers. So these are not our own companies, but they will fly our our flag, so to speak, wear shirts and hats, and they're kind of in

the less dense areas. I mean, that's that's a way to think about it. and that's the first and foremost is the people. The second thing is, hey, endurance is coming. And we're gonna take out all the systems. It's not a negotiating point. We all have to be on the same system. That is more efficient, both in in the sense of operation, so services to to our customer and cost. There's nothing even close to that.

One thing know it's interesting to hit on is people are talking a lot about the cost of AI, what are you gonna pay open AI, for instance, or anthropic and so forth. I will tell you this: if you manage it right, you will not blow out a budget like with some of the high profile companies did. Like the last thing you want to do is hold a contest to see who can consume more tokens, right? That's not a good idea.

We have been able to manage that. No contest to consume tokens. And so our cost structure is materially below what we have. And so we want to get that out very, very quickly. And we've learned anytime you delay that, it's very costly in a variety of ways I just laid out, both in in human capital and and capital itself. The last piece is how do you get your processes all aligned?

Yes, there may be some differences and regulatory and so forth in different countries. Frankly, the United States has different regulatory structures between the states. But for the most part, the vast majority, all the processes should be the same. The terminology should be the same. So how do you assimilate the company? And again, as so as these companies come on board, they're like, you know, that that's better than what we've been doing. So let's go change what everybody else is doing and we'll adopt yours. So

It's gotta go really, really fast. if you're gonna get married, you might as well like, hey, let's let's get married, let's do this, right? let's make it happen. Let's get together. The companies that don't do that very quickly, I find will fail. And I I had some learnings from that from Sunnova when I did an acquisition. I moved too slow and I left a lot a lot of money. It was still a fantastic deal. but I left a lot of money on the table and I endeavored not to do that this time.

Wes Ashworth (23:32)

Yeah, a lot of insight there. And I think overall that operational details where the strategy really becomes real as trust does not automatically transfer in an acquisition, and there's a lot that has to happen and bring those customers up to speed. which I think this leads into one of the most important distinctions in the whole conversation, which is you started to touch on earlier, but for years the industry has treated installation  and service as if they were naturally connected. But there's a lot of reason to believe that they are just fundamentally different businesses that you started to touch on. but

Go ahead and just walk us through that distinction because most homeowners probably assume the company that installed the system is naturally the company that should service it. Businesses the same. talk us through that a little bit more and just unpack that.

John Berger (24:09)

Yeah, and and look, I I could I'm trying to articulate this as much just in the in the experience level. You you do have some electricians and and personnel that can go back and forth. That that is true. The the problem is again, when you're pulling a permit, everything changes. And not everything when you think about it, like for instance, HVAC or pool fix or a plumbing fix.

There's a lot that gets done without pulling a permit. I just had a major HVAC disaster in one of my homes. No permit was pulled coming out and fixing it. Okay. And when you when you look at it that way, and even the replacement unit, which actually caused the problem, that wasn't a permit pull. But in our industry, it is. Now, should it be? That's a whole nother question. Okay. But it is. And that permit pool is hard. And some areas are

are worse than others. We all know that. And so what happens is you start having totally different processes, totally different people on the back office side of things. Then you start getting into project management, which gets you into field management. And all of a sudden you're at a different level and you're now measuring things in weeks and months on a project, going back into getting inspected. That's another whole thing, getting interconnected, another whole thing.

And versus, hey, you ran out there, the fuse was blown, the conduit was crimped, the inverter was blown, wanted to just do a swap out. Totally different animal. And and my and I'm sitting there as a as a homeowner going, as a customer going, I want my power back on. I'm not here to wait on you until you can fit it in your schedule and the construction of all these other people. Like that's what really happens in the trenches. By the way, this is not specific to solar.

Generators do the same problem. They have the same issue. Generators a little different in that we get call it service. And most of the time, people are talking about proactive maintenance, not service. Service is the power is not flowing. It's broke. I need somebody out here to go fix it, whether it's a generator or solar, that's service. And that's different. And that is time-based. And again, measured in hours. Some people would argue it's measured in minutes. I would agree with them.

And measured in days. And so it just it requires a totally different process and company setup and strategy. Now let's look at the people. The people are really different. The people that go in and say, take the panels in the grass, put them on the roof, it's fairly straightforward, shall we say. Okay. Not a lot of like, I gotta go figure out what's going wrong here and I gotta use my experience and gotta think about how I can use AI to

try to deduce what was really going on here. That's a whole other level of expertise, experience. And frankly, you're going to be interacting with the customer. When you're installing, yeah, probably, but not always, from my experience. And so here's the situation with the service. You're out there. You're out there because something's wrong. You need to have the kind of charisma that's

Hey, I'm glad, you know, and thanks for calling me. I know it's a problem, you know, I know it's gonna cost you money, but let me make this easier on you because I know how to talk with, you know, to the person, right? So that's a different type of personality than say somebody who's like, yeah, I don't need to talk to anybody, I just need to go put this stuff on the roof. It's not demeaning the installer at all. I'm just saying there's differences of it.

And when you get into qualifications like licenses and so forth, it can even vary up much differently than that. Like for instance, you're gonna need a very experienced electrician to sign off on the design and the final installation on installation. And there's a lot of repairs that you don't need that capability for. So there's just a whole host of reasons where you see very successful, like let's take the generator landscape where you have installers and service, and you're like, well, it's one company. Look behind the scenes if they're really good.

They're actually two separate companies owned by the same person or same holding entity. And those two companies rarely even talk to each other.

Wes Ashworth (28:04)

No, I agree completely with with all of that. And you see it clearly. They're two very, very distinct, different things. And and not to again, not to take one away from the other. They're just completely two different businesses. So I agree a lot. And I think that's what's caused a lot of the problems that we see now. with with I think one's trying to be sort of both and installers trying to get into service service and that vice versa. and I know this is where

You know, the word orphan customer gets used a lot in in residential solar now. what does that actually feel like for the homeowner or business owner when the installer is gone, unresponsive or unwilling to take the call? and I know

you started using the phrase solar service crisis as is now really a part of Otovo's public messaging. So just talk us through that a little bit and kind of like what you're seeing from your perspective?

John Berger (28:47)

Yeah, and and to be clear, you know, crisis is an opportunity, right? You know, it's opportunity to be better and and and again improving in improving the industry, global industry, reputation and so forth is a key part of our mission. you know, I would say that in terms of the orphan, one, it's well above fifty percent. And it varies. Like my home state of Texas, I gotta say it's probably pushing eighty.

Why? Because so many of the of the installers are are not with us anymore. Like they're gone. that did a lot of the installations in Texas. so it it it creates where there's even nobody to answer the phone. Now there's another part of the orphan which is another thing here in this is ironic. Those installers that are still with us.

That have been around for a long time, they're actually in a really bad spot typically because they promised free service. And a lot of them, if not all of them, really can't afford to do that. They flat they can't. And so they're in this situation, like, I know what I promised, but if I served you and then you started telling people on social and everything, then I go under. Because I can't afford to give you free. I know what I told you, but I can't afford that.

I really believe that this stuff didn't break. And it does. And so you can get creative with like lead generation value and so forth and referrals. And there's the possibilities there, but that's really complex. And what we've seen a lot of solar installers do is actually diversify into like HVAC generators, plumbing, bunch of other things that are more in the in initial install side of things, and then get out of service.

Frankly, we've already bought some businesses, as you know, from other installers that just wanted to get out of it. and so there is a situation where on top of bankruptcies of installers, Europe and the United States, there's been a lot. We bought several in in Europe actually books of customers. There's also this, yeah, I didn't really see what I was getting myself into when I committed to that. and then there gets into a lot of like, well, this is kind of what I meant, and you know, it's been several years.

After a certain, you know, two years, you typically you're looking at this and going, I don't think that was an installation issue. That's something that's come up. It's like buying a car. I just had my car repaired, so I'm not gonna say what brand, and it was quite expensive to get fixed. And I was really hoping it was under warranty and it wasn't. So it goes with that that that's adding further orphans is people like you know, contractors like installers.

I yeah, I know what I said, but I can't financially give that to you.

Wes Ashworth (31:11)

Yeah, absolutely. It's a real, you know, thing as you go through that. I think some of those stats are like really eye-opening, right? And and really just again points more to why your solution is really important and why companies like yours need to exist.

We've kind of talked through where the problem exists, the solutions, how you're going about it differently, kind of comparing those two different businesses and understanding that. I do want to get into AI that we've we've touched on briefly a little bit there, but I know you have some thoughts around this and and how you're using AI and not AI as a buzzword, but as a way to really change the cost structure of field service. And so everyone's putting AI in the investor deck right now. So let me ask this as a skeptical operator.

what does Endurance actually do that a well-run service company could not do with, you know, a sales force, a hub spot, dispatch software, and good managers?

John Berger (31:56)

I mean, right now what we're what we've done is built out our tech stack. Now we have some more build out to do. And so that tech stack, like for instance, back in my old company, would be, I don't know, more than fifty SaaS software companies. And that that's not unusual. that's not a ridiculous number. I've have several friends that have companies that have a hundred SaaS software companies contracted. That adds up.

And the complexity, the way SaaS has worked is is they build you essentially a platform and then that's for everybody. Like let's take Salesforce. because that's what I have a lot of experience with with Sunnova. And then you got to spend tens of millions of dollars more to go do what you need to do on top of that. That's your money. You gotta cough that up. And then you're still paying them, you know, a fee.

And it's per seat. So as you're growing your business, because you got to scale because you're spending all this capex, they're getting more money too. And on top of that, they're raising your rates. And that's been true for the last, I don't know, 30 plus 40 years. now what you've what you have is AI has collapsed that cost structure. So now you can't afford, as it, you know, got to be a decent sized company, like we're be, you know, becoming big. Now you can afford to build the bottoms up.

including that layer you already had to take on yourself, you just take on this layer because the models are that much more powerful. And if you know get people, which is the hard thing, that is hard, really hard. We have them. and in particular one, the head of software and AI, he can come in and he's built this up. And so

We have the functions of a salesforce. We have the functions of a hubspot that we need. That means we don't have all of them. We never needed all of them.

At a fraction of the cost. When I mean a fraction, 95% less. That's yeah, it's well. I mean, because the other thing that's not well understood, there's a couple of things. One is the AWS or Azure, you're actually getting a lot of that through the LLMs, the large language models. So these are open AIs and anthropics. And so that's changing too. That's something we're gonna start hearing something about. And it's been a little that's not clear.

Here's the other shoe that's gonna drop. When you have your own tech stack, remember a lot of the failures that I faced at Sunnova on systems was when somebody, Salesforce or somebody else, did something else, an update. And then it triggered a cascading effect because it didn't enter, it didn't interface very well with all my other SaaS. And then all of a sudden the whole thing goes down. Okay. That happened a lot. More frequently, I gotta tell you, because I get calls from dealers.

John Berger (34:24)

Like what the, you know, There is a lot of that goes on. One of them does it, the whole thing goes down. And so this idea that somehow SaaS was, you know, more durable and everything else, I was like, I don't understand what you're talking about. That's never been the case. The bigger your business and the more complex your business, like in our our world, in our space, the more problems you're gonna have, the more times that's gonna happen. It's just an engineering equation, if you will. So

John Berger (34:49)

What we have on top of that is we don't have that risk of interaction. We own it. Doesn't mean we don't go down, doesn't mean we don't have software problems. We do, but as we're as the models are getting better and as we're getting better and finding them and our agents are finding them, then it it's improving and over a period of time that's gonna iron itself out. We've already seen that in many cases. But the last shoe to drop is gonna be that owning that stack is far more conducive.

for you to create agents or hire agents to do tasks. They can run around in their own system, their own backyard, so to speak, much more readily and be able to do these tasks far quicker than say trying to go into a yard that's got 50 different participants in it, 50 different yards, right? That's what's not being discussed. It's because not many companies are frankly doing it. This is why OpenAI was

profiling us this past week on social as because we are we're pushing that. That's the next shoe that's got to drop is that all the things that make SaaS, you know, we're more secure, do all this stuff, is exactly the problem that's going to create in creating agents when companies really getting engaged to do that, to take on tasks that have been, you know, for done by humans, that's going to be a limiting factor. And you're going to go back and say, gee, I wish I had built my own tech stack.

Wes Ashworth (36:08)

Yeah. And obviously it's working. So your your team has shared some striking Endurance results. Forty five minutes of labor saved per service call, forty percent of customer interactions handled by AI, more than three million in in annual software savings. So huge, huge numbers there. which of those numbers maybe matters most to you and and what does it prove about the model?

John Berger (36:28)

The fact that we are already saving money, you know, remember like the the new Otovo I started things is is like nine months old, not even. It's more like eight. I mean the fact that we're already saving millions of dollars blows my mind. I mean so when you look at what we're spending, tokens and and staffing, this is gonna scale quite a bit as we get bigger and bigger and bigger. It there there is no seats to buy.

There is no more to to to do to pay AWS. Like we're just gonna keep, you know, scaling and that's really what's exciting. So we're gonna these savings are literally gonna multiply as we move forward in time as the business grows, you know, quite strongly.

Wes Ashworth (37:08)

Absolutely, it's kind of proof point the market needs. AI only matters here if it changes cost, speed, service Yeah, a hundred percent.

John Berger (37:15)

I mean, look,

people would say, well, what's sales for Salesforce yeah, Salesforce can do it. HubSpot can do it. No question. But at what cost? That's really the question is, is that at what cost? And yes, it's harder to do this. It is very yeah we have issues. I'm not going to say we don't. We do. They're getting rapidly better as the models get better and so forth. But when you look at the cost difference, it blows your mind. I've never seen anything like this.

Wes Ashworth (37:18)

Yeah, as you said, ninety-five percent difference. It's it's absolutely incredible. And we know so these field service businesses live or die by response time, route density, inventory diagnosis, first time fix rates. which metrics should we watch to know whether Otovo's AI native model is actually working or which what do you pay attention to?

John Berger (37:55)

Net income first. you know, it can we you know, that that's a big that's a big big, big difference. you think about ultimately what what is that gonna mean for the customer? Lower prices.

John Berger (38:06)

And in a structurally inflation, you know, at least that's what we've been experiencing the last five years, been part of the industry's problem, right? And I I don't see how that gets solved anytime soon. So, you know, we are gonna bring savings in a desperately needed area for homes and businesses. So that's that's the first thing to watch. The second is, you know, can we do

John Berger (38:26)

a better and better job at responding quicker to customers, and that's gonna enter into a customer satisfaction? So this is why we've laid out gross margins of forty-five percent is our target. Net margins is twenty-five. This business typically you're doing well to get fifteen to twenty. Okay. do we want to go bigger than twenty-five? Of course we do. is there an opportunity? Yes, but that's our target is twenty-five and happy. So you

You have some companies trying to do the first two, but then the third fails. Well, you know, I can take people's money and then not do the service, but that's kind of the defeats the whole point of the whole company, in my opinion. So I think it's very important that you keep saying, Look, are your customers happy and are you making the kind of net because that's where it's really going to show up is in the adding in the back versus the gross as much. Can you make the money and keep the customers happy?

Wes Ashworth (39:15)

Yeah, I think a clear goalpost there makes a lot of sense in and how you look at it. so there's a broader question here too around just the future of companies. Are you building an an energy company that uses AI or an AI native service company that happens to be focused on energy?

John Berger (39:29)

Yeah, I've actually thought about this a lot for and you know, I I'd have to say that we're building an AI company that happens to do energy. I mean, at the end of the day, a lot of what we're doing, is it specific to solar, specific to resi solar, resi generators, commercial solar, commercial? No, it's not.

And other companies are gonna do this in many other service industries. They're already doing it. It's not much of a prediction. again, I mentioned, you know, General Catalyst and Thrive and Founders Fund and so forth. They're doing it legal services, call centers, is what I've been told. you know, this is eventually gonna spread to HVAC and plumbing all the home service roll-ups, which are by themselves, by the way, getting rather full valuations.

Shall we say? and so that's what's really interesting, by the way, is that Otovo sits at kind of a Venn diagram in the middle of the power industry, going really well. We can all agree on that. The service industry, the home service industry, actually is going really well. Not many people know that. The third is, of course, everybody knows is AI is going very, very, very well. you know, some would say too well. So when you look at all those together.

know, can we take that same and and have as much opportunity? No, by definition, we're not. But you know, we'll lose the power, maybe lose the home service, but there's still gonna be some home services out there to to do, some commercial services, and then just some other service industries that you could take the AI framework that we've done and be able to apply it and have a very successful financially successful outcome, in my opinion.

Wes Ashworth (41:02)

Yeah, it's super fascinating distinction. I was curious if you were going to go that direction with it, but I think it it does. It gets at a bigger trend where the best companies may be re rebuilt around software from the inside out, not simply upgraded with it. And again, I think you're seeing that trend across a lot of different industries. so we talked about a lot. The final layer is the grid. And if if more power is going to live behind the meter, then homes and businesses can be treated as an invisible or unreliable asset. So service may be that bridge between distributed energy as a customer

product and distributed energy as a real grid infrastructure. if say behind the meter assets are gonna matter to the grid, which we hope they will, utilities and system operators need confidence that those assets will perform, is service actually the missing precondition for virtual power plants to scale in your opinion?

John Berger (41:45)

Yes. I've known it for years. I've said it for years. If this thing does not, whatever it is, solar system only, solar with battery, solar with battery, an EV charger, a generator, if it doesn't work, it's pointless. And you've got a bull market in power that you know, I just I've looked at this, I've been in the power business now for thirty years. This this is the real deal. And

We have a long ways to go to try to solve this. And I'm a believer that the chips are gonna get more efficient, that the centers are gonna get more efficient. But part of that efficiency may be to break up these huge data centers into smaller what a lot of people focus us on on the training data centers and the training cost for the LLMs. But the inference, like for every big center that you hear about that, you know, Elon is building or somebody else, there's

at least 10 or nine others that are these really small inference centers that need to be closer to where we all live and use the service, right? Use the AI. That can be further fragmented up. And you're starting to see some companies start to come think about that, which means pushing the intelligence to the endpoints of the system. So what goes with it, just like we saw at the internet, but more so in my opinion, power needs to go with the connectivity.

to provide that ability to harness that intelligence, the AI. And so I think that we're going to see more and more of just like you know, you're seeing the data centers go behind the meter to get the power they need, that's going to spread, in my opinion, to the commercial and residential. And frankly, you should have already gotten that memo as a homeowner or a business owner if you own a structure as a business. Guess who started to understand that this was going to be a long term problem?

Years ago they start they understood it. Guess who it was? The oil and gas industry out in the Permian. They had a problem. The utilities out there, they're mostly all regulated, which means monopolies, and they couldn't get enough power when the oil companies electrified the wellheads. And so, you know, the utilities don't care. They're basically quasi-governmental agencies or governmental agencies, effectively. And so you saw a lot of these companies, you know, the

Pro Petra, the Solaris and these companies, these are all companies that are like, John, aren't they the data center power companies? yes, they are. They learned how to do that in the oil business. You go and look at the well-run companies like Devin and Diamondback, they have power companies within them because of this experience. Now we have data centers that are gonna have power companies. And those same service providers, again, the Solaris and Pro Petra, all these other, they moved over here because the data center guys.

They pay more than the oil guys do. Although, right, maybe in the last 90 days or so, maybe it's been challenging. But it's gonna go to the next commercial customers. And then residential, yes, it'll start in the high income as everything does. And what you're gonna want is when you have that system, by God, you want it running all the time. And you wanna pay for it. And I see I've seen this firsthand already. This isn't again, I don't think it's much of a prediction.

You go have a hurricane hit Houston and you have generators go out and people that have high discretionary amounts of income, you go see how much money they're willing to pay at that point in time to get that generator back on. And again, I'm just saying that to leave solar out of this. It's a lot of money because it impacts their life tremendously to be without that power. No air conditioning, no TV, no iPad, nothing. And they they have the willingness and ability to pay for it.

That's going to continue to move forward in the economy as we get richer, richer hopefully as a species, but it's certainly as a country and in Europe and the willingness to pay, to pay for those services to make sure that power's online is clearly has been going up and is going to continue to go way up in the future.

Wes Ashworth (45:21)

Yeah, without a doubt. final question, kinda t looking at that and and through the Otovo lens. Ten years from now, if we fast forward out, things go as planned and and all of that, what will what will a normal home energy relationship look like? If if Otovo is right, what will homeowners expect that would feel almost maybe impossible today?

John Berger (45:40)

Think a good analogy is to go back to Amazon. You know, unfortunately I'm old enough to remember the days, you know, a couple of things about Amazon was you're gonna put your credit card number into this website thingy. Are you out of your mind? You're gonna get robbed blind, no one's gonna do that. I can't even believe you suggested you're such a moron. We all know what happened there. and then you're gonna get this thing to me in two weeks. Okay, maybe, maybe it could work.

I don't know about food and clothing. Remember all that? Well, I do. And then now look at it. I can order something from Amazon and no matter what it is, food, anything, right? And it could be at my doorstep within 30 minutes, certainly within a few hours. Could you go back in time and say, you're gonna be able to order anything that you want, almost anything on the planet, and it gets to your house within hours and then soon minutes.

Wes Ashworth (46:09)

yeah. I do too.

John Berger (46:30)

Back, you know, even 20 years ago, you'd say, No way, it's not gonna happen. Here, this is the same thing, it's gonna happen. We're gonna be able to solve your power problem within minutes. Who knows where this AI goes? Could go all the way into embodied AI or robots, and you're out there and we're constantly having autonomous vehicles or robots there to go out there and try to fix something. If you need something, then we send one of our technicians that really can can help very quickly. But the speed to response.

from Otovo is gonna continuously increase because that's what the consumer wants. That's what makes the consumer's life better. And that's what we're about.

Wes Ashworth (47:07)

Yeah, love that. It's such a strong place to land. And I think you know, the best version of this future is not just cleaner power, it's power that feels dependable, understandable, supported, and just right there when you need it. So I love the the Prime analogy as well. John, and affordable, absolutely. It wins all around. So hopefully that's the case. We'll we'll stay tuned and continue just to watch the story and and we'll have you back on at some point, I'm sure. but John, this is just a fantastic conversation. What I appreciated most is just

John Berger (47:18)

And affordable.

Wes Ashworth (47:32)

You're not talking about more solar adoption and more batteries. You're pointing at the layer that determines whether those assets actually deliver on their promise over time, which is service, reliability, accountability, and trust. for everyone listening out there. This is one of those conversations that shows where the energy transition gets real. This next phase is not only about installing more equipment, it's about making millions of distributed assets work for customers, for businesses, and eventually the grid. Thanks as always for listening to Green Giants Titans of Renewable Energy. If this conversation was valuable, follow the show.

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