Why Clear Communication Wins in Solar with Aaron Nichols

Solar has world-changing technology, but the industry still struggles to explain itself clearly.

In this episode of Green Giants: Titans of Renewable Energy, Wes Ashworth, President of Lee Group Search, sits down with Aaron Nichols, Marketing and Business Development Specialist at Exact Solar and host of This Week in Solar, to explore why clarity, trust, and human communication have become competitive advantages in renewable energy.

Aaron’s path into solar was anything but traditional. Before entering the industry, he worked as a teacher, traveled internationally, trained as a solar installer, and built experience in copywriting and marketing. That background shaped his ability to translate complex topics into language customers, employees, and business leaders can actually understand.

The conversation examines why renewable energy companies often narrow their talent pools by hiring for the same backgrounds repeatedly. Aaron explains why small businesses need adaptable problem-solvers, how nontraditional candidates can demonstrate value through consulting, and why creativity and pattern recognition are difficult to identify through a conventional hiring process.

Wes and Aaron also unpack the widening gap between corporate communication and human communication. They discuss why jargon-heavy messaging weakens trust, how clear website copy can improve visibility in AI search, and why companies must explain what they do, how they do it, who they help, and why it matters.

The episode also explores the right and wrong ways to use artificial intelligence. AI can help simplify internal communication, organize workflows, identify automation opportunities, and generate new creative ideas. But without clear thinking, strong processes, and thoughtful editing, it only produces more noise.

Additional topics include:

• Why stories earn attention before facts close the deal
•  How customer case studies build long-term credibility
•  Why automation should begin with process mapping
•  What solar companies misunderstand about payback periods
•  How authentic short-form video can outperform polished advertising
•  Why simple, consistent communication is difficult to copy
•  How expertise and a trusted public voice can strengthen a company’s brand

This episode is packed with practical insight for solar marketers, founders, sales leaders, recruiters, job seekers, and anyone working to make clean energy easier to understand.

Links:
Aaron Nichols on LinkedIn
This Week in Solar
Exact Solar'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 we're joined by Aaron Nichols, marketing and business development specialist at Exact Solar, and host of This Week in Solar, a weekly solar news and interview show covering clean energy news, policy, and stories that matter. brings one of the most unique backgrounds you'll find in the industry. He's a former teacher, storyteller, marketer, sales communicator, podcast host, and now one of the public voices helping explain solar in a more human way. This conversation is about much more than marketing.

It's about talent, trust, language, AI, and why an industry with world-changing technology still struggles to explain itself clearly. work has been profiled by PV Magazine USA, which highlighted the role of storytelling in helping customers move past confusion and doubt before they ever get to the facts and figures. With that, Aaron, welcome to the show.

Aaron Nichols (01:13)

Thank you very much. And for anyone who's watching on video wondering what happened to Aaron's bottom lip, I actually was drinking tea out of a hot metal straw. It was horrible. But yeah, you know, just to address that for anyone who sees that it's not some sort of crazy cold sore.

Wes Ashworth (01:22)

that does not sound pleasant at all.

Yeah, and how important this show is, you know, he came injured and all. So we'll start with probably one of the more interesting questions I've ever asked on the show, which is I wanna start with a story that sounds almost too strange to be true. How does your path into solar begin with circus girls on a beach in Ecuador?

Aaron Nichols (01:36)

So back in 2020, I shipped out for Peace Corps in Nepal, and it was January of 2020, which was horrible timing. So we were there for seven weeks. We were evacuated as soon as COVID hit, and we were all sent back to the US. Now I took a teaching job that I had turned down to go to Nepal to serve in Peace Corps after only serving seven weeks of my two-year commitment.

And after a year working that teaching job, I was more burned out and depressed than I'd ever been in my life. So I went traveling and I decided to learn to surf. And because I had some money invested, I was able to stay out of the country for about two years. And about a year and a half into that, I was doing my soul searching, figuring out what I wanted the next chapter of my life to look like. And as I was drafting and thinking, I really thought I wanted to work in renewable energy.

And I had no idea how I was gonna do it. And then the opportunity presented itself one day when I, like you said, met circus girls on the beach in Ecuador. I was living in a town called Alampe, which is a surf town in Ecuador that, you know, it's famous for learning Spanish, yoga, just kind of a hippie, slow sort of place. And there were these women I met who they were self-described circus girls. I'm not being diminutive.

And it's pretty common when you're living in hippie villages around the world that you'll see people who are into what they call flow arts, which is like fire spinning, circus skills, juggling, that kind of stuff. So these women were like that, and they supported their passion for circus skills by going on blitz trips, which used to be much more common. It was when a solar company would just fly people somewhere in the US, they would knock doors and sell solar. So they would do that.

Would knock doors, sell solar till they had enough money to go traveling, and then they would travel till they ran out of money and then fly home and knock more doors. And because I was in a time of my life where I wanted flexibility, I went on a few of those trips with them. I did very, very badly. I am not a natural door-to-door salesman, but that was my entry into clean energy. And then at the end of two years of travel, after I had done a few of those, I was in Bali, figuring out what I wanted to do with my life, how I wanted to move forward, how I wanted to re-enter the workforce. And I signed up for a six-week installer training through Grid Alternatives. Finished that, went to Alaska for summer of 2023, worked doing nothing to do with renewable energy at all. Came back, and I was with a woman at the time who wanted me to get to her income level really fast because she was a bit older than I was, and I just started copywriting and learning marketing skills. And then because I had a NABCEP PV associate through that program, I just started finding more and more solar clients. And then eventually one of my clients from that time that I met on Upwork, Exact Solar, brought me on full time. So here I am, circus girls on the beach in Ecuador four years ago now, and I haven't looked back.

Wes Ashworth (04:51)

Man, I love that origin story so much. That is one of the more interesting ones I for sure have ever heard, probably number one. and I love it too for a lot of reasons, but it immediately breaks the myth that everyone in clean energy arrived through some, you know, perfectly planned technical path, which we'll kind of dive into that as we go. And then so kind of going back before solar, there were time you mentioned there you were a teacher. And so what did teaching train you to do that most people in businesses are never really taught?

Aaron Nichols (05:17)

I love this question because it's my it's become one of my soapboxes now.

I'm very, very grateful that I not only worked as a teacher but also went through education college and graduated with a degree in education, because in education you are rewarded for simplifying complex topics and you have a feedback loop of reward for that. Whereas when you are, you know, studying like communications or business, or especially when you get into the higher levels of that, when you have people who have masters or even PhDs in those things, they spend a lot of time in academia, which is a self-reinforcing echo chamber where you are rewarded for needlessly overcomplicating things. And then they enter the corporate world, where once again, you are rewarded for needlessly overcomplicating things because you have all of these people working together. So what it prepared me to do, which has become incredibly useful in the AI era, is to break things down to their simplest components and actually understand what's happening step by step and how to explain that.

And that's become very important as we start doing things like automating things within Exact Solar or interfacing with AI agents because they are basically toddlers that don't understand nuance.

Wes Ashworth (06:34)

Yeah, exactly. I you know, I think that as you said there, that the ability to reduce an idea to its smallest useful form is just an incredibly underrated skill, you know, especially in technical industries or any industry. But that teacher lens feels very relevant to solar, the greater renewable energy, because that, you know, I think the customer often has to learn before they can trust. And even us, you know, as people in the industry, I think that makes a huge, huge difference as we kind of look at things.

And then I know your background as we've just stated there very non-traditional. and I know too, just from a previous conversation that you were passed over for a lot of jobs so I want to get into that a little bit and introduce that idea, but what were those companies sort of missing when they looked at your resume and maybe they were looking for this hyper specific experience?

Aaron Nichols (07:18)

I think that there's definitely a lack of imagination in hiring. And now that I've been more on the side of private industry for a couple of years, I get it. I understand why it's difficult to hire for certain things and how scary it can be to try to take on someone who has no experience. But I think what a lot of people were missing when I was going through my job search was understanding that, like, Creativity and competence are quite difficult to hire for and quite difficult to screen for in an interview. And it's two things that I gratefully have in spades. I'm very good at pattern recognition and seeing like, okay, this is over here. How can we take this and put it over here? That's like how I created the podcast and have figured out how to get it to show up in all of these LLMs and then like realize that, you know.

We have now created this separate media channel, so how can we use that to get Exact Solar to rank higher in LLMs and AI search? Like all of that stuff I think is very difficult to screen for or understand, but I didn't know how to relate those things well enough and got passed over for a lot of jobs.

Wes Ashworth (08:31)

And I think it's such a common story in the industry. I see it firsthand in recruiting. Like you see this play out day after day. And some of the best hires, you know, don't come from this, you know, picture perfect skill set and background that the hiring manager originally wanted. So I appreciate going into that. I wanted to introduce that idea. And I think that brings us to a much bigger issue for the energy transition. You know, we talk constantly about workforce shortages, but the industry still does have these habits of just narrowing the talent pool before the conversation really even starts.

again, renewable energy always saying like it wants more talent, but often screens for that same background over and over again. Where do you think the industry is still too narrow and how it defines qualified?

Aaron Nichols (09:09)

That's good question, and I don't know if I'm the right person to speak about that from the corporate level because I work for a small business, and I think the difference between a small business and a corporation is very clear. Like a small business is figuring out how to make money, and I love that. A corporation's job is to hire people who don't mess up the machine that makes money. That's something I don't have experience with and don't really know how to talk about what they're missing. But I can definitely say small businesses should not hire like corporations do. Corporations are looking, like I said, for someone who will do what they're told and is very good at a certain narrow set of competencies and will not mess up the machine that someone else built that makes money.

But small businesses try to hire like corporations, and it creates a huge problem. Because, like, if you're a small business, you need creative innovators who can step into different roles and actually figure out how to build the machine that makes money. that's not the type of person that you are trying to hire for at a corporation, but small businesses will aspire to be corporations and then they'll think, okay, we should hire like they're hiring. So they write job descriptions like much bigger.

companies but it's a mismatch and when everyone is screening for the same talent pool you miss out on so many creative awesome people

Wes Ashworth (10:36)

And that makes sense. I appreciate the distinction between the two organizations as well. And I would say that, you know, there's a lot of like smaller entrepreneurial type of companies that are in the industry that I think you're right, you know, do try to hire like corporations. So really important to make that distinction and kind of see it. And I think the biggest thing is like just to be open, like no harm ever came from a conversation. You're like, just talk to somebody. If they're they look interesting, people often surprise you. But I'll tell you like, a smart, capable, curious person usually can learn about anything. Certain jobs, you know, do require very, very specific technical skill sets, but a lot of them, if you hire the right person, they're gonna figure it out in short order. And then all those things that you can't teach are still gonna be there and support them in their

Aaron Nichols (11:16)

And to expand on that, just to jump in, like there's One of the things that I am very, very proud of is that like the first year I was at Exact Solar, we grew by about 20%, the second year about 60%, and we're on track to double our annual recurring revenue this year. I obviously can't take credit for all of that. A lot of that was fixing our sales process. And we just picked up some people from companies that had gone out of business and basically just accidentally hired a bunch of killers.

So we didn't even know what we were looking for and we found it by accident and now we have a better idea of what we're looking for. But you know, it's you don't always know. Like you sometimes think you have an idea and you're totally wrong.

Wes Ashworth (12:00)

A hundred percent. You know, like we see this happen every day. You know, what a hiring manager tells us like day one they need and they want usually is not who they end up hiring. It usually ends up somewhere down the road, it is a little different than their original vision. And you kind of see that happen. But to your point, too, like some of those the best top performers, same true in my team. Like those people were like, Yeah, they didn't have like this picture perfect, you know, background where you go, yeah, this makes perfect sense. But again, a lot of them came from that just, hey, we had a conversation, opportunity presented itself and we hit it off and you know, next thing you know, things are history. But it's great when it works out like that and like, Hey, we accidentally hired a bunch of killers. that's awesome.

Aaron Nichols (12:37)

And that's the difference between I forget what it's called. It's like the divergent versus the other word thinking, but divergent thinking is difficult to screen for if you are following the same categories as everyone else, because there the job market optimizes for people who are very good at doing what they were told, who went to school, got good grades, went to a good university, continued to just always do what they were told and continue to be praised for that. And like I said, they're a very specific, very narrow band of people that are amazing at one thing. But if you're trying to grow and you need people who are gonna be like, maybe that's a stupid idea. Maybe we should try this instead. Those aren't the people you

Wes Ashworth (13:15)

A hundred and that's the trouble too when you just continually hire from right inside, you know, so take solar, for example. You only hire people within solar, only people that have seen solar. They're gonna have unique ideas, but some things are gonna be limited and restricted versus sometimes you bring somebody from some completely different industry, they've just been able to see things differently and different thought processes around them. They think about things differently, they view problems and may have a different solution as well, too. So tremendous value there.

so let's talk about a little solution wise. If a company is out there listening and going, Hey, this makes sense. I need to rethink this a little bit, and they want to hire more non-traditional talent, what do you think they should change first? Is it the job description, the interview process, like the manager's mindset? Like what comes to mind for you?

Aaron Nichols (14:01)

I think one of the things that is helpful if you're looking for creative divergent thinkers, there's that classic question. I read this in a social science book, and I've since seen Alex Hormozy talk about how he uses it on certain job applications. But basically, it's tell me all the uses for a brick or like a common household object, right? And if you're hiring a narrow thinker and or you just want a screen for creativity.

The more things that someone is able to tell you about that, like the more creative they are. If someone is like a brick, you know, you use it to build walls, period. Then that may not be a creative person. But if someone is like, okay, you can use it to throw through a window to start a revolution during a riot, you can use it to like weight down papers on a desk. You can use it to catapult into your neighbor's yard.

to start a passive aggressive fight. or like you can use it to anchor a very small boat. You know, you if you're screening for creativity, that's a great question to start with.

Wes Ashworth (15:02)

Yeah, I like that a lot, those examples. But the screen for creativity piece, I think that's a big part of it. I think for one, being open to that conversation. When you have those conversations, yes. I always like to get down to that? Like, how does somebody think? You know, like how do they view problems? How do they view this and what do they go to solutions and how many different pathways do they kind of look at and analyze and how creative are they? So I agree with that. flip side.

What advice would you give to somebody outside the industry right now? And we get these a lot of, you know, folks that are not in the industry but are like, Hey, I'm really passionate about this. I want to get in. but you know, they keep hearing some version of you don't have enough solar experience, you don't have enough X experience. what advice would you offer that individual?

Aaron Nichols (15:36)

This is I've actually given this advice many times because this is what worked for me. you're probably not going to get a job with no experience. But there are so many companies if who are willing to pay for fractional experience if you have just a narrowly defined value proposition. So consulting is your way in. If you are, you know, I'm very good at building, like, I mean, now it's to be like AI agents that research blog posts rather than like writing blog posts yourself. But if you have something that you have built that you can repeat with companies, then eventually someone's gonna bring you on full-time. But it's very unlikely that you are going to just apply for jobs and get them. I mean, I've I still have friends that I've given this advice to who haven't tried to consult yet, who are still looking for jobs in the industry and working something else in the interim and it's difficult, right? It's difficult to prove that you have translatable experience, but consulting in your skill set is probably your way in.

Wes Ashworth (16:38)

Yeah, I like that angle a lot. It's really useful advice. and I don't think it's something people like first think of, you know, when they're looking at that. And just I think an example that there are more doors into this industry than most people realize, that being a great one. And I think that the I always encourage like breaking in takes persistence, you know, any job search a lot of times takes persistence and a lot of no's a lot of not hearing anything and getting ghosted. And you know, it's as much as that sucks, like you just gotta stick with it and kind of like be persistent through that.

And I think taking the time to know how to translate your own story, how to translate your own experience and explain, like, yes, I did this. This is how I think this could bring value into your company or into this industry. And so that translation, and I think, you know, the word translate is sort of a perfect bridge. And I think so much of your work is really about translation. You're sort of taking solar policy, technology, customer fear, business strategy, and then making it really understandable.

Wes Ashworth (17:32)

And so I wanna switch and focus on that a little bit. So you spent a lot of time thinking about the gap between corporate communication and human communication. tell me about that. Like what does that gap look like in solar and I'm sure the whole industry as well?

Aaron Nichols (17:43)

Yeah, this is, I mean, we're once again on my giant soapbox, but the solar industry, especially once it gets more corporate, where it's much more like utilities and much less beholden to the public and much less B2C, much more B2B.

Seems to be bound and determined to take this very exciting, sexy thing that we do and describe it in the most boring way imaginable. not only just boring, but meaningless. Like to use the word innovation as many times as possible in ways that don't mean anything. I saw like i was on a website of a billion dollar company the other day that said something like, We innovate sustainable materials that advance materials and advance technology, something like that. And, you know, that's all that was above the fold of the page. So I was like, all right, I guess I suppose I'm leaving here having no idea what you do.

I think I've, as you said, I've thought a lot about this. I gave a talk about this in Texas. I think it comes down to a couple different things. But there's that desire to be like, well, if we don't actually say anything, no one can sue us. And then there's the self-reinforcing echo chamber of people who have spent too much time in academia and only talk to each other and are moving further and further away from the public and don't.

have to talk to them anymore. And so it's just bringing it back to first principles. I when I talk to people about this, I wrote an article called Four Rules of Storytelling That Corporate America Desperately Needs. And when I talk to people about this, I always say like, this is all. Just what does our product do? How did we make it do that? Who does it help by doing that?

And why should anyone care? You should answer those questions under a fifth grade reading level. And then you have something that people can understand easily, that you can explain in a few minutes and that, you know, you're not gonna confuse anyone with.

Wes Ashworth (19:37)

I again I think this gap is everywhere and how you just outlined that, like that's brilliant. It's simple and brilliant. And hey, communicated very, very clearly to I understand it. But so much time, like that's true. And I would encourage those companies, like have somebody that's not in the industry go to your website and see if they can figure out what you really do and you know how you're communicating and if it makes sense to them. Cause if it doesn't, it's probably not landing in a lot of places. So it being that clear, you know, it's not always again, I think there is a safety aspect of it.

probably, you know, people are worried about, hey, we don't really want to say anything so we don't want to be at risk. but you know, I think that's a real problem for the industry and real opportunity where we can really start to change there.

Aaron Nichols (20:15)

It's been a real opportunity for us as a small local business. Just, you know, just educational blog posts written under a fifth grade reading level, everything kept around that area, not being complex, explaining only what solar is gonna do for you. And three years on, we're absolutely crushing it, especially in AI search, where you have all of these chatbots now searching the internet, and they can clearly understand what we do very, very quickly.

Aaron Nichols (20:42)

Whereas we have all these competitors who, you know, the classic copywriting advice is don't get cute. We have all these competitors who got cute. They tried to be clever, they tried to, you know, sound smarter than they were, and now LLMs have no idea what their website is about, what their product is about, what they do.

Wes Ashworth (21:01)

And that's a great point too. I'd love any like quick insight on that in terms of you know, some people I'm sure listening to this, like that's not even on their radar. they haven't even started to think about like, how are we popping up in Google results? Like, yeah, it's one part of it, but how are you popping up in large language models and those kind of things? And so what advice would you give them? Just some kind of like some basic things to start doing so they have you know better results on the LLMs?

Aaron Nichols (21:26)

Everything just needs to be clearly explained and written out in as the smallest amount of nuance possible, right? Like you need to think about esoteric terms and define those and break them down into a set of actions. Like the word innovation is meaningless. If you say we innovate, that means nothing. What do you do? How did you make your product do it? Who does it help and why should anyone care?

Wes Ashworth (21:56)

I truly was hoping you were gonna rattle that off one again just so we had that on there twice. I think people need to hear that twice. That was perfect. Let me ask you this. What is one solar concept that the industry explains terribly? And how would you explain it instead?

Aaron Nichols (21:59)

Ha.

So I've only worked in behind the meter. so once again I can't speak for large corporate companies that are jet building gigantic systems. But the idea of the payback period is often portrayed in such a confusing way and just generally should be deprioritized for anyone who's selling because All someone needs to understand is that it's gonna save them money and that it's gonna pay for itself. And when you start showing them numbers, they have something to check against. but it also just confuses the issue up front. You're trying to get things down under a certain number of years and you don't even know if that's gonna be true, and something might have to be serviced down the line that might change the whole thing. There are people who are gonna ask for that, but you shouldn't lead with that.

You should upfront just tell them it's gonna save you money and you're gonna own your own energy and it will pay for itself. but once you start getting into the nitty-gritty of that, it often scares people away and just overcomplicates things needlessly. That's something we found in our own sales process.

Wes Ashworth (23:16)

Yeah, I think that's a good one. I like that, the like that a lot. I want to continue hitting on this a little bit. So, you know, in a technical industry, you know, where we're dealing with technical types of things, engineering, all that, all the like, people often equate complexity with credibility. And that's kind of what we're talking a little bit against. But how do you sort of find that balance between simplifying without sounding too simplistic? Like where's the line and how do you navigate that?

Aaron Nichols (23:41)

Well it depends on what you're trying to do. I do think there's a case for complexity, but it's only when you're trying to convince people that you're so smart that they should hire you. Right? Like if you're like, yeah, we have geniuses in the back room who are just hyper nerds and we're gonna give you access to them and we don't even understand what they do, that's the time to be a little bit more complex. But if you are just trying to

Aaron Nichols (24:06)

have the greatest number of people understand what you do so that they can come to you and actually try to buy your services, then things need to be as simple as possible. I think that one of my favorite examples of this is the white paper. Everyone seems to be everyone seems to think that they've done it when they put out a white paper. But you have to hide the vegetables in the cake, right? Like if I go up to anyone on the street and I say, do you want to read a white paper? They will say no.

If I go up to anyone on the street and show them a tiny section of a white paper that might relate to their life and then explain how that relates to their life and then say, and we have this white paper, then the number of people who will be interested in reading that will be so much greater. But like, if I don't know who you are and you tell me that you've written a white paper, I don't care.

Wes Ashworth (24:56)

That's such a great example. I love that. And that's so relatable. 'cause I think, you know, I'm sitting there nodding my head who's like a hundred percent. Yeah, go ahead.

Aaron Nichols (25:02)

wait, wait, can I got something that made me laugh so hard the other day. It was an email from someone I've never heard of who like apparently has a big following as a PR consultant, who, once again, I've never heard of this woman. And she said, if you fill out this survey I've sent you, I will enter you into a drawing to win a 45-minute Zoom chat with me.

Like, this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. And I was joking with my wife about that. I was just like, we should see if we could get like free yard work with this. The same format. Like, if you come to my house for free and rake my leaves, I will enter you into a drawing to win a 45-minute zoom. It's the craziest thing even ever. Like, people lead with.

Aaron Nichols (25:47)

thinking that people give a crap about their experience when they have no idea who they are and there's no bite-sized chunk of what they can understand. And so the pool of people who intake the information that they're putting out is so much smaller than it could be.

Wes Ashworth (26:02)

And I like that, you know, you made that fourth point of like, I say that a lot, like why should they care? You know, why did should they care at all? You know, to give you a the time of day. but yeah, that's a great example. And as funny as that is, like, probably not that uncommon. Like that's happening a lot, you know, things like that. And there's probably somebody out there teaching, like, this is what you should do. but yeah, you know, to your point, I love that.

Aaron Nichols (26:25)

The audacity of that is hilarious. Like if I had been on this person's email list for five years and then they were like, You could win a zoom with me, it'd be like awesome. But no, this is a cold email.

Wes Ashworth (26:37)

Never heard of this person a day in my life.

you know, as kind of we were talking through all of this, like this challenge I think has become even more urgent and relevant today because like AI has changed the economics of words. You know, it's never been easier to produce content, never been harder to earn attention. She probably created that pitch through AI. We're not bashing just her, but this it's easy, right? And I think it's making it even more complicated. And I think, you know, with AI making it almost effortless to produce more content.

You know, more emails, more posts, more scripts, more proposals, you know, you start to get inundated and it starts to lose a lot of validity and you know attention. like what do you feel like that's doing to the quality of communication overall?

Aaron Nichols (27:21)

I think it is making, I mean, the volume of communication has certainly gone up. The amount of noise is obviously insane. And it now it takes less time to create communication than it does to consume communication, which has never been true in all of human history. And so all of a sudden, you now have way more of a responsibility to edit communication when you create it, especially when you use AI than you ever did before. Because like people have less attention than ever, they have less time than ever. They're being inundated with communication from every side. And like they just no one has time.

Now, what the great thing about this is that it makes it very clear when you're someone who's putting in effort. I mean, this is the thing that our president Doug Edwards, the owner of ExactSolar, always says the best shortcut is no shortcut, right? And it's a principle we've followed that's responsible for why we're growing so much. It's just like i get so many LinkedIn DMs that are just like. I mean, basically the script is: I care so little about your time and attention that I have outsourced communication with you to a robot in hopes that you are too dense to notice. Insert publicly available information about Aaron. I see that you went to university at Colorado State University, Go Rams, like whatever. But when someone has taken the time to read something that I've written and then they specifically mention that, it stands out so much more. And there's a way that AI mentions things that no one would ever talk like. And you we're getting more and more of a sense for it. So it's never been easier to stand out if you're putting in effort, but it's a bad time to be try be automating all of your outreach.

Wes Ashworth (29:03)

Yeah, agree completely. And I like that you went that way, you know, just that no better time to really stand out, you know, and I've often heard like, see what everybody else is doing, go the opposite direction. Like it's the easier to stand out and you get that sort of real authenticity, that comes through really quickly and you pay attention to that. But to your point, I think we're all becoming more aware and just kind of like jaded with it too. And you're like, gosh, like there's another AI message, you know.

Aaron Nichols (29:13)

And just the role of the I hate the term thought leader, I don't know what else to call it, the role of the expert has never been more important because

Aaron Nichols (29:38)

One thing that can't be faked now, like obviously, people can send fake DMs and pretend to be people on social media, but expertise earned over time, an audience earned over time, cannot be faked. and so it's a great time for anyone who's willing to put in effort to be an expert. And this is something that we've actually found at Exact, like, this has not just been good for me to post on LinkedIn. Like the for me to set up this week in solar and then be the face of it has actually had tremendous benefit for Exact Solar. And so people trust brands less than ever. But if you have someone who's willing to be a face at your company and be a thought leader and who's willing to like put in work over time to be the face that people can trust, it's a great time for that.

Wes Ashworth (30:28)

Yeah, I agree completely. and I think the positive thing is I think you are seeing more of those individuals kind of like surface and rise to the top where it's because it's creating that pathway. let me ask you this before we move on, where do you see kind of the value of this, right? In marketing and communications, we have these large language models, we have all these tools. Like, where can it actually help?

We've talked a little bit about the negative sides, but what are some of the positives and how people can be using it and how it can make a difference?

Aaron Nichols (30:55)

Yeah, absolutely, man. I think like once again, AI, you know, there's one of my favorite movies is The Western Shane. I grew up watching that, and there's a scene where Shane tells this woman, a gun is a tool, it's as good or as bad as the man using it. AI is very similar. And if you don't have clear thinking and you're just kind of a chaotic person, AI will just amplify that.

But if you actually take the time to understand how you can use it and train it on very specific things and take the just a little bit of time to edit things before you create communication and set up frameworks like I mean, Smart Brevity, Smart Brevity is one of my favorite frameworks. I format all of my internal communication at ExactSolar in smart brevity format. So rather than big blocks of text which people see and their eyes glaze over and they zone out, I have everything formatted in like TLDR.

And then bullet points, and then here's what's important, and then, like, here's what you, you know, here's what you need to know if you want to go deeper. AI's pretty good at that kind of stuff. another thing is like this is a journey that we're on now that has saved us a ton of time and money, but we had to put in a lot of boring administrative clerical work to start this journey.

But like everyone talks about automation, but if you don't understand what's happening within your organization, automation means nothing.

So we had to sit down and talk to every department and be like, what happens when someone comes in and they're a lead? And then we're like, my God, we have to manually input data in 17 different places. And then we're like, okay, and then for them to be passed to sales, there's more manual data. And then, like, for them to be passed off to engineering, they have to be dropped in two different softwares, and that has to be copy-pasted by three different people. And if we mess it up, the process doesn't work. And we mess it up all the time.

Aaron Nichols (32:48)

So like everyone wants to run with AI, but you have to walk first. Like automation of stupid is stupid magnified. But if you understand like what's actually happening and where automation can be useful and you try one piece at a time, you can do incredible things, but you have to start at the simplest possible root level and break down every imaginable step of what's happening.

Wes Ashworth (33:13)

Yeah, that's so well said. I think spot on. and I would argue probably it's a crawl before you walk, then maybe a light jog, you know. But take the time, do it correctly. And it's like anything, right? Like, what's the right path? Or like you said, like the shortcut is no shortcut. Like take the time to set it up right and get the right input, you know, and make sure that it's dialed in and you're getting the right stuff out. Because you're right, you know, it's like

Wes Ashworth (33:38)

Garbage in, garbage out. Like that's the reality. so we talked about this, and I wanna move on kind of like the next layer is trust, right? Clear communication matters because solar is not an impulse purchase to people. Customers are making, you know, major financial, technical, and emotional decision. And so you've argued that stories open the door, facts close the deal. tell us a bit about that. Like, why does that distinction matter so much in solar?

Aaron Nichols (34:00)

Yeah, I think I would take that as far as to say no one cares about your facts until they care about your story. And I gave a talk about that. And we have convinced ourselves that facts speak for themselves and they fundamentally do not. We live in, you know, I mean you can call it whatever you want, like the post-truth society, the death of traditional media, like wherever we're at, everyone has their own opinions and everyone comes at things from different values. And whether we like it or not We can talk, you know, we can convince ourselves that we're rational creatures till we're blue in the face, but we're not. We make decisions because we're hungry or we're tired or we're bored, and then we explain them to ourselves afterwards. And those obviously aren't the only three reasons we make decisions, but it's just like we make decisions impulsively, and then we backfill rationalization to convince ourselves that we're rational creatures.

I really like to joke about how like when you see people arguing on LinkedIn, it's just like copy pasting different graphs, as if like throwing a graph at someone is gonna convince them of something. And I like to make the joke when I'm giving talks, i say like, how many people here have ever gotten in an argument with their spouse and immediately showed them a graph? And then there'll be like one dorky engineer who raises his hand in the corner and I'll say, and how did that go? And he shakes his head and I'm like, I know, not well. But we think we can do that to strangers. But the truth is, like, no one cares about your facts until they care about your story. So you have to lead with who did this help? How did it help them? Why should anyone care? Go back to that first principles thinking. And the good news, I mean, especially for us, because we've spent so much time putting these together, is LLMs love case studies, because now that AI can just generate a blog post and spit out data, anyone can be a thought leader and anyone can put stuff together, but no one can make verifiable videos.

And deep interviews on your customers' good experiences with you. And those are very emotional. They're not fact-based.

When we talk to people and they talk about what they love about solar, it's like I'm not paying my utility company anymore. I know now that if there's a disaster, my family is covered. Those are not things that we convince them of with graphs. So yeah, like facts are great. And once someone's in your ecosystem, your facts are incredible. The facts you have, the data you have, that's amazing. But you have to get people interested with the emotional journey first.

Wes Ashworth (36:28)

Yeah, I love that so much. So well said, and I've said that a lot, you know, like we are emotional beings, we make decisions fully based on emotion, and then we justify them with logic, and then we say, I made this logical decision. but you gotta start there first, or it's a lonely, lonely road ahead. So I love everything you shared there. What does the solar industry just generally misunderstand about trust?

Aaron Nichols (36:48)

One thing that has been a gold mine for us that very few people in the solar industry actually do is the fact that we've in we've been in business for 20 years means we have people who have gone solar five years, 10 years ago, that we can reach out to and ask how that went. I think the solar industry bases a lot of conversations and a lot of sales conversations on the idea that something's going to be around for 25 years, but then no one Bothers to go get the verifiable proof of that, and it's the best marketing gold you can have.

Wes Ashworth (37:22)

Yeah, I love that. And again, back to like stories, right? I think that's what people connect with. And, you know, it's why they say the proof is in the pudding, right? All those, all those types of cliches and phrases we say, like a lot of it's true. It's like you being able to reference that and people connect with that and sort of like put themselves in that person's shoes and kind of see that there. So I like that a lot. What makes a customer story? I guess when you're thinking about these stories, what makes a customer story actually work? Like instead of feeling like, Polished testimonial nobody believes. Cause I've seen those. I think we've been guilty of that as well, too. But like for you, when you're looking at this, like what makes it truly work?

Aaron Nichols (37:55)

I think the heroes journey framework has worked pretty well. Like getting them to talk about how bad things were before, or how annoying the problem was or how much they hated their utility company, cueing them with that first because you know you're offering a solution, but if they talk about how great it is up front, you just don't have as much attention because, you know, negativity unfortunately grabs attention. So cueing someone to talk about the problem it's solved before they talk about how the problem has been solved.

Wes Ashworth (38:24)

Love that format a lot. and I know too, like you've become a public face in sort of short form video and UGC, which is user generated content style ads. Tell us a bit about that. I think others could learn a lot from that. I'm certainly trying that journey myself as well too, as we look at this, but what have you learned about just being believable on camera? Like why does this work?

Aaron Nichols (38:42)

The best way to be believable on camera is to believe what you're saying. So I think that's the first principle. But I think my favorite lesson that we've learned in that process is that the barrier to entry is so much lower than you think it is.

And our top ad right now is me making a smoothie in my kitchen talking about the benefits of our PPA and why it's different from other companies that have partnered with unethical financiers. 35 seconds long, it's brought us a bunch of leads, and it took me three minutes to make.

So the barrier to entry is very low. But I think like you have to be honest, you have to be truthful, don't pretend to be a customer, don't lie. Just clearly and succinctly explain the benefits of what you're doing, and if possible, incentivize your existing customers to do the same. And you know, that's in a world where people can still pretty easily spot over polished AI content, it's worked really well for us to just have someone talking to a phone and then put an ad budget behind that on Facebook. And I mean, we run them first organically to see which ones win, and then we put an ad budget behind the winners, and it works really well.

Wes Ashworth (39:57)

Yeah, I love that so much and the simplicity of it. Like I think people think like, I need to have this like hyper polished, you know, presentation and put all this huge budget behind the production and all this kind of stuff. And you're saying kind of the opposite.

Aaron Nichols (40:10)

We've done that. We have this, like, we have all of these feel-good highlight reel ads, and some of them have done okay. But that's why I thought that was funny. It's not because like I just filmed a bunch of stuff with my phone and then we uploaded that, and some of it's doing well, and I'm gonna tell you to do that. It's because we have polished ads and we have feel-good ads, and we have all this stuff that we've paid videographers to go do, and we've run all of that. And our top performing ad is me in a white t-shirt making a smoothie in my kitchen.

Wes Ashworth (40:41)

I love it. That's awesome. like what does if you're making the one of those short videos like that, like do you follow a certain like guideline or anything? Like what does it need to do like in the first five seconds? Like is there what's sort of the magic sauce or recipe with it?

Aaron Nichols (40:54)

Yeah, the best hook we've found is just stating the problem immediately. I mean, we've tested a bunch of different hooks, but the one that, you know, our five top ads all have the same hook and we've been creating more of them for that. But it's just if your energy bills keep going up like mine did, you need to hear this.

now in terms of creating those scripts and creating UGC content, I write stuff out and then I'll just do 10 takes saying the same thing in different places in my house or around the neighborhood. Like another one of our top ads was i just kind of walked like through some low-hanging branches. And so the kind of hook of the ad, the beginning of it, is you could see my face like emerging from under these tree branches as they're brushing past me. And then I'm like, if your energy bills keep going up, you need to hear So I would say like Test formats, experiment with scripts, and then take your winners, just your winners, like because you know you're always gonna be uploading hopefully fresh content. I mean the Andromeda wants you to upload fresh content all the time. That's Facebook's new ad algorithm. And the more you could get into it, the better, because like it's gonna be shown to specific people. but when you find winners, like after you run a batch of ads, just take your winners and put them into a Google Drive, just take the best ones and use them to continuously train an AI. And that can be as simple as keeping them in Google Drive and just running Gemini off that folder and having it suggest new scripts. But you should always be testing and refining new content, taking the winners, putting them somewhere, and then using them to train an AI that you can make better ads.

Wes Ashworth (42:30)

I love it. It's so practical and like seems easy. which I'm hoping like people kinda hear this and kinda like, you know, it's a for me a hopeful thing of I think what holds people back, like, it has to be a certain level of quality, has to be this, has to be that. But you're saying like, you know, it's that simplicity and I think people connect with that and you know, even when you're walking and walk through some branches, like it's those little things that kinda like catch your attention, you're like, Wait, what just happened? But

Aaron Nichols (42:54)

Well, I think people are afraid of simplicity because if things feel simple, then it feels like you're unnecessary, that you might lose your job. But like doing this well just means doing simple things a lot. A lot of simplicity. A huge volume of good simplicity.

Wes Ashworth (43:06)

Yeah, consistent like simplicity, you know, over time, right? I think it's just kind of sticking with it and continuing that and maintaining it and staying consistent with it. I think that's sometimes a tough part for people. but yeah, I mean, I think you've gotta people have to wake up. I think there are a lot of people stuck in like what worked 10 years ago, you know, from a marketing communication standpoint. But it's you gotta pay attention to what's happening now. And I think you're covering it super brilliantly, which I hope everybody's hearing.

as we're getting closer to time, you know, I know we had other questions, things like that, but I wanted to kind of open it up. Like anything you haven't been able to say, things you wish the industry could hear, whether it's solar, greater renewable energy industry, like what else is on your mind you feel like you would like the audience to take away and some things that they could just kind of sit with and will help.

Aaron Nichols (43:54)

We have enough white papers. We wrote all of them. We don't need any more. No one's reading them.

Wes Ashworth (44:02)

They're not. They're probably putting them into AI, into a large language model and like, hey, distill from this, like give me the basics.

Aaron Nichols (44:10)

If everyone's gonna dump it into an AI and try to distill down so that they don't have to take the time to read it, just give them the distilled version.

Wes Ashworth (44:18)

There you go. That's the key, right? Like it's awesome. but seriously, Aaron, like this has been a fantastic conversation, like super refreshing and authentic. And I really do appreciate that. You know, I appreciate the way you connect that human side of communication with the practical realities of growing a solar business. And I think this is what we need as the industry continues to evolve.

there's a lot here, I think, for marketers, founders, sales teams, job seekers, really anyone trying to make clean energy easier to understand and also help grow your business. to our listeners out there, thank you for joining us on Green Giants Titans of Renewable Energy. If this episode gave you something useful? I guarantee it did. share it with someone, you know, building, hiring, selling, or communicating in the renewable energy industry. As always, subscribe, rate the show, stay connected for more conversations with the people shaping the future of clean energy. And with that, we'll see you soon.

Aaron Nichols (45:04)

if you are interested in hearing more of what I do or just following along with my ideas, you can find me on LinkedIn at Aaron Nichols. You'll have to search Aaron Nichols Solar on Google. Unfortunately, there's a country singer in Nashville whose name is Aaron Nichols who is ascending the charts and he's beating me on Google for my name. And then check out This Week in Solar on Substack.

Wes Ashworth (45:24)

Love it. And I will link all of that in the show notes as best as I can as well. So check those out. And with that, we will see you next week.