The retailing business is growing slightly more quickly, up 18 sites to a total of 110. Part of this is we pushed a fundraiser with one of our fundraising partners, and part of this is personal sales.
I’ve also finally got the website update live. A big part of that was I gave up on a complete rebuild, as the existing framework does everything I need it to do today.
0 comments more ...Most of this past month has been spent working on getting more generation online. But I’m discovering that many of those projects will have much poorer returns than I’d initially hoped for due to high (only now confirmed) installation costs.
0 comments more ...Most of this past month has been spent working on getting more generation online. It is a frustratingly long process, with far too much paperwork. 0 comments more ...
One Saturday morning at three,
A cheese monger's shop in Paree.
Collapsed to the ground,
With a thunderous sound,
Leaving only a pile of de brie.
I’m aiming to build a new electricity and gas retailer here, but this isn’t my first rodeo. In fact, I’ve built and sold a company like this twice before! But this is the first time I’m doing it solo. Previously, I focused on the business processes and backend management and let my partners guide the marketing and sales efforts; this time, I get to manage it all.
As part of our new Backend agreement (signed earlier this month), I have certain, regular “performance thresholds” I need to hit. This is new, and I expect it will have a focusing function. Overall, I need to find a way to maintain bringing on just over one site per day for the next several years. This will likely be the primary Key Performance Indicator (KPI) I mention in these update. My initial target is to hit 120 sites by the end of June.
0 comments more ...I am building a boutique energy retailer to provide a human touch to our electricity and natural gas bills, and to make sure that that money get reinvested back into our community. This matters because many of the established players are huge multinationals, with call centers on one continent and their head office in yet another, both far from Alberta.
But it doesn’t have to be like that: the money from our bills can grow our communities and our energy retailer can be human scale too.
Strathcona Power: Deep roots, New Power.
0 comments more ...Spurred by another superficial review of Paris’ push for bicycle lanes1, I decided to write out why I think so many of these takes are overly superficial, and thus fail to provide useful lessons when applied to other cities.
First, by way of background, I feel like I have rather unique vantage point of being trained in Transportation Planning (in Civil Engineering), paired with having lived and studied in all three of France, Canada, and the United States. On one hand, my schooling was in Utah, one of the few places in the US where they are still building urban freeways2; on the other, I spent three years in France (including 8 months in metro Paris) relying almost exclusively on public transit. In a word, I’ve lived and commuted in both.
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