Chris BackusJournal #1
I’m finishing up my fifth week at Thornton Holdings, LLC and am almost half-way through the summer break. It’s incredible how quickly the time is slipping away. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I’m enjoying the work that I’m doing, which is something new to me.
The firm that I’m working for is a renewable energy consulting business that’s in its earliest stages of development. The founder, Peter Gish, has a long history of experience in the renewable energy sector, specifically wind project finance. He is leveraging that to start his new venture. Currently, there are five of us in the office, although there is constant talk about expansion. As is typical for entrepreneurial organizations, the vision is grand with aspirations of transforming the energy landscape with emerging technologies.
One of the benefits of working in a smaller organization is that I’m involved in pretty much all of the office activity. In addition to creating financial projections for a series of wind projects in North Africa and Europe, I’m also conducting market analysis for a company with an innovative energy technology. I have been in meetings with industry leaders such as Morocco’s Director General of the National Electricity Office and on calls with representatives from some of the leading carbon trading firms.
So far it has been an extremely educational experience and I’m excited to see where it leads.
Journal #2
I’m in the final couple of weeks of my internship. A lot of work has been accomplished since I started two months ago, but even more remains to be done. The time horizon of the projects that we’re working on is fairly long, with the shortest being about 18 months. It takes a lot of effort to get a wind project sited and obtain preliminary quotes from suppliers and contractors. Once that is completed, we need to compile all of the information into a compact presentation used to court investors. Assumptions and conditions change all the time, so we’re constantly adjusting this accordingly.
Since I’m working for a small entrepreneurial organization there isn’t much structure around what I do with regard to timelines and deliverables. I own the process, which sometimes makes it challenging to stay on task. It has its advantages, though.
Journal #3
This is the last week of my internship at Thornton Holdings. I found the work extremely interesting so I stuck around as long as possible. I’m getting married on Saturday and then I am off to Kenya for a couple weeks before school starts. I plan to continue working here part-time throughout the school year if my schedule permits. It would be nice to take part in the negotiations for which we’ve laid the financial groundwork. That’s when things should get interesting and big numbers start to get thrown around!
Some of the key takeaways from my internship are:
- Entrepreneurs are serial optimists and often times their expectations have to be properly managed or tempered. I’ve never seen such a bad case of “confirmation bias” as I have with dealing with successful entrepreneurs. The more successful they’ve been in their past ventures, the more dangerous they are. Managing expectations and fostering objectivity is equally as important as the quality of work produced.
- Its essential to properly align incentives when dealing with contractors in emerging markets. Upfront fees often lead to flight, while award fees based on successful completion of a project are more effective. There are also large cultural differences inherent in negotiating fees.
- When making projections, triple-check all your assumptions. Something as seemingly minute as an improperly scaled map can ruin a $40 million dollar wind project.
