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Scaling Clean Podcast

Episode 55: Chris Finley, TruGrid CCO, on What Actually Breaks Battery Storage Projects

February 6, 2026

 

Scaling Clean: Chris Finley, CCO of TruGrid

U.S. utility-scale battery storage capacity has grown more than fivefold since 2021. Storage is no longer a niche add-on to power generation. It is becoming a core part of grid reliability and resilience. 

But as storage scales, so do the risks.

Unlike traditional generation assets, battery storage systems sit at the intersection of hardware, software, controls, finance, labor, and operations. Dozens of stakeholders touch a single project, and success depends on how well those pieces are integrated.

That “messy middle” was the focus of my latest Scaling Clean conversation with Chris Finley, Chief Commercial Officer at TruGrid. Chris has spent more than 20 years building utility-scale solar and storage projects across 16 countries, totaling over 8 gigawatts of deployed capacity. Today, he works with developers, asset owners, and utilities to solve the problems that quietly derail storage projects, long before commissioning begins.

Here are three lessons from our conversation that stood out.

Most storage problems live in the gaps.

Storage failures emerge in the overlaps and blind spots between stakeholders. OEMs, controls providers, EPCs, financiers, and asset owners are each focused on their own slice of scope and risk. Individually, those perspectives make sense. But collectively, they create gaps, especially around controls, software integration, commissioning responsibility, and performance expectations.

Without a clear integration plan before construction starts, those gaps turn into lost revenue once a project is live. Decisions that could have been resolved on paper suddenly become schedule delays, change orders, or underperforming assets.

Storage projects are won by coordinating the system as a whole, early.

"We are going to be your quarterback with everybody involved and help facilitate an integration plan upfront. Before a shovel ever hits the ground, we’ll have a commissioning plan that is proactive and ready to go.”

Labor may be the biggest constraint ahead.

Chris flagged a different bottleneck for the industry that’s only getting worse: skilled labor.

Battery storage is scaling at the same time as massive infrastructure investment across the U.S. All of it draws from the same limited pool of skilled tradespeople. Even well-designed projects can struggle if teams can’t staff safely and at scale.

“It's hard to find really good folks that are willing to get out there and do the wrenching. That is a systemic issue for the U.S. at this point.”

Speak less, listen more

In storage, this mindset matters. Developers, asset owners, and utilities don’t need another partner who shows up with predetermined answers. They need partners who ask better questions, listen long enough to understand the real objective, and design around it.

“If you can coalesce a mindset of asking more questions, versus providing more statements, I think that's a safe place to be in any and all conversations you have with anyone.”

Why This Conversation Matters

Battery storage is moving from early adoption to mainstream infrastructure.

Integration, commissioning, labor planning, and risk alignment are strategic decisions that determine whether projects perform as intended. The most valuable insights often come from those operating across the full lifecycle of a project.

Below are some of Chris’ reflections:

  • Integration planning has to happen before construction, not during commissioning.

  • With infrastructure buildout accelerating, lack of skilled labor may become a major bottleneck.

  • Ask better questions early, get stakeholders on the same page, and avoid expensive assumptions.

Listen on Apple, Spotify, Radio Public, Amazon Music, and iHeart.

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Overview

Introduction

Melissa Baldwin:
U.S. utility-scale battery storage capacity has grown more than fivefold since 2021, underscoring how rapidly storage is scaling to support energy deployment. But a battery project's success depends on careful planning of controls, commissioning, and safety, which requires coordination across dozens of moving parts. That's where Chris Finley comes in.

Chris is the Chief Commercial Officer at TruGrid, and he has spent more than 20 years building utility-scale solar and storage projects amounting to more than 8 gigawatts of power. At TruGrid, he leads commercial strategies, including pre-construction and business development, helping customers integrate battery systems and solar projects in ways that reduce risk and speed commissioning timelines, which is so important right now.

Today, we're talking about common mistakes that asset owners and developers can make when they move into storage, possible constraints in the years ahead, and the lessons that come with scaling energy storage systems. Chris, welcome to Scaling Clean.

Chris Finley:

Thank you very much for having me today.

Chris Finley’s Journey Into Renewable Energy

Melissa Baldwin:
Glad to have you. We always start with the background of the folks we're talking to, so we want to look at your background. You've been in the industry for 20 years across solar and storage. What drew you into renewables, and what's keeping you here?

Chris Finley:
That's an interesting question. I started out as more or less a struggling and starving musician in my late teens. Eventually, I needed to support a family and all of the accoutrements that come with that.

My family members were longtime electrical contractors throughout the Southwest in the United States, and my father offered me an opportunity that I could not refuse around the age of 20. That was to start working as an electrician, and that quickly advanced to project management and engineering within the first two or three years.

By that time, I was looking for what was going to be the next evolution, not just for me, but for energy infrastructure and what the U.S. was planning in terms of generation and things of that nature. I kept bumping into solar photovoltaics at the time, and it caught my interest. I haven't looked back.

Melissa Baldwin:
Nice. So do I have it right that you grew up watching your dad and your family wrenching, being electricians, and working hands-on? Is that accurate?

Chris Finley:
Absolutely. I spent my summers from the age of 11 on in the Phoenix, Arizona, heat, pulling cable and other large conductors through conduit banks and doing everything that I certainly took for granted at the time. But that is the bread and butter of essentially what I do here at TruGrid and what we provide as a solution and EPC services.

The Hustle and Work Ethic That Shaped Chris Finley

Melissa Baldwin:
Looking back at your career, is there any mentor who sticks out to you? And if so, can you share what they taught you?

Chris Finley:
Yeah, I've been blessed to have many great mentors, not the least of which was my own father at the very beginning of my career. I was thinking about this as one reflects at the end of every calendar year, just a few weeks ago.

There's a lot of individuality between the two or three core mentors I think back on, but the commonality has definitely been a sense of hustle that I don't think is taught. I think it's an inherent trait, maybe genetic in nature, but I only hope to have a portion of the hustle that any of my mentors certainly exhibited in the time that I was with each of them.

What Hustle Looks Like in the Battery Storage Industry

Melissa Baldwin:
What does that look like to you when you think of the hustle? How do you see that day to day? How does it show up?

Chris Finley:
It's a number of different manifestations, for sure, but I think as it relates to solar and battery storage specifically, we provide contracting services, engineering services, and certainly not the least of which, procurement services.

EPC is not a new business model. It's been something that's been used in infrastructure, large, complex generating sites, and oil and gas for a number of years. But when we are talking about a relatively new mainstream technology that has just met cost parity and economically has become viable, we don't want to come in as an EPC and just assume that lessons learned and practices, whether from engineering, project management, or whatever the facility is, directly apply.

We certainly don't want to be complacent about what the technology is capable of doing in the deployment, construction, and practicality aspects of things, through commissioning and certainly as an operating asset. We, as an EPC, also have an operations and maintenance arm. We want to ensure that we have a long-term viable product in the way of these generating stations once they're complete.

So the hustle comes in finding where the gaps are. There are inherent infant mortality aspects that need to be addressed with new technology. The bottom line is we can't be complacent as an EPC.

I certainly learned that in terms of the initial hustle, and the other piece is grabbing those respective independent power producers and utilities that are hoping to understand this better and becoming that subject matter expert for them even before contracting.

It helps develop the industry. It helps develop relationships. But we, as an EPC, don't sit on our hands. We are actively engaged upstream and downstream in the ecosystem.

The Advice Chris Finley Would Give His Younger Self

Melissa Baldwin:
And if you could go back to the start of your career and give advice to your younger self, what advice would you give yourself?

Chris Finley:
Speak less, listen more. You definitely don't have all the answers. Surround yourself with the folks who do, and learn as much as you possibly can.

If you can coalesce a mindset of asking more questions versus providing more statements, I think that's a safe place to be in any and all conversations, any and all dialogue you have with anyone.

What Working in 16 Countries Taught Chris Finley About Communication

Melissa Baldwin:
Looking at your career, you've worked in 16 countries. Tell me about how working around the globe has influenced what you notice about working in the USA and what we get right and wrong here in the States.

Chris Finley:
Communication style really boils down to two different types in the majority of first- and second-world countries that I have had the blessing of participating in and helping build up.

You have your linear conversation style and your nonlinear conversation style. Linear is very American. We can be blunt. We can be upfront. We can be forward.

Nonlinear countries, parts of Europe, and certainly countries that had been colonized by Europeans early on, can tend to lean toward implications or inferences, a nonlinear communication style.

What you end up finding is that blunt American coming in and trying to explain something might be a little bit harsh. Having humility to understand that first and foremost, and then react to it and try to find a way to bridge the communication gap, should be necessary in any conversation anybody has with anybody.

I think everybody deserves that, but it is quite humbling in those initial business conversations that one might have with a culture or a communicating culture that you just don't have experience with.

Why TruGrid Focused on Battery Storage Integration

Melissa Baldwin:

Well, let's move to the next question. You talked about being an EPC, and it's a business that's been around for a while. TruGrid is a newer brand in the industry. You had your rebrand launch in 2024. How do you show that you're unique? How do you stand out in a sea of sameness as an EPC, in a competitive field?

Chris Finley:
What we, as the management team, decided when we relaunched this brand and the former entity known as SunGrid, now considered TruGrid, was that we wanted to come to market with the expectations of providing niche-specific services related to solar and battery to just a core few long-term partners.

These were partners that we could scale with, that had quite a bit of developed pipeline over the course of the next two, three, or five years. We knew that as a smaller entity, one to 200 folks, we could not serve all masters. So we wanted to be the best we could be with folks that we knew would trust us upfront. Thankfully, praise the good Lord, we are meeting and exceeding those standards.

The service specifically that sets us apart is that we're focused a lot on the battery storage side. Battery storage is still a little bit nuanced. The market itself, with all the different players that exist in the supply chain, has some overlap in scope. There's some gap in scope.

As I mentioned earlier on, we want to be that subject matter expert that can come to a client with this new technology in this infancy of the industry and say, if nothing else, “Hey, we're going to figure out where those gaps and those overlaps are.”

We are going to be your quarterback with everybody involved, the DC block, the EMS, and the BMS. And we are going to help facilitate an integration plan upfront where we can intentionally say that everybody's been partaking in this plan. Everybody's bought into it. And before a shovel ever hits the ground, we have a commissioning plan that is proactive and ready to go.

Whereas in the market, what we had been seeing and what drove us to this intentionality model was the fact that an EPC would take a DC system and set it on piers or concrete pads and pull wire between it, which is rudimentary electrical work, basically, from a high level.

But as with most things that are new to a contractor, you assume a lot of things at a high level from a plan-set perspective. The devil's in the details. There are a lot of gremlins with the software specifically between all of these different players that really just need to coalesce, and we become that glue. We're that subject matter expert.

This was before the Big Beautiful Bill came through and knocked down a lot of the opportunity with solar, but really bolstered and extended the ITC opportunity with battery. We knew that that was going to be an up-and-coming big market. As we see it, even with the OBBB in place, it's expanding quite a bit. Overcoming FEOC, overcoming tariff uncertainty, it's a must.

All to say that we're not without the opportunity of building solar as well for those same key partners who say, “Not just a battery, but we want a battery coupled with another generator.” In some instances, those projects and those performances make sense. So we can provide that as an optionality in most cases as well, and in a lot of cases, behind the meter at a large scale with some of these new demands that we're seeing from the likes of hyperscalers and data centers.

So those are the perspectives that really set us apart from our initial business model and reason for relaunching the brand.

The Two Biggest Challenges in Battery Storage Projects

Melissa Baldwin:
Chris, what you were just saying really tees up my next question nicely, because you've recently published a piece on five of the overlooked details that can make or break a battery storage project. Can you explain for our listeners what those pieces are and which one is the most common that you see?

Chris Finley:
Those five pieces are ever-evolving. I'll touch on the two that maintain, for us, relative amounts of consistent heartache. But there are a number beyond them, for sure.

It's hard to find really good folks who are willing to get out there and do the wrenching, as you put it earlier. We're up against a massive infrastructure boom that's drawing from the same pool. So it's a compounding issue all the while.

We are all trying to keep up with building generators that, in turn, feed whatever else is being constructed with the same labor pool. So supply and demand are all pushing and pulling right now.

Just like anything else, we like to think that we're taking a proactive approach. We have some of our own training programs. We are somewhat double-breasted in terms of using union labor in certain markets and open-shop labor in others. A lot of our regions and a lot of the clients that we serve are in open-shop markets where that is the primary driver for our labor.

In those instances, yeah, we take a lot of time with some of the new hires who have very limited experience and walk them through, first and foremost, all of our safety protocols on-site. We spend a lot of time making sure that we are putting forth the knowledge necessary to not just carry out the project, but carry out those individuals and their careers going forward.

Now, in terms of other points that we're dealing with, the other major one, again, just comes from the lack of experience that we all have on the battery side of things, primarily related to third-party finance expectations and/or contracting gaps.

We talked about the gaps in technology and collaboration with just integrating the individual pieces of hardware, but there are still inherent gaps in terms of what the facility is required to do from a finance perspective.

Are you supposed to be pushing and pulling energy 100% of the time? Is it in very specific arbitrage plays at certain times of the day, like we see in ERCOT? Are we, as mentioned, broadening the shoulders of an intermittent generator?

These things have to be defined and fully secured. And of course, the operators who are meeting those contractual needs need to have the opportunity to operate the facility in those manners as well.

So are all the controls in place? Are all the constraints out of the way so that everybody's getting what they were expecting to get out of the facility?

Why Skilled Electricians Still Matter in the Age of AI

Melissa Baldwin:
With what we see AI doing to entry-level white-collar jobs, I wonder if that will create a resurgence in hands-on work. I guess the question for you would be, do you feel like robots could replace electricians? Or do you feel like there's maybe job security in that type of EPC electrical work?

Chris Finley:
The way robots are viewed and considered, there's an absolute possibility that these advanced pieces of technology with some level of AI can do more than we think.

But the way that we, as an organization, are looking at AI in general across the board, whether it be white-collar back office or blue-collar out in the field, is: how can we integrate it purely as a tool?

We're obviously very early on with AI, depending on who you talk to. But I would say we're still very early on. We're still building to that degree of fully understanding the limitations of ourselves and the limitations of the actual technology.

In my opinion, and in the opinion of some of my colleagues here at TruGrid, AI is being misconstrued as maybe autonomous intellect instead of artificial intellect.

That “set it and forget it” kind of scope or task could be applied, and you just back away, and that's just one less head you have to worry about on your staff. That's not something that we think is, one, a responsible way of conducting any sort of business and, two, a responsible way to put forth some level of community engagement and make sure that our culture and our folks are taken care of.

So what this all boils down to is, yes, we are proponents of AI, but AI is artificial intelligence, not autonomous intelligence. We use it as tools. So setting base, keeping metrics, all the binary stuff. I use binary because it fits so well, but man, that's all it is. It's binary output.

Adapting to Uncertainty in the Battery Storage Industry

Melissa Baldwin:
Okay, so job security for now for electricians. Good. I want to come back to the research that you did and that thought leadership piece you put out. Just thinking about looking ahead for the next three to five years, what do you think is going to be the biggest constraint for storage integration?

Chris Finley:
I think the number one biggest concern for me personally is just being able to adapt to the agenda of whatever administration is running the show in the U.S. at any given point.

Not knowing what that next shoe to drop, so to speak, is going to be is always the contention for me and planning with my team. When we receive these types of questions from clients, it's honestly not, “What do we feel is going to be the next problem?” It's, “How do we stay adaptable enough to provide immediate solutions?”

Keep our heads on the swivel. Going back to the AI question, use the experience that we have to know that if it's a tariff issue, we have contingency plans with U.S.-based manufacturers to a certain degree. If it's an FEOC-like issue, again, similar answer.

We have our hedged approach with domestic content and domestic use cases for labor and everything else. If it is just a pure material shortage, well, in that case, we will look at different technologies that can still drive storage in general. It might not be lithium. It might be sodium. It might be gravity-fed. It might be something else.

But we know the macro level that we're trying to solve for. We're just living in a space constrained by the materials and the economics of those materials that make the most sense right now. That's where someone, I think, could get complacent. So we stay adaptable.

The Changing Role of EPCs in Energy Storage

Melissa Baldwin:
That's great, though. It sounds like you can become technology agnostic. And you hit on the next question a bit here, but I'll still give it to you in case you want to add more.

You talked about not being complacent. The opposite of that is evolving. So what do you think will be the evolution of EPCs as storage grows in its importance, as it becomes a bigger part of grid planning?

Chris Finley:
Well, without sounding a little doom and gloom, I'm thinking that a large subset of these biggest infrastructure companies, mainly the data-driven companies that require their own data center facilities, are going to start gobbling up a little bit more of the upstream in terms of their capital expenditure spend.

What I mean by that, and we saw a recent acquisition happen with Google and Intersect Power.

Melissa Baldwin:
I was just thinking of that. Yep, and Sheldon Kimber.

Chris Finley:
Yeah, that's an 800-pound gorilla gobbling up a great organization that Mr. Kimber put together and certainly deserves the opportunity and the synergy that that creates for Google.

When does the consideration for owning the design, owning the relationships with the critical long-lead equipment, and maybe even the construction force become so integrated into what's becoming just a massive organization? When does that happen? When does that become real?

Is there an intersection point of risk versus reward that always insulates that? I would have thought there was between a development firm and an end user, but those lines have been blurred, or at least risk perspectives have changed and evolved as well. So we're on the ready.

Integrated into something larger, even into a development firm at some point, that wouldn't surprise us. But the tiny little sliver of scope that we have in the supply chain view of things, that doesn't change. It's just how we are providing the value and absorbing the risk as an EPC provider.

How TruGrid Uses Thought Leadership to Stand Out

Melissa Baldwin:
I want to switch now to marketing and AI. You talked already about your company's approach to AI, but I want to ask you about marketing. In your opinion, what marketing tactics has your company used that have generated the most success for you and the best results?

Chris Finley:
Yeah, being a battery- and solar-focused EPC, our key demographic is extremely niche, right? We're not doing email blasts. We're not doing commercials. We're not looking at the macro.

Not because there's not still an inherent return, I'm sure, in doing that, but we're very guerrilla warfare in terms of our penetration into the market. So we use AI to generate a lot of thought leadership pieces, just like the five instances that we were discussing.

The world won't know that we are subject matter experts around battery storage unless we make it known. So we push that quite a bit through social media. And that's where AI has actually been extremely helpful within the organization as a whole.

AI within marketing has been a heavy-handed tool to lay out the straw man initially, get a draft, and start to pull together the pieces that formulate a really good thought leadership piece in the way of putting things out in the written word.

We also use that as a script or a playbook to expand on speaking opportunities where we can, just like this forum, really lean into the points and pieces during any season of the industry that we feel is strong enough, important enough, or maybe just the big glaring thing in the room at that point that needs to get addressed.

Why TruGrid Sees Complacency as the Biggest Risk

Melissa Baldwin:
And what do you think is the toughest challenge in marketing that you have right now?

Chris Finley:
Making sure that we are not becoming complacent. I keep using that word. It's our archenemy, right?

Just as one can say, “I'm an EPC, and all I do is the E, P, and C. Everything else, you guys figure out,” we could just as easily say that our marketing efforts are focused on the biggest and loudest things, and we just keep pushing, pushing, pushing.

Well, you can make folks aware, and that's fine. But if you're not following through with a solution, a way to solve that problem or a multitude of them, or enticing the idea of maybe some concepts that are hard to grasp or hard to achieve, but at least start the dialogue, you're stagnant, right?

So our hope is that it's not just a thought piece, not just something that, “Okay, well, those guys are thinking about it,” but we're provoking engagement.

What TruGrid Sees That Clients Often Miss

Melissa Baldwin:
One of the ways that we think about creating content is for subject matter experts like you to share something about your target audience that they don't already know about themselves, but something that you know and you see because you deal with them all the time.

Can you think of anything like that, something that you see in your clients, like a trend or anything at all that you're aware of that they may not be aware of?

Chris Finley:
Everybody works in their own little atmospheres, and they form their own opinions. As an EPC, we get to share in the good opinions and the bad opinions of a broader audience.

I think a developer, utility, or even a private equity firm looking to invest in something and coalesce everything together in a little bit more of a bootstrap model, they all have an opinion, a perspective on the technology that they believe is going to work, or a technology provider, a way to engineer it, or some other monetized strategy on how to use the battery or a generator like a solar plant.

We are open to listening to all of it and really putting ourselves in the perspective of that respective client. And until we are completely, or at least 95% in sync, and understanding their go-to-market strategy, it's not until that point where we get to say, “Well, we're dealing with these other folks, never named or anything of that nature, but this is how they perceive it. And this is how they perceive it.”

One entity would manage a risk associated with labor one way, whereas another entity could care less about the labor, just throws it on the EPC and says, “That's your risk. But I'm really concerned about using this technology that might have a faster discharge rate or something that makes the widget better than any of the other problems that they're hoping to solve.”

But we like to step in and say, “Listen, as a subject matter expert with these different perspectives, you're looking at a diamond through this one facet. Well, we're looking at the diamond spinning and seeing every facet. What can we share with you out of that to provide some level of value?”

Melissa Baldwin:
I love the diamond analogy. That's beautiful.

Chris Finley:
Now we go back to analogies. Hopefully, we can write a few of these down and publish them or something. I don't know.

What Chris Finley Learns From Simon Sinek’s Work

Melissa Baldwin:
All right, well, let's move on to a different topic. For you personally, Chris, what do you follow? What do you read? What book or podcast, or whatever media you consume, have you listened to or learned from that you would recommend for our listeners on the podcast?

Chris Finley:
I've been spending a lot of time on leadership, the typical leadership guys, your Maxwells and a few others.

I've been on and off with Simon Sinek for the last five years. Not for any other reason than I love taking in his cerebral approach to working with the youthful generation to really peel apart somebody's why.

Going back to communications, that in and of itself is, those are always inherent thoughts and ideas that exist in the back of my head when I'm talking to somebody new. What is driving this person? What is not just getting them out of bed? What's causing them to think three, five years down the line?

And Simon does a really great job of identifying not just how different generations take that perspective, but how different generations have perceived the why question in different ways in corporate organizations throughout a number of different years. He uses a few case points, your Southwest Airlines, your GEs, and really dives into the anthropology of these organizations, which I truly enjoy.

The Role of Family, Music, and Faith in Chris Finley’s Life

Melissa Baldwin:
Great. And what about in your personal life? What do you do? You're a busy guy. You're running important parts of the business. What do you do in your personal life to help you re-center? Or what do you do to bring yourself joy?

Chris Finley:
I participate a lot in church functions. I'm very blessed and fortunate to be part of a great church and volunteer quite a bit in a local community, just trying to leave things better than I found them in that regard.

That brings a lot of peace and inner joy and reflection at any given point. Outside of that, music remains a big part of my life. I do spend a lot of time here in my home studio and spend time teaching and passing a lot of my interests, hobbies, and passions to my children, my 13-year-old and my 10-year-old.

With the absolute cornerstone of our household, their mother, my beautiful wife, Shelly, we tackle homeschooling them, which is very much a focal point of our spare time. But it is a massive piece of our household.

So spending time with them, showing them what I do, showing them what Mom does, I'm also an active day trader and family office participant, and showing my kids generally things that you just wouldn't find in traditional school settings has kind of been a recent hobby in the last six or seven years.

And then health and fitness has always been a mainstay for me. I don't want to say I spend as much time as I do in the gym, but it definitely releases some stress.

Melissa Baldwin:
Nice. What instrument do you play?

Chris Finley:
Quite a few. I did some studio guitar work in my late teens for some local studios, anything from electric to classical guitar, just kind of whatever anybody needed.

I play piano, play some horn instruments, and a little bit of percussion. I never really just dove into one. It was more, if I could grab a collection of people who were even relatively capable of playing an instrument, I'd play whatever wasn't around, and we would make music together. And that was always my goal, right? Just kind of bringing community together and having something beautiful to show for it. If that didn't sound too cheesy.

What Music Taught Chris Finley About Leadership

Melissa Baldwin:
Actually, I wanted to ask you a follow-up on that. One of our other clients is Nextpower, Dan Shugar, formerly Nextracker. And he's another musician, and he's so passionate about his music.

We noticed this for him, that being a musician can impact the way that you work. So what do you notice about that? Your skills as a musician, the way that you treat music, the way that you read it, how do you notice that impacting your approach to your job?

Chris Finley:
I can certainly play sheet music and recreate something with a little bit of adaptation just to make it my own. But it's either when creating music or playing with anybody, that improvisation aspect that I believe makes a musician truly an artist versus just a person that plays an instrument or follows a guideline.

That allows me to, again, stretch my perspective, my view, and my way to react. It slows me down in a lot of cases where I am adaptable. And maybe I hit the wrong note, but I move into a different key, and the audience is none the wiser. That's hopefully what I can do when I make mistakes as a leader.

How TruGrid Stayed Focused During an Industry Slowdown

Melissa Baldwin:
So music, family, and church bring you joy. Let's flip now to talk about your team and your company. What are you doing in your company to help motivate your folks, especially when we go through tough times, which I think it's safe to say 2025 and 2026 have put a lot of pressure on our industry right now?

Chris Finley:
I don't want to be in a position where I'm just cheerleading all the time as a leader, or especially the leader of the team that's creating the new business opportunities. I try to be as forthcoming as possible.

It's a little bit of binary, providing what the market is doing, where those headwinds are known, and where the tailwinds are known in good environments as well.

A lot of the communication aspects that we touched on, a lot of the solution stuff that we're trying to provide a respective client base, I focus on that in good and bad markets because that is our DNA.

And maybe in a bad market, we know it's not always going to be bad. And we know that there's an uptick, and we, as the leadership team, have ideally budgeted in a way that we can stomach the downturns as well as take advantage of the upturns.

But it's not a time to sulk. It's not a time to mope around. And if nothing else, this industry specifically has taught me, make hay while the sun's shining. I mean, as bad as that is, it's the truth of it.

We can tighten our process flow. We can write more guidelines. We can get more effective and efficient in how we do our business by even taking a step back a quarter or two, seeing what worked well, what didn't, and adjusting our playbook for when that upturn comes.

Chris Finley’s Simple Leadership Mantra

Melissa Baldwin:
So my last question, is there anything else that you'd like to share with our listeners?

Chris Finley:
Always stay hungry. Always stay humble. If you're contributing and you're not finding joy, then you're probably not contributing where you were intended to contribute.

I mean, if my career was summed up into just two or three lines that I more or less use as a mantra, that would be it.

Melissa Baldwin:
Okay, all right, Chris, thank you so much for joining Scaling Clean. It's been a pleasure to have you.

Chris Finley:
Thank you so much, Melissa. I really appreciate it.