As listeners know, our show engages CEOs in conversations that harvest best practices and usable tips to successfully build, run and lead companies. Our diverse lineup has featured power sector veterans, techies, individuals with finance and energy trading backgrounds, among others. Now, we introduce our first CEO with an environmental consulting background, Robin Laine. She’s also possibly the youngest CEO we’ve had on the show.
Robin now runs the renewable SaaS company Transect. She founded her company with a mission to revolutionize the way traditional environmental consulting firms evaluate potential development sites for renewable energy projects. After dedicating 11 years to three different traditional environmental consulting firms, Robin recognized the need for change.
Here are Robin’s B3P’s (Big Three Points) from the show:
8:31 – Working in clean energy fosters a unique and collaborative environment, driven by a shared commitment to save our planet. Due to the industry's rapid technological advancements, we work in a space with creative mindsets and problem solvers.
11:00 – As a new CEO, having a clear "why" is crucial. It helps overcome fundraising rejections, challenges with early clients, and product criticism. It’s also important to aim for your product to be 10x better than the current solution.
27:34 – The energy transition has the current administration's support. We also have both the appeal of capitalism and public opinion urging the private sector to rapidly expand power generation and integrate it into the grid. This creates a positive momentum for the transition.
Thank you for speaking with us, Robin.
Also listen on Apple, Spotify, Radio Public, Amazon Music, iHeart, and Google Podcasts.
Mike Casey:
Hello, cleantechers, and welcome back to another episode of Scaling Clean. As listeners know, our show is tightly focused on interviewing CEOs to glean usable best practices and tips on how to build, run, and lead companies. One of the things I'm fascinated by is the backgrounds of our guests. We've had serial entrepreneurs, power sector veterans, techies, people with finance and energy trading backgrounds. But Robin Laine is our first environmental consultant by training. She's also possibly the youngest CEO we've had on the show and a new mother to boot. Robin now runs the fast-growing renewable SaaS company Transect, it's based in Texas. She founded her company to improve the way traditional environmental consulting firms assess potential development sites for renewable energy developers. Robin knew she was sitting out to disrupt her alma mater and companies like it after spending 11 years at three different traditional environmental consulting firms. Robin, welcome to the show.
Robin Laine:
Hey Mike, thanks for having me.
Mike Casey:
All right, let's start with your background. How would you summarize your career and how it landed you in the corner office, so to speak?
Robin Laine:
So I am a biologist by training. I started out in the field 17 years ago, working for proposed land development projects. I had hiking boots and snake guards and a backpack full of water, stepping over rattlesnakes, the whole thing. I moved out of the field fairly quickly after that into doing the environmental permitting and project management side where I permitted probably over 10,000 miles of linear projects and thousands of acres of energy and real estate and infrastructure projects.
In my last position, before I started Transect, I was the National Program Manager for the natural resources department at a nationwide consulting firm. So I was running a team of other people like me and while I was running that team and trying to meet our revenue targets, I saw a lot of the gross inefficiencies of our industry, just how laborious it was to help our customers assess, just simply assess a project site. A lot of our work involved repetitive research and inefficient and repetitive reporting and finding, replacing, and saving the same reports for different clients in similar geographies, all while billing more hours than we needed or I was comfortable billing, right? Because of revenue, hashtag revenue.
And so the industry really hadn't advanced much since the 70s with a lot of passage of a lot of our nation's landmark environmental regulations like NEPA and the Endangered Species Act. And so I decided to create Transect. I was ready to leave corporate America and came up with this idea of creating Transect to help solve these problems, help land developers make their siting decisions faster with technology. And here we are.
Mike Casey:
Alright, if we split-screened footage of you managing a human being for the first time in your career and we compared it at the same time a footage of you managing and leading now what differences would we see?
Robin Laine:
Honestly, I'm still trying to figure out how to be a good manager. Managing people is very hard. It's like when you're good at something like environmental due diligence and permitting and fieldwork, then the powers that be put you in charge of other people to do that and think that you're going to be good at managing them and managing people is a completely different skill that I've had to learn over time and I've learned a lot of lessons and I've learned some of them the hard way.
I think what's important now about managing people as I'm still learning how to be a good manager is at least trying to create a lot more space for feedback from my team and then prioritizing finding ways to address concerns and kind of support that feedback. I think in the past I had kind of earmuffs or blinders on really driving towards revenue or project completion or I paid you to do it up, just do the thing and let me know when it's done. And that's not a great way to be a manager. I didn't know much back then about management, but I've been around some wonderful staff and had some wonderful managers at this point in time who've taught me that there are better ways to do things.
And so at Transect, we are culture first at this point in time, we care a lot about our people. And so I think that the manager part of me now cares a lot more about feedback and prioritizes that feedback.
Mike Casey:
Got it. This is your first clean economy company. What drew you to this sector and what keeps you there?
Robin Laine:
Well, as this is my first company, all in, I think it was a pretty logical tie-in with my background in ecology and the environment. Fun fact. I don't know if you knew this about me, Mike, but I actually used to be a zookeeper when I was in college. And so I've always wanted to be outside. I worked for a nonprofit rescue zoo, like old circus tigers and things like that. And so I've always just had an interest in being outside in the natural wonders that are part of our earth. And there's a natural correlation there between the interests I've had my whole life and using that expertise to help accelerate the energy transition, which is ultimately prioritizing this world that we live in.
Mike Casey:
Okay, I gotta ask you, because we're Tigercomm, you have to tell me at least a minute of explanation about what it's like to care for tigers at a rescue, what's it like to care for a rescued tiger?
Robin Laine:
They're like big house cats. They don't meow, but they have this chuffing sound that they make when they're happy to see you. And they're just big house cats. They rub up against the cage and everything. And I don't know, they were a very special animal to work with.
Mike Casey:
That's so cool. Oh my gosh, how long did you do that for?
Robin Laine:
I did it on and off for three years in college. I started as an intern and then came on as a part-time keeper for a couple of years.
Mike Casey:
If you can find me one here in the National Capital Area, I'll volunteer there. That would be so cool.
Robin Laine:
If you're okay scooping poop for a while, that's where you start. You start with the poop scoop.
Mike Casey:
I have Mastiff Breed, so I've been scooping poop for 20 years and I'm really good at it. But hey, all right, we'll get back to what these listeners actually want to hear. We got a little poopy in this conversation. Okay, here we go. As you've grown in your current job, we were at RE+ together and you were matching notes with other CEOs. As you've kind of traveled around the business world in your current role, have you had a chance to compare notes with people who run companies in more mature sectors? If you have, have you noticed a difference in how they experience their work and what's demanded from them versus what's demanded from you as running a clean economy company?
Robin Laine:
I'm gonna go back to some of my prior experience as well because I've not always been in the clean energy space. My background is in commercial real estate and traditional energy, and infrastructure and transportation, and some of the more legacy industries. And it feels different being in clean energy because it feels like the rallying cry of the energy transition is motivating in a different way than we find in other industries that might be motivated by, I'm not gonna say like capitalism, but kind of a more traditional business model that hasn't been created around a rallying cry of kind of more like a social problem that we have or kind of the problem of this earth that we live on.
And so it feels like this industry has much more of a collaborative mindset when it comes to things like technology adoption and rate of change. It also feels like the newer industry, going back to maybe my company or companies in my space compared to maybe more legacy companies, there are a lot of newer players involved, both on the supply and the demand side. And so it feels like this industry is open-minded to that problem solving and it really kind of creates a very fun and creative space to play in because we're all looking for new solutions and we don't have legacy processes and legacy methods that we're following.
Mike Casey:
I love that description, boy, everything you said resonates with my experience. Just every single word. It is nicely said. Okay. You quit your job tomorrow. You become a lecturer at the University of Texas's Business School. Your first lecture is about the role of the effective CEO. How will you explain that to your students? What are the components of the job and how would you rank them? Your most important thing, your next most important thing, et cetera.
Robin Laine:
This is hard because as a startup CEO, there are life cycles or life stages to what I've done. I think there are qualifications and things that an early-stage CEO needs to have and needs to focus on. And then as I've grown my company, my focus has had to change a little bit. And so I'm going to answer this in a couple of parts. I think in the early stage it is so important to have some sort of firmness of purpose. You have to have the why or the passion because that is the only thing that's going to get you through all of the noes of fundraising and all of the noes of first clients and the noes of I don't like your product and that can be hard.
It's definitely the most uphill slog of this journey so far has been those early stages when it's exciting because you have an idea and you have some early adoption. And when you get that first contract, it's amazing and you feel so validated. But it's really hard to make sure you have the right product. And so really having the passion and the why to get there is a characteristic that a CEO absolutely has to have if you're gonna start a company, like me, and a little bit of crazy factor because this is crazy-making. You need to be on the scale of crazy, just like a little bit to decide you wanna start your own company. I'm sure you feel the same way, Mike, as a founder of a company. It can be lonely at the top, right? And a trudge. I think the CEO also needs to have some pretty intense technical skills in the problem they're trying to solve.
So my background is in environmental consulting. It's a logical step for me to then use technology to try to solve some of the problems that I found in my industry. I think that that's important. And then creativity and the desire to solve the problem enough to find product-market fit, I think I read this in a book, I think it's called ‘Exponential Organizations’. I read it early on in my career. And there's this concept of making sure that whatever you are building as a tech founder is 10x better than the current solution.
Mike Casey:
I love that, that's so good.
Robin Laine:
And having that statistic because it takes a lot for anybody to change the way they're doing something. It has to be 10x better in order to change the process of what you're doing right now, change contracting, change pricing, all of that. It has to be 10x better.
And it takes a lot of creativity and steadfastness to find that solution and to get to that product-market fit. Once you've got product-market fit, at least in your individual and kind of your ideal customer profile, then you start moving into the growth stage. And I think we're growth stage at this point in time. And the number one thing that I think I can do as a CEO at this point in time is hire good people.
Mike Casey:
Yeah.
Robin Laine:
Because I can no longer do it on my own. It's no longer just a small team, a tiger team. This tiger theme keeps coming up. It's no longer a small tiger team of people trying to build this business. Now, the fate of the business is in hiring the right people. And that I think is the number one thing that CEOs should be doing.
I think secondary to that, it's continuing to define the North Star of where you want the company to go and holdings, but while holding space for new ideas, I always have to, as a CEO know where I want my company to go, but a lot has changed. The macro trends have changed. There are new technologies, there are new competitors, and I have to be willing to make space and hold space for how those new influences impact our company and where we're going.
Mike Casey:
Love that. Absolutely love that. Okay, we're going to come back to hiring here. In the hypothetical classroom, several of your students approach you to ask for advice on how they can get into a corner office like the one you occupy. What advice do you give them?
Robin Laine:
I really feel for the current college kids, they're entering the workforce in a hard time coming off the heels of COVID and recession and inflation fears and climate change, and from what I've read, there's a lot of pessimism around the economic opportunity for them. That being said, I think my advice is fairly timeless. I think this worked well for me. And that is to master a craft, to get good at something because then people will notice and doors will open. I think that the first decade out of college is about establishing a career. I mean, I started at the bottom in the field with hiking boots, and a bottle of water, and 105-degree heat. It sucked at times, but it is where we have to start.
And I got really good at that. But it's a grind and it lays the foundation for all those future opportunities. I was quite good at what I did. And I was noticed by someone who worked with our company and was hired away. And that's where I started getting into leadership positions. So being really good at what you do is the key to having a successful career.
As a college grad is trying to figure out what they wanna do and what they are good at, I think the word of warning is to be careful how much job hopping is done. Because for me, any resume that shows or hints at kind of that lack of commitment and that lack of trying to get good at one thing, typically that resume goes to the bottom of my pile. So I think commitment.
Mike Casey:
Got you.
Robin Laine:
Knowing that it's a bit of a grind, knowing that every job isn't going to be your dream job, but it helps you get good at your craft is I think how you get noticed.
Mike Casey:
And some of those students that seek your advice after the first lecture, they're young women. Are you going to give them a customized version of that advice for young women?
Robin Laine:
Hate that I am saying this but because I've gone through it in some more traditional industries, the same advice applies with the asterisk that I think we have to work a little bit harder. And I hate that but it's true, especially in fields that are traditionally dominated by men, which is not a new message. But I think the secret that I would give to them, the secret weapon, will always be to find other women, build those professional and friendly relationships with, because it's almost an unspoken code that will help each other open doors, even if we have a very new or tangential relationship from whatever position we're in because it does feel like within industries, it's a small cohort and we want to see each other succeed.
And so I would say the secret weapon is to find the women in the industries and build those relationships because those women that do have seats at the table and that do have those corner offices, we are very willing, at least I know I am, to take cold calls from women who are interested in doing what I'm doing or need help just because it's a small cohort, and I just wanna help.
Mike Casey:
Nice. Okay. Let's go back to hiring. Hiring is almost always cited as one of the hardest parts of the CEO's job. What have you learned about hiring?
Robin Laine:
This may sound like a really simple answer, and this is actually something our current COO, Peter at my company taught me, always meet them in person, always. In this age of remote work, it's very tempting to do all the interviews over Zoom. And I have noticed that we have done interviews, you think you found the right candidate, you think they're everything you want them to be. And then you meet them in person. And it's a pretty immediate no.
You're like, wow, I'm glad I flew you here because this relationship would not have worked out. And there's just something about being in person that you can't figure out over Zoom or over remote. And so it feels like a really simple solution. But man, I think we have made some really strong choices by following that.
Mike Casey:
That's a really good rule. It's interesting. I remember talking to somebody who ran one of the major trade shows and they said that during the pandemic when they were trying to replicate trade shows all online, the thing that once the pandemic began to recede and they were going to bring back in-person convenings, the thing that the industry told this person and his colleagues was, ‘We simply cannot virtually replicate the sales conversation, the in-person sales conversation. So there's something about humans that we need to meet in person to ground the relationship at a certain depth. And without it, it's hard to do the really big things if we've never met in person’. And, to me, it's a mystery why, but it makes total sense at the same time. I don't know if that's your thinking as well.
Robin Laine:
Yeah, absolutely. You can learn things and there's just a vibe when you're in person that you can't pick up on over Zoom. And there's a relationship built there or potentially built or pretty clear, you don't want to build that relationship pretty quickly. And for a small company, it can be taxing to fly in four or five candidates and do the whole interview thing in the dinner thing, but we've just found that it's a hundred percent worth it.
Mike Casey:
Do you have a go-to interview question? And if so, what is it? What does it tell you?
Robin Laine:
So at this stage in where I am in running my company, I have folks on my leadership team who are really great at assessing actual technical skill for the different roles that we're hiring. My go-to at this point in time, because I want to make sure that we are hiring culture first and that I am creating a company where people want to work. My go-to question is always what is important to you about the place where you work?
Because if we can't offer that to that person, it's not gonna be a good fit. I wanna make sure that it's not just about, what they're doing for us, but I as a CEO wanna make sure that every single new person that I hire is coming in with an expectation of something I can meet. Otherwise, nobody's gonna be happy.
Mike Casey:
I love that. That's really good. Okay. In your experience running Transect, is success in business more reliant on what you choose not to do or what you choose to do?
Robin Laine:
That's kind of a complicated question. My first thought is, what is success? Success for me feels very much like a moving target. As soon as we at Transect meet one revenue goal or one fundraising target, there's another one right behind it, giving me the next standard of success. And so I try to have a growth mindset around success by tracking what we've learned as a business, as well as what I'm learning as a leader through the trials and tribulations of growing a business. But in order to try to specifically answer the question and also to give a non-answer, I think it's both because it comes in the form of focus, I think what this question is trying to get to is how do you focus? For instance, at Transect, we do build products that our ideal customer profile wants to buy. And we make sure that we don't get distracted with moon shots and edge cases.
As I mentioned in my last question, we do focus on culture, we don't tolerate animosity or harshness. And so it feels like for every do, there's a don't, and it's all about focus. Because if we don't focus, then we're just distracted and all over the place, and I'm not sure that we're all rowing in the same direction. So I don't know, it's not about doing or not doing, it's about knowing what's important and focusing on those things.
Mike Casey:
Okay, last two questions. This one's my favorite. I love the answers we get back. What have you found that you need to do at work and at home or both that really elevate your day-to-day performance as a CEO? I've had every answer from one CEO boxes, another one gets up at 5.30 in the morning. Another one works on antique cars. One goes to the opera. One takes hikes with her family and another one batches electronic interruptions. So there are ways, big and small, people habitualize themselves in order to optimize their performance as a CEO.
You're a new mom. So I know that those of us who have become parents have realized that children are the rock that lands in the middle of your life and everything gets squashed out to the side. So optimizing performance when you're as sleep-deprived as you are becomes probably an even more acute question. So I think the rawness of the answer is going to be very helpful to our listeners.
Robin Laine:
I think there are two answers here. One is what I do at work to make sure I stay focused. And this could apply to anybody. In my role as a CEO, as it's been evolving from an early founder CEO doing everything to a scalable CEO, it really helped. An exercise I went through recently was to list out all the things I need to accomplish in buckets and tag a percentage of my time I should be spending on those. And then I track that to make sure I'm not spending an outsized portion of my time on things that don't impact the business and making sure I do spend a majority of my time on things where I can have an impact, like on hiring, business development, evangelizing, PR, things like that. So that's practically what I do during my day.
The totally impractical and not sustainable way I'm maintaining my CEO lifestyle right now is I'm going to one up on whoever gets up at 5.30, I get up at 3.30, not every day, but probably at least two days a week. I get up at 3.30. Sometimes it's cause the baby's awake anyway. And so I take care of her and then I get up and I start my day and I go to work. And it's amazing. I'm a morning person. And so I've had to shift my day from ending at 5 or 6 to ending at 4 so I can spend time with my family. And in order to make sure I have that quality concentration time, I've moved some of the start days of some of my times to 3.30, which is painful, but I've gotten used to it and I am so productive, I kind of look forward to it.
Mike Casey:
Do you need an alarm clock to get up at 3.30? That's what I want to know.
Robin Laine:
Yes, if I'm getting up because I've decided to, I definitely need an alarm clock, but oftentimes I'm getting up because there's a little person in my house across the hallway who's yelling at me and I'll just take advantage of the fact that I'm up anyways and start working.
Mike Casey:
Okay, I get it. Has your work left you a climate optimist, a climate pessimist, and why?
Robin Laine:
So I feel like I'm typically a neutralist, but in this case, I'm feeling optimistic. The energy transition has the support of the current administration, which is great. We have both kind of the appeal of capitalism and the court of public opinion driving the private sector to move as fast as possible to build more power gen and to get it on the grid. And that feels good for now, which is good. I also, as you mentioned, have a new baby daughter with her whole life ahead of her on this planet. And I feel like I have to be optimistic for her that she reaps the benefits in her future for what we're doing right now. Maybe I live in a bubble, but I feel optimistic about all of the wonderful things that are going on in this industry right now, how collaborative it is, and how creative we're trying to be.
Mike Casey:
Robin Laine, I want to thank you for coming on the show. It has been a super fun conversation. I think listeners are going to really like it. They're going to benefit from it. I appreciate the work you're doing at Transect and out in the world. Full disclosure to our listeners, you are a client of ours, but most of our CEO guests are not. And I still thought this was a fascinating conversation. So thanks for honoring us with your time and thanks for the work you're doing out in the clean economy.
Robin Laine:
Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.