Creative Day fosters innovation and and teamwork among the Sol Systems team.
If your work days are full with responding to emails, crunching numbers, following up on punch lists, and a portfolio of meeting and phone calls, then you’ll appreciate the importance of taking a time out challenge the status quo. Well, it’s not as much a time out as it is a zoom out.
One of the biggest challenges to innovation and invention is the pressure to get the day-to-day stuff done. So, one day a month the Sol team steps away from the emails and punch lists, and into a full day of thinking, researching, and creating.
We start the day in a circle (coffee in hand!), and share our projects for the day. Creative Day projects can be big and small, and can involve anything from building out a new business initiative and making a process more efficient to researching and writing a juicy thought piece for our blog or Greentechmedia.
Creative Day fosters innovation and and teamwork among the Sol Systems team. It’s a unique experience each time, and a day with lots of buzz and invigorating energy, not to mention a delicious lunch we share together. Then, the day culminates with a closing circle to share our victories, and company-wide happy hour where ideas continue to blossom in extended discussions with team members from other disciplines.
“Creative day is a chance to pull back and look at my work, Sol Systems, and an industry,” said Dan Yonkin, director, tax equity.
Some Creative Day highlights include:
- New business initiatives, including the Sol Commercial Advantage, our partner program for developers seeking financing for their commercial solar projects. Born out of creative day, we announced a partnership with Sungevity in mid-March.
- Research on innovative financing solutions that Sol Systems can institutionalize such as demand charge PPAs, or a way to standardize commercial and solar credit
- Solar finance and policy blogs on community solar, solar game theory, breweries that have gone solar, the fiscal cliff, and more
- A incentive program for employee referrals. As a result, 56% of employees hired in 2014 came through this program.
- Branded recruiting campaigns, including the redesign of our “Working at Sol Systems” page to better inform candidates about the rich corporate culture at Sol
- Improvements to the models we use for SREC pricing, tax equity, and project due diligence
- Trainings for the team on coding, modeling, statistical analysis, and more
“I love hearing about all the cool stuff my colleagues put together at the end of the day,” said Jennifer Williams, analyst, project finance. “It makes me excited to get back in the office Monday morning.”
Creative Day is one of the things that makes working at Sol Systems special. Most important, as Senior Associate Sara Rafalson puts it, “It’s the only day of the month that we can wear jeans.”
ABOUT SOL SYSTEMS
Sol Systems is a solar energy finance and investment firm. The company has facilitated financing for nearly 200MW solar projects on behalf of Fortune 100 corporations, insurance companies, utilities, banks, family offices, and individuals. Sol Systems provides secure, sustainable investment opportunities to investor clients, and sophisticated project financing solutions to developers. The company’s tailored financial services range from tax structured investments and project acquisition, to debt financing and SREC portfolio management. Inc. Magazine named Sol Systems on its annual Inc. 500 list of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies for a second consecutive year, ranking it No. 6 in the nation’s top solar companies in 2014. For more information, please visit www.solsystems.com.
