Boat Captain to Boardroom: Sometimes the Barrier Isn’t the Product, It’s the LanguageBoat Captain to Boardroom: Sometimes the Barrier Isn’t the Product, It’s the Language

Boat Captain to Boardroom: Sometimes the Barrier Isn’t the Product, It’s the Language Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White, and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, mate? 

Carman Pirie: I am enthusiastic for today’s podcast. Great to be recording with you today, sir. 

Jeff White: Yeah, no, this is a really interesting topic.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I think, the world of manufacturing, marketing, industrial marketing, et cetera, there’s so much we talk about around having to the kind of dynamics of having to speak to very technical people. And how it can be intimidating, I think, for people who aren’t in the space who are just entering it. This notion that they have to be deeply technical and knowledgeable in order to market what it is they’re being tasked with marketing. And I love the extra layer of challenge that today’s guest is experiencing with all of this. So I think it’s a cool thing to dive into the challenge and opportunity.

Jeff White: Yeah. The neat way to talk about things. So joining us today is Jennifer McQuilken. Jennifer is the Vice President, Corporate Communications at Enchanted Rock. Welcome to the Cooling. Jennifer. 

Jennifer McQuilken: Thanks so much for having me, 

Carman Pirie: Jennifer. I’ve gotta ask please tell our listeners what is Enchanted Rock? It’s a very different company name and I’m guessing many people haven’t heard of it, but, so maybe tell us a little bit about the firm, if you would. 

Jennifer McQuilken: Oh, sure thing. Enchanted Rock. We do onsite power generation. That’s really what it boils down to. It’s for companies, organizations, critical infrastructure really they cannot afford to be without power. Even a blip could cost them millions of dollars or even lives. 

Carman Pirie: Very cool. And and how did you end up there, Jennifer? Tell us a little bit about your background. 

Jennifer McQuilken: Actually it was a little bit by chance. I have a varied background. I have done everything from nonprofits to having my own agency to running a law firm and being a boat captain along the way. Sometimes people think about, oh, what’s the next step in my career ladder? I don’t think I’m one of those people that ever was like, I’m gonna achieve this. I’m more, this looks really interesting. I’m gonna go do that for a little while. That’s how I found Enchanted Rock. I had been at Cummins managing their marketing communications globally for the Marine and Oil and Gas divisions, and Enchanted Rock came up and it was an opportunity to get in with a smaller company, be able to make a difference, and I believe in what they sell. 

Jeff White: I think we should just derail this entire thing and talk about what being a boat captain is like.

Jennifer McQuilken: I would be more than happy to talk about boats all day long.

Carman Pirie: This is the thing about people who are into boats, Jeff, if if you open that door, they’re walking through it. 

Jeff White: Yeah. This is like me and bikes. I get it. But you can’t be a bike captain. It’s just Sounds lame. 

Jennifer McQuilken: No, it doesn’t really work the same way. 

Jeff White: Jennifer, tell us about the core offering and the core product ’cause it is really unique the way that product is brought to market. And also how it works. 

Jennifer McQuilken: I can boil it down to, we have basically a single natural gas generator about 500 kilowatts, and that is it. We do end-to-end services. So we do everything, the whole lifecycle of what a customer would need. But at the end of the day, it is the ERT 500 is our current offering, and we do have a couple. Minor variations of it, depending on emissions packages, but generally it is one generator and we serve all of our customers through that platform. 

Carman Pirie: So you combine them together basically when you need a more generating capacity, et cetera?

Jennifer McQuilken: We do. So they’re smaller than a diesel. If you’re thinking about like a diesel generator, it’s one megawatt, it’s a certain size. Ours are a little bit smaller, but like you said, we actually combine them together. And that was one of the challenges that we were facing is that our generator is not what you would traditionally think is a of a diesel generator. When you’re specking out, backup power for a hospital system. 

Carman Pirie: And there’s so many use cases for this, which, I guess the crux of what we’re talking about here is a notion that. Enchanted Rock needs to serve multiple verticals, multiple use cases speak to different buyer personas and different ICPs. And they do have to do it all basically with one product. 

Jennifer McQuilken: Yeah. At the core though, when you boil it down, it’s really truly about providing that reliable power that someone needs. And then from there you start branching off. You say, oh, okay, this hospital needs about, maybe a 1.5 megawatt system, maybe up to five, depending on the hospital system. And you say, okay, what they’re looking for is to replace your diesel generators or to wrap around their diesel. They’re looking for reliability. Again, that’s what everyone is looking for. Is the power gonna be there when we need it? But they want something that’s quiet and they want something that has clean local emissions. Because a lot of times these generators are in a parking lot of a hospital and people are walking around and obviously, healthcare.

Carman Pirie: So is that in a nutshell how you think about the messaging challenges to say, when faced with this, start from a core that kind of appeals to all use cases and then find basically the nuance and nuggets along the way to help shape up the offering for to make it more vertically centric, or use case centric.

Jennifer McQuilken: You just put that in way better words than I’ve ever put it as to how I’ve approached my messaging. So thank you. You’ve just made my life easier. But yeah, that is really what it boils down to. What is that common thing? The couple key, very high level messaging that we can use across all verticals. We can use it with different audiences, whether it’s consumers or community engineers, and then we start looking at some of the more specific, for example, we have community microgrids. We’ve got one in Houston. It’s 500 kilowatts. It’s just one generator. They needed resiliency during hurricanes so that this neighborhood would have a place to go to be able to have AC, water, charge their devices. They had a disproportionate amount of power outages as compared to some of the other neighboring communities. So they saw a great need for that. And we have one up in Bronzeville as well that needed to appeal to the community. That’s a community outside of south side of Chicago. And again, they had disproportionate power outages. And they wanted something that’s going to be able to be there, be reliable and turn on. So you know, those are having to appeal to community members as well. It’s not just an engineer, a CEO, a CFO, or a sustainability person. 

Jeff White: And part of the messaging with this, depending on the user of it, is this notion that not only can it provide power and quickly, but you’re also able to feed that back into the grid so that it compensates the user for the purchase, is that accurate? 

Jennifer McQuilken: It is. It’s really what is now becoming popular and known as flexible capacity. So what we’ve been able to do, and some of the reason why we were even founded, was to find a way to pre-provide resiliency. Which is what we were originally designed to do for customers who perhaps could not afford the level of resiliency that they needed.

So we ended up with our dual purpose microgrids. So not only can they provide backup power to the host facility. So that could be like I said, a hospital, a water treatment plant it could be a manufacturing facility, really anyone. And at the same time, if you don’t need backup power. What you can do is you can basically flip the switch and instead it provides power back to the grid that helps flatten out some of the peaks and demands.

Down in Houston and Texas in general with Ercot, they have some pretty high demand during the summer and now during the winter as well. And so when you’re able to run your generators and feed the power back to the grid, that helps lower the cost for everyone involved. 

Carman Pirie: I’m going to disclose that while I worked for a power utility, I did not have anything to do with the generation of power.

Jeff White:  That’s for the best.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I was just, I was a cost center. So I’m going to be well out of my technical depth there, and the question may not make any sense at all, but… I’m thinking of other examples where one product has to appeal to a wide variety of use cases and sometimes it’s like the product is more thought of to be a natural fit for one use case than the other. Oh, of course everybody’s used small natural gas power powered generators for X, but never for Y. And now you’re trying to sell it to me for Y. Have we run into any of that where your technology or approach is thought to be a better natural fit by the prospect in one vertical versus the other? And I just wonder how you’ve addressed it with messaging. 

Jennifer McQuilken: I don’t really know if it’s necessarily seen as a more natural fit in some areas yet, but we have had to adjust the messaging. So when you’re looking at data centers right now, you know what they’re looking for is power. How quickly can I get it and how much can I get? I need to be online in 18 months. The grid is like, whoa, we can’t do that. You can have it in three to five, maybe seven years. And so they’re looking for a solution that could bring them online a lot sooner. And we call that our bridge power solution. While there may not be like one natural fit that we’ve really been honed into, we’ve had this amazing opportunity that we can see the needs coming of what else we could use our generators for. And we’re trying to get out in front of that and be ready for those next waves. 

Carman Pirie: And you mentioned this bridge power solution. I think you’ve talked about some different naming conventions previous in the conversation. Is that a key part of this messaging approach as well is to basically bundle the product with a custom level of service or customized types of service and applications for a specific use case and just call it something different like bridge power solution.

Jennifer McQuilken: We do, it’s back to that core generator. So we can package it into bridge power solutions. Those are for utilities, data centers, manufacturers, and other large load users. We package it into the flexible capacity, so that’s for backup power and grid support. And then we also just have standby backup power as an option as well, because not every utility has the opportunity for market participation.

Carman Pirie: I think you mentioned this that, did I get it right with a GRT 500? Is that correct? 

Jennifer McQuilken: E-R-T, enchanted Rock. Yes. 

Carman Pirie:  Yes. Ah, that would’ve been… 

Jennifer McQuilken: It’s okay. What, we have an easier innate product name. It’s called Rock Block. 

Carman Pirie: People need to understand that that’s just a result of my absolutely poor writing, making a G look like an E when you were speaking earlier. But nevertheless… 

Jennifer McQuilken: That’s really impressive. By the way, I don’t think I’ve confused an E and a G before myself. 

Carman Pirie: It’s, I appreciate you thinking it’s impressive. But you were saying it’s named Rock Block.

Jennifer McQuilken: Yes. So what we’ve realized recently is that because our generator is smaller, and when you go to a data center and you’re like, wow, you need 200 generators in their head they’re thinking, oh gosh, we need 200 diesel size generators for that. Whereas our 200 generators actually are a lot smaller than those.

So what we did is we packaged it into… Same generator just called Rock Block, and we have options from 1.5 to 3.5 megawatts, and those are positioned as a one for one diesel replacement. So rather than saying I need 200 generators, we can now say you need 50 rock blocks with four Gens. So two megawatt ones, or something similar along those lines. And then that’s a lot more receptive to people because when they see that you need 200, actually we have a customer soon that’s gonna need 800 generators. You say 800 hundred generators, their eyes get really big and you lose them. So we packaged it into rock block. And so all of the testing, all of the specs, everything like that. Equivalent to that diesel generator or better. And it’s not just taking one generator and putting a bunch out there necessarily. We’ve tested these blocks and that they perform how they should. 

Jeff White: And just to give our listeners a sense of it, when you say, it’s much smaller than a diesel generator, how big would a one and a half megawatt capable diesel generator be versus the Rock Block? I just wanna understand the visual difference.

Jennifer McQuilken: For a one and a half. I think an easy way to think about it is a 1.5 megawatt generator for diesel is our 1.5 megawatt Rock Block, but is actually three of our generators because ours are only 500 kilowatts. I know it’s a little bit of math and I understand some marketing people and comms people we shy away from as much math as we can, but trying to figure out a good way to explain the calculations here. You could tell some engineers were behind me in putting this all together. 

Carman Pirie: So this may be a bit naive, but wouldn’t there be some benefits to that in terms of redundancy that wouldn’t be offered with the 1.5 diesel generator alternative 

Jennifer McQuilken: There is because if one of our three gens for some reason is offline, it could be for maintenance, it could be down. Things happen, you still have two generators, so you can actually still pull one megawatt or you can build in that redundancy if you know that you without a doubt are gonna need that 1.5 megawatt. You simply upsize it to two megawatt of our system. You have three gens running at any one time. One can come offline and another one kicks in automatically. That’s big for data centers and for others, again, who they just can’t afford to lose the power. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, that makes total sense to me. And it’s a really interesting thing because it’s just this recognition that the sales conversation shuts down when we talk about it through the tradition using the traditional language. So we have to alter the language in order to begin, almost inviting them into the conversation in order to open their mind up to how this can work. But then eventually we actually do wanna tell them, by the way this is how it works. Because there’s some strong benefits in the redundancy that it offers and things of that nature, but they have to be ready to hear that. And what I love about this is just the choice of how you talk about it is tilling the soil, for them to be able to hear it. It’s fascinating. 

Jennifer McQuilken: I think that’s key. Anytime you’re trying to speak to a customer, you have to understand what they’re looking for or what’s their language. And you have to see when they start zoning out when you say a hundred generators, they’re like nope. Nevermind. We’re outta this conversation. So we had to find a way to like just get past that first point, because if that’s what the first thing they hear is, oh, it’s gonna be this many generators for that size site there, there has to be another way around it. And so that’s how we came up with the Rock Block. 

Carman Pirie: Jennifer, I’ll tell you, it may be it may be obvious, to you, that the customers start reacting like that, something needs to change. But I bet an awful lot of people would just keep beating their head against that wall and trying to communicate the benefit of having a hundred generators, right? They wouldn’t see the difference that happens when you change the name. 

Jeff White: These go to 11.

Carman Pirie: Everybody that has not seen Spinal Tap listening to the podcast right now is like, what?

Jeff White: How closely integrated are you in terms of working on the messaging with your sales team? 

Jennifer McQuilken: We’re really closely aligned at Enchanted Rock. We’re not a big company. We’re only about 300 people right now and growing in case anyone’s looking for a new role, come check us out. But we are very closely aligned with our sales teams. We just, for example, every other week we have a marketing communications. Tag up with all of our sales teams for each vertical, and we understand what they’re hearing from the marketplace. We let them know what we’re seeing and we have a good open discussion. So really, it’s, to me it’s a two-way street because the sales team and others are out there and they’re hearing things that perhaps we’re not hearing where we are. But at the same time, we’re seeing other things and trends and macro level what we need to be aware of for the future. But they could tell us what the hospital said today to them, and that’s all good intel that we can use, figure out a way around whatever. They’re hearing or, oh, that’s a point that is resonating with them. Okay, let’s do some more about that. Or education too. We do have natural gas generators. A lot of people don’t understand the difference between natural gas and diesel and why does it make a difference and how does renewables come into play? There’s just, there’s no one energy or fuel of the future. And so also trying to make sure that people understand why you would use something in a certain case and what the benefits are is really key to our marketing and comms team. 

Carman Pirie: That must have been a huge challenge over the last year or so. Just I feel like the conversation around sustainability the conversation has just changed. I think the political dynamic both in the US but I mean that spreads across the world. I feel like it’s altered the value that customers potentially see in more environmentally sensitive solutions. And it’s just altered how we had to, we’ve had to talk about things. How has that been a big impact that Enchanted Rock? Have you noticed that you’re maybe not putting sustainability and more pro-environmental messaging in the window as same as you used to? Or maybe just customers aren’t demanding it as much? I’m curious. 

Jennifer McQuilken: What we’re seeing with some of our customers is that it’s becoming lower on their requirements list. They still want it, but they’re not going to want it at the expense of getting the power that they need. And I’m thinking specifically of data centers for this one. They need power, they need it now. They still want the cleaner option because they wanna be part of the community. It’ll help them get, across certain hurdles and so forth. There’s air permits that need to be obtained. So there are reasons to look at it, but I don’t think it’s as much sustainability as it is cleaner. It’s not as much of an ESG conversation perhaps as it used to be. So we’re seeing that’s dropped down a little bit in their requirements list.

It’s a nice to have. They would love to if they can, but at the same time, they need to keep their businesses operating. 

Jeff White: I think there’s some interesting learnings in that for an awful lot of manufacturers and not that we should begin to shy away from, things that are related to climate change and all of that, but maybe just to not completely issue it either, like you don’t want to totally get rid of the benefits because at some point it’s going to become important again, I think. And if we completely walk away from that, it’s going to be harder to restart it.

Jennifer McQuilken: I think it’s really people taking a whole look at their portfolio and how can they plan for. Whatever the fuel of the future is. A lot of people talk about small nuclear reactors coming online, maybe 20, 30, maybe further out, but that’s not a solution for today. You look at some of the renewables, they’re great for certain uses, I live in a place where we have wind farms and solar farms up the road. Little farm community here, but at the same time. They can’t provide a hundred percent of the power that’s needed. Batteries also play a role. They do a great stop gap. They can, two to four hours, but then there’s those long duration event. During the hurricane last year that was July, 2024, we ran a couple of our sites for two weeks straight off of our generators and solar batteries, they don’t have that capability right now. Even Diesel doesn’t have that capability. There is no way to refuel a large data center for two weeks straight. If you’re looking at, 500 megawatts, the logistics and everything else, it just doesn’t math. 

Carman Pirie: I think what I find interesting about this conversation in addition to the varied messaging, is just this notion on sustainability and just how it would rub so many marketers the wrong way, who tend to be oftentimes, maybe sometimes a bit more of the progressive or lefty voices in their organizations, particularly in industrials and manufacturing organizations. And I really urge people listening to say, you’ve gotta embrace this frosted mini wheat kind of thing. Like it can be frosted on one side and and sensible business on the other. I don’t know. I mean, because to Jeff’s point learning how to talk about these kinds of things through a business benefit lens in an ROI lens, not just a ESG lens is critical, it’s not like climate change isn’t important just because the political conversation has changed, but it does mean that as marketers, I think it’s incumbent upon us to talk about it in a different way. We have to find another way, if we don’t, who else is going to?

Jennifer McQuilken: I think that’s part of where marketing communications really comes into play too, is keeping a pulse on what else is happening out there, what are those macro trends? What are other people doing? What are they saying? Do you start seeing a little bit less sustainability on your perhaps competitors’ websites? No shame and going out and seeing what they’re saying too. You gotta know what’s out there. And yeah, not completely wiping it, but maybe you need to minimize it and focus on some other key attribute to this point. And then, you know what, in a couple years if things shift, you just move ’em right back up that list.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. And recognizing along the way, if you were too biased in one way or the other personally, and you let that get into your work too much, you may not even see the opportunities or the changes that are afoot. 

Jeff White: It’s almost like it’s more sustainable messaging to be able to talk about it in a way that is more business focused as opposed to it being about almost an emptier way that kind of where we’re trying to apply a green filter to everything, especially as we see with some of the packaging companies that we that we work with, you know, or that we’ve interviewed on this show even. Jennifer, I wanna go in a slightly different direction for maybe just a moment, and you’ve had this incredibly varied career, where, the boat captain thing. You also own a hobby Marina, I believe. You mentioned before and agency side and working with a law firm and all of those different things. How do you think that experience has shaped how you think about marketing now and what do you think younger marketers should think about when they’re choosing their career path a bit. If they’re trying to get towards something, towards a position like you’re in right now with, a cool startup-esque company that’s in an industry that’s in a growth mode, somebody wants to get there, they’re doing other things. Do you think that your varied path helped you get there? And do you have any advice for younger marketers? 

Jennifer McQuilken: I do think that my path, my untraditional career path has helped because you were just talking about understanding the business and how to communicate. And I think that’s one of the things that I learned along the way is understanding the business impact of everything that goes on. I own a hobby marina. Basically, I have a marina in my front yard. I have to, at the end of the day make the balance sheet work. I would love to be as green as possible. I would love to have certain offerings, you gotta balance, there’s a balance that you need to find with everything. And I think having been able to be in some of these roles along the way taught me a lot. I used to be a regional communications officer for the America Red Cross. It taught me a lot of empathy because I was out and I responded to disasters. And being able to see where people were coming from and be able to communicate with them in that time. And also at the same time, be able to move quickly because you don’t necessarily always have a hundred percent of the info. You want to be able to make a decision to move on it, especially during a crisis or a large scale natural disaster like we used to do there. So I do think that take an adventure, try something out. And I think one of the things I look for in my team is someone that wants to step up and take an opportunity. They’re gonna take charge, they wanna try something out. They’re gonna volunteer and they’ll be like, oh, I wanna try that. It’s okay if it doesn’t work out in the end, but at least put it out there, try to solve a new problem that comes up.

And that’s another thing too. A lot of problem solving has to occur in our daily lives and in marketing. And I think being able to solve that problem and go out and almost have a journalistic mindset at times. Go and dig it out, ask the questions, understand it. We do work, a lot of manufacturing is very technical, as you were saying. We work with a lot of engineers. They are more than willing. I have found most of them to sit down and, explain something to you and make sure that you have a good understanding of it. ’cause then you need to go and translate that to someone else in your material. So I know it’s a little bit round up out of a way, but those are a couple of things I learned.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, it it’s a really healthy advice. Jennifer, I thinking about the people that I’ve worked with over my career that maybe really stand out and it is those people that embrace the unknown a little bit more and are willing to dive in and figure things out and bring a different problem solving lens along the way and throwing yourself into some unpredictable or different work experiences over a career help you develop that skillset, I would think. 

Jennifer McQuilken: Yeah. It’s been interesting. Like I understand some people, perhaps want a more traditional career path than I’ve taken, but I’ve had some ups and downs along the way, but now that I look back, I’m like, wow, that was really cool. I got to do that. I got to run a law firm. I was hired to do some marketing for them and then ended up running the whole thing for a while, and I was like, oh, okay. Sure. Benefits, accounting, finance, I got to learn a whole lot about a lot of different things in a role like that and be able to take those elsewhere as I’ve moved on in my life. 

Carman Pirie: This is the oddest thing. Jeff and I actually know an agency owner here in Halifax, Nova Scotia, he owned a small digital agency and he sold his agency and then ended up getting hired on as a law firm at a law firm to be CEO after running the agency, because he built their website. That’s how they knew him. 

Jennifer McQuilken: That’s pretty much what I did. I built a website, I helped him with a new logo, and suddenly I was running this law firm. It was like, okay.

Carman Pirie: There’s two of you in North America. If we could find three more, we’ll have quorum here or something. We could at least have a basketball team. 

Jennifer McQuilken: Now, is he also recovering Type A? Because working at a law firm, I used to be a Type A and I was like. Wow. Nope. That is not how I’m gonna live my life. So I call myself a recovering Type A I have moments, but I’m not as like I used to be. Back then. 

Carman Pirie: Jeff knows this unnamed person better than I. He’s a lot more 

Jeff White:  He’s a lot more chill now than he was running his agency. I’ll say that. He was never a super Type A, not quite like me. 

Carman Pirie: All right. Jennifer, this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your journey with us. This has been a lot of fun. 

Jennifer McQuilken: Yeah. I’ve been enjoying the conversation and like I said, I’m more than happy, you ever wanna talk about boats and marinas? I am your girl. We’re talking boats. I’m big fan of those. Or generators. Of course.

Jeff White:  Generators, of course. Yeah.

Carman Pirie: Thanks again, Jennifer.