27 - Christy Cannon

In this episode, we’re joined by Christy Cannon, an energy industry expert with 25 years of experience navigating electric markets, energy management, and building technology. Christy shares her career journey: from helping guide Texas through electric deregulation to building energy programs from the ground up and now working on energy automation at Yardi.

We also talk mentorship, career pivots, and why sustainability isn’t a niche role, it’s a mindset that can show up in any job. Whether you’re deep in energy or just sustainability-curious, this conversation is full of practical insights and encouragement for building a long, meaningful career.

Connect with Christy on LinkedIn. 

Resources mentioned: 

• Natural Capitalism by Amory Lovins
• Reinventing Fire by Amory Lovins
• Mother Earth News

Terms/certifications mentioned: 

• Certified Energy Manager (CEM) from AEE
• The Council on Women in Energy & Environmental Leadership (CWEEL) from AEE

Transcript

Aparna: [00:00:00] All right, pod people. Welcome back to another episode. Today we are chatting with the lovely Christy Cannon. She is an energy industry veteran with 25 years of experience spanning electric market deregulation, municipal and corporate energy management and energy technology. She played a key role in guiding Texas through their electric deregulation in 2002 and later built a corporate energy management program from scratch.

Wild Today, she's a solutions consultant on the energy automation engineering team at Yardi. She studied mathematics and civil engineering is a certified energy manager and volunteers with the Association of Energy Engineers as an advisory board member and mentorship program chair for the Council on Women and Energy and Environmental Leadership.

And most recently, she also became an a EE fellow. Welcome to the podcast, Christy. We are excited to chat with you.

Christy Cannon: you so much. I really appreciate the invitation to be here. Have been very excited about this [00:01:00] chat we're gonna have today.

Aparna: Well, that's awesome to hear Listeners get ready. This is gonna be a fun one. \, Christy, from hearing your intro, I'm sure folks have so many questions about your career. I know. I sure do. So we'd love it. If you could start from the beginning and walk us through how you, as a math major ended up at Yardi Talking and shop about business development and product management.

Christy Cannon: been an interesting journey. I'll put it that way. And you know, five years ago I would've said that it's not typical, but the more that I talk to people in this industry, the more I find that there really is no typical path. I was in the high tech industry, so in the late nineties I was living in Austin, Texas, and high tech was all the rage, right?

You had startup internet companies, you had the tech bubble, you had stock options being thrown around like candy. Like it was just, it was a crazy, crazy time. And so I was in the high tech industry working on Oracle. I was a systems analyst working with Oracle Financial Analyzer. I [00:02:00] loved it, really geeked out on it.

And I used to do some, some coding. And what happened was I had a very. Great life lesson on how to turn lemons into lemonade. In October, 2001 it was a Friday. I walked into my company just expecting a normal day. And about an hour later, two thirds of us walked back out with our little boxes of everything that was on our desk. Out you can't run a company for multiple years. That doesn't make any money. And so two thirds of the staff was laid off that day. It was pretty crazy.

Kiersten: Oh, talk about a transition that I do think is potentially a first. So where did you go from there?

Christy Cannon: it gave me time to think, and this is where, how I grew up, the influence of my dad and my parents being hippies. This is where that really came into play because I really wanted to give some thought to. Building a career in an industry that was stable and was not going [00:03:00] away and was maybe managed a little more responsibly.

And there was an ad in a paper. Yes. This is back when there were like paper newspapers. And they were looking for an energy consultant, so someone to come in. a database that modeled all of the electric rates in Ercot in, in Texas. And this was right before Texas deregulated electricity in January, 2002.

And so I went and I interviewed, I knew nothing about the electric industry. I remember being so lost in those interviews and thinking there's no way anybody is gonna gimme this job, but they did. And so it was trial by fire. crazy, crazy learning curve and it's training classes and books that I read just to try to get up to speed, but it happens.

Aparna: Can you tell us what Ercot is, what was actually happening? With the market, what regulated deregulated means. You can pretend that you're back giving one of your classes and we are your audience.

Christy Cannon: Texas deregulated [00:04:00] in January, 2002. And what that means is, and think about it this way, you've got a a hundred, 120 year old vertically integrated company where you're generating power, you're transmitting and distributing that power to end users. So buildings and. and homes, and then you have a retail component that's got a, that's got a bill for it.

You've gotta get cash for this power that you're generating and you're distributing. So you know, in a very short period of time, relatively to how long you've been in existence, you have to unbundle that and you have to separate into a generation component. That's its own separate company, transmission and distribution that is separate and a whole separate retail component. And so there were a lot of issues. It didn't go real smoothly. In Texas it's the retail component that is the deregulated component. there's no reason to deregulate wires. You don't want competing wires in transmission lines everywhere. That really doesn't [00:05:00] make any sense. So that part is still regulated. The deregulation part meant that you could shop around the retail component of your electricity bill and try to find a retailer that had the best rate. the primary driver for who you'd sign for, but for some, you know, commercial clients, municipal, which is who I worked with, there's also customer service components that were important for them, but it just kind of gave you, as the end consumer of electricity, more power in, in who you worked with to pay that bill.

Kiersten: That is perfect. Thank you for explaining a little bit about regulated deregulated and just that Ercot is the Texas market. so you also built an energy management program from scratch. Verbal question mark. Can you tell us more about that?

Christy Cannon: Yeah. So that was that it was fun. It was a lot of fun. So, yes. After I worked in Ercot as an energy consultant. It was [00:06:00] crazy when, first deregulated, you know, for, for six months. The utilities had a hard time getting out bills. It just, they weren't prepared, which was completely understandable.

So as an energy consultant, I did all sorts of things working with utilities on their billing systems and explaining, giving classes on electric, deregulation. Markets and I worked a lot with municipalities, so my clients were 120 or so municipalities in Texas. and my job was really helping them understand the market and doing calculations around budgets and helping them understand demand load profiling and load shedding and things like that.

And I got hired by a company that wanted to automate all of this on portal. So instead of creating all of these sort of manual reports, they're out of a database, but it's not the same as having it automated in the background on a portal where the [00:07:00] client can just log in and then these reports just run automatically for them.

So this was like a next gen automation and I'm so cool. I'm so excited about it.

So at this company where we're building this portal that will provide all of this usage information back to our clients on how to be more efficient, the company itself said, you know what? We're not very efficient. We need to become more efficient, and in fact, there's a whole lot more we can do in energy efficiency to help make our clients more efficient. So we hired from scratch. We built a team. We hired electrical engineers, mechanical engineers. We hired energy managers. We hired resnet Raiders. We hired. LEED professionals, and we built a team that, from the ground up, would look at our company, our processes specifically, and how we ourselves could become more sustainable.

We looked at our utility bills, we did rate and tariff analysis, then. From looking at our company and how [00:08:00] we could become more sustainable and efficient and save costs, then we thought, okay, let's translate that into services that we could sell to our clients. And the very first thing we rolled out was ASHRAE Level two audits, right? Boots on the ground. Go look at their operations. And this was initially at multifamily apartment complex. So we're meeting with the property managers and facility managers. Not many of them had building engineers. We see that more on the commercial side, but a few of them did. It's a big high rise residential properties. so it was boots on the ground understanding what are you doing? How are you doing it? What kind of equipment do you have in place? What does your building envelope look like? What kind of lighting are you using? And most importantly. How do you use that system? Because we would go look at LEED gold, LEED platinum, high rise multifamily buildings, and they weren't run very efficiently. it all boils down to it's great to have the right equipment in place, but if your people don't know how [00:09:00] to use it, then you're not really getting as much out of. As you could. And so that's really how the whole thing came about, and it was just this crazy five year period in my career where again, I felt like I was drinking from the water hose learning so many things that I hadn't really done before, but it's the people around me.

It's the whole team that we hired that made it possible. I've learned so much from that whole team.

Aparna: That's incredible. It sounds like a couple of through lines are really, like, you're learning and then you're teaching, and then there's this technology piece that has been in lockstep with you this entire time. So really interesting to see the inner workings of how one brings about a program like that. Who is involved and. How you shared what you guys learned and what was actually important to move on from this corporate energy program to your time at Yardi.

Yardi's a big technology company. Right. So did you lean heavily on this tech experience that you had [00:10:00] and this grassroots effort that you had just completed?

Christy Cannon: Here's what's funny. The company that I worked for was acquired by Yardi in 2012 and. And Yardi acquired that company, not so much for our energy management program but more for utility expense management, utility bill back. So taking those utility costs that buildings have and allocating those and billing those back out to residents and tenants. They didn't really immediately have a use for energy management. So honestly, what happened was our team was basically disbanded and we were put in different groups and teams around Yardi. what what's fortuitous about that? And this is just, again, it's just, had so many crazy turns in my career, but it all has worked out. So brilliantly, I ended up working in the utility expense management team and doing some implementations working with [00:11:00] clients. what that helped me do was see, okay, one thing that every building gets is a utility bill, right? Not every building's gonna have an ashray level two audit. Not every building's gonna have this wonderful, efficient building automation system. They're not all gonna have super efficient, envelopes, but every building gets a utility bill, and that's the place to start for analysis for every client. So what we did is we started using that as our basis and doing analysis just on that monthly consumption and demand number. And we were looking at things like, , how many kws are you paying for that you aren't actually using? Right. That's like ratchet demand from a utility bill and every utility has them. we started trying to use things like that to get our clients to pay attention to how they're operating their equipment and how, and really when. They're using their electricity because that's just as important, [00:12:00] right? You want to when your chiller plants come on. You don't wanna turn 'em on all at the same time and create this really high peak demand that you're gonna pay a percentage of for the next 11 months.

Whether or not you used another KWH or not, right? There are components of a tariff, the utility tariff rate schedule that every person should know in order to optimize how and when they use energy. And we found that just with utility bills we could glean a lot of great information and we started sharing that with our clients. what happened was. As we started doing that and our clients were asking more questions, then our clients at Yardi started requesting more services and at the same time, Mr. Yardi, and there is a Mr. Yardi on it, Yardi, is just, and I'm not saying it's just because he owns the company I work for, like he is an amazing visionary. And his family members that work for our company, by the way, are just amazing too. This is one [00:13:00] company where that really, really works for us. he bought different energy management sustainability companies and pulled us all together, and that is what the energy division is today at Yardi. We're six different companies that were pulled together. So there was a company he purchased. That interfaced with building automation systems and did HVAC fault detection and optimization where they sent resets to building automation systems for back pressure and differential pressure and supplier temp, and just helped automate and basically bridge the chiller plants with the air handlers to run more efficiently and safely.

Kiersten: Wow, Christy, so happy to hear that you love this place that you've ended up at at Yardi and that they've pulled together what they need to really execute their vision. So we have heard a lot about what you did, but can you quickly run through what you are called across all these experiences?

What job title did you have?

Christy Cannon: Okay. Good question. I had a million of them. So let's see. When [00:14:00] I first started out in the high tech sector, not this industry, but I was a systems analyst, then I was an energy consultant for the retail market when I was in Austin, Texas. Then when I was. Hired by the company that ISTA bot, and we were working on portal reports and backend calculations for clients. I was the the manager of business development. then Yardi purchased us and I went and worked. In utility expense management, and I was a client executive. I've had like five different Yardi titles. And then from client executive, I was moved onto the engineering team. And there I've been a solutions consultant and there have been, can't even remember all.

Oh yeah. And then I was also an. Account executive. I was on the actual Yardi sales team selling energy for a while as well. So between client executive to commercial energy account executive on [00:15:00] the sales team, to then stepping back into operations on the engineering team as a solution consultant. That's been my journey basically for the last 12 years.

Aparna: Some good things to Google, some good things to type into the LinkedIn search bar. So appreciate you walking us back and forward through it. So you care deeply about education. You care deeply about organizational change, it sounds like, and being on this forefront of tech.

And it also sounds like you care deeply about mentorship and really fostering the youth around us and. Helping the next generation find their feet, especially given your role within CWEEL and being a mentor to a lot of folks.

so Christy, we'd love it if you could tell us about what mentorship really means to you and why you feel so passionately about volunteering in this space.

Christy Cannon: That's a good question and that is really linked. The legacy that I hope I leave behind. I'm in my fifties. , I'm looking at maybe retiring in a few years because it [00:16:00] is something that I'm thinking about. And I'm not a cheesy person. I'm actually very practical, but what I'm about to say is gonna sound really cheesy. But those of you who are listening, who know me, you will recognize the sincerity. I'd like to leave behind a culture where women don't wait to ask for permission to lead. Where women understand their technical value and they trust their judgment, they, they advocate for themselves and maybe others who aren't as comfortable. They step into decision making roles and own it. So if my work succeeds with mentorship, Hopefully the next generation of women in energy, they're not gonna need to be invited into leadership per se, 'cause they will already be there. I know it's a lot to ask, if a few women get there and then they help a few other women who also help a few other women, then it grows exponentially and will get there.

Kiersten: I adore [00:17:00] the philosophy and can speak personally about what a great mentor you are and how much you've given back to the community. But flipping the question a little bit, let's talk about your mentors. Do you have any sustainability mentors or folks who really influenced your outlook?

Christy Cannon: That is also a fun question. I've had many wonderful professional mentors in my career at different stages along the way. And they were all amazing men. I haven't had any big women mentors per se, 'cause I just haven't worked with that many. But honestly, the biggest influence. For me in sustainability, it's gonna sound crazy, but it's my dad. My parents were hippies. I grew up in rural Arkansas. We grew as much food as we could with a garden and animals, like we had pigs and chickens and goats and rabbits that my mom would butcher, like we ate them. My dad especially respected Amory Levins, I don't know if you're familiar with him. He founded the Rocky Mountain Institute. so books like [00:18:00] Natural Capitalism were on my bookshelf growing up, and Amory wrote the Forward for Reinventing Electric Utilities, which is actually sitting on my desk.

You can't see me, but I'm holding it up right now. I read this book, it came out in the late nineties to help accelerate my understanding of dereg electric markets when I first started, because I was. Building from scratch. But, growing up I grew up conserving water because we were energy efficient, honestly, because we were poor.

Although I didn't have any awareness of that at the time. We grew non GMO plants in our garden from seeds that my dad harvested himself. The, you know, prior season we always reuse. Repurposed, recycled, anything and everything. And in fact, my husband laughs at me because I'm always squirreling away.

Like those nice thick plastic zipper bags that Amazon sends things in, or like the clear plastic cases, that they send electronics in. I use those to store extra batteries around the house. They're like put my watch movement in when I'm replacing the bezel or I don't know, replacing the capacitor 'cause I'm [00:19:00] just too cheap and I do my own watch repairs anyway, I just had this great childhood with a very cerebral. Educated, environmentally minded father, that stuff has a habit of sticking with you. And so this all influenced, I think, the whole direction I took in my career and life.

Kiersten: I just have to chuckle again. The audience can't see us, but I'm laughing a lot because it's so relatable to squirrel things away and have our loved. ones laugh at us. But I think it's the curse of being interested in sustainability is it's really hard to let go to waste when you know there's a secondary or a tertiary, or even a fourth case use for it.

So very relatable there.

Christy Cannon: Thank you. And the per item cost goes down with every use.

Aparna: That's girl math and sustainability. That's sustainability math. Those like takeout containers, the nice plastic ones. We have so many and I'm never gonna throw them away. I always think they're gonna have a use. [00:20:00] indeed. You're right, Christy Never throw 'em away.

We'll just get more Tupperware space. that's fun. I love that. Thank you for the unique answer to the mentor. , Thinking about mentor, mentee relationships maybe one outside of a familial one, do you have tips on how to have a mentor mentee relationship be productive and have it last longer than maybe a designated time period?

Christy Cannon: I do and I might define mentorship more broadly than most people do because when you talk about mentorship most people

think of the traditional one-on-one pairing I I more define it as like the small interactions that you have every day to help people and in fact one of the things that's been interesting to learn the CWEEL mentorship program is international

and what we've learned from women in other parts of the country especially you think of Middle East and Africa where culture's very different for women their daily responsibilities are In a [00:21:00] lot of ways a lot more stringent and tougher than ours They don't

necessarily have time to commit every week every other week every month for a six month formal program But they still have something to give and wanna give And so they would like to do something more like Hey I have

specific topics that I feel like I could really provide some advice and guidance in I have 30 minutes available for two months this year Connect me with someone who can actually use that so we're trying to look at mentorship as not so much this permanent

sort of formal relationship although that's wonderful Like I know people that Through formal mentorship programs still talk after years and that's beautiful but it's not the only way to do it and not everybody has that time And I also hear the same thing from mentees who say you know what It's just unreasonable for me to expect that one person is gonna be the end all be all for all the guidance that I need in my career I'd rather have [00:22:00] Multiple conversations with different people and not this formal pairing structure Like we we hear both to me mentorship

means flexibility for the guidance that you need when you need it or if you are a mentor right You have a little bit to give and you have some guidance that you wanna share some life lessons so that other people can learn from your mistakes

just make a little bit of time to share it with someone and it doesn't have to be formal It can be a conversation on the expo floor of AEE world or any conference of your choice right

It can be a phone call You can pick up and have a phone call It might be an email I've gotten an email from someone who says Hey I'm having a specific issue with something I'm looking to figure out how to overcome this obstacle Can you help me Right It can be

Any of those things where you just take a little bit of time to think through how to help someone you've been in maybe the same situation and you've been able to successfully overcome it and you [00:23:00] just you reach out and try to provide some guidance it doesn't have to be something formal

Kiersten: yeah,

the many forms of mentorship from everyday interactions all the way through formal

interactions. I know Aparna and I are thinking we're your sustainability sisters. We hope we serve as kind of

a virtual mentor. The pod is all about being a resource to our listeners, so

hopefully you all can reflect on , ways that you've received mentorship

and could offer mentorship

while we go to break.

Kiersten: [00:00:00] All right. Thanks for joining us back everyone.

We are .

here with Christy and Christy. I wanna share our hypothesis with you. You might already know it, but we do believe that every job can be a green job and should be a green job. If we're honest and we're wondering if you had any ways for folks who might not work in, obviously related to sustainability, jobs on how they can make their job a little bit more environmentally friendly.

Christy Cannon: Really, really great topic. I think that job can be a green job. And the reason why is because we all live on the same planet, right?

I think about whether you're an attorney. So I was looking to one of your podcasts, your previous ones whether you're an attorney or you are in business or you are an engineer or you're a landscaper. Sustainability itself is such a big topic. It's not just energy efficiency. It's not just water [00:01:00] conservation.

Right. It's, it's resiliency, it's biodiversity. It is even things like indoor air quality, right? And so I feel like green collar job just kind of gets misunderstood as it's near a niche, right? It's just solar installers and wind technicians and environmental engineers and lead architects. But you know. I. Environmental consequences are treated as part of that job description. So from that perspective, sustainability is not really a sector per se. It's like, this lens that we look through when we make decisions and kind of how we, we judge our impact. And one way that I would say anybody can bring sustainability into their jobs and a lot of people. There's this quiet power they maybe don't realize they have, under, they underestimate the professional leverage probably quite a bit, but it's just asking questions in [00:02:00] places where decisions are already being made. So ask your vendor about their efficiency. What's the expected lifespan of this option compared to cheaper one or like how energy intensive is it over its full life or? Start asking sustainability questions in meetings. You don't need to pitch things to just say, well, what happens to operating costs of energy prices spike? Or are we designing this to, think about hotter summers than possible power outages? Or can this be done cheaper with, fewer materials and less VOCs?

Things like that, you can, you can share data versus opinions. That's another thing that people might be a bit more receptive to. And a big one, and I'll tell you, we use this at Yardi all the time. Publicly, praise someone for doing something sustainable, even if they didn't mean to, you know, for reducing waste or simplifying a process, and, and provide some [00:03:00] stats that kind of back that up because people recognize that.

They notice that they're like, huh? That person got recognized for doing this thing. I never really thought about that, but I would like to be recognized too, so maybe I can get on board. Like there are little things that everybody can do no matter what job you are in, that can make it more sustainable.

When you define sustainability, the way I view it, that should be defined, which is much more broadly than most people think.

Aparna: I, you know, venture to say that I think that's a correct definition of sustainability. I don't think we need to be boxing ourselves in. I think we get that from enough places. So those of us who are working in the space, I believe that the more inclusive we can be, the better an impact we're gonna have.

So, really appreciate the answer. the word that's coming to mind is externalities both. In the positive and the negative sense, but in conversations with vendors asking a question to have someone think about an unintended. [00:04:00] Result. ? And even with the positive reinforcement aspect, it's a positive externality.

That's fantastic. Someone has made a small change and that's getting recognition. It's gonna have an impact, and that creates a daisy chain of action from those who get to see it. So I think that's a really beautiful idea and a great suggestion for everybody who manages teams or gets to sit in these kinds of meetings.

Christy, the two of us met last year at a conference called AEE World, which is super fun. It stands for the Association of Energy Engineers Listeners, and as a participant, definitely learned so much from everyone there, and was lucky enough to have a couple days off work where I could just play student again.

. I feel like these conferences are hotbeds for sharing ideas that are going to push us into the economy of tomorrow. So, Christy, thinking about attending these conferences, can you tell us about how industry conferences and meet ups like this have helped you out in your career?

And if there are specific ones that you'd recommend for the listeners to attend?

Christy Cannon: [00:05:00] absolutely. I mean, there's, there's the obvious answer, which is they have a lot of vendors there that we use and it helps us kind of stay on the cutting edge, and for us, like submetering as an example, like what kind of cool cutting edge hardware is out there to help clients. Understand and measure at equipment points or units, consumption and demand, things like that. Like how can we do it quicker? How can we do it cheaper? Things like magnetic switch, readers that fit on top of, water or gas utility meters without having to cut into pipes. Things like that.

Like those are the obvious answers, you know how to improve the nuts and bolts of what I sell or how I do my job. But I think the more impactful answer is just the people. If we're gonna talk about what is the most important to me, and I don't wanna link everything back to mentorship 'cause that is super important to me, but, the most important resource [00:06:00] I would recommend is Human Resources, right? Because the conferences, that's where I find someone who knows about something that interests me. And it's way quicker and easier talking to them than reading a book. Plus they can already tell me about their journey and the mistakes they made and how they overcame them. So that is what I love conferences for. I mean, there there's obvious things that help my job and there's, there's competitive intelligence that we can gain from our competitors. They're there, but I am there to talk to people even though that's crazy. I'm an introvert. I'm a huge introvert, and like I'm exhausted after these conferences, but talking to people. Kind of feeling their energy, you know, gets me excited in some ways, recharges my batteries, understanding and hearing what they're learning that they're fascinated about. And the network itself, this is an old adage, but it's not bs. It's not what you know, it's who you know. Okay. Maybe in our industry it's a little bit of both, but it's definitely a lot of who you [00:07:00] know as well.

Like I've made so many good contacts, I've been able to connect people that can help each other. So just the network that you can build at these conferences. If you just get out and like talk to five people, you don't have to talk to everybody. Just talk to five people, get to know them. Connect with them on LinkedIn and then who knows, who knows what'll happen and where it'll take you and where you know, your next job offer might come from.

Kiersten: Really, really great advice. . A little bit more specific to your, guess you can kind of pick out. Your ticket, right? 'cause we've hit on almost four distinct careers. But if someone wanted to do what you're doing today or what you've done in the past, are there any specific skills or certifications that you think they should acquire?

Christy Cannon: For sure. So what I do now is it's not selling, it's consulting. I have been on the sales team, but what I do is consulting and the difference is You have sales [00:08:00] goals, you make a commission and your job is to get a signature on that contract. Not that you don't care whether or not it's gonna benefit the client but it is maybe a bit of a secondary concern.

Whereas consulting, we don't have sales goals. We don't get commission. We do sell, we do contracts and we. We work on legal agreements, but what we're really after is what's that client's goal and how do we get them to the next level? And in order to do that, you have to have some deep expertise, first of all.

So Yardi, I have expertise with most of the energy services that we sell, right? It's all interconnected. Energy Star benchmarking is one of our services. It leans heavily on utility invoice processing. That's where we get a lot of the data. It also can lean on manual utility meter reading. It might lean on hardware, which we've installed to collect consumption.

So you have whole building data for reporting, like everything's interconnected. You need to understand those services, even the ones [00:09:00] you're not directly selling. You need to understand the upstream and the downstream connections. The other thing is, you gotta be comfortable stepping outside your comfort zone, right?

You can't just always live in your comfortable box. It was one of the hardest things for me to do when I moved from operations to the sales team I'm used to having all the answers before I have a client conversation, and now all of a sudden in a discovery call with a client and I'm the one asking questions and they're asking me things that I have had no chance to prepare for.

And I suddenly, for the first time in my career, have had to be comfortable saying, I don't know the answer to that, but I will find out and I will get back to you. it or not, that was one of the hardest things for me to do. So you've gotta be able to step outside your comfort zone. I would say the other thing, probably the biggest that I've had to develop is making decisions with [00:10:00] incomplete information and looking towards finding that happy medium.

So many things are a compromise or even a negotiation, right? need to get other teams who don't report to me to do things for me, and how do I do that? Every single day I'm dealing I'm wheeling, I'm dealing, I'm negotiating. I'm like, Hey, if you can get me that data from that report that I don't have access to, I'll hop on your client call and maybe do a demo.

You know, you're offering your. Skills in exchange for someone else or something you can deliver in exchange for something they can give you that you need. This long term goal, like you can never lose sight. As much as I might really grow close to a client, I can never lose sight that I work for Yardi. And there's always win-win situations that we can find when we compromise. I always, when a client asks for something that it's really not something that we deliver, there are [00:11:00] good ways and there are bad ways to deliver that information. If we're working on a submetering project, maybe things don't go quite as well as planned. There are good ways and bad ways to deliver that information, and that is an art. It's not a science the client say, Hey, we couldn't get this submeter installed, but you know. We've worked with your electrician or your plumber, we've looked at the budget that you have. We know you don't wanna inconvenience your tenants, so here's the options that we've come up with, right? You're delivering bad news, but you're also letting the client know, Hey, I'm looking out for you. Those are all sort of nuances in how you communicate, how you make decisions, how you interact with people, right? a lot of what I do that along with just the knowledge of the services. I will tell you hands down, like the one thing that everybody has to have to join our team, you can't join our team without it is you have to be a CEM with AEE. You have to be a certified energy manager. [00:12:00] It is the requirement to even be considered to join our team. The CEM is valuable because from a client perspective, you have credibility, right? It establishes the baseline of knowledge that you have. know, especially a lot of the clients the contacts that clients that I work with are also a lot of them cems. speak the same language, we understand the same things, not having to explain everything. And so you know, there is, because the CEM has requirements for degrees or number of years in the industry, there's an exam that you have to take. There's letters of reference that you have to get right. Just getting a CEM tells everybody something about your level of expertise.

Aparna: Totally. I feel like speaking that same language, it helps with the, the term that came to mind was kind of new age bartering. Like when I was listening to you, describe what you were doing and like kind of how you communicate with clients. Like , the feedback sandwich, right. [00:13:00] The good, the bad, the good or the, if you gimme this data, I'll hop on this call.

I'm thinking about people in the prehistoric ages where they used to get salt for goats and it's really cool to see the progress that we've made in the last thousand years. But thank you for highlighting the CEM as well. That's something that Kirsten and I both have, and it's been invaluable in a lot of discussions that we've had in our professional lives, and honestly kind of in personal lives, even thinking about our HVAC systems at home.

You've dropped a bunch of fantastic one-liners throughout this conversation so far, Christy, so I'd love to keep the momentum going and ask if there is any other advice you would give to someone who's just starting out in the space or someone who's sustainability, curious.

Christy Cannon: My biggest piece of advice is make it personal first. Like find small ways to practice it in your daily life that's meaningful or fun, and then expand from there. Like, if you love to garden, well then expand to low [00:14:00] impact edible landscaping and focus on native plants that thrive in, your soil and the amount of rainfall that you have.

Or if you enjoy working with your hands, this is my husband, grab a mother Earth. news. And build a portable solar generator on a wagon or a solar water heater with PVC pipe and plexiglass, right? You're gonna learn about sustainability just by doing these things, and it's an easy way to understand the principles in action.

You can expand from there, right? I think , being sustainably curious, doesn't necessarily mean you have a job dedicated to, you know, energy efficiency or water conservation or, LEED certifications, like the majority of every day is not spent at the workplace. It's at home. So do fun, sustainable stuff at home.

Invite your family and friends and neighbors to join in. I believe whatever skills or degrees or certifications you can apply them to a sustainable career.

Kiersten: [00:15:00] absolutely sustainability is so. It hits so many things that I think it's almost impossible not to have some relevant skills. It, there's obviously some flex depending on which particular role you want to go into. If you do have something in mind, but if you're just open and sustainability, curious. Chances are you already have skills that you can apply. So if people have been inspired want to be a part of the sustainability shift, are there any books, documentaries, or other resources you recommend? I think you mentioned something about a guide to building your own solar that maybe your husband uses.

So maybe start us off there.

Christy Cannon: so I love Mother Earth News and in fact. It's what I grew up with, like with my dad. He had the old paper Mother Earth News, like in a stack in the desk in our living room. Like I can still see it in my mind. And he would pull one out and he would thumb through it when he was looking for [00:16:00] stuff. Now, of course, remember this is the eighties.

This is pre-internet where you didn't have everything at, your fingertips on a computer. We didn't even have computers back then. Not at the house at least. and so I still get misty eyed. I see those old Mother Earth news, but they are so full of information to this day. I have a subscription to Mother Earth News.

I have their little. Thumb drive that has every article that they've produced since like 2020. I have it on my computer downloaded so I can do a quick search if there's something that I wanna do. I'm a hands-on person. We're outdoorsy people, we're homesteaders for us. I don't have a lot of time to read books and watch TV and things.

It's gotta be projects, hands-on projects that I do, and Mother Earth News, like it has the best sort of bite-sized chunk. A you got a very specific need. You need hot water. It's outside, there's no electrical requirement, but you do have some well water you can get there. Here with, these five parts and some black paint [00:17:00] and some. , PVC pipe and some fittings that attach your garden hose and some plexiglass and a piece of plywood. Here's how you can generate hot water wherever you need it. things like that. That's actually , really useful to us with having livestock and animals . You need to wash your hands and so Mother Earth News is actually what I use probably more than anything.

Aparna: Very cool is not something I've heard about before, so I'll definitely be googling a little bit afterwards. I think you mentioned a couple other books throughout the episode, so listeners, we will link those. in the show notes for you guys because I am very curious and Christy, we have a fun little bookshop online that we like to put our guest recommendations on, and we'll definitely try to link Mother Earth News there too.

I dunno if we can do newspapers, but you know, in the, in the spirit of learning, we might as well try.

Christy Cannon: I have one

and I wish I knew where this came from, but it's so perfect for your podcast. I, I just have to read it to you. Can I share it?

Aparna: Oh yeah, [00:18:00] of course.

Christy Cannon: I've, I've had this forever and I don't remember where it came from but I think this is so perfect for your podcast. So here it's, sustainability isn't about turning everyone into an environmental activist. It's about stopping the habit of pretending impacts don't exist.

Because they're downstream. When people account for consequences, systems change without needing heroics, and the uncomfortable inside is this. Most environmental damage is not caused by bad people. It's caused by jobs designed without feedback loops. And once that feedback is restored, the collar color stop mattering.

Aparna: I just got some goosebumps. That's fantastic. Christy, can you send it to us later and we'll definitely link it for everyone so that they can reference back to it. And selfishly, I'm gonna reference back to it.

Christy Cannon: not mine, and I've had it forever, and I thought, oh my gosh, that's exactly what that quote is about, but I can't find it anywhere to be able to cite it. Those are not my words, but yes, I'll send it to you.

Aparna: I appreciate [00:19:00] it. It's breaking down barriers, it's being inclusive, it's understanding , your decision isn't made in a vacuum. So that's, it's incredible. Yeah. That really does capture the ethos of what we're trying to do, so thank you. Honestly, Christy, thanks for this conversation. It's been so much fun to reconnect and chat through all of these things.

Hear more about your career. I the four different lives that you've lived in, this one incredible life so far, and also learn about your work. So thank you for sharing with us and being a great resource, being a fantastic mentor. I know I will be sending you some notes in the future if I run into some issues.

I need some help brainstorming around. And we look forward to keeping up with you in the future.

Christy Cannon: thank you. I really appreciate you having me on this podcast. It has just been a blast and a pleasure talking with both of you.