Spruce Power Holding Corporation (NYSE:SPRU) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Christian Fong: Yes. The €“ there’s always this cadence of looking at deals, picking the best ones, have the best characteristics, and then closing. So obviously today is the culmination of going through that cycle. We are in active discussions, so it’s not a on-off switch to €“ between finding and closing. And so those continue. I don’t want to project when our next deal would be, or how large it is. I’d just say that we are inactive bilateral negotiations on things currently. I am seeing a more active market. I think when €“ let’s say some things are shaking loose €“ there’s some well-known private installers that have gone under or are struggling trying to raise equity themselves. And sometimes instead of raising equity, recycle the capital from selling the assets that you own. So between asset owners and developer installers needing to find capital. It is an active market right now.

Jordan Levy: Thanks for that. And maybe just as a quick follow-up on the different front, you mentioned some of the initiatives around the enterprise technology stack. Just wanted to see if I could €“ if we could get a little more color there on what that allows you to do from a customer servicing perspective and that sort of thing?

Christian Fong: There’s no €“ there’s not like dialing up a sales force representative and saying, hey, hand me your package of residential solar tools. This is a new industry and the tools are being invented and developed by the participants. There’s pluses and minuses to that. It does take longer. So, for example, we just €“ we just launched the billing platform that I talked about and that took a lot more months than again, pulling something off the shelf and stalling. So what we’re working on going forward is an enterprise wide, where all our systems of records are effectively talking to each other so that when a €“ when a customer calls in or logs in again, previous I talked about a single sign-in process. Every time you build something for security reasons, you end up having a different sign and it’s a very clunky customer experience.

So even the process of giving what may seem to be obvious, like you just sign-in with a log-in and password like we’re all used to in many apps that is something that has to be built inside this industry. It actually creates a moat as folks get to 30,000 or 50,000 customers, it’s impossible to do things by spreadsheet to do things with legacy older technology. And these things all have to be built. What I’m happy to be able to share is that all the different portions of an enterprise technology stack have been built. And so in 2023 and 2024, by connecting them all together, a customer will be able to log in and see every aspect, whether it’s the performance of the system or a bill or a customer service question, if there may be a €“ an asset component replacement or something that is going on.

And so their experience then becomes very real time in being able to interact with their or to see their €“ the power that’s on the rooftop and interact with Spruce and of course from a future sales standpoint to be able to select and begin a sale process or an acquisition process of their own to buy the next piece of that home power systems. So that’s what we anticipate coming in the next two years leading to higher customer satisfaction, better customer experiences all the way through, so, one call, one answer situations and ideally greater sales as additional components come to market.

Jordan Levy: Really interesting. Thanks for the commentary.

Operator: Your next question comes again from the line of Joseph Osha with Guggenheim. Your line is now open.