Today we are joined by Sergey Fedorov (co-founder and CTO) and Tatiana Ivanova (Business Manager) from A1 SolarStore. This is an unusual kind of organisation for us to feature on the podcast because they deal with physical products, and real-world customer installations - but new ways of working are increasingly pervading every kind of industry, as this case study demonstrates.

Helping both businesses and consumers access the right products for solar energy conversions in the USA, Canada, and UK, A1 Solar Store doesn't just offer a marketplace for products. They are committed to educating and supporting the transition to this renewable green energy source, so in addition to product sales, they generate a lot of content as well.

Sergey’s background is in digital creation, and this reflects across their go-to-market strategy in what is still a new idea for many prospects. The detailed information they offer even supports customers to install their own panels, and make the switchover to solar both affordable and accessible, especially in a time of rising fuel bills.

9.30mins
A remote distributed team
Sergey and his business partner wanted to build in flexibility from the start, and that meant creating a globally distributed company.

With a blend of full time and hourly paid roles, their development team is mostly around Moscow/Turkey time, with salespeople in the US.

This was an emergent situation they later followed as strategy, and their sales team remains small - the whole operation is designed for self-service, supporting customers through detailed information from the why to the how of transitioning to solar energy. That means the team can work flexibly as well as location-independently, in exchange for which, they need people who can bring versatility and a startup mindset to the table.

As Tatiana explains, they specifically seek people who want to experiment and diversify their skills, wear many hats and solve problems, as the company grows. Even Sergey describes himself not just as a co-founder, but somewhere between a project manager and a technical director! Valuing these attributes in addition to the essential self-management and self-organising qualities of working remotely and flexibly, they hire generalists and problem solvers, who can see what needs doing, and aren’t afraid to try something new.

Approaching hiring and culture in this way means that A1 SolarStore has maintained a startup spirit around their business, after 5 years.

19.00mins
Collaborating and communicating

Like many remote teams, their initial collaboration was somewhat reactive and all over the place as they figured things out, but they have consciously transitioned to a Microsoft environment over the past year to bring everything together.

Different teams can then chat or call or share resources easily online, but the greatest challenge has been uniting the sales and development sides of the business. A 7-hour time gap on top of language and cultural differences has led them to focus on the window of overlap to work together, but they’ve also cut back on large synchronous meetings for their own sakes, and they even support different teams integrating non-Microsoft tools they need for their own kinds of collaborating.

On the product side, they operate a scrum-based methodology, with daily stand-ups and sprints, weekly retrospectives, and so on - all the usual tasks to ensure that a product roadmap is followed with no bottlenecks or delays.

23.38mins
Flat hierarchy promotes accountability

While there are some team managers as well as the founders, Tatiana pointed out that every member of the team needs to consider themselves a manager - not only of their own work, but often for other areas and colleagues on a fractional basis. This is why they actively seek new hires who can definitely manage and organise themselves, but who also want to take ownership of outcomes and results within the business.

Product and resource decisions are made at the founder level, but on a data-driven basis, which is logical in a sales enterprise. Client feedback is listened to and acted upon fast, in the name of continually improving the user experience.

Their work with contractors may be more flexible and hands off, depending on the level of involvement the role demands. That ranges from part-time IT workers who don’t need to attend every meeting to do their work, to gig workers who check on supplier fulfilment centres and do other location-dependent tasks: something as simple as a photo of a building makes it easier for a customer to collect their purchases directly from a vendor, and keep support as well as sales costs down.

32.20mins
Informing the solar energy revolution

Educating customers in how to install and use new technologies is an important part of A1 SolarStore’s mission, and more than 40% of their sales are driven by their blogs and videos.

This is part of a lengthy sales funnel, because a 5-figure investment in a new home energy source is a big commitment. Without offices and showrooms to build trust for their business they do it through the quality of their content instead.

Such specialist technology demands detailed product knowledge in content creation, but they have the in-house expertise to support the creative side, and ensure the information they share is industry-leading and always up-to-date.

Founders regularly attend events and exhibitions to ensure they stay across the latest developments and technologies, and this is combined with a strategy to cascade and share that learning in-house. The content they create for customers is also deployed as a resource for educating their own teams and sharing the latest breakthroughs across the organisation.

Above all, Tatiana considers the most important learning from managing a cross-cultural cross-continental remote team is to ask the right questions. Bottlenecks and misunderstandings might not be immediately obvious until you notice something isn’t being done or wasn’t picked up early enough.

But all of these challenges seem to be addressed transparently and clearly at A1 SolarStore.

Their commitment to clarity in their communications both internally and externally is evidently a big part of the startup culture they are consciously maintaining, as they scale and grow to solve a tangible problem in the world today.

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WLP326 Solar Spotlight on the Startup Spirit

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