Allen and Joel catch up with Will Friedl, CEO and co-founder of Prometheus Wind, based in Colorado. The company has been growing rapidly in the industry, conducting maintenance, blade repairs and more. Will discusses his experience as a business owner in the wind industry and the lessons he has learned along the way. To learn more, visit https://www.prometheuswind.com/ or call 1 (800) 487-4460.

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Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with Joel Saxum. We're here with Will Friedl, who is the CEO of Prometheus Wind. And if you're not familiar with Prometheus, they're based in Colorado and they do a ton of turbine work from blade repair to foundation.

Torque and tensioning, pretty much anything to do with wind turbines they're involved with. And Will is a graduate of the Air Force Academy and is a veteran, and this is their third year in operation. And we wanted to touch base with Will. Because when we get an update of all the things that have happened, and there's been some tremendous growth at Prometheus Wind, so Will, welcome to the program.

Will Friedl: Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it, sir.

Allen Hall: Let's start off with I think the most exciting development, on top of everything else that's happened, is the training center. You've now built out a training center. Yes, sir. Can you tell us about it?

Will Friedl: Yes, sir. Yeah. I think there's a fundamental difference between companies that, are hiring for talent and then going out there and doing work.

And of course we're a bootstrap company that's what we had to do for the first two years of our operation. But it was quickly apparent. It's Hey, we need to get a training center so we can upskill our guys so they can grow, they can earn more money. But also so that we can check people coming through the door to make sure that they have the skills that they need.

And so that was a big initiative, a huge lift this winter time, during the. Quote unquote off season we built out a a small training center here in Greeley, Colorado about two hours away from where I live. And and we've had great success with it. So we've had, we've run all of our guys through that.

Everyone who's new goes through that training center. We get, we able to do a thorough evaluation of their skill sets, put them on the correct, educational track, and when they graduate, they they get the appropriate skill level identification and the qualifications that they need.

That we provide. So it's been a huge success. It's not something that, immediately, you flip the switch and it comes online. There's growth to it. You learn how to train, you learn how to change your curriculum to be more effective. But overall just right out the door, we've seen a lot of success with it.

Seen a lot of extra buy in from guys who are appreciative of being up skilled. We've seen better retention. We've seen, higher quality and more, a better production rate of guys in the field. So it's been a, it's been a huge blessing for us.

Joel Saxum: Will, I know you and I were catching up at ACP and earlier than that in the year, I think O& M as well, over in San Diego with your team, we were talking about the build out of the training center and what it looks like for you guys in the future and what that was going to do for your program.