A nationwide community solar company — two years in the CIO chair
Built and secured the entire technology environment, held the functional Chief Information Officer role for two years, and designed the enrollment portal the sales organization ran on.
- 20–30 min → 5–7 minEnrollment time
- 450+Sales representatives supported, nationwide
What they were facing
They were launching a community solar company nationwide, in one of the most heavily regulated industries in the country.
Associated Konsultants came through the board’s vetting process and was engaged on that basis — not on a handshake, and not as an IT vendor. The remit was the whole technology function.
What was actually at stake
A community solar business collects and transmits credit card data, banking information, personal identifiers, enrollment questionnaires and signed authorization records — for customers in states with different rules about all of it.
Inadequate safeguards would not have produced an inconvenience. They would have produced data breach exposure, consumer-protection violations, payment-security failures, regulatory penalties, customer complaints, and the reputational damage that follows a young company around permanently.
This is what “regulated industry” means in practice: the technology decisions and the compliance decisions are the same decisions.
What they had
An aging ERP system and an early version of a proprietary enrollment platform.
Neither supported what the business was about to become. The gaps were in API connectivity, data protection, equipment controls, geofencing, reporting, and the secure handling of customer information — and the systems had no realistic path to the scale, mobility or integration a national sales operation would demand.
What we did
Built and secured the entire technology environment
From that starting point, to the standard a regulated national business requires.
Put employee access controls in place
Specifically to keep the company clear of regulatory violation — who could see what, under what circumstances, with what record of it.
Served as functional Chief Information Officer for two years
Through the launch and the formative period, so technology decisions were made by someone accountable for them rather than referred out.
Designed the enrollment portal
The system the sales organization ran on.
What the portal did
Beyond the time itself: new representatives reached productivity faster. Manual entry dropped, and avoidable enrollment errors dropped with it. Customers got a consistent experience rather than one that varied by whoever signed them up. And the business gained real-time information exchange, reporting, accountability and management visibility across a sales organization spread across the country.
An enrollment that takes twenty-five minutes and one that takes six are not the same product. At 450 representatives, they are not the same company.
How it ended
The engagement concluded in 2019, once the launch, infrastructure, security, integration and operational objectives had been met.
That is the intended shape of this work. The company had a secure, scalable technology foundation and no further need for a fractional CIO. Staying longer would have been billing for presence rather than value.
The client is not named at their request. The engagement was board-vetted and independently contracted, and this is our own account of work we performed rather than a client speaking for us.