Are there any other accomplishments, either individually or as an organization, that you’ve especially been proud of?

I think the [Kum & Go] transaction we did in 2023 is a huge accomplishment. It will likely be the largest transaction I ever do in my career. I think it’s one of the biggest transactions that will happen in Des Moines, in Iowa. It’s hard to not call that an accomplishment, but that’s not my accomplishment. It was all of us. I played a significant role in the transaction, but ultimately it was Kyle’s [Krause’s] transaction and the Krause Group’s transaction. My personality is maybe less inclined to point to transaction-type accomplishments. I lean more toward that people stuff.

Will you share about the role you had in the sale?

I was kind of the key point person running the deal. I worked with our investment bankers, prepared transaction documents, sale documents and marketing documents. I ran point on some of the management meeting preparation. I was really kind of involved in all pieces from the beginning until the end of really selecting our team, our external advisers and who we would be working with preparing those marketing materials and launching the deal, working with diligence with different counterparties who we worked with along the way as potential buyers for Kum & Go and Solar Transport. Once we got to announcing the deal in April [2023], the bulk of my work was all kind of culminating up until that. And then once it was kind of out in public, then you have every person in the company to help you, and so a lot of the work went out further after that. It was clearly something that was kept very tight with a small group of people. It was clearly a privilege with the Krause family to be able to play the role that I did in helping Kyle get that across the finish line.

You mentioned that opportunities like those don’t come around very often, so how were you able to prepare yourself to take on that role, and what did you learn from it?

There’s really no preparing yourself. It’s a significant amount of work, and there’s no training or preparation that you could probably have for that. In terms of what I learned, just being able to have a front-row seat to a transaction through every stage – I’ve played a role in other transactions in the past where I was involved in a portion of it – so I think just knowledge of the end-to-end transaction process as a whole, there’s probably an endless number of things that I learned. At the end of the day, the other big lesson is it takes a lot of work from a lot of people to get something like that done, and you have to work together as a team, make difficult decisions, challenging decisions. If I had to boil it down to one thing, I think the importance of clear, regular communication, you gotta keep everyone informed, being the hub or the main coordinator, kind of point person – just constantly making sure that the right people have the right information. I was keeping Kyle in the loop. When a decision needed to be made, just make sure the right person had it. I think just regular, clear communication makes everything go smoother, so that was really a very, very important part of my job through the entire transaction.