From Founder Oversight to Dedicated Operations at a California Solar Portfolio

The client is a California-based company in the solar, recycling, environmental services, and related clean economy industries. The portfolio is an operating group, not a holding structure: project delivery, field operations, and commissioned assets are spread over a number of entities, each with their own commercial and operational rhythm. By the time this search opened, the activity level across the group had made the case for a dedicated operations function clear. 

There had been no similar role in the business before. The CEO and COO had been managing cross-portfolio oversight directly, a model that had worked through the early growth years but was no longer proportional to the complexity of the group’s operations. Keller Executive Search worked with the CEO through a structured scoping process to build the role from the ground up: the reporting relationship, the operating authority across entities, and the specific gaps it would fill. That process helped refine the brief so it was much more precise by the end of it.

Having established a clear scope, Keller Executive Search focused on finding senior operators in the solar and clean energy space who had built operational infrastructure across multi-entity environments. The defining qualification was direct experience with the pace of a growing clean economy business (project pipelines, field workforce scaling, cross-functional coordination across operating entities). Candidates who had managed existing systems rather than designing and building new ones were not considered.

The new Operations Leader had spent his career in the solar and green economy sector, holding operational roles at companies that were adding project capacity faster than their systems could handle. His experience covered large-volume project delivery, field workforce development, and the cross-functional coordination a portfolio business needs from a single point of oversight. He knew how to build operating infrastructure in environments that were similar to what the client had, and his track record was in developing, not inheriting.