What does it take to market to an industry where relationships matter, traditions run deep, and the next generation of buyers is changing the game?

In this episode of Backstage Pass: Inside Energy, host Brittni Castilaw sits down with John Downey, Marketing Director at Tallman Equipment, to talk about the unique challenges of marketing in the electric utility industry.

From the continued importance of word-of-mouth referrals and printed catalogs to the growing influence of digital search, AI, and changing buyer behaviors, John shares how his team is adapting its approach to reach linemen and utility professionals.

The conversation also explores the importance of educating customers, communicating technical expertise without unnecessary jargon, and building trust through honesty and authenticity.

And as technology continues to reshape how businesses connect with their audiences, John offers a simple reminder: People still do business with people.

This conversation offers a practical look at what it means to connect with your audience.

Subscribe to Backstage Pass: Inside Energy for more candid conversations with the people, leaders, and innovators shaping the energy industry.

What if we stopped looking at waste as a problem to solve and started recognizing it as a resource with untapped potential?

In Episode 7 of Backstage Pass: Inside Energy, host Brittni Castilaw sits down with Timur Dunaev, Managing Director and CEO of Paques U.S., for a candid conversation about the evolving relationship between environmental engineering, energy security, and business innovation.

With decades of experience in wastewater treatment, renewable energy, and environmental engineering, Timur brings a unique perspective on how the industry is changing and where he believes its greatest opportunities lie.

Together, Brittni and Timur explore the growing potential of resource recovery, from converting agricultural waste into renewable natural gas to recovering valuable nutrients and metals from wastewater. They also tackle the challenges of bringing new technologies to market, the role of private investment, and why traditional ROI calculations don't always tell the whole story.

The conversation goes beyond technology, touching on the importance of entrepreneurial thinking, the agility of mid-sized companies, and the human relationships behind complex industrial decisions.

At the heart of this conversation is a compelling reminder: Some of the industry's biggest opportunities require us to rethink how we define value in the first place.

About Backstage Pass: Inside Energy

Hosted by Brittni Castilaw of Backstage Energy Marketing, Backstage Pass: Inside Energy brings you honest conversations with the people shaping the energy industry. We're pulling back the curtain on the challenges, decisions, innovations, and perspectives influencing where energy goes next.

Subscribe for more conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and the people doing the work.

Meet Cody Castilaw, our VP of Technology & Operations at Backstage Energy Marketing, and one half of our new monthly Backstage Pass: Inside Energy segment!

Cody brings nearly two decades of experience in technology, operations, and the energy industry, along with an engineering mindset and a healthy habit of questioning how things have always been done.

Each month, Cody and BEM Founder Brittni Castilaw will dig into the increasingly connected worlds of marketing and technology, from AI and automation to data, digital assets, CRMs, and the systems that keep businesses running.

Expect candid conversations, different perspectives, a little pushback, and plenty of opinions about what's actually worth your time.

Because good marketing doesn't operate in a silo, and neither should the technology behind it.

In this episode of Backstage Pass: Inside Energy, Brittni Castilaw sits down with Nikki Gonzales, Director of Business Development at Weintek USA and co-founder of Automation Ladies, for a candid conversation about AI, industrial automation, manufacturing, and most importantly: the people behind it all.

Nikki has spent nearly 20 years following her curiosity through technical sales, machine vision, software, AI, supply chain, controls, and automation. She brings a unique perspective to the AI conversation because she was working with machine learning and natural language processing long before ChatGPT made AI accessible to everyone.

Together, Brittni and Nikki dig into what has changed, where AI is creating real value, and why understanding the problem you’re trying to solve still matters more than simply adopting the latest technology.

They also talk about:

• Where AI is moving beyond the hype in industrial environments
• Why AI should help experienced people work faster, not replace their judgment
• The importance of keeping humans in the loop, especially in critical applications
• How better access to data and AI tools is opening capabilities once reserved for large enterprises
• Why Nikki helped launch Automation Ladies and the community that grew from it
• Creating more visibility and opportunity for women in technical careers
• The talent and skills shortage facing industrial automation
• Why attracting great people takes more than talking about how badly the industry needs them

Nikki explains that while better tools can help us solve bigger problems, we still need curious, experienced people asking the right questions.

Subscribe to Backstage Pass: Inside Energy for more honest conversations with the people shaping what comes next across energy, technology, and the industries that keep the world moving.

What happens when you combine a background in genetic engineering, 15 years in oil and gas, and a passion for developing the next generation of industry leaders?

In this episode of Backstage Pass: Inside Energy, Brittni Castilaw sits down with Jennifer McGee, VP of Strategic Development at High Rock Infrastructure Services, for an honest conversation about the people, relationships, and changes shaping the future of energy.

Jennifer shares her unconventional journey from working on smallpox vaccine research to building a career in oil and gas, along with her perspective on some of the industry's biggest challenges.

They get into workforce development, the importance of passing decades of experience to the next generation, and why mentorship needs to work both ways. They also challenge traditional approaches to trade shows and sales, explore how technology is changing the speed of business, and discuss what it really means to be authentic in a professional setting.

Plus, Jennifer isn't afraid to share a few industry practices that make her roll her eyes!

From taking ownership of your career to rethinking how we connect, communicate, and develop talent, this conversation is a reminder that the future of energy depends just as much on its people as it does on its technology.

Subscribe to Backstage Pass: Inside Energy for more candid conversations with the people shaping the industry.

In Episode 04 of Backstage Pass: Inside Energy, Brittni Castilaw sits down with Owen Barrett, CEO of Shine, for a candid conversation about solar, entrepreneurship, policy, AI, and what it takes to spend more than a decade pursuing an idea plenty of people told you was crazy.

Owen’s path to Shine has been anything but quick. His pursuit of bringing on-site solar to multifamily properties has stretched across roughly 12 years and four companies. Along the way, he and his business partner became multifamily owners themselves, purchasing 650 units and going through the underwriting, due diligence, and capital-raising processes firsthand. It took years inside the industry to understand why solar wasn’t being adopted and even longer to build a solution around each problem they found.

Today, that persistence is beginning to pay off. Shine is growing quickly and working with some of the largest multifamily owners in the country. But ask Owen about the company’s impact so far and he gives a surprising answer: “Our impact rounds to zero.” Compared to the total number of apartment units in the U.S., the amount Shine has reached barely registers. To Owen, that isn’t discouraging. It’s evidence of just how much opportunity is still sitting in front of them.

From there, the conversation gets candid. Owen is unafraid to touch politics, policy, and the way solar has become tangled up in both. He talks about rising electricity rates, the loss of federal solar tax credits, and why he believes policy changes intended to hurt renewable energy could ultimately make its economics more compelling. He also pushes back on the tendency to divide the conversation into “renewable” and “traditional” camps. His argument is simpler: the country needs more energy, quickly, and every source should have to compete on a level playing field.

That willingness to challenge conventional thinking carries into the way Owen talks about entrepreneurship, too. They also get into trust, and Owen’s answer is refreshingly simple: be willing to say you don’t know. At Shine, he would rather someone admit they don’t have an answer and go find it than pretend to know something they don’t. It’s an interesting contrast from someone who also readily acknowledges that starting a business sometimes requires believing you can do something long before you have the track record to prove it.

The conversation turns toward AI and the challenge of adopting new technology without creating fragmented processes, generating slop, or outsourcing the thinking itself.

And Shine isn’t finished questioning what’s possible. Owen shares a first look at the company’s work on a new hardware solution designed to bring battery storage into multifamily installations. We are so excited to see their work come to fruition!

For Owen, innovation seems to come down to a particular combination: curiosity, stubbornness, courage, and just enough stupidity to try something you probably have no business trying. Curiosity asks why something has to work the way it always has. Stubbornness keeps you around when the answer is, “That’s insane.” Courage gets you moving anyway. And sometimes, a little stupidity keeps you from realizing you’re supposed to be intimidated by the size of the problem.

It’s candid, opinionated, funny, occasionally irreverent, and full of the kind of perspective Backstage Pass was created to make room for.

In Episode 03 of Backstage Pass: Inside Energy, Brittni Castilaw sits down with Erica Honeycutt, President of Honeycutt Solutions and CEO of Lando Solutions, for a candid conversation about technology, process, relationships, and what can happen when you’re willing to question the way things have always been done.

Erica has spent more than two decades in oil and gas, building her expertise in an area of the industry that doesn’t always get much of the spotlight: land administration. Her path started at the entry level, filling in for a receptionist after her aunt helped her get a foot in the door. From there, a willingness to help wherever she could turned into a career built around one of Erica’s greatest strengths: finding problems and figuring out how to solve them.

Today, she does that through both people and technology. Erica and Brittni dig into the rapid rise of automation and AI, including how work that once took months can now be accomplished in a day. But with that speed comes a different challenge. If technology is doing more of the work, do we still understand the process well enough to recognize when the answer is wrong? As Erica puts it, sometimes we need to “supervise the robots.”

They also talk about one of the habits Erica sees holding companies back: continuing to follow a process simply because it works or because it’s the way things have always been done. She shares how her team helped turn one three-day process into five minutes, why companies need to take a closer look at the work happening behind the scenes, and how curiosity can uncover efficiencies that have been hiding in plain sight.

That willingness to question things also applies when something simply isn’t working. Erica shares a lesson from earlier in her career about sunk costs and the importance of making decisions based on where you are today, not how much time or money you’ve already invested. Sometimes moving forward means admitting a decision was wrong, pulling the plug, and finding a better path.

The conversation gets into the less visible side of oil and gas, too, including suspense balances, back-office liability, disconnected processes, and the consequences of allowing problems to sit unresolved for months or even years. Erica believes technology and better-connected data can help, but only if companies are willing to examine the processes underneath it first.

And for all the conversation around software, AI, automation, and what’s coming next, Erica believes something much more traditional will continue to matter: relationships. Reliability, accountability, communication, and knowing the person across the table has your best interest in mind still carry weight, no matter how sophisticated the technology becomes.

Through all of it, one idea keeps resurfacing: curiosity. Is this actually the best way to do something? Could we eliminate a step entirely? Are we solving the right problem? What could change if we stopped accepting a process simply because it works and started asking if it could work better?

For Erica, sometimes progress starts with taking a step back and asking a better question.

It’s practical, candid, forward-looking, and exactly the kind of perspective Backstage Pass was created to bring to the table.

In Episode 02 of Backstage Pass: Inside Energy, Brittni Castilaw sits down with Wesley Adams, Vice President of Energy Advisors Group, for a candid conversation about deals, capital, relationships, and what it takes to keep moving in an industry where the market rarely sits still.

Wesley’s path into oil and gas wasn’t exactly conventional. After starting his career in the medical field as an athletic trainer, a conversation with his Sunday school teacher opened the door to the dealmaking side of energy. He learned the business from the ground up, and today, he works with buyers and sellers across an industry where every transaction brings a different set of challenges.

They dig into one of the biggest shifts Wesley is seeing today: capital is harder to come by, and that changes the way deals get done. From the growing importance of liabilities in asset valuations to the challenge of finding well-funded buyers, Wesley shares a firsthand look at a transaction market that requires more scrutiny, creativity, and adaptability than it did even a decade ago.

But numbers only tell part of the story. Wesley and Brittni talk about what actually builds trust in business, why reputation still carries serious weight in oil and gas, and why Wesley is willing to take a meeting even when there may not be an obvious deal on the table. You never know what someone knows that you don’t, and in Wesley’s words, he’s a lifelong learner.

The conversation also looks ahead to natural gas, LNG, data centers, power generation, nuclear, and the growing energy demands that will shape the next chapter of the industry. Wesley’s view isn’t about picking one winner. It’s about recognizing the role different energy sources have to play and remembering that affordable, reliable energy underpins far more of modern life than most people realize.

Through all of it, one idea keeps resurfacing: this industry survives because it keeps learning. Markets shift. Capital moves. Technology evolves. Opportunities show up in places people weren’t looking before. The people who stay curious enough to change with it are the ones who keep moving forward.

Or, as Wesley puts it: never stop learning.

It’s thoughtful, practical, refreshingly open-minded, and exactly the kind of perspective Backstage Pass was created to bring to the table.