Nozomi Offsite -Recharge 2024
I thought it was a good omen for our first ever corporate offsite when I discovered that the meeting room we had booked in our hotel, the Hilton Odawara, was called ‘Nozomi’. And so it proved: our one-and-a-half day ‘Recharge 2024’ event was a tremendous success: around 30 colleagues came – almost the entire team — and we did some work together, had a lot of fun and bonded as a team.
The venue was ideal: Odawara is a beautiful city on the Pacific coast, the hotel was modern and well set up and it didn’t rain, so our barbecue ‘under the stars’ went ahead – and it was delicious!
Turning to business for a moment: our carefully designed strategy to scale Nozomi Energy through building a team and intelligently deploying resources – via acquisitions, brownfield and greenfield developments — in order to build momentum is paying off.
After just 18 months – a very, very short time — we have assembled a portfolio of solar, wind and battery storage projects that is already 500MW, half way to our goal for 2027. And we are confident of another significant increase before the end of the year.
We have also made some key hires in the last few months, recruiting a Head of Sustainability and building out our finance function and operations. We have launched an internal training program and submitted an inaugural Community Investment Plan to our parent group Actis – many thanks to Jun Ohashi, Tareq Sirhan, and all the Actis colleagues who took the time to join us in Odawara.
But mainly I want to record here – and give thanks for – all the good exchanges and conversations I had with Nozomi people during the offsite. We got to know each other better, we bonded over good food, so-so karaoke (I’m looking at you, Jeff!) and a some enjoyable team building exercises. Since we have so many engineers at our company, maybe it was no surprise that one group managed to build a tower 68cm tall just from pasta, string, tape and a single marshmallow – well done, Ben and colleagues.
Although our world (and the situation in Japan) remain politically and economically volatile, at Nozomi we have a clear plan for any kind of external environment and we will continue to execute it with focus and precision. By the time of the second Recharge event a year from now, we will have many more achievements to celebrate.
As I have been known to say from time to time: the best is yet to come…
