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.