How to hire, fire, and get max value from carbon market consultants
David LaGreca shares his expertise from countless carbon projects during his time at EcoEngineers and beyond
This is a summary of episode #403 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast with guest David LaGreca. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc. or literally right below this paragraph.
These are distilled from David’s advice throughout the conversation, which you should listen to in full since there’s a lot more than what is below.
If you’re a climate tech founder or project developer trying to figure out the contractor question, start here. You can also comment or send me a message if you’d like advice or a connection to EcoEngineers.
Choosing the Right Consultant
Match the expertise to the specific problem, not the brand. A firm that’s brilliant at nature-based removals might be the wrong choice for your DAC project, even if they’re the most respected name in CDR. Look for direct experience with your mechanism or market.
Evaluate the team, not just the company. Ask who specifically will be working on your project. Some people at every consulting firm are better than others. You’re paying for the individuals, not the logo.
Check for intellectual honesty. A good consultant will tell you your project might not work. If every consultant you talk to says yes without caveats, somebody’s may be lying, and possibly by omission.
Use the intro call as a personality screen. Most consultants will take a 30-minute introductory call for free. Use it to assess whether you actually want to spend dozens of hours on calls with this person. The relationship is going to be intensive.
Beware the self-made AI expert. If your entire feasibility analysis came from prompting ChatGPT, and it told you your idea was brilliant, you should be more skeptical, not less. AI will validate almost anything. A consultant who pushes back is giving you the more valuable service.
Consider the network you’re buying into. When you hire a consulting firm, you get access to their contacts: verification bodies, ASTM members, LCA teams, finance connections, hardware vendors. That network took them a decade to build and you get it immediately.
Hiring and Structuring the Engagement
Start conversations earlier than you think you should. Pre-revenue with a pathway to revenue? That’s a fine time to call. A quick intro call costs nothing and might reframe your entire go-to-market.
Do a feasibility study first, or have them do one. Zero-based thinking on your own project before you start spending on consulting is the single highest-ROI activity David recommends. If a firm offers this as a first engagement, take it seriously.
Run the cost comparison honestly. A consulting engagement might be $50K–$100K over a few months, but a full-time hire at $150K–$200K with benefits, onboarding time, and the risk they leave in 18 months might cost more for less flexibility. People generally assume FTEs are the better deal, but the scope of work and labor market details matter a huge amount in getting it all to math correctly.
Don’t treat consulting as a one-off. David’s best client relationships are on their third, fourth, fifth projects. The consultant gets better at serving you over time, and the switching cost of starting over with someone new is real.
Ask about registry selection early. This is one of the most consequential decisions a project developer makes, and it’s one where a consultant with cross-registry experience can save you from an expensive mistake.
When to Fire (and When Not To)
Make sure it’s not a miscommunication first. David says this happens a lot with strategic advisory: the client feels like they’re hearing things they already know, but sometimes those were things the consultant brought to them weeks ago. Clear the air before you cut the cord.
Fire when you’ve given clear direction and they’re not executing. If the deliverables are defined, the timeline is agreed, and the work isn’t happening, that’s straightforward.
Fire when they’re actively holding you back from your mission. Sometimes a consultant’s risk aversion or narrow focus becomes a bottleneck rather than an accelerant.
Don’t fire just because you’ve learned enough. That’s actually the goal. If you’ve absorbed enough expertise to handle things in-house, the engagement was successful. Move on without guilt, but recognize it as a win, not a failure.
Don’t fire over cost alone without running the numbers. Sometimes a piece of advice in a tight cash-flow moment is worth the scant dollars. Saving on consulting by making a $500K mistake is not actually saving.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, thanks for listening to Reversing Climate Change. This is Ross Kenyon. I’m the host of the show. I’m a climate tech and carbon removal entrepreneur. I’m an executive in residence at Maritime Blue. I produced the Green Blueprint for Latitude Media. Someone was asking me the other day what exactly I do, and it’s often a lot to explain. I’m a commercial strategist working in climate tech, and I often work at the intersection of commercial strategy and storytelling, is usually what I say to someone to get them to stop asking me that question.
In any case, I’ve been making this show since 2017. I have a strange background in the humanities. I did a year of PhD work in political philosophy. I’ve worked in filmmaking for a long time. I’m interested in ideas, but also how ideas get deployed into physical instantiations in the real world. Many of the shows that you will hear on this podcast will have really strong practical applications for those working in climate tech, deep tech, carbon dioxide removal, things of that nature, things adjacent to those spaces. And also crossover with some of the biggest questions from the humanities, which are all things like, as my dad likes to say—I don’t know where he got this, it sounds so vaudevillian to me—the “Who am I? Where am I? Who ordered the veal cutlet?” So the show has some of the episodes that are definitely more like in the “who ordered the veal cutlet” territory than average. But a lot of them are questions of who are we, why are we here, what’s going on?
Why is it so hard for us to live well on this beautiful planet and treat each other halfway decently? And climate is one of the ways that this lack of care is expressed, and the ways that we are working to try to ameliorate that before the cost of inaction or bad action sweep over us.
If that sounds good to you, subscribing to the show is very much appreciated. If you already like the show, ideally you love the show, a great rating and review in your podcast app of choice would be greatly appreciated. On Apple Podcasts and other apps like it, you’re even able to write a review. So if you could just take a couple seconds now to open up your podcast app, give this show a great rating, write a review if you can. Stuff like that adds huge amounts of value, helps bring new people into the show. You can become a paid subscriber on Spotify for five bucks a month and get rid of all the ads. I do not read myself if you use Spotify. I’m using Substack a lot more. Thank you so much for people who have subscribed, especially as paid subscribers on Substack. And it may not seem like a huge contribution sometimes on your end, but it is, and it’s appreciated and noticed, and they add up and really change the equation of how it is to keep this work going.
Today’s guest is a friend of mine, David LaGreca. His company, EcoEngineers, is an advisory and consultancy firm within carbon markets. They are also a sponsor of this podcast, so you have heard their little bumper at the start of the show where I discuss what a great organization they are. David and I joke about it in this episode, that we would often find ourselves getting onboarded into a project and be like, “Oh, you’re here already? Oh, you’re—okay, cool. I guess that makes sense then.”
David does a really good job explaining what it is that EcoEngineers and his team likes to focus on, so I won’t belabor the point any further here. Except to say that EcoEngineers grew out of biofuels and working on things like carbon intensity scoring with regard to biofuel tax crediting. And they have become one of the biggest players in carbon dioxide removal, helping those who are trying to stand up new technologies, new methodologies, get these projects over the line, figure out what types of credits they can qualify for, how to make all of these equations sort of work in favor of the companies with whom they’re contracting.
I have a bunch of friends over at EcoEngineers. I would have no reservation sending you to them. If you would like to be connected to EcoEngineers, you can reach out to me personally. You can also tell them that I sent you. They are a sponsor of the show. They care about producing good carbon removal content. They care about having these kinds of conversations. I’m not just saying this because it benefits me, which it does, but I think that shows a lot of leadership that they would sponsor some of these shows that are dealing with big ideas, that are engaging people within our shared work that we believe is so important to the world, and I am really grateful for them for that. Rudy Krehbiel is someone that I can connect you with over at EcoEngineers as well, if you would like to get into their system to figure out where you can plug in and how and who you should meet. Rudy’s a really great close friend of mine. We’ve collaborated for a long time and I think I will just be steering you into Rudy’s hands.
So link in the show notes to Rudy and David. And in this episode, David and I are talking about how to actually use contractors successfully because we’ve seen good and bad versions of people working with contractors in our space. When done correctly, it is a way to have very high bang for buck. I’ve also seen a lot of money be wasted on contractors in ways that were very inefficient. Today was my opportunity to work with David to be like, “How do you actually make this relationship work well?” And to share that knowledge with people who are often trying to decide, do I hire someone or is this a contractor role? How do I know the difference? And David does a really nice job of helping me lay out how to think about this. His insights are things that I’m going to carry with me both for my own work and as I’m trying to advise companies on how to hire for various roles. So thanks so much, David LaGreca, for being on. Here’s the show.
Ross Kenyon: David, thanks for being on the show. Really happy to finally have you here.
David LaGreca: Excited to be here. Thank you very much for the invite.
Ross Kenyon: I’m glad we’re going to do this because this is a topic that I think has befuddled a lot of people, a lot of founders. It’s really unclear. I think people don’t know how to effectively work with contractors, especially for contracting with a group like EcoEngineers that’s doing scientific engineering methodological work. It seems like the default position is that it’s better to bring those people on staff, just hire someone who can focus exclusively on your own company rather than hire someone externally, and I don’t actually think that is true. I’m tasking you with complicating that story in a productive way. How is that to set the bounds of the show?
David LaGreca: That sounds great. I, for anybody who doesn’t know me, I am David LaGreca, close friends with Ross, as everybody that’s in this industry who’s ever heard his sweet voice online.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. No, the flattery—you’re already on the show. You’re already here, Dave. You don’t have to do more. When you’ve made the sale, stop selling. That’s the rule, right?
David LaGreca: I never stop. Never stop selling. That’s the other rule of consulting is you never stop selling. But so EcoEngineers is a full-service advisory consulting company. We are owned by a company named LRQA, based in the UK. But we are an independent entity who is keenly and exclusively focused on energy transition. In my case, we’re exclusively focused on decarbonization projects. Some of those are carbon removal, some of them are offsets, insets. I don’t really care, but we just have to make sure it’s done well. So we worked with, I don’t know, probably a couple hundred project developers at this point in time across the team and find that some companies don’t actually need consulting, and that’s fantastic.
I think those rainbow kind of entities are few and far between, however. Most people don’t know everything, and that’s why consulting exists is to fill in those gaps. Consultants can’t do everything. They can’t take over your team. They can’t make you have a good company. But can sure sometimes add that insight that makes your project actually get off the ground or give you a new idea you didn’t think about.
Ross Kenyon: Go back a little bit here. You said you don’t care. So what, you don’t care about the project type—it’s insetting, it’s offsetting, it’s decarb, it’s carbon removal. You care about them all equally? What do you mean by that?
David LaGreca: Yeah. I care in a way that if the project is doing what it’s claiming to be doing and it’s engaging with the broader market and with the climate change movement in an honest, effective way, then I don’t care what the outcome is. I do care insofar as things that I don’t know about, I don’t advise on. But basically, carbon claims my team and I treat interchangeably as far as whether we’re going to work with them or not. We’re not idealists or ideologues that exclude working with certain types of entities or certain nationalities even. We just make sure that the project that’s being done is proper and the teams aren’t completely horrible to work with. Those are kind of our parameters.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. All right. We just did a show recently that was about how to sell. It was specifically about TerraSet, but the lessons in there were also much broader than that—how to develop relationships, how to make your carbon removal project development company bigger than merely selling credits, how to make this more catalytic, how to think and approach people where they are. And there’s a lot of useful advice in there. I was hoping to duplicate that a little bit here for engaging a consultancy like EcoEngineers. When is the right time to engage? What is a productive relationship? What are times when it’s actually a bad time to bring a consultancy in? How does this all fit together in a way that may make sense or may not make sense for carbon dioxide removal project developers or climate tech companies generally?
David LaGreca: I actually think that’s changed through time. It’s kind of morphed when we engage with companies. In the heyday in 2022, 2023, it was largely new companies who had a new idea that didn’t yet have a direct mechanism or a pathway to the market. So the majority of our revenue and the companies I worked with at that point in time were drafting new methodologies. So we were writing like mad for about two, two and a half years there, getting the industry planted with a lot of these methodologies that we’re using today. We worked across the CDR space about seven or eight different mechanisms, about 10 protocols between those, and then we reviewed module after module.
So at that point in time, consulting for me and my team consisted of writing the new rule book for how to legitimize these project types that hadn’t happened a whole lot prior to that, or they didn’t have a direct pathway on a registry. And that process was everything from scientific validation of the concept—like, does this actually have legs? Do we want to engage with this type of thing?—all the way to bringing them the PDDs and all the draft documents that it actually takes to get registered. Some of the people were, at that point in time, selling credits out of the back of their truck, and we were just trying to make it more legitimate to do so.
That’s kind of morphed through time. So at this point in time, we’re working with big energy companies. We’re working with corporates. We’re working with companies who have actually managed to stay alive through the battle of attrition in CDR these last couple, few years, and we’re working increasingly with companies that are already operating. It’s a little bit of a shift, and that just follows the market trends, I feel like. So in those instances, the larger companies are stepping into a new market, and they frequently assume that the market’s going to be the same as whatever other market they’re selling into. So we quickly dissuade them of that notion that carbon removal is anything like fuel sales or energy sales and kind of tie in the much more bespoke characteristics of the VCM compared to a lot of the regulated markets. And that’s a lot of what we’re doing now.
So the time to speak with consultants varies based off of where you are in your development journey. But if you’re not certain whether the VCM is the right market or you’ve just had a chat with your favorite agent online and it told you that, “Yeah, you can earn a million credits and it’s going to be no problem, you should just go for it,” you should probably call somebody who’s walked those steps before.
Ross Kenyon: Does that happen? Do you actually get inbound for that reason?
David LaGreca: More or less, yes. We get a lot of that stuff like, “Hey, I’ve got a couple hundred hectares of trees. I want carbon credits.” We get, “Hey, I’ve just invented this device, I want carbon credits for it.” “I invented a faucet type, I want carbon credits for it.” Like everything under the sun, people assume that if it has any remote affiliation with energy, efficiency, carbon, that they should get that. And then there’s other much more pre-refined groups that we work with, which I’d say the majority of the people who end up being clients have somewhat more of a refined concept. But there’s still a lot of misinformation out there about what it takes to be a carbon credit developer.
Ross Kenyon: It’s the easiest way to riches that exists.
David LaGreca: Yeah. You and I just tripped and fell into it. Now we’re doing this for fun outside of working hours.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. For the love of the game. That’s exactly right. Okay, but you’re still working with project developers or tech developers who want to create a new methodology or they want to figure out which existing methodologies they should work through. They’re trying to evaluate their go-to-market and how to actually go from cool tech or cool project orientation into commercial viability, and that is something that you’re still pretty focused on though, no?
David LaGreca: Yes. Yes, frequently. We got a new inbound today about some cool new tech that I’m really hoping has legs and we get to write a methodology about it. We don’t get that every day anymore, but it is exciting. But even for companies who are just trying to figure out where to set up shop—do I go with the Puro registry? Do I go Rainbow? Do I go Isometric?—which registry is a very important question that I think people sort of shortchange, because it, as much as it shouldn’t, it determines everything from how many credits you’re going to get, what your commercial engagement’s going to be, how often your credits are going to be verified, and what kind of stamps and letters you can put next to your credits as far as Core Carbon Principle labeling, as far as other types of industry standards.
That decision’s really fundamental, which I think is why we spend so much time and why I would like to just dwell for a second on the crazy importance of upfront diligence on your own project. Everybody thinks of project diligence, and I’ve spoken about this elsewhere about project diligence from outsiders being really critical and how to do that. But you’ve got to be critical on your own project, and that’s one thing a third-party advisor can provide that can’t be provided necessarily by anybody within your team, is kind of looking at it again. Because EcoEngineers does not have skin in the game besides wanting to do the work and to keep doing work for you. We don’t take equity positions, and that’s a really unique place to be in the market, is to have that independent eye and to be able to tell you to your face that this project can work under XYZ scenarios, and if you follow those scenarios, then you might have a path.
But we definitely have a small graveyard of projects that don’t call us back because we’ve told them that we think you need to do a lot of work to get it off the ground and to make it viable in this market.
Ross Kenyon: Well, one of the reasons why we know each other is because we will often end up consulting or working with teams and be like, “You’re already working with them? There’s already an Eco contract with you guys? Oh, okay. So again, David. How funny.” I suspect we also probably take some of the meetings with those types of entrepreneurs where one of the recurring challenges of my consulting is determining whether a particular company—they’re like, “Is this person the smartest person here, or is this the biggest crackpot idea that exists in this space?” And some of them I have a hard time telling. This might actually be genius or maybe just a fever dream. But those people don’t really like being told no either, though. I lose those contracts. I think if anyone’s paying me, I’ve said this before, if you’re paying me, I’ll tell you my true thoughts about it. I won’t lie for the sake of keeping the job. But they don’t always necessarily want to hear that information either.
David LaGreca: No, they absolutely don’t, and that’s—but if you’re blowing smoke, if you’re—you can straight up lie to people and that’s—I mean, it’s also a lie of omission sometimes if you’re not telling it how it is. You don’t have to be a jerk, but to kind of misconstrue somebody’s likelihood of success in a market—the only way to do that nicely is to do it in a spreadsheet, where you kind of show them, “Here’s how many credits you can actually get based off of your scenario.” And that can really break people’s hearts, but in a non-verbal way, which some people take better.
But most of the time projects have some way to get off the ground. There is viability, so it’s just getting to be a higher threshold for what kind of projects actually succeed. We’ve kind of increased our level of honesty in that way—as far as, “You can do it, but here’s where you’re going to be losing out. Here’s who your competitors are. Here’s what it looks like if Microsoft’s not in the picture,” which isn’t always as big of an issue in some sub-markets as people think it is. It’s a vibe thing to some degree.
But yeah, it is a small market too, and I always love that. Clients we work with that you’ve worked with—we just come across the “Oh, you’re already working with this digital MRV provider?” “Oh, yeah, well, we’re friends with them too.” Different parts of our company, people don’t know that we do either one side of the fuel market or the carbon market, and so it’s fun to be at the intersection of the industry in a lot of ways.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. It’s a good reminder as a general principle, beyond just it’s nice to be nice and it’s good to be nice to one another as sort of a baseline. All of these fields, even fields bigger than carbon dioxide removal, are small enough where you end up running into the same people all of the time, and everyone pretty much talks. And so even if you’re just purely self-interested and Machiavellian about it, it usually makes sense to try to treat everyone decently well. And whenever I come across someone where maybe social graces did not enter their brain or body or both to the degree that was necessary, I’m like, “You know we’re going to see each other three months from now, right?” So anyways, yes, that is a good rule of consulting and contracting too.
I imagine that there are probably opportunities that come up for project developers that you are able to connect people to, and sometimes companies that are difficult to work with or maybe a little bit prickly, maybe fewer opportunities might accrue to them. I don’t even know. Is that even true? Do you do business that way?
David LaGreca: Everybody does, intentionally or unintentionally. There’s parties that you make referrals to and you don’t make referrals to other parties, and sometimes it’s directly technical, other times it’s like you just don’t want to work with that person. That’s just how it is. And I think this is networking, right? We get the majority of our leads through the network. We do a lot of thought leadership and stage talking and things, but the majority of what we get is from referrals and people who are just reaching out because they heard of us or Ross said good things on his podcast, and then we get to—those sorts of things. We get a lot of it.
But it is a very small world and bridges are easily burned. But I do think that one advantage of bringing in consultants is that the network that myself and others in my team have been building for 10 years—you just immediately enter that network, right? Just like meeting anybody in your world, but you just kind of have access to dozens of different verification bodies and different ASTM members who are developing systems. We have an LCA team who’s working on writing EPDs. Just basically other parties that you’re going to need in your project. And we’ve got forestry subcontractors, soil subcontractors, other parties we’ve worked with that we try to connect. The finance side—we’re not out there raising money for folks, but we do connect people where it fits.
And we’re on that circuit together as you were talking about seeing people in three months—it’s the CDR circuit and we see each other three to five times a year in various forms, and everybody knows everybody and it feels like you just picked up the conversation yesterday. But some of those contacts, that’s where the business comes from for us, and that’s who we like to connect people with is the friends in the industry.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed. Okay, let’s go back to this original question here. The original question of this podcast was how to effectively work with a contractor, and I think probably the place to start is why hire a consultancy like EcoEngineers in the first place? I’ve worked at companies that have thought that we’re investing in people over time. We want to get them on a sort of wholesale pricing. We want that knowledge to stay inside the company, which is not even true because people leave companies. They don’t always stay there that long either. But you want people inside the company who are accruing this knowledge and experience rather than paying someone to take it with them outside of the company as a contractor. How do you know which of those approaches is correct for your particular company? How do you begin to figure that out?
David LaGreca: I’d say if you’re working on acquiring somebody with decades of experience, you’re just kind of buying that in-house consulting help. But then that knowledge is limited in some way, shape, or form. Nobody knows everything, so you need to kind of fill your team with advanced experts in the field, along with the analyst level as well. Where it makes sense to bring in consulting contractors is on markets that you are just now getting into, or you’ve been in for a while, but the going gets more complex than you assumed, when the market shifts and you just want to make sure it’s still viable.
When you get hard questions from your diligence parties about how you did this, why you did this, how this conforms, what it’s going to look like in five years, and you can’t just rattle that off because that’s what you talk about all day—it’s probably good to at least consider it. You pick up contractors for hardware when you need somebody, because you’re not going to produce your own meters. You’re still going to probably pay somebody to sell them to you and to install them at your facility if you’re doing any kind of measured activity. You might not need to have a party on board who is absolutely an expert at soil science unless you’re running Nori, and then you do, right? But you don’t want to necessarily have every expert on board at all times.
So when you work with a consulting company, you get their entire breadth of expertise on hand. And some people at every consulting company are better than others, so it is critical to assess who the team is along with the name of the company that you’re working with. So you want to make sure that the people you’re working with directly are going to add that value beyond just the name on the block.
So that name can be really important—signing up with EcoEngineers, Deloitte, whoever you’re working with. But if the party you’re working with isn’t the knowledgeable one, then you might not be getting the full value. And we make sure that we’re teaming things properly, where we’re not putting somebody on that’s going to frustrate the client. Because every client—I don’t know if anybody else has been in consulting—everybody you’re consulting with, they already know it, of course, but you’re just kind of reflecting back to them what they already know, and that’s a subtle trick in the consulting world to just recognize that they already know it, but you’re just kind of confirming what their thoughts are.
But no, in all seriousness, you just have to have the right team. And those team members get brought into your company most of the time at a lower net cost. So instead of bringing somebody on for a 12-month position at $200,000, $150,000, you can get 90% of the same amount of work done in a brief amount of time with a fraction of that cost. So frequently consulting is an expensive out-of-pocket one-to-six-month endeavor, but it can oftentimes be cheaper than actually bringing on a full headcount.
And there is that changeover period between when it pays. If somebody stays at your company for two to three years and you can just know that from day one, and you have more than just a half a percent of equity or something over them that you can just kind of let go or use as a bargaining chip—you want to make sure that if you’re going to hire, it’s got to be really well worth it, and that that person’s got to be valuable on the recurring basis, not just on a one-off. Where consulting also can be more than a one-off. That’s not exactly my point, but it’s a relationship. And the parties that we work the best with, we’re on our third, fourth, fifth projects with. We’re doing multiple tasks, multiple years on, because they just like the way it flows and they get their results. They know it. If they don’t, they know who to yell at.
Ross Kenyon: I can imagine someone listening to this episode and thinking, “David’s really smart, has a lot of experience. Why don’t we just hire him out from EcoEngineers?” Why shouldn’t they do that? Or are you willing to entertain their offers? And I’ll send—I’ll list your personal email in case they’d like to talk to you.
David LaGreca: Oh, man. Sometimes people do reach out in that capacity. And I’d say that happens to a lot of consultants, and I think what they don’t recognize is what is super curious, what fulfills my curiosity and a lot of other people that I work with, and other consultants in the field too. I mean, there’s a lot of really smart people out there who are taking past experiences and leveraging that for another consulting company or for their own. And I think what keeps me excited is working on a variety of things.
We’ve worked on many dozens of project types, and I really get my kicks off on that. Working internal is valuable in that you build one thing, but when you’re consulting, you build many things for many people, and you can kind of extend and leverage that expertise across the field. Nobody stays at a job forever, but consulting is a unique process that anybody who does it probably ends up growing to hate it at some point because of the demands on you. You can’t just tell your boss to shut up because you don’t have one boss. You’ve got a client who owns you for X number of hours, for X number of weeks or whatever. But it’s a different process than working in-house.
Ross Kenyon: If you don’t already have one, you could just take that answer to a psychiatrist and get an ADHD diagnosis. That’s considered diagnostic, David.
David LaGreca: Yeah, I’ll consider myself diagnosed.
Ross Kenyon: I like that too. I’ve actually thought a lot about that for myself—would I like to be at a company full-time? There’s obvious benefits and stability to that, but I think I am a really effective synthesizer and combiner of things in novel ways, and having more independence I think allows a bit more truth to come through, and I think that better serves my personality in some regards. Although I think for the right company I could be quite powerful in those roles too. But I also like going between things. I think that sort of connective way of being in the world I think suits me very well in a way that I don’t know, I would feel different if I had just one employer or company that I was focused on.
David LaGreca: Yeah. No, it really can, and I think that’s part of the fun. It is a challenge though, especially early on in a consulting career to try to be an expert in all the things and not know what the focus is. It’s nicer to be farther into a career and be able to actually recognize patterns. Even if you don’t know every detail, I mean, you still have to research. It’s part of advisory is to research and get up to speed, but you can kind of reach into your past and reach into your network more and understand things better and improve the outcomes for the parties you work with too.
So that’s a key advantage is being able to really leverage those decades of broad-based experience. Like my experience was in coming from the audit space—I didn’t have an anal retentive right-angle component in my body, and then after auditing for five years, that still shows up. Whether I want it to or not, I still have that auditor nagging at me in the back of my head to make sure things will pass muster through an audit lens at the end of the day, and I think that’s really helpful to have, not just stayed as a consultant my whole life. It’d be really tough to be a consultant day one till the end, because without direct experience doing some kind of project development phase verification—I’ve kind of built up about a 360 view of this industry at this point from the project development side, from consulting, from auditing, the advisory side, the in-house side.
So it’s kind of this view around it. I can try to pull myself back from the situation and look 360 around the project and say, “This is going to blow up on this side.” You’re not even looking at that side of the moon, but things are going off over there that you’re not thinking about. It’s hard to put an example without using specifics that I’ve worked with, but let’s say your equipment is undersized or improperly tailored for the type of biochar you want, and you’ve gone off and you’ve already got an investment and you don’t want to go back and tell them that it was based off of a flawed premise, but here’s how we can do things that are a tweak as opposed to telling your investor that you may have been incorrect on this. So more about subtle changes than radical shifts in projects.
Ross Kenyon: I think both of those are variations on a similar theme, and they both hit on—for listeners that have a Reversing Climate Change bingo card—the old familiar things that I go back to. But yeah, I think having familiarity with different roles and different archetypal approaches to problems gives you a lot of fluidity, and I’m sure you’re kaleidoscopically oriented. Being able to have multiple perspectives and professional experiences like that, I think really makes people robust and good thinkers. I really do like that. And I also like being more independent because the pattern-matching practice that you get is so robust.
And for you, I don’t know how many project developers you’ve worked with and how many methodologies you’ve written or have your thumbprint on, but my guess is dozens, hundreds. That’s enough where you see commonalities. And what comes out of that pattern matching that I think is really important—and if you have pattern-matching experience to the depth that you do, or like a lot of people who remain independent hopefully do, then you’re able to apply those in ways that it’s not just the boilerplate advice that you give everyone. Sometimes I’ll give two teams entirely contradictory advice that if they consulted with each other after they talked to me, they’d be like, “What the hell? Does Ross believe literally anything at all?” And I’d be like, “No, the context was the important thing, the wisdom. I know that you are more like this and therefore this piece of wisdom applied to you here and vice versa.” And if you don’t have that sort of experience or that ability to zoom out and have enough pattern-matching experience, I think you maybe are more fragile on that. Please tell me if you disagree with any of that.
David LaGreca: Yeah, we’re getting deep over here. But sometimes CDR is, at least historically, has been such a cancel culture as far as who you talk to. I can’t tell you how uncool I was that I had done 40 methane project verifications coming into CDR. Like, “Oh, you’re old school. You’re from that passe era.” I’m like, “Okay,” or I know something. You choose. And now it’s cool again, right? So now super pollutants are cool again, and now it’s back up on top.
But for a while it was so uncool to have been working with large waste management type companies in the US, and now that’s okay again. But I also feel like it’s partially my obligation and my pleasure to be able to talk to hundreds of people every month. No joke, I just try to pack the calendar with conversations because you learn something from everybody. And some of those people end up being fools, some of them end up being just passing acquaintances, and some of the people you don’t necessarily put on the top of your list to follow up with emails on.
But that’s how it is. I feel like you can’t learn unless you talk to everybody in the market and everybody who wants to get into the market. I do have to put up some kind of a threshold. We fortunately do have some—I do have a team that I get to work with who help to screen sometimes. But it is the more conversations the better. The more you know, the more perspectives on the market there are. You’re not just reading one report by one entity who has a fixed interest, but it’s a broader-based understanding of how it is. The market is not one thing or one company.
Ross Kenyon: If someone’s listening to this and they like you personally, they want to work with EcoEngineers, or maybe they’re just ready to find the right consultant or contractor for their particular problem set—what is the right moment for them to start that engagement, start having those conversations? How should you take meetings with these people and figure out what is the right fit for you? How do you begin to sort through that?
David LaGreca: Yeah. For early-stage people, you can’t talk early enough, realistically. Once you have a concept and you’ve thought about it for more than a week, and it’s more than just back of a napkin, but you actually have put some concept together—I think that’s about the right time to start getting strategic advice and input.
I would say that it’s honestly never really too late. So we get calls from people who are doing—they want a pre-audit equivalent. Like, “Can you do the diligence for us that we’re going to get done by our offtaker, or that the investment company is going to do, or the auditor is going to do?”
But it’s as simple as sending an email or picking up a call. Most people that—myself and most of my colleagues and people that report to me—are more than willing to pick up a call, schedule 30 minutes. I’d say if you are pre-revenue with a pathway to revenue and you want some input on what your project will look like or what it’s going to take to get to the point of having enough revenue to pay for some consulting, that’s a good time too. We don’t advertise free consulting, but we do take short calls that are introductory in nature and provide guidance that will support you in getting along the journey. That type of quasi pro bono work pays back in droves, both with goodwill and with understanding and with kind of positive relations.
I am almost always willing to have a call with people, assuming they’re not literally calling me to ask a Googleable question, right? I’m fine to opine on Googleable questions or your ChatGPT theory of the universe, which is sometimes very entertaining, but it’s not always bankable. And I’d say the time is whenever you have a thought that you can’t justify on your own without some degree of uncertainty.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I wonder if they’ve corrected it at this point, but I suspect if you said something like, “Hey, what if you used biochar as a direct air capture sorbent? Would that be a good use, ChatGPT?” And it’d be like, “Wow, that is such a creative, brilliant combination.” And you’d be like, “Okay, I’ve got to go talk to David right away. Wait, has no one thought of this before?”
David LaGreca: Oh yeah, that’s the new dynamic—self-made experts. You can get pretty far along on a lot of pathways. I feel like without a particular expertise, you can get halfway anywhere. You could write half of your own methodology, you could write half of anything. With expertise, you can get to 70% or so, I think is my kind of going value. And then it takes manual manipulation for that last 30%. And sometimes that last 30% is always the most time intensive. So the net savings of just going AI is not always 70%.
I would say that you can get a long ways, but if you don’t prompt your AI bot properly—it’s only as good as the questions you put into it. And then I’ve got an algorithm in my system with Claude to push back on things and to, rather than just kiss my ass on it. But either way it can drive you the wrong direction if you’re just taking any one perspective, honestly. And that’s the thing about consulting too. If you have a guru in your life, that can lead you wrong as well if you just have one person you listen to, especially if that one person has a very narrow corporate focus rather than a broad-based market understanding. Asking an investment banker what’s best for you—you might get a different outcome than asking an independent consultant. And you might need to ask both because I’m not going to tell you the same advice they are.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, so some of the advice we’ve gotten here is that it’s never too early to take some of these calls. Consultants and contractors are often willing to take these introductory calls, give some free advice, build some goodwill. That’s something that people listening here, you can literally do with EcoEngineers. I suspect that’s true of others too. And then another one of these early-stage pieces of advice I wanted to make sure I got your answer on: how do you know if a consultant is the right fit for you? How should you be evaluating that? Is it any different from hiring an employee? How should you be diligencing a potential contractor, both professionally and just the personal nature of the relationship?
David LaGreca: I think you should be able to get a closer fit to what you’re going for with consultants than you can with an in-house person. Because unless that in-house person has done exactly what you’ve done before for multiple decades, people usually just say, “Yeah, it was similar what they’ve done.”
Ross Kenyon: “It’s a wonderful new challenge for me. I’m great at this thing and I can also grow into it in a new way.” How many times have you said that, person listening? Myself? Yeah.
David LaGreca: Yeah. Right. And that’s also bravado of consulting. Be wary of that. Everybody, every consultant thinks that they can do everything, and they claim that they can, and that’s also a big risk. So it’s not universal that an employee’s going to oversell, but how often are you going to hire a consultant who says—when you’re reaching out for somebody to evaluate your sorbent technology and you’re going to have somebody who’s like, “Yeah, I built a biochar project once.” You’re not going to do that. But for an analyst-level role in your company, you might be like, “Yeah, you know CDR stuff. You can do MRV maybe.” Maybe.
Ross Kenyon: Such a good point. Whoa.
David LaGreca: But I think the fundamental thing is that it’s got to be a personality fit too, and that’s a big piece of it, because it is—you don’t have to love each other, but you do have to hang out a lot on calls. You do have to respect each other’s approaches and each other’s time, and I think that’s a big part of it. I think somebody that—just like you’re not going to hire somebody who’s a total ass on the call in your interview, you’re probably not going to do that for a consultant either. Even if that bravado comes across as, “Oh man, they must know their business.”
It’s a lot of it’s going to be that gut check, but also the actual technical match with what you’re looking for. And if you’re doing something brand new nobody’s ever done, it’s better to work with some group who’s more creative than somebody who’s hyper-focused. Once again, just the DAC company example—you want somebody who has some kind of industrial or sorbent or CCS type knowledge, even if you’re doing something new with one of those approaches. Somebody who might be absolutely brilliant at nature-based removals and agroforestry project development might not be that helpful, even if they are the most regarded firm in CDR at that point in time.
And I use that specifically because there aren’t any disparagements, and I try not to be disparaging in any of this, because we have some competitors, but it’s a small little world, and I feel like most of the people who have survived this long in CDR are doing pretty well. So we—I like to play nicely with them. Doesn’t do a lot of good to talk trash. I really liked your episode with Martin from Octavia about that. It’s just, I really jive with that—the market’s small and people should get along instead of tear each other down. We’ll grow a lot bigger that way.
Ross Kenyon: I bet you like that episode because you’re one of those boring legacy methane development weirdos. You’re biased. I can’t even take that compliment seriously because of your bias, but thank you.
David LaGreca: Yeah, Martin and I click too. That’s probably—
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m not surprised. Thanks for saying that. When should you fire a consultant? Is it different from an employee, knowing when the relationship’s not working? Or how do you deal with the difficulties that come about from work with a consultant?
David LaGreca: One hard thing about consulting is that people have no trust in general. Unless they already know that you’re the right ones or they’re just out of time, they’re probably thinking skeptically about, “Do I actually need a consultant for this? I’ll just do it myself.” There’s a lot of that bootstraps mentality in CDR.
Ross Kenyon: Wait one second, David. My favorite thing—this has also come up on the podcast so many times—but have you ever seen that show Grand Designs?
David LaGreca: No.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. It’s a British show about people who are doing really ambitious architectural renovation or house building, and whenever someone says that they’re not going to hire a foreman because they’re going to serve as their own project manager, you’re like, “Oh, crap. They’ve never seen this show before? They know this never goes well.” It’s always a terrible—
David LaGreca: Yeah. But it’s so true. People who—the only people I have refused to work with on any basis besides they just didn’t come through for some reason, or I thought they were scoundrels in some way or another, is people who refuse to partake in a feasibility study for a brand-new project. And if you’re not willing to, or you haven’t already done this independently and exhaustively—to really do a pre-mortem and dig into the potential problems in your project and really understand what you’re getting into, making the right decisions up front—it’s really tough to work with people who think it’s already perfect. Unless they are well advanced. There are different stages of advancement, and we’re not going to force somebody to go back to stage one if they’re TRL six and they’re already ready to launch with investment.
But for new concepts, just a little bit of zero-based thinking now and again is really helpful. And not hiring a foreman, that’s—yeah, I was guilty of that in my first two home remodels, and I don’t think I’ll do that again.
Ross Kenyon: No, there’s something about the “I’ll just do it myself” thing where it sounds responsible because you’re saving money. When you do need to end a relationship or change a relationship with a consultant, how do you actually think it’s different from an employee? Is it different? And if so, how?
David LaGreca: I think I dodged your question because I don’t like being broken up with. But I think—
Ross Kenyon: It doesn’t even have to be you. This is also just of general interest. Break up with them and then hire David, I think is what he’s trying to say.
David LaGreca: Nah. The time to move on is when you’ve given—you have clear direction, you have clear understanding between the team, and they’re not executing. Or if they somehow are holding you back from your ultimate mission.
Ross Kenyon: That first step is really interesting. Wait, you’re saying like if there’s a chance that maybe it’s a misunderstanding? Is that—
David LaGreca: Yeah, that happens a lot, especially with strategic advisory. They’re like, “Oh, well, you know, you’re telling me things, but I already know them.” Even if it’s something you brought to them weeks ago, years ago—it’s like, well, what are we getting out of this relationship? And if you truly don’t feel like you’re getting something out of the relationship, that’s actually fine. Or if you’ve gotten enough out of it, you’ve been brought up on education, and you’re just good to go—that’s—like, I would prefer somebody not to be kind of reliant fully on consultants in most instances, if it’s a large enough team or I guess a small enough team where somebody can take that on in-house.
We do a lot of training, and I think that once you understand your market as well as we do, move on. But it’s kind of an osmotic thing. If you hang out with people in your life or you hire people to work with who have a deeper level of understanding, then by passive nature, you’re going to glean a lot of their knowledge, and I like doing that too. Clients know more about their vertical than I could, because that’s all they do—they focus on DAC or ARR or whatever their unique approach to methane removal is. And that’s great. I get to learn from them as well. Selfishly I enjoy that part of it.
But if you’re not getting anything from them, they’re not executing on the task at hand as described, or they turn out to be just bad partners—that’s when you move on. But on the flip side, it’s worth continuing, even if you think that there’s a price encumbrance—if it’s possible with cash flow and you’re going to—it’s one of those paying a consultant versus staying alive, you’re not going to do that. But sometimes a piece of advice is worth some of those really scant dollars for companies.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve used these terms interchangeably—consultants, contractors. They probably are not the same exact thing because there’s different words for them, and is anything truly a synonym when you stare at it long enough? Is there a difference here in your head?
David LaGreca: Well, the inbound we get—people ask for a VVB. They say they need an LCA, they need a PDD, they need—they want a compliance pathway. They want—they need somebody to do their work for them. They want—they need a contractor. We get all of these jumbled-up asks, and frequently, I’d say 9 times out of 10 when somebody asks for a VVB, for instance, they’re not asking for a final verifier, especially in CDR where that person is chosen for you with a lot of the registries.
So it’s—one of those things is just understanding what the client needs. But yeah, advisory and consultant, I’d say synonymous. VVB is an overused term which has a very specific, explicit focus. And as a VVB, EcoEngineers does consulting work for different clients, but that’s one thing that’s jumbled up. LCA is a particular task of—a particular aspect of project development. And then there’s implementers, there’s brokers—everybody works and engages differently in the market. So it is good to know who you’re actually looking for and hoping that the consultant isn’t just morphing into whatever you want them to be.
Ross Kenyon: I have a silly question for you, David. I saved it till the very end out of respect for your professionalism and your reputation. Have you ever been to the overlook of Toledo, Spain and wished that you were named El Greco and not LaGreca? Has that ever happened to you?
David LaGreca: Just wishing that I had a more powerful name?
Ross Kenyon: No, no. Do you know this artist? Do you know El Greco? The—
David LaGreca: I do.
Ross Kenyon: You’re so close, but it’s not yours. That’s what I’m trying—
David LaGreca: Yeah. I can claim it though.
Ross Kenyon: You can claim it. You can just switch the gender of your surname.
David LaGreca: El Greco, LaGreca. Yeah, we could, but it would undo the value of the heritage of the LaGreca clan. Moving from Italy in times of strife and tax dodging in the 1700s, so it’s—yeah, we would—
Ross Kenyon: You’re from a family of smugglers?
David LaGreca: Well, depending on who you ask. Some say that we were too prominent and had to leave to manage our wealth better, but others claim that it was for tax dodging. So could be some of both. But if I had the artistic sense of El Greco, I would probably not be a consultant presently.
Ross Kenyon: Is it safe to say you are the El Greco of carbon consulting?
David LaGreca: I’ll go with that.
Ross Kenyon: To go with that. This is too silly of an ending to this show. It probably will stay against my better judgment. Dang it, David. Why did your name force me to do this? Why did you make me do this?
David LaGreca: At least you can pronounce my real name. Many cannot. It’s funny listening to my colleagues pronounce it, like my Latin American colleagues. It’s much more—they put a lot more emphasis on it. It’s like saying, in Colorado it’s like Buena Vista, or Buena Vista.
Ross Kenyon: Oh no, that’s so bad. One of our family jokes is whenever Jon Ronson has a new audiobook out or whatever, we’ll listen to it and he’s always just like “Los, Los Angeles.” And you’re just like—British people who are trying to do Spanish stuff. I grew up in the Southwest, so it’s all very natural to me to say it properly, and when hearing someone just be like, “Oh, Spanish stuff just sticks in your mouth wrong”—and it just doesn’t sound good. In any case, David, thank you so much for being on. I appreciate the good advice. Will definitely impact how I understand consulting and contracting, which are actually synonyms it turns out, in the future. And thanks for doing this.
David LaGreca: It was a pleasure. Always enjoy talking with you, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Likewise.
