As CEL’s Director of Customer Success, Rebecca Cordeiro de Peredo is responsible for, in her words, “ensuring our customers get the results they’re expecting and the experience they deserve.” Rebecca, who is always ready with a kind word of encouragement and a dad joke, appreciates the opportunity to harness CEL's work furthering climate change goals.
As a new startup working in a relatively new field, CEL has encouraged its employees to play an integral role in developing the company and the product. “What’s unique is that I get a say in how the foundation stones of this company are laid. I think that’s not just a factor of our age, it’s our culture. We’re each empowered to share ideas on how to make things work better.” Now that the team has laid the groundwork, Rebecca looks back and sees how their work has come together. “Now, in the later stages of our projects, I learn more about what impact we can have. I see the reasons for all the things we did previously to get here and why that was so important. Having seen the project from the start has been exciting.”
CEL has spent its first few years constructing a solid foundation. Now, it’s time for the fun part: turning that work into something impactful and lasting. This is an exciting time to join CEL because, as Rebecca says, “We’re poised to do great things. We’ve got proof of concept, we know that we have strong results. Now it’s a matter of refining the business model to actually implement it at a larger scale. We just have to tweak it.”
In her teammates at CEL, Rebecca found a similar drive to continue building on the company’s early success. She initially accepted the job at CEL because she admired the team’s cohesion. CEL’s staff is diverse—in terms of skillsets, nationalities, personalities, locations, backgrounds, etc.—and the team leverages that diversity to drive toward something greater than the sum of its parts. “That’s by intention, by design,” says Rebecca. “There was a focus on that. That’s something that's not common in a lot of companies I’ve worked for in the past. There was a lot of diversity but there wasn’t a lot of focus on making that diversity work. I also knew that this was something I could learn from for myself—how to improve my communication with everybody around me, both professionally and personally.”
For Rebecca, this work began 20 years ago when she served as the energy manager for a school district. She saw firsthand the challenges that schools face when it comes to building energy management. This sparked a lifelong passion for working at the nexus of climate action and education. In her current role, that experience allows her to be an empathetic, understanding, and informed advocate for our customers. Acting as a bridge between the product team and the customer, she creates a seamless experience in which customers feel that CEL understands their motivations, meets their needs, and presents them with a user-friendly product. She is grateful for the opportunity to build on the work she began two decades ago in a manner that allows her to have an even greater impact.
In a potential coworker, Rebecca looks for someone who is equally passionate about driving the company toward success. She loves working with people who are “not trying to hoard their knowledge in order to get advancement. They are open to sharing their skills and knowledge, collaborating, and developing others along the way.” Rebecca is excited to continue being part of a company that will continually grow, innovate, and build on its strong foundation.
