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Twenty years ago, when Roy Simmons first joined General Electric Company as a rookie financial analyst, it likely would have been difficult to imagine that he would someday occupy the CFO office of GE Lighting.

Of course, occupying the CFO office of \u201cGE Lighting, a Savant company\u201d would have required the young analyst to be endowed with not just imagination \u2013 but a crystal ball. This being said, in 2019, when a more seasoned Simmons joined the former GE business (now owned by Savant Systems, Inc.) as CFO, he had little trouble imagining a list of finance leader priorities for the coming year.

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\u201cWe\u2019ve been together for the last 14 months and we together have a vision to bring that brighter life to the people,\u201d explains Simmons, who spent a combined 18 years at GE, a span of time during which he served in a number of senior FP&A roles including one with GE Lighting.

\u201cBack in the lighting days, we realized that our customers who bought lights for their businesses were also finance professionals and operating professionals who had goals, so we asked ourselves, \u2018How do we sell lights better than anyone else?\u2019 and \u2018How do we actually create a meaningful opportunity to provide value to the customer?,\u2019\u201d recalls Simmons, as he begins to outline the thinking behind a strategic pivot from GE\u2019s past.

Says Simmons: \u201cNormally, a customer would say, \u2018We\u2019re just going to go buy a series of new lighting fixtures for our parking lot, and this will cost me $100,000.\u2019 However, what if instead we went to a customer and said, \u2018Rather than spend $100,000 on lights, how about a solution that means that you\u2019re going to save $40,000 a year in energy consumption?\u2019\u201d

According to Simmons, the GE team narrowed its lens in order to target CFOs and other operationally minded executives with a commitment to deliver the customer savings within two and a half years.

\u201cSometimes we could get it down to less than a year. Sometimes it was a bit longer, but by doing it this way, we changed the paradigm on selling,\u201d comments Simmons, who credits the solutions approach with helping GE to land a landmark deal valued at $180 million\xbea hefty price tag for what Simmons describes as \u201cthe largest lighting deal ever closed.\u201d

Looking back on the approach Simmons says: \u201cIt really brought to life a solution for customers that has survived past those days and which has now gone on to morph into a company that\u2019s today outside of General Electric Company in a different capacity, and it set a paradigm in an industry that had been thinking of things in a singularly focused way and changed them.\u201d\xa0\u2013 Jack Sweeney

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