And it’s Tori Perfetti, but with the vol at the end of my last name, everybody likes to just assume it’s Tony. So as chairman of Floridians for Solar Choice, I’m going to try to give the quick notes version of how this all came about. Because what ended up happening was FSC is a conglomerated organization of individuals from the right and the left. Individuals like the Libertarian Party of Florida, Tea Party Network, Concert Synergy Freedom on the right, the Christian Coalition on the right, as well as on the left, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, which is an environmental group. You’ve got legal women voters. You have Concerned Scientists for Climate Change. You have a whole quarter-eighth individuals that came together for one single organization called Floridians for Solar Choice. And how this originally happened is I got a phone call one day from a friend of mine, Debbie Dooley, who is the National Chairman of Concert Synergy Freedom and is one of the founding members of the Tea Party Movement back in 2009. Now her political accolades on the right go back to the 70s. And she calls me up one day, and I’ve been friends with her for a long time, and she says, Tori, how are you? I said, I’m good. She says, do you know what’s going on in Florida? And I said, you know, what do you mean? A lot of stuff is going on in Florida. They’re the largest state in the nation. And she goes, no, no, no, no, regarding energy and the utility industry. I said, well, I mean, what I know is that if I turn my light switch on, my power goes on. If I turn it off, power goes off. If a storm hits, I have to find a number to call someone and yell about it. And she goes, no, no, no, no, read about this. So I went to read about it, and come to find out. Florida was at the time, this was in 2014, moving into 2015, was one of only four states at that moment where the utility industry was the only allowed industry to sell energy to individual homeowners or businesses. Meaning that if an individual wanted to enter into a contract with a solar company and have that solar company front the cost of the installation of the system on your home or business and sell you that energy as part of the plan, you were not allowed to do that. So being a conservative, being very far to the right socially and fiscally, I said to myself, well, you know, that doesn’t sound very conservative. That doesn’t sound very free market. You know, I don’t own solar, but I don’t think it’s correct that you have a single government sponsored monopoly that gets to dictate all energy sales. You know, I don’t drink coffee either, but I don’t think Starbucks should be the only person that is allowed to sell coffee. I think that people deserve choices, and you can make those choices responsibly. So that’s where FSC originally came about where I wanted to become chairman of this organization, and then we met with groups on the left, and we created our own amendment. Our amendment was very simple. It was going to give individuals the right to enter into that contract with a solar company and allow that solar company or any individual to front the cost of a system and sell you that energy. Along the way, though, when we started collecting all of our different groups on the right and the left, and we also had the Florida Retail Federation, the Hotel Restaurant and Lodging Association, a lot of business groups, we were opposed very viciously by the utility industry and many of their allies, which while not numerous in population of citizens, very numerous in money, and money matters in politics. But something that we had going for us on FSC’s side is that all the general leaders in the organizations people work with were all actually professionals. We’re professionals within marketing or PR or running campaigns. I do that myself. I have a small business as well as do many of the other people that were involved. People have been involved in politics going back to the 70s, and it’s easy to understand where we were at that time. Of course, the utility industry came up with amendment one. Now, this was roughly a two-year process from FSC’s founding to just the end in November of 2016. In that time, FSC one has never lost any of our members, but have participated in led fights to one, help pass amendment four, which removed the tangible personal property tax and individual purchases for solar and defeated amendment one. We did this with very few monetary resources. Amendment one as an example, we had $20 plus a million thrown at us with about 200 grand in our pockets. We still won, about 50.7 percent. Yes, 49.3 percent. No, you have to get 60 percent in Florida to actually pass an amendment. Here we are an organization comprised of individuals on the right, Trump people, myself, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders people on the left, and all of us were able to set a bar where we selected an issue, focused on that issue, created messaging around that issue, and came together to actually lead a fight which has done something in the state of Florida that everybody thought was impossible. And that was to actually open up first the discussion and then create meaningful change through actual policy voting regarding the energy industry and solar. Florida is the third largest state in the nation, has one of the worst solar penetrations in the country. I mean, the Sunshine State. So we have the greatest potential east of the Mississippi and solar policies that are dark age oriented. They’re monopolized. And we accomplished this fight. And as I said, I’m trying to make sure I honor the time here, so I wanted to give you the quick notes version of how this happened, but I think what’s important is, and I continue to get asked this question, I think it’s important for this conference, is people continually ask me, how in the heck did you bring these many different political organizations, business organizations, ideologies together, never lose a member and fight one of the wealthiest, influential organizations in not just the state of Florida, but in the United States, the utility industry, and actually win. So there are three very, very big things that ended up happening with this. One, I have a very big rule. And that rule is do no harm. And what that means is we never, ever made any single organization, any single person have to choose their ideological purity or belonging to FSC. See I’m very realistic in understanding that ideology, your belief system, your partisanship is actually not a negative word to me. These are sacred values that many people hold. These aren’t things that you should have to necessarily turn in to find an issue that could potentially allow people to unite together to do something for a state or for a group of people. So the rule originally created was we would do no harm. We would listen and communicate with each individual group that we were attempting to bring on board and to include the citizens of Florida and figure out how is it that we’re going to focus on the single issue, build the messaging around it, and not allow that messaging to get broke while at the same time making sure that the street cred of every individual organization involved can’t be called into question by the activists and the organizational members that belong to it. Because that’s an incredibly important thing. Look, people who belong to organizations, nonprofits, conservative groups, liberal groups, whatever it is, if you do it and it’s your belief and it’s real, then you’ve built credibility, reputation, and respect with the individuals that you pal around with. We did not impact that. So we made sure that the amendment that we first came up with as FSC and the fights that continued over the next two years did no harm. We made sure that on the right, free market, personal choice, and not mandating that people purchase solar power was an important part of the campaign. But on the left, you get solar power, clean energy, more environmental benefits. So we were able to take a cleaner renewable energy power, combine it with individual choice through the free market where it could become economically viable and not mandating to people. We combined the two and we were able to lead this fight. So the do no harm was the first part of this. The second is any good consultant, and I say that, remember, good consultant. There are a lot of people that I find today, especially in Florida that continue to pop up and they always want a piece of your business and they know everybody in their role at X is great. You know, Google exists, I can put phone numbers in my cell phone as well and impress somebody and call them up, but do they pick up and will they listen? So any good campaign strategist, any good PR individual, any good marketer, any good communications person, any good consultant should tell you don’t listen to everybody else when you know what it is that you’re attempting to do. And I get it, that sometimes sounds contradictory, but what do you mean don’t listen to everybody? If you understand the message and you understand the team and you understand the fight and you believe in the fight and you’re ready to go forward with it, then everybody else is going to have an opinion that doesn’t belong to your group. And everybody is going to start throwing rocks at you and they’re going to say, no, no, no, no, you got to do this, no, no, no, you can’t do this. Understand what your message is, understand your fight and move forward and do it in a professional manner. Take it each single day by day and understand if you have to adapt, but don’t change what you understand is correct because the moment that you break is the moment that basically you were lying because what you said originally is we believe in this. We understand this, we came together, we’re going to fight for this, but you know what? Gosh, this entire row over here is correct, so I’m going to listen to you and I’m going to start changing what we’re doing. That is an incorrect way to think of attempting to make change regarding policy and politics and laws. This is not theory. He gets to do theories. People write books, people do things, but executable action, that’s the reality of politics. You can protest, you can cry, you can scream, you can yell, you can Facebook, you can email, you can yell at your friend in a bar while you’re both are drunk, but it really doesn’t matter because it’s about the execution. Did it matter? When it mattered? Did it matter on vote day? So we stayed very professional and very un-message. We never broke. Nothing actually ever took place, no matter what was thrown at us, no matter all the advertising, no matter all the things that happened, all we ever made sure to do was adapt to continue rolling forward. You don’t adapt to stop in place. So that was where our success was partially able to not be matched by our opponents. We don’t stop. We simply adapt it and rerout it and then continue to move forward because we knew what we were doing. And then third is understanding the people that you’re talking to. I like partisanship and I don’t like the word bipartisan and I’ll tell you why. Bipartisan means that I’m going to ask you to give something up that you really believe in. To me that might be easy to come to any one of you and say all you have to do is this. I just want you to give up this one part of you, but we can then get along. You know, if we’re talking about an empathetic opinion, if somebody came to me and said, listen, Tori, all I want you to do is give up this one common core belief you have, then we can be friends. I don’t know. That doesn’t sound like a great friendship. It sounds like I’m already attempting to adapt my personality, my character, my beliefs, everything that I’ve ever stood for. So I enjoy the word and I’m trying to figure out if I can trademark this. I don’t know if anybody created it beforehand, but I like multi-partisanship, right? And people tell me it was created before I said it, but I disagree with them often. Our partisanship and our understanding of each other’s individual belief systems was our greatest asset on top of the do no harm, right? You had people from the League of Women Voters and people from the Christian Coalition arguing on the same similar 30,000-foot message view of why Amendment 1 was an incorrect policy and it was incorrect policy for the state of Florida. You had Tea Party members and you had libertarians and Republican Liberty Caucus members standing with hardcore Sierra Club and environmentalists and evangelical, what you would call evangelical environmental network Christians, all standing and speaking on these same issues. That partisanship was incredibly effective because, again, we understood how to utilize the things that made people passionate. I’m a believer that if you’re going to find an issue, if you’re going to find an issue like we did, then you have to be able to legitimately respect, not fake respect, right? Not when somebody says, oh, yeah, no, I can kind of tolerate what you think, but I hate you and I don’t want you to say it, right? You have to legitimately understand if you’re going to enter into any kind of an organizational agreement where you’re going to run a campaign and it’s going to be all these different people, you have to understand the pitfalls, right? And this is number four, reputation. Every person that got involved, these weren’t just individuals. That’s great that anybody who’s an individual, you don’t have to be in charge of something or a chairman of anything or on a board of anything to attempt to make policy change, but every individual in these organizations had reputations. We have to be responsible for the importance of standing for those things that that organization believes in. So everyone who initially went to lead this FSC fight and continued through, we’re putting our reputations on the line. That is also a very key prospect of actual change. If you don’t have a background where people have the ability to trust that you have intentions which are good, that’s obviously definable different ways. But if people can’t trust you, if the members that you’re friends with, if I wasn’t able to call up the Christian coalition, I wasn’t able to call up people on the right and I wasn’t able to say to them, look, you’ve known me a decade, I’m telling you this is an issue we need to do. And I’m telling you you need to trust me and I’m telling you I’m not going to put you in a bad position. And that happened on the left, too. They had to trust. And that’s an important aspect of reaching for change. Now there might be, again, a different definition of what change is from a conservative perspective, right, from a Trump voter compared to a Bernie voter, compared to an Al Gore voter or a Hillary Clinton voter. However, concept is the same, right? The concept of being able to keep your reputation intact and have people trust you and trust that you’re going to actually do what you’re saying you’re going to do at your own risk is a key tenet of actually enacting change. Because if not, then you’re just like everybody else who’s talking about what they want to do without having any ability to actually accomplish anything. So Floridians for Solar Choice was extraordinarily unique. And I’ve been told often that it has set a new bar, at least in Florida, third largest state in the nation, for how people on the right and how people on the left can interact and do something. And the question that always follows is, do you think this can happen in other states and do you think there’s other issues that can be done as well as FSC? And I say, well, I don’t know. I think that it’s extraordinarily difficult because you have a large amount of people who are going to watch you to adapt more to their bipartisan style. And you’re never going to accomplish anything, in my opinion, and in the members of our group’s opinion, if you’re making people trade off all the time and you’re making people say, well, you know, on Monday you can be 50% less of this belief and I’ll be 30% less of this belief on Tuesday. So my answer is always generally the same. One, it depends on the situation and it depends on what you’re fighting for. It depends on what other people have an interest for. What we did with energy and solar, we took clean energy and solar policy but we put it through the free market, non-mandated and gave people choice. So people in Florida don’t have to buy solar. I don’t own solar. I don’t even own solar stock. But I can if I want. Left gets what it wanted. The right gets what it wanted. Nobody harmed each other and we were able to accomplish one of the largest victories in the state of Florida’s history relative to the resources that we had. So I think I shall leave it with this. I see the red numbers. I think it is important, especially and very thankful to be invited here to a frank conference and where people are supposed to talk openly. I had a conversation last night while I was at dinner with some nice people. People who actually, I thought were nice. They asked what was one of the biggest issues when we first started, besides all the other things I mentioned. One of the biggest issues that would happen is keeping your street credibility. So if I were to stand next to somebody on the left and take a picture with them, would your people that your friends were on Facebook go nuts? Would people freak out and think that you had betrayed every single thing you’ve ever stood for? So we made sure that that do no harm rule was broadcast in a very big way and communicated correctly that people understood we weren’t asking anyone else that we stood with to believe what we believed outside of this one issue. You can go and fight the good fight that you believe is the good fight. I think that that is probably going to be one of the difficult issues going forward if there is ever another political ideology that people unite on another decision, another piece of policy in Florida or anywhere. You’re going to have to be very careful and we have to be very careful of what issues chosen so that people get to keep their reputations and their respect intact and nobody feels like they have been discounted or their views have been considered less. So it has been an honor to be here. I appreciate it. Thank you for letting a Trump supporter speak. We have to go. But there was one question that I wanted to ask you and that is when this issue came to you and then you went to all your people and the folks on the left went to all the people, how much time did you have to invest in explaining that the issue was important or when you put it out there on its face did people get it right away? We just have a couple of seconds but I’m just curious about that. This is the reputation part. It took me a week when I called everybody that I knew and Debbie Dooley called people that she knew it took us about a week and that was mostly just getting a hold of everybody. The left about the same way because everybody involved understood before we went at this that we weren’t asking people to change what they believe and we were asking people to take a look at what we were doing and it was in an amendment which meant it couldn’t be legally changed no matter what we did. It wouldn’t matter if somebody gave me a billion dollars. You can’t change legal writing once it’s actually being proposed and it’s in action. So we were able to use that as a great proof that look all we’re doing is what we’re saying we’re doing. There’s no hidden message. There’s no hidden anything. Nothing, everything you see is in writing. That’s it. That’s what we fight for. There is no tricks. It doesn’t matter who posts anything. I don’t care what anybody says. All you ever had to do was say go read the writing. It’s done. You can do it yourself. I don’t even have to talk in. Awesome. That’s what I’m talking about. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.