The MD powering her own way: A year in the life of DCC Energy’s Maureen Bray

As Managing Director of DCC Energy’s Equity Energies and Centreco businesses in the UK, Maureen Bray is bringing the strengths of both businesses together to create a unique customer offering, while empowering colleagues to broaden their skills and experience.

When Maureen Bray moved into her house in the Scottish countryside, she had an important decision to make: how best to heat her home for the future. Should she replace the ageing oil boiler or do something different? The house sits off the gas grid, so she explored alternative options and ultimately chose air source heat pumps, solar panels and a battery, just as the world went into lockdown.

"When you experience something like lockdown, this huge change in society, you realise how quickly your day-to-day can change," she recalls. "It made me realise how something you take for granted, like being able to leave your house, can just not be there anymore."

As Managing Director of both Equity Energies and Centreco, two businesses within DCC Energy's Energy Services area, Maureen spends her working life helping other organisations build exactly the kind of resilience she built into her own home. “Resilience might seem like something just for industrial users,” she acknowledges. “But as a domestic user, it's also really important to feel like you're somewhat in control.”

From advising to building

Maureen joined DCC Energy just over a year ago, arriving from a career spent almost entirely in consulting, including senior roles advising major organisations on energy and carbon strategy. It wasn't an obvious move, but one she saw an opportunity in.

“When you're in a consulting organisation, you're often giving recommendations and insights, but you don't necessarily do the implementation,” she explains. “There's advice given, but you don't always see the end result. For me, joining DCC Energy felt like a much more tangible way to get involved in the actual implementation of the energy transition, rather than just advising on it.”

That appetite for seeing things through is evident in everything she talks about. Not just her own career, but what she wants for the people who work for her. “It feels great to be able to advise a customer, and then actually deploy that advice and see the results,” she adds. “That's a good feeling."

Bringing two worlds together

Around a year into leading Equity Energies, DCC Energy's energy consultancy business, Maureen took on the added responsibility of Centreco, DCC Energy’s UK commercial solar business. The two businesses came from different acquisitions, with different histories and ways of working, and she's candid that bringing them closer together is still very much a work in progress.

“Bringing those processes and cultures together to create one culture is a journey,” she shares. “We haven't reached the peak of a unified culture, but there are two very good cultures that are starting to work much more closely together.”

What's driving that closer collaboration is a simple idea: offering customers a single integrated solution that reduces energy costs, improves resilience and sustainability, and unlocks greater value from their energy assets. “If I look at the customer experience, it’s one touchpoint, one knowledge base. One where the data on your usage, your spend and your savings also includes the data from your solar installation: what you're generating, what you're storing, what you're exporting and how that's saving you money. That's a true energy management service.”

She's equally clear that the industry itself is changing too fast to stand still. “I don't think the traditional service people expect from an energy management business today – what's been delivered for the last 15 to 20 years – is what we'll be offering, even in two or three years' time,” Maureen predicts. “Energy isn't always going to come from the grid. There'll be completely different generation models and that's exciting.”

Leading without hierarchy

When it comes to leadership, Maureen isn’t a fan of hierarchy in the workplace. Managing around 70 people at Equity Energies and close to 50 at Centreco – two teams, at this stage, still finding their way toward each other – she describes her role less as directing and more about making herself available.

“I always try to be available for my teams and support them as true consultative individuals,” she explains. “I don't have all the answers, and I don't expect anybody to have all the answers – but the more we collaborate and bounce things off each other, the better we get, and the more effective we are at solving our customers' problems.”

It's an approach she hopes will give her teams the same sense of momentum she felt when she made her own career leap: “I'm hoping that everybody is going on that same journey as me, to feel more empowered to have a direct impact on the energy transition for our customers.”

Life beyond the day job

Maureen moved to the UK from Canada at the end of 2008 and the story of how she ended up in Scotland has nothing to do with energy at all. A lifelong Highland dancer, she performed at the Edinburgh Tattoo the year she arrived and met her now-husband there.

She's still involved in the sport today, though her days of competing and performing at military tattoos are behind her. Instead, she runs a small local dance class: “It was really to make sure my children also got the opportunity to dance, but I'm passionate about people having access to Highland dancing. It's my way of giving back to my local community.”

When she's not running two businesses or a dance class she turns to yoga and gardening. “With a busy life and a busy mind, you need something that grounds you day to day,” she notes.

It should come as no surprise that the woman helping businesses across the UK take more control of their own energy has spent years quietly doing the same thing at home – one solar panel, Highland dance class and yoga practice at a time.