NRG People Power: Get to Know Holly Fuller

Welcome back to People Power, where we introduce you to the NRG team members working hard to bring you world-class customer service, cutting-edge technological solutions, innovative product suites, and the best energy strategies for your homes and businesses. This month, we’re excited to feature Holly Fuller, NRG’s Senior Director of Revenue Operations & Analytics.

In accounting, a pivot table is a powerful tool for reorganizing data, shifting perspectives, and identifying insights from patterns and trends. For Holly Fuller, pivoting is more than just a helpful function in an Excel spreadsheet — it’s a metaphor for her life and career.

Holly manages a comprehensive team of 95 analysts and subject matter specialists who are responsible for revenue operations, a significant portion of the order-to-cash lifecycle, and its associated analytics. Revenue operations at first glance may seem almost basic: invoices go out, payments come in and go out, systems balance the data, repeat. Every company that sells a product or service has a similar invoicing process. However, for Holly and her team, there’s nothing routine about it.

Every touchpoint in the billing and payment process is carefully analyzed for accuracy — from setting up product structures and validating usage data to confirming invoice accuracy and applying and sending payments correctly and on time. The stakes are high: more than six million invoices are sent out each year, and whether it’s seamlessly supplying their energy or trusting us to accurately handle their hard-earned money, customers need us to get it right six million times.

With a 99.9% accuracy rate, Holly and her team are proud of their results — but never complacent. “We live in that less-than-one-percent where something doesn’t line up perfectly,” she says. Data blips and human error are inevitable, but how a team pivots to solve them, through proactive communication, fast resolutions, and attention to detail, makes all the difference.

Their data analyses go out to teams across the organization, so they can stay transparent with what issues are currently driving that less-than-one-percent margin, and how they can prevent recurrence. Customer Care is a constant collaborator, since Care agents are intaking requests about invoicing and payment issues.  Together, the teams keep their fingers on the customer pulse, adapt, respond, and position processes so that the need for those types of inquiries shrinks even more, and the billing and payment experience is directly impacted by customer feedback.

Holly’s journey to leading the charge for better billing and payment practices has been defined by moments where she chose to shift her perspective, rather than follow the obvious path.

Growing up, she had an interest in forensics — crime scenes, spatter patterns, using DNA to catch the bad guy — and while she didn’t end up pursuing it as a course of study, it certainly set the tone for her interest in solving problems with data.

Holly began at Penn State as a computer science major but quickly realized it wasn’t the right path for her. Transferring to Clarion University (now PennWest), she switched to accounting and discovered a passion for financial data and analysis — a return to her forensic interests in a new form.

After earning her Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, she became a CPA on a partnership track, modeling her career path on the trajectory of other CPAs. But in the back of her mind, she was asking the question: is this really what I want? It was the typical path, she admits, but “I didn’t love it, and it didn’t feel right for me.”

Knowing she wanted to be passionate about what she was doing and confident in the value she was bringing to the table, Holly pivoted again, this time to the energy industry and to Direct Energy.

There, she started overseeing the Collections team and learning the energy industry. Ten years, the NRG acquisition, a lot of data analysis, some relationship-building, and a few more pivots later, she’s leading the team keeping NRG’s operational engine running smoothly, and demonstrating that changes in direction aren’t risks, they’re recalibrations.

A fan of Myers-Briggs and other personality tests, Holly describes herself as curious, adventurous, stubborn, and a perfectionist. These traits play out in her life with her husband of 23 years, Eric. He’s been along for the ride through many unconventional life-pivots, from leaving her successful career in one industry to start fresh in another, or the decision to sell their house in the suburbs and move to the city. Her zest for big life changes that raise eyebrows has never been something she’s afraid of with him backing her up. “I can’t decide where to eat dinner,” she jokes. “But I’ll make big, bold moves without hesitation.” According to Eric, either way, it usually involves pasta.

The couple loves being outdoors together, whether they are hiking the trails around their weekend home in the mountains or chopping down trees on the property to fuel her woodworking hobby. For the last several years, Holly has been learning the ins and outs of furniture-building and is currently working on a table for one of her nieces. For this labor of love, there was no going to Home Depot for pre-cut planks. She cut down the trees, milled the lumber, and is using all her problem-solving skills and perfectionism to get it just right.

Holly comes from a large, loving family and enjoys visiting her 18 nieces and nephews, and nine great-nieces and nephews. They hang out at the beach, eat, laugh, and go shopping, and she thrives off building her cred in the family as “Cool Aunt Holly.”

When she’s not hiking with Eric, picking splinters out of her hands, or waffling on what restaurant to dine at, Holly can be found rereading the iconic psychological thrillers of John Grisham, or indulging in an annual rewatch of perennial favorite, “The Gilmore Girls.” Certainly, keeping up with Amy Sherman-Palladino’s motor-mouthed dialogue and hyperactive heroines requires every detail-oriented neuron in her brain.

Holly is inspired by watching her team succeed, often in ways they never imagined for themselves. The most exciting pivot now is mentoring them to become leaders and coaches themselves, defining success on their own terms. “That’s how we grow sustainably,” she points out. “Not one big project, but small, continuous resets and adjustments.”

She leads by encouraging her team to proactively devise improvement initiatives, embrace new technology, and always remember that their path doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. As in her own life, the things they didn’t think they could do, or want to do, might be exactly where they are supposed to be.

For Holly, and the energy industry leaders she is mentoring, the ability to change direction isn’t about indecision — it’s about integrity. Adaptability is a crucial trait in business, as in life, and approaching every choice and challenge with a clear, courageous understanding of your passions and skills will put you on a path leading to greater value, for customers and yourself.