5 minutes with… Irina Jaghinyan, Account Manager at Energy One

• Could you tell us who you are and what is your role at Energy One?

• When did you start working for Energy One and how did you experience your first months?

I started mid-April 2023. It has been really exciting so far, getting to know the company and its subsidiaries and travelling between Germany and our offices in Belgium and France. Getting to know the different cultures, work processes and structure is my main goal right now.

My experience of joining Energy One was unique, because I attended the Energy One Europe Customer Day in March, which took place a month before I officially started my role. This meant I was able to ‘get stuck in’ straight away by getting to know some customers and my future colleagues all in one room on that day. This exposed me to the positive dynamics between customers and customer-facing people at Energy One.

When I fully started in April, I was involved in online meetings with customers in my first week. Five weeks after I joined, we had the biggest energy industry event of the year, E-world 2023, and I was really looking forward to it. We had more than one hundred meetings pre-booked with prospects and customers and I was eager to meet them face-to-face.

It was a bit of a challenge for me since I was relatively new and had to collaborate with colleagues from across the business during meetings and demos. However, we have an interesting mix of colleagues in France, the UK and Belgium, as well as the many different business cultures at our clients.

All in all, it was a great experience, thanks to the down-to-earth and practical approach at Energy One. Colleagues from across the business work closely together on projects. There is no sense of hierarchy, and everyone is very open to answering questions and helping out. People are very responsive as well, and it feels like one team working towards a common goal.

• What did you do before Energy One?

I worked for over seven years for Wintershall, Germany’s largest crude oil and natural gas producer, where I started in the marketing and sales department, focusing on contract management and negotiation. After three years, I moved into a trading role, as we were starting our own trading desk at Wintershall and I helped with starting up the trading team. This was my first entrepreneurial experience, as an ‘intrapreneur’ responsible for starting up a new business within an existing company. I really enjoyed this sense of accountability and ownership that came with managing this project.

After four years on the trading side at Wintershall, I decided to fully embrace entrepreneurship – opening my own health and fitness business, where I was working with clients individually to take their health and wellbeing to the next level.

In April 2023, I went back to the energy sector to get back to the topics I really enjoy. As you may guess, I am a multi-layered person with many interests, one of them being the energy sector and the other being healthy living/healthy mindset, etc.

• Having worked for a big energy company before, what would you see as the biggest benefit of our offering?

The range of software and services really lightens the workload that is resting on the shoulders of trading and operations teams for our customers. Because we combine intuitive software with an outsourced operations team that takes care of balancing, trading, auction bidding, etc. either 24/7 or out-of-hours, it really makes a difference and facilitates the trading and logistics operations of the customer.

Like I mentioned earlier, I was working ‘on the client side’ before and used egssPort (one of our balancing and nomination solutions) at Wintershall Dea, and the solution and 24/7 operations team of Energy One really helps Wintershall in running the business smoothly and efficiently. So to summarise, I believe the combined offering is really needed and helpful for any company active in the energy sector.

• Before joining Energy One you were an entrepreneur in the health & fitness industry, how does this bring value to your current role?

On the one hand the health and fitness industry may look like a totally different industry, but on the other hand I gained valuable insights from my time in the sector. 

In my previous roles in the energy sector, I was more removed from the end-customer, and having interacted closely with the end customer in the health sector, it taught me how I can engage on a more personal level with my customers at Energy One.

These insights help me to really make the customer feel heard and to take care of their needs and build mutual trust. This is very important, because many customers are with us for a very long time, and the trading and logistics side is the core business for many of these companies. They want to interact with someone that has their best interests at heart.

• What excites you most about working for Energy One?

There are several things I would say:

1. I’m excited because of the international atmosphere and many cultures. I love to collaborate with the people in our French, UK and Belgian offices.
2. We exchange knowledge and collaborate on projects. It’s really hands-on and practical; we all work with a strong customer focus.
3. The events and customer interaction is really great, E-world and the Customer Day showed me we have a great relationship with our customers..

Last but not least, the business is growing and this also means I have a good career perspective where I can grow in my role and the role is also evolving over time.