Last week our team was proud to see Groom Energy’s name again included on the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Companies list, this for our third year in a row.
A decade ago we started our company not knowing how it would develop, but expecting that each year would be a new chapter, with constant change being a fundamental part of the entrepreneurial journey. It has delivered on our forecast.
Years later one thing that has remained the same has been our high annual revenue growth, the principal criteria used by Inc. Magazine in making their selections.
So today it is an honor worth celebrating, even though our 2014 performance seems like forever ago…
The market for energy efficiency services isn’t new; it’s been around for more than 30 years. And most companies already know they have opportunities for reducing energy consumption. Their managers have heard of new energy efficient technologies in compressed air, HVAC, LED lighting and refrigeration. Utilities have told them about incentive programs providing financial subsidies for qualifying energy efficiency investments. They have mechanical and electrical contractors who claim to be taking care of their buildings and would be anxious for the new work. Their management teams know historically these have been fast returning investments.
So why haven’t they implemented these upgrades?
Like with any new corporate investment, new funding requires a high level of internal management support. Senior managers need to think what they’re doing is meaningful, that it’s consistent with their company’s philosophy and be convinced that investments will pay off with energy savings. And they must build internal support in order to get their investment ideas funded.
This is where we focus our efforts.
From the earliest stage, our engineers work closely with our customers’ management teams to develop an energy savings thesis based on their company’s real energy consumption data. We meter, study results and model where there are opportunities. We engineer upgrades with savings projections that are conservative and reachable. Then we jointly plan to deliver energy savings through programmatic, repeatable building upgrades that match their company’s capital and operational cycles. And we insulate them from the challenge in recovering the utility incentives for which they’re eligible.
Our customers need to be impressed that our team brings experience from studying hundreds of similar buildings, an operational understanding for their business and delivery capability for implementing building upgrades in any location, at any time.
To make this possible, as we’ve been growing each year, the biggest investment we’ve been making has been the hiring and on-boarding of new team members, each bringing new skill sets, in new US geographies. We train each other, work collaboratively across distributed geographies and move quickly to develop projects and deliver as a team.
So, as it did in previous years, the Inc. 5000 list reminds our company that we’ve hit a big success metric with revenue growth.
But our broader goal is to see our team grow in size, skill and reach, continue to operate virtually and win the confidence of senior management teams in our core markets of distribution, grocery, hospitality and manufacturing.
If we’re successful at this, we’ll expect that Inc. 5000 might be recognizing us again in years to come.
