How This Engineering Firm Helps Huge Corporations Meet Their Sustainability Goals

In 2009, Sergio Castillo stepped out of a corporate career in manufacturing with 3M to take over Eco Engineering & Automation, an INC 5000 company , the consultancy his father had started a decade before. After a time, Castillo, 54, concluded that the company was in the wrong country (Panama), the wrong market (South America), and the wrong business (consulting). So he reincorporated in Minnesota as a solutions-oriented engineering company, and set out to crack the $358 billion engineering services market. He's grown his company to $4.2 million in annual revenue by helping multinationals solve a nagging issue with their grandiose plans for sustainability--namely, getting their own manufacturing plants on board. --As told to Bill Saporito

Sustainability is difficult to deploy. Why? Because each plant is independent. They have priorities around productivity, quality, and safety, but not necessarily sustainability. Corporations have quite a hard time, and that's where we come in.

Our customers today include the top distilleries, such as Beam Suntory, and breweries, such as Heineken. We're working with the top snack producers worldwide, PepsiCo and Mondelez. At the beginning, there was so much competition.

Our first step, as a company, was to understand that all major corporations need to be sustainable. They have aggressive targets around carbon emission reduction, carbon neutrality, and so forth. And typically they are public, so there is pressure because they'll be held to account.

We were founded as a consulting firm, in 2000, in Panama; that's where my father is from. He was consulting on sustainability, on a macroeconomic level, for countries like Brazil. I took over in 2009, leaving a 3M spinoff where I was a general manager and vice president of our global division.

After I took over Eco BCG, I restructured it and realigned it, taking it away from consulting and more into execution. Read More...

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