Well, it's happened again... Brilliance!

Alternate title: My amazing new green friends.

First: A quick disclaimer. All of the information, numbers, speculations and so on in this article are my own. I did not specifically 'vet' this information with the founders, but it is an honest attempt to crystalize what I have learned about these amazing guys, their history, their plans, and their awesome company. So, if you find a fault or something to troll about, troll me not them.

Over the decades, I have had the incredible privilege to become associated with a large number of people considerably smarter than I (my wife, Dr. Donna, comes to mind).

Engineers, scientists, innovators, artists and, of course, fellow entrepreneurs... Each with their own new 'take' on life and on the world around them, and each with concepts, visions, projects, products and solutions that continue to boggle my mind.

Thankfully, I have no real ego about my intelligence. True, I have always relied upon it to get me through life (it wasn't going to be my looks!) and have always prided myself on being just smart enough to stay with almost any conversation for at least 5 minutes... but I never feel 'hurt' by not being the smartest person in the room. In fact, I LIVE FOR IT! As one of my favorite clients once told me, "If you find that you are frequently the smartest guy in the room, you are either spending too much time alone, or you need better friends." As always, Bruce was so right.

Well, as the title says... it has happened again. ...and this time lightning has struck twice in the span of less than a month.

On that note, please allow me to introduce you to one (the other one next week) of the most amazing new projects, and its founders, that I have had the privilege of being involved with, in a very long time indeed:

First up: Meet the Energi Pros.

Waste = waste. Period. You don’t have to be an environmentalist to see that waste benefits no one, especially when someone is actually paying cash-out-of-pocket money for it.

The four principals at Energi Pros have, between them, nearly a century of experience in helping commercial facilities to massively reduce their energy waste, improve their energy sourcing, and as a natural outcome of those, find truly amazing savings! …and they hate waste!

Now, when you think of ‘energy efficiency’ you may think ‘LED light bulbs, ’turning down the thermostat,’ or ‘better insulation’. You’re probably not thinking co-generation, thermal energy storage, power factor correction, and building envelope management. ...and you’re almost certainly not imagining $50,000 or higher monthly electric bills.

So, for most of us, it’s difficult to conceive of just how impactful what these guys can do truly is for businesses, institutions, schools, hospitals, hotels, places of worship, and so on.  

So let me give you an example:

Let’s say, just for giggles, that you run the largest Lexus dealership in the United States. Let’s also say that, between lighting, heating, cooling, service bays, body shop, parking lot lights, etc, etc… that your monthly electric bill used to be something on the order of $70,000 per month. Enter Energi Pros’ Founder and Chief Engineer, Bill Probst. Bill shows up, does a full energy audit, and after making all of the recommended changes, your bill drops by, on average, $27,000 per month. That’s over $324,000 per year, every year, back on your bottom line! 

Oh, and that’s a real client case. …and by no means an isolated one. To-date that client has saved in excess of $5,000,000.

The Energi Pros can trot out similar case studies for such names as LG Electronics, Chase Bank, Kenilworth, Sonic, and others.

In almost every engagement that moves past a quick eval, these guys can find savings of 25% to 50%. Just as importantly, they are helping these facilities to ‘go green’ and reduce pointless energy waste that benefits no one and contributes to higher energy costs for both the clients themselves and for everyone else due to overtaxed and ever-expanding power grids.

Just think of it: If every commercial facility in America could reduce their energy consumption by 30, 40, or even 50% and/or make use of off-grid renewable energy resources to meet their demands… what would that do for us all, economically, environmentally, and even in terms of foreign relations? It could be completely transformative! However, even if you can’t get your head around such big theoretical numbers and outcomes, think of it at the level of each business owner. If you currently have an electric bill of, say, $40,000 per month and the Energi Pros save you 50% of that… that’s $240,000 per year that you are no longer just flushing down the proverbial toilet!

Anyway, these guys can’t likely do the whole country by themselves… but they do have a systematized process that is designed to ramp up to over 400 facility evaluations a month in less than 9 months! That’s 4,800 facilities a year by year two, and they have the track record to make it work. Read: They’ve actually done it before.

In the past, two of the founders (CEO John Bogeman, and COO Michael Logan) scaled a similar energy services company (ESCO) to over $6,000,000 a month in revenues in less than a year, and they were just high-level employees on that one. Now, they have joined with Bill and the final founder, Larry Boone (the installation fulfillment specialist), to create this new business. Think of it as “Energi Pros 2.0”, the reboot.

Again: They’ve done it before, at scale. No reason that they should not be able to repeat.

The science and engineering are complicated, but THE PLAN IS SO SIMPLE: 

FREE SELLS.

Nearly every client engagement begins with a quick, free, ‘know your numbers’ evaluation of the client’s current/recent energy bills. On average, one in two of those evaluations shows enough promise to warrant a full Energy Audit. Fifty percent of those audits then result in an ‘Installation’ (all of the fixes and tech required to achieve the full savings potential) that, typically, nets Energi Pros around $40,000. So, 4 engagements = 2 audits = 1 install = $40,000. In other words: Every ‘free’ client engagement is worth, on average, $10,000 to Energi Pros.

Oh and, to the client, all of the facility upgrades and fancy new technology and equipment is basically free as Energi Pros leverages their exceptional financial relationships to get the customers 100% financing on the upgrades – which costs much less than the savings the client is receiving. No out-of-pocket expense for the install.

Essentially, the Energi Pros are in the rarified business of handing out 'free money.'

As an old business partner of mine used to say, “If you're selling Dollars for fifty Cents, you’ll have a line around the block all day, every day, and riots when you close for the night. Now, if you can figure out how to make a profit doing it… THEN you’re a genius!” Tom was right.

I, of course, love to wax lyrical about the massive aggregate effect that this kind of thing might have on the planet. But to Energi Pros’ clients, that’s really just a bonus. It’s all about putting lots of Dollars and Cents back on their bottom line.

Energi Pros’ current expansion plan has them scaling up to 400 client engagements per month within 8 months of start. That is $4MM per month in gross revenues by the end of 2019. …and all by helping businesses to save vastly more money and waste less energy. Amazing!

So, here’s the kicker! They already have roughly 70 potential clients lined up from just a single, two-hour appearance at a recent IFMA (International Facility Management Association) event in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago. The important statistic here was this: 70%. A full seventy percent of the facilities managers that they spoke to or who even heard them speak, signed up. There were hundreds more present that they just did not have the time to get in front of. They have that covered next time.

Let’s do the math together. Remembering our 4:2:1 rule, that breaks down to roughly 70 times $10,000 ($700,000 if you’re counting) already in the pipeline – generated from a single two-hour meeting – and hundreds more already ‘teed up’ for next month.

The Energi Pros are currently scheduled to host the next IFMA event in Indianapolis in June and be the keynote speakers. That one relationship alone gives them immediate access to over 8,500 potential U.S. clients and 24,000 internationally.

But wait… there’s more! In the past month they have also lined up energy audits at The Smithsonian (yes, THAT Smithsonian), The City of Denver, CO, The City of Orlando, several universities, and a number of other large institutions.

Success, it seems, (to me at least) is almost assured.

So, other than it being a wonderful thing just to know these fine folks and share what they can do with the world (or at least my tiny little corner of it), what’s the point of this article?

Simple: Energi Pros WAS looking to raise a quick $250,000 so that they could meet the demand that they are already generating BUT that deal sold within hours - faster than I could finish writing this article. However, they have decided to open up one more $250K slot in order to ramp up even a little faster AND hold some reserve funds so that they can capitalize upon unexpected opportunities.

Now I am neither a broker nor an officer of the company so I’m not selling anything. Not mine to sell. But, if you want the details, you can contact their liaison at Energi Pros, LLC and he can address that stuff directly.

Anyway, I just think that it is a massive opportunity and, even if you don’t have the rather significant minimum buy-in of $50,000, an amazing business to follow. Check them out at www.energipros.com.

Full disclosure: I am a (very) minor shareholder in this business and I am helping them with their marketing materials and outreach. That said: My primary motivation for being involved is that I am so excited about what making 100 mid to large-scale commercial facilities a month up to 50% more energy efficient can do for the world that I am currently borrowing from my kids. The CO2 offset numbers are truly incredible! 

Go ahead, play with the numbers. It's fun! 

Here in the U.S., $40,000 a month buys you, on average, about 5.8 million kWh (Kilowatt hours) of electricity per year. Half of that saved would be around 2.9 million kWh. That, depending upon generation methods, equates to 2,000 metric tons of CO2 not pumped into our air! Now, scale that up again by 1,200 such businesses per year and you get over 2.4 million metric tons of CO2 offset per year, compounding. That’s like eliminating 1/2 a million passenger cars or taking 1 coal-fired power plant offline! …just by saving some businesses some money. Wow! Source: https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator

I am also enamored with almost any business that can Do Well by Doing Good and, in the process, help to prove that you don’t have to be an environmentalist to save the planet, you just need to hate waste.

See what I did there? Full circle. Hakuna Matata and all that.

Watch this space for the other, potentially even bigger, green tech deal that I have been fortunate enough to become an advisor to. That one is starting out in the Caribbean and it's all kinds of awesome!

As always, feel free to reach out to me directly at: [email protected]