Today we’d like to introduce you to Jon Guerster.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
We started Groom Energy in 2005 on Boston’s North Shore. The early team was a small group of engineers interested in building energy efficiency. Our idea was to help large corporations save money by reducing the energy consumption in their buildings, anywhere across the US.
Like most start-up companies, however, we started locally. We used Google satellite photos to look for buildings with the largest rooftops knowing the bigger the building, the larger the savings opportunities. Then we did reverse address look ups, cold-called the company and tried to convince whoever we could get on the phone to let us visit. It wasn’t glamorous.
Eventually we started working with some great Boston area companies such as GE, EMC and Thermo Fisher. We built early successes and slowly hired more team members, each bringing added skills and capabilities.
After our first projects went well our early customers let us look at their building in other parts of the US.
But we had to fly there to see them.
At one point a friend of the company was on a flight back from LA with five Groom Energy engineers. They called to congratulate us on how big we had gotten. We had 12 employees at the time. That was a turning point. We decided to hire quickly in other geographies if we were really going to be a national player.
So since then our business has grown, making the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing company list the last four years in a row.
Last year we were acquired by EDF, the large French utility company, who has aspirations to build a larger building energy business here in the US, with Groom Energy being their starting point. Now beyond energy efficiency, we can bring our customers offerings from our EDF’s US “sister” companies with wind, solar, electricity and natural gas services.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Start-up service businesses can be a bit of a wild ride, depending how the first customers engage, pay for services and how the founding team comes together to learn and grow.
Obviously for us these worked out, but along the way we’ve learned to deal with long sales cycles where customers develop trust that the energy savings we promise will actually materialize. We can remember periods where cash flow was challenging.
The financial market collapse in 2008/2009 was a bit scary, as our business relies on large corporations spending their capital for us to perform their building upgrades. Fortunately our customers continued to invest in energy efficiency during this less wonderful period and we got through it by managing ourselves very carefully.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Groom Energy – what should we know?
Today we provide our energy efficiency services to companies in the distribution, grocery, hospitality and industrial markets. Our team has grown to be 90 people, scattered across the US in 16 different states, working in sales, engineering, project management, accounting and operations. Last year we performed building projects in 46 US states.
Obviously the building types vary – supermarkets have a typical retail store layout, a hotel can be a vacation resort or a Residence Inn, a distribution center is a large building with lots of dock doors for tractor trailers and a factory has large equipment for manufacturing or process production.
But regardless of type, there are always ways to find places for energy savings.
Since these businesses are always “open,” wherever we find a way to reduce energy for air-conditioning, heating or lighting, the dollar savings opportunity are relatively bigger.
We’re most proud of the fact that our company has had a positive environmental impact through our energy saving projects and that our employees have achieved a good level of professional and personal growth through our journey.
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
One thing we did from the beginning was admit that we needed to operate virtually – meaning our team worked from home and didn’t commute to our North Shore office each day.
Buildings were our “office” and they were scattered across any geography – first New England, then later the whole US. So, we hired a distributed team to address the need of being closer to the buildings.
We needed to trust that our team members could operate independently, collaborate with each other using virtual tools (today they’re called “cloud”) and take pretty broad responsibilities for each building project’s success.
Fortunately our first projects were successful and that set us on a good path to grow.
Contact Info:
- Address: 200 Cummings Center, Suite 177c
Beverly, MA 01915 - Website: www.groomenergy.com
- Phone: 978-306-6052
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