Energy
Currents of change
How to steer your company through fast growth
By Brooke Bates
Smart Business Chicago | December 2008
Page 1 of 2
Guy Morgan
founder and CEO, BlueStar Energy Services Inc.
On a nuclear submarine,
decisions come quickly, and it was in the intense environment of a U.S. Navy submarine that nuclear reactor operator Guy Morgan learned to
make decisions under pressure.
Now, as founder and CEO of
BlueStar Energy Services Inc.,
Morgan’s decisions have helped
propel the retail electricity supplier to huge growth, from 2003 revenue of $1.5 million to 2007
revenue of $171 million. And
he’s not done yet. With the help
of his 76 employees, he’s anticipating 2008 revenue of about
$200 million.
“For me now, it’s tweaking,”
he says. “It’s not trying to make
big changes to the model that
we’ve built. It’s been successful
thus far, so we try to stay the
course we’re on.”
Smart Business spoke with
Morgan about how to face the
changing tides and sail through
growth.
Keep your financial footing. The
challenges we face as we grow
tend to be financial in nature.
The biggest challenge is getting
started. Talk to as many financial institutions of varying types
as you can until you find the
one that fits your needs.
The key is persistence, not letting the first 20 ‘no’s’ make you
think you’re not going to be able
to do it.
A lot of people told us all the
things that we couldn’t do. When
I said I wanted to start an electric company in the extra bedroom of my apartment on the
North Side of Chicago, those
people said, ‘You’re crazy.’
Whether it’s family or banks or
potential investors or partners,
there are always going to be
those people that say you just
can’t do it.
Getting ahead of yourself is
easy to do. When you grow fast
and there’s a lot of money coming in all of a sudden, it’s easy to
spend that money. We had the
opportunity to go to different
states to buy more power, to do
things that in retrospect would
have been very irresponsible.
But we didn’t. We maintained a
financial discipline and controlled the expense side of the
equation, even with the rapid
growth.
I don’t have [financial discipline]. I hire people around me
that have it, and I rely on them
to check me. Recognize your
strengths and your weaknesses.
Where you’re weak, if you’re
honest about it, you can find
people to balance that.
Build a chameleon company. If
you initiate change, it’s pretty
easy to manage because you
plan for how you’re going to
manage that change. The other
type of change is change that
happens outside of the company, whether it’s a regulatory change
or market change. How do you
manage that? You have to react
to it. You try to build the organization to be as flexible as possible. The way you do that is primarily with people who are
good with dealing with change.
You look for people who are
self-directed. If they don’t need a
manager to hold their hand
through a process, then your
organization is better suited to
deal with change.
Whatever their job is, you give
them decision-making authority
for things that you feel comfortable, on an individual basis, giving them authority to do. You
empower people to their capabilities and their comfort levels.
The more people that are
empowered to deal with those
changes, the better off you are.
