What We Believe
Our belief is that the residential building energy efficiency opportunity will be led by a new breed of service providers--knowledgeable about building science, skilled in construction, exceptional at customer service, working house by house and developing custom approaches--that will succeed by building long term consultative relationships with homeowners. Our mission at Energy Circle is to use our team's deep past experience in business strategy, strategic marketing, brand creation, web and software development, design and writing to support these emerging companies. We recognize that it's very difficult to maintain a solid business development effort while spending long days diagnosing and fixing buildings. We also recognize that the energy efficiency business, while all the rage, isn't making anyone rich right now.
Our Solution
So we've built Energy Circle PRO as a smart, low cost set of tools and services that help energy auditors, home performance contractors and other energy efficiency professionals drive their businesses. Our platform enables contractors to easily manage their marketing, maintain a dynamic online presence, qualify leads, and take advantage of online inbound and outbound marketing opportunities without wasting time or learning a new and complex skill set. We aim to charge as little upfront as possible (just enough to try to recoup our development costs) and will build our business on providing cost effective, powerful modules and services charged on an affordable monthly subscription basis. Fixed prices, no surprises. We're listeners. We use Agile development as our software philosophy, and the agile mandate extends throughout our organization. We're perpetually curious--constantly probing the world and our customers for their needs, sorting out the best ideas, and acting quickly.
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Management Team
Peter Troast, Founder/CEO, leads the Energy Circle team, is a passionate advocate for energy efficiency and drives innovation for both Energy Circle PRO and the growing selection of hand picked products within the Energy Circle store. He contributes to the popular Energy Circle blog for home performance professionals nationally, maintains the EnergyCircle presence on twitter, and is a frequent presenter at national conferences on topics of energy efficiency marketing and communication, use of social media and energy monitoring. He currently serves on the marketing and/or communications committees of the Maine Association of Building Efficiency Professionals (MABEP), Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) and Efficiency First. Angered by profligate 765KV powerlines in upstate NY, he dropped out of college at 19 to work for Friends of the Earth in Washington, where he had the amazing experience of sharing an office with Amory Lovins. It's taken a while, but thanks to mentors like Amory, David Brower and others along the way, he's ecstatic to be back working exclusively on energy issues. In prior business life he was: co-founder/Managing Director of Moulded Fibre Technology (recycled packaging startup acquired in simultaneous IPO by UFP Technologies, Nasdaq: UFPT), Strategic Principal, VIA Group (professional services, marketing consulting), VP Marketing & Brand Strategy, American Skiing Company (a resort consortium sold at historic multiples), and a cofounder/head of internet of FetchDog.com (a VC backed ecommerce site for dog products and information.) He is a graduate of the Resource Economics program at UC Berkeley where he studied in the Energy and Resources Group.
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Tom Harrison, Chief Technology Officer, leads both software development and our technical strategies involving search engine optimization (SEO) and search marketing and analytics. Tom was turning his thermostat down as a teenager in the first energy crisis, and comes from a family whose motto is "Waste not, want not". During and after college, Tom was an independent building contractor, and spent some years in property management. He has worked in software development and leadership positions in software companies for the last few decades, and was part of the first recent bubble as a founder of Internet start-up Direct Hit, a search engine, bought by Ask Jeeves. Tom worked in one of the businesses of TripAdvisor as it was getting off the ground, and then was a partner in DigitalAdvisor, an e-commerce company involved in electronics like digital cameras and HDTVs. In short, Tom was part of the problem, not part of the solution. He was just another "consumer" until reading the End of Oil in 2004. The next year during a vacation in smoggy LA as the Katrina hurricane battered Louisiana, Tom decided it was time to change, and started writing his popular Five Percent: Conserve a Little Energy blog on ways he and his family conserved energy around the house and after several years his family has reduced their footprints by more than half. After finding Energy Circle, Tom left his job selling cheap stuff destined for landfills to be part of the next great wave of human evolution: being smart about how we use energy. In addition to development geekery, Tom tests energy monitors, usually having at least four or five running at any given time, as well as many of the technical products we sell in the store. Officialness on his prior lives: VP Engineering, Direct Hit (acquired by Ask Jeeves), VP Development, Ask Jeeves. Partner/VP Engineering DigitalAdvisor (spin off of TripAdvisor, acquired by Expedia), Director of Cust. Svc, Easel (IPO 1991). He is a graduate of Princeton University.
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Lisa Fahay, Director of eCommerce and Customer Service. Cutting plastic 6-pack rings to spare marine animal life since she was 10, Lisa's environmental values have always been paired with practical application. She founded Reternity, a full-service recycling service for small businesses and restaurants in the Portland, Maine area. Later, as a Recycling Specialist at Waste Management of Maine, her persona as resident treehugger was quickly dispelled when she proved to management that recycling could be profitable. They bought her a truck. As Deputy Director of GrowSmart Maine, Lisa spearheaded the outreach efforts and drove the van that led the Brookings Institution road trip in 2007. That road trip, consisting of public 'listening sessions,' informed the research and writing of "Charting Maine's Future: An Action Plan for Creating Sustainable Future and Quality Places," also known as The Brookings Report. The Report's release had a significant impact on Maine people and policy-makers. Its policy recommendations continue to be borne out at the legislative and local levels. Lisa was trained in the art of Customer Service a L.L. Bean. Dedication to extremely high standards in customer service drives Lisa's work at Energy Circle. She is a graduate of the University of Maine, where her love of the state created deep roots. She has a secret passion for foaming & caulking.
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