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Matt Brakey can crack the code baffling many small-business owners — the electric bill.
“This is very, very complicated stuff,” Brakey says. “We are talking about subject matter that few people have expertise in, involving hundreds of calculations.”
But by steering clear of the intricate details of their monthly power bills, businesses lose out on opportunities to save, Brakey says. Companies simply need someone to untangle the math.
Brakey launched EnergyManager.com to do just that. The Web site analyzes electric bills and advises companies on ways to save. Since 2002, Brakey and his father, Michael, have consulted area companies on ways to conserve energy with Brakey Consulting Inc. But the younger Brakey envisioned a sister company that would simplify the process by offering businesses an online avenue for understanding energy- rate structures.
“I wanted a site where companies could take their electric bill, put in a few pieces of information and audit for accountability and saving opportunities,” he says. From there, EnergyManager.com was born.
In the beginning, Brakey hoped to keep it as simple as possible.
“The original concept was that this would need very little customer support,” he says. “It really would be a vertical business model where it’s as self-contained and automated as possible. They would get the analysis and they would take action.”
But when investors began to show interest in Brakey’s idea, he was forced to re-examine his plan.
“We were approached by someone with a venture-capital company that had caught wind of our business model,” he says. “They said that in order to consider us, we needed a new plan.”
So Brakey headed to the Business Clinic at Baldwin-Wallace College. The clinic allows small-business owners to work with staff and qualified students to focus their ideas into marketable realities.
“We bring structure and rigor to thinking through a strategy,” says Phil Bessler, director of the Business Clinic. “We really do get them to think differently about their idea, get them to open their eyes and see opportunities and roadblocks.”
Bessler and his students advised Brakey to focus on the type of customers he hoped to attract.
“We drove him to [complete] a detailed market analysis to see who the perfect client is and what market he’s trying to serve.”
Bessler also encouraged Brakey to take control of how word about his company reached those markets. The staff at the Clinic suggested Brakey use chambers of commerce and business associations such as COSE (Council of Smaller Enterprises), the small business arm of the Greater Cleveland Partnership, to spread the news about EnergyManager.com. Many small companies struggle to find the right channels to reach potential business, Bessler says.
After spending time at the Business Clinic, Brakey realized he had to work closer with clients. “We’ve married the Web site to the consulting side of the business,” he says. “We now work hand in hand with customers and take the results from the Web site and work on the solution side.”
Together, Brakey and his clients design schedules for machinery that optimize energy efficiency. He also realized he could run EnergyManager.com without outside financial aid.
“We saw we could fund it at the pace we wanted to,” Brakey says. “We didn’t know what we wanted until we took the time.”
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