 If you guessed that the 4 o'clock block would be Community Matters, you were 100% right. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech. That fellow over there is George Benda. George Benda, I know for a long time he is a Renaissance business person who lives on Molokai and who has had great experiences and energy, including right now. Welcome to the show, George. Thanks, Jay. It's always a pleasure to come and visit with you. I really do enjoy our time together. We should get together off camera sometime. Yeah, well, sometime. So far, it's only been on camera. Anyway, George, can you tell the people about Chelsea Group, the company I guess you founded some years ago and built over the years? It's an energy efficiency company. How did you design and develop that? Well, Chelsea Group, I formed the company in 1990. So it was a 28-year run until we sold it this year to Amoresco. We started out doing a combination of indoor air quality, which was a hot issue at the time, and energy efficiency. Generally speaking, at that time, everybody thought it was one or the other. And what we said is, no, you can do them together, but you've got to think about it. You've got to do it correctly. Over time, the company evolved into something I call the Building Science Consulting. Ah, that sounded a perfect term. For the first 10 years, we did a combination of strategic consulting to major corporations that brought products into that market, and they wanted to know, how do we do this? And is this a good product, and are we hitting our market correctly? Consulting for the manufacturers, the vendors of this high-tech stuff for energy efficiency and air. And they were introducing products all the time. So we were working on everything from air handling systems to we did a huge amount of work on this Null Loader Spray that SC Johnson introduced. What is that now, so we know? Well, so you have a smell in a room, and before that, all you did was you put a fragrance in there so that it overwhelmed it in a sort of the toilet world of fragrances. And what these guys came up with was a way to find a molecule that would neutralize so that you wouldn't sense the compounds that were in the air that were smell. So you didn't have to lay perfume over it that way. Exactly. So you started with a, they called it a Null Loader. There was no odor in the product. So we did a lot of work with SC Johnson for years on that product. But that was one half of the business, the other half of the business I built an engineering firm. And those guys were busy working in, particularly in large privately owned office buildings and such. And we worked on indoor air quality, but we also worked on energy efficiency at the same time with the private equity firms. And this was before it was all that popular? Yeah, it was 1990 to 2000. And about 2002, the concept of sustainability finally took root. Now I've been working on it since 1990 with some of the people that were in the Rio de Janeiro Global Sustainability Conference in 1990. Are you an engineer, George? No, I studied philosophy. Okay, well, then it's completely appropriate that I called you the Renaissance business person. My master's degree was on a Renaissance, so. Oh, and we made that up. It works really well. But were you back on, were you on Molokai at the time, way back when? No, I started that company when I was in Chicago. I had until, for the prior six, eight years, I'd been involved with another energy service company called AGC, and there's a funny way this connects. And I'd worked myself from a consultant to regional director to VP Ops to CEO of that company, and then with the direction of the board sold that company to Northeast Utilities in 1990. And that then became the origin of Chelsea Group because I had nothing to do. So I had to do something. Fair enough. It's still pretty young. And that's when you came to Molokai. Not quite yet. Okay, so tell us about it. And the transition to Molokai was really important. My wife and I never really were fully comfortable in Chicago. We love the city, beautiful city, love to be in the city. For city life, there is no better city in the world for my money. But there's nothing you can do outdoors, really. I mean, there are a few days of the year. The weather's good, and it's just 10 million people, and you've got to drive for hours to get to anything that's natural, and that's where our hearts are. And so we knew that as soon as we could, we'd move away from Chicago to some place where we'd have access to the natural environment. And we were scanning the globe, and our accountant said, stop scanning the globe. It's got to be the United States or the Cayman Islands. For tax reasons, you can't go anywhere else. And when we told him we picked Hawaii, he was very upset. He had to pick the one with the highest tax rate. Leave it to the tax account. So that was a moment. We'd settled down to Hawaii, and then it was pick an island, and we toured all the islands and spent time on all the islands. But when we landed on Molokai, it was like a magical moment where we felt like we'd lived there in prior lives, and we were home, and we'd really come back to where we were supposed to be. Interesting, because Molokai is not all that welcoming, if I can say that. You can. And yet, as long as I've known you, you've been completely comfortable there. Yes. And I think a lot of it was that we came with that sort of spiritual connection of we've lived prior lives here. So we didn't come there saying, we're going to change it. We're going to make it the way we wanted it to be the way it was. We just wanted to protect it, and then we wanted it to be as good as it can be, given the criteria of the way it was. And so that's what we've done on Molokai with our lives there. It's been fun. Yeah, that's great. I know you're comfortable there, and it takes a certain, may I say, may I say this philosophical approach. The schooling stands you in good stead, George. So now you were doing business. You have been doing business from Molokai all this time. Yes, absolutely. Tell us about how that has worked. Well, it's been very interesting, because the company operating out of Chicago, we were a national company with some international reach. And I've been doing business in Hawaii since 1993. When we moved here in 2001, we finally moved our household here, and then began the transition to the headquarter here. The company was still national. And I kept it a national company, and I was going two weeks on, two weeks off, going to the mainland back and forth. And it was exhausting, Jay. It was just plain exhausting. And because I had to carry the sales, the company at that point transitioned in the sort of strange economic conditions that happened after 9-11. All of our strategic consulting, we went from 17 global clients. I mean, global corporations that we were working with, they just fired all those guys. They said, we don't need this stuff. This isn't going to happen. And they closed down the marketing and the research departments that we were working with, and the people were just gone. I think that could hurt your top line and your bottom line. Exactly. We didn't just not have clients. We didn't have people saying, well, you're not going to be able to pay for the contract this year. We were having, they're gone. There's no one to call. Start over. And rather than start over, I just refocused on the building science aspect and really doubled down on marketing to the private equity firms that we were selling to and built a national consulting operation in what is now known as sustainability in that sort of core space. So you said a minute ago that you were carrying sales. What is that being carrying sales? Well, I had other people in the organization who had responsibility for relating to clients. And they didn't produce much revenue. They didn't produce much work. So for us to go forward during that period, I would have to meet with the clients. I would have to make the deal with the clients. And then the folks that worked for me could implement the deal. So I was carrying sales in the sense of I actually physically had to go meet with these folks and keep the process of selling projects. I'll bet you didn't lose stride at all. I mean, I think in every good corporate executive and every business leader, there's somebody who can step up to what has to be done, even if that was not the plan. That's what it sounds like. Well, you know, I appreciate that remark. And when it's your own business, and I had no shareholders, it was all on my shoulders. So if I was losing money, it was literally coming out of my pocket and into the company. And that's a heck of a motivator. I can assure you that you really pay attention when it's coming out of your own pocket. And so I had to learn how to do all of those things. And it was disappointing. There were people that paid a lot of money to be sales people and they ended up sitting around the office throwing darts and having fun. And I was out there really hustling and working and they'd show up for the meeting or they'd drive me to the meeting and say nothing and wait until all of the dust had settled and then try to convince me that I owed them their commission because they had pulled it off. Over time, you had to shed those people didn't you? I did. I did. And you know, I worked it out. Everything was going along. But finally, in about 2010, I could no longer sustain the physical burden of traveling that much. And so I started to train people and really, really force them to give them sales goals and, you know, wait from the chaff, pick the people that I thought could do it. And by this time you'd learned or relearned the skill, the art, I shouldn't say the art of the deal. That's too popular right now. Not in a good way. Sorry. It pervades our universe. But you relearned, you know, how to do this sort of thing. So you were in a really good position to train new people coming in. Oh, absolutely. That's absolutely correct. And then the hard thing in high level sales like that, you're selling to really the top of corporate America. These are people who are commanding billions of dollars of assets. And you have to have a presence. You have to have this connection with them. They have to trust you and believe that you can get the work done. And that's the hard thing to get an employee to do. They tend to waffle and say, let me check and all this stuff. They don't just kind of walk in and like, I control the room. And you don't deal with people who handle billions of dollars. I'm going to drill on that for a minute because I think there's some real wisdom in there. So how do you do that? How do you make them believe in you or your company or your sales people in the field? Well, you know, I just had a conversation with a friend about this over the weekend. She's a young MBA and she's thinking of starting your own company. And she's telling me how good her administrative skills are and she can run anything. And I said, well, here's my first lecture to you. Sure, you can run anything, but you can't have a successful company unless you have a real passion for what you do. And so I've felt and it's been, you know, I'm very dedicated. You've known me for a long time. I'm very dedicated to the sustainability and environmental issues that I work on. And I would sit down in the room in the depth of knowledge and my passion and energy would just be there and be obvious. And be visible, yeah. And it was clear that I wasn't just sitting there trying to take money out of their pocket to put it into mine. Although that's their business. They really liked that when they were going to do something that related to their buildings and they wanted somebody they could trust who really cared how this came out. So how do you come at that? Do you come at that from global warming, sustainability of the environment, of the business, of the American economy of, gee, I don't know, of humanity on the planet? Or do you come at it from the point of view of this is going to save you money? The latter, absolutely the latter. What you have to know when you walk in that room is the guy across the table from you, even if he feels strongly about environmental issues and really does mean that he's going to do it, and 95 or more percent do not. His responsibility is to make money for his private equity fund. You could be sure of that. I can be absolutely sure of that. Whatever his religious propensities are, you can be sure of that. Absolutely. And so I would spend time in advance of those significant meetings finding out what the motivation was. Often it was the positioning of the company as a global leader so that those who were investing in green would invest in their fund. And then they had to have a credible program. And so I would say, well, this is what a credible program looks like so those investors will come on board. And if I knew that and I knew what the criteria were, I could walk in the door and say the ten right words that they would hear and know that those are the ten words written down in the list of things that they needed to match up to. And we were in business. You know, George, we here at Think Tech, we take a break during our shows a minute. We play public service announcements and we promote other shows. And we like to do cliffhanger questions so that people will hang around. So they'll still be there after the break. So I'm going to tell you my cliffhanger question. George, after the break, would you tell us the ten words? We'll be right back. Hey, loha, my name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii, airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii, live from the studios. I'll bring you guests. I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe. Your co-workers safe, your family safe, to keep our community safe. We want to teach you about those things in our industry that may be a little outside of your experience. So please join me because Security Matters, loha. We're back. Community Matters. I'm Jay Fidel. This is George Benda. And you're probably sitting on the edge of your chair waiting for the ten words. The ten words you say to an official of a large corporation you're trying to do a deal with, get them on your team. So what are the ten words, George? Well, the ten words are not secret. The ten words are the ten words you read in their report. Trick is to get and read their report. Absolutely. A hundred percent. You have to find people in the organization who will give you that report before you meet with the senior. There you go. And that's the whole thing. Because the ten words vary from each report, each company. And what you see is the strategic consultants, the Booz Allen guys, the who's hot today, EY and the rest of them, they can't sell the same words over and over again. They're essentially the same meaning, but you have to say the words that were in their consulting report. And even if it was EY that did here and did here, they're different words, but they mean the same thing. So you just have to be very, very quick on your feet. Follow-ups. Yes. Do you tell them that you looked at the report? No, of course not. No, you kidding? You just use the words. Absolutely. You have to be a magician. And I will tell you that sometimes it's the most bizarre thing that sells some things. I sat down in a room, this is in the 1990s, when LED projectors were all the newest thing and hardly anybody had them. And I had an IBM computer that was a pen-based computer. People don't remember, but those things were around very early on. And it turned out, Microsoft produced a version of PowerPoint that you could write on the screen. So you would do the PowerPoint presentation and then you would draw arrows and things as you were writing it. And so the chief operating officer of a company that was doing about 300 billion at the time, who was one of the 10 largest companies in the world at the time, sitting next to me. And he's watching this. And he's looking at my hands. He's looking at the machine, looking at the screen. He's looking at my hands, looking at the machine. He's not hearing a word I'm saying. He waves over his assistant and says, by tomorrow I want one of those. He wants the machine. I got the contract, but it was the machine. There's a statement in that, isn't there? I mean, you're demonstrating by action that you're Akamai, that you're at the cutting edge. This is so important, you know, especially if you're in a tech field, which you were in a thing, are in a tech field. So, tech, energy, it's all connected. Efficiency, it's all connected. Absolutely. It is the future, and it is so important from a business point of view. And, you know, a moral values point of view is not hard to sell. So somewhere along the line, you connected with Amoresco. Can you tell us who and what Amoresco is? Sure. Amoresco is a large energy service company. And so they bid across the country and in many other countries in the UK and several EU countries. They're trying to advance in Asia. They've done some work in Africa. So they're becoming a global corporation. They are very focused on core energy services of deep energy conservation. And they're also focused on utility market changes. So smart grids, efficient production, distributed generation, solar, other technologies. They've done all of those things, massive lighting projects and things like that. And they tend to do very large projects. But they moved on from old-fashioned classical generation using oil or coal, that sort. They don't do that. Typically, no. They don't go back in technology. They're moving forward in technology. And so they've been expanding. They've been in Hawaii previously. And now that they're in Hawaii, they're established a foothold that has more credibility than their prior projects have offered them. And so they actually came to us around the first of the year, January, February timeframe. And they came in order to talk to us about providing engineering consulting. Chelsea Group had had, before it was acquired, a tremendous team of engineers for retrofit projects. Is this the same sort of consulting you were talking about before, where you consult with somebody who is selling high-tech? No, no. This is the consulting where we're doing building science consulting to actual properties. OK, OK. And so we have this great team of engineers and they want to hire that team. And they're telling me about their challenges with their projects and some of the issues they have in working in Hawaii. And I think you can appreciate this. And it's a little bit out of school, but I'll tell it anyway. They did a project out here and they brought engineers from Boston. And they didn't have a local project manager. You know how well Boston engineers go over with local building engineers. Not very. Not very, yeah. The cultural clash is just beyond imagination. So they needed the local presence. They needed the local knowledge. And I was listening to what Ron Haxton, I think you'll meet him this week, was saying. And I said, gee, why don't you just buy my company? And he said, is it for sale? And I said, oh, yeah, I'm trying to sell this company for a little while now. And he goes, OK, we're interested. And the next day we have a non-compete, non-disclosure agreement. The following Monday we have a preliminary letter of intent. So you'd been thinking about it though. About 10 years. And he had not necessarily been thinking about it. He did not expect me to say that when he walked in the door. But then, I'm really interested because this is a moment. It's a moment in business where the heavens light up somehow. So you waited for this exquisite moment. There was a certain moment called hesitation, pause in the conversation. You knew this was the time to pop the question. It's almost like a romance, isn't it? And then you dropped the question and he's ready in some sort of spiritual way. He's ready to move in on that and actually respond to you. I like people who respond quickly. I think business is better that way. It absolutely is. Better deals and the right stuff happens. That was an amazing moment. You knew though. You knew that it was fertile ground. Well, I'll tell you how much I sense that. We had been meeting over the last year with various energy service companies that were trying to expand business. And it wasn't the right fit every time they came in. It clearly wasn't the right fit. We're looking for affiliations, for partnerships, for collaborations of one kind or another. Right. And I was very open to that. I'm not arguing that that would be a good strategy for us and for them. And we were building those deals up, but they weren't fits. They didn't match up. When he told me what his set of problems were, it was like, well, that's what we do here. These are the problems we solve. It's not that we don't look at it as an engineering problem. We look at the whole building and how does it get to the next stage? Had you read the report in advance of this conversation? Yes. And the other thing that was to give you some idea of how committed I was to this, I was slated to go home the night before. And my salesperson brought this meeting in and I said, and she said, well, should I tell them? We weren't going to take another meeting with these guys because the sales guy we'd been meeting with, we weren't doing very well with. And I said, but he had told her that it would be these two senior vice presidents that would come in. And I said, I'll take that meeting. So I stayed over an extra night, redid my travel arrangements and stayed for the meeting. And I will tell you, I was not feeling well in advance of that. I was in pretty poor physical condition, but I just stuck it out and we made it through the meeting. But read their website, read all the background in. Well, let me say that sometimes when you're not feeling well, you actually are in a kind of altered state. And the kind of limitations and barriers you might feel, the concerns you might experience in a regular state don't necessarily apply. Sometimes you do better, don't you think? Yeah, I think it's entirely possible. Entirely possible. So it worked out. So you had an agreement the day after, and from there you went to close. How long were you closing today? It took us about three months to negotiate. And it was a hard negotiation. There was nothing. You know, they're publicly traded. New York Stock Exchange Company. They've got plenty of lawyers and accountants. And like everybody else, the first offer was, let me steal your company. And my answer was, no, you can't. And then they got serious about it and we negotiated until we finally made a deal that was acceptable to me. And that's happening right now, George. Yes. It's done. It's closed. It's closed. We closed on August 31. They took over the company on September 1. Chelsea Group's employees are now Amoresco employees. They bought all of the intellectual property. So I cannot promote or say anything about Chelsea Group in any business-like manner. We've had to change our company name and all of those kinds of things. So yeah, Chelsea Group is gone. The king is dead, long live Amoresco. We're going to meet Amoresco on Thursday, no? I thought Wednesday, but yeah. Wednesday, whatever. Later on this weekend, we'll take a look at the celebration you're doing in Pacific Guardia in town. Yeah. Yep. Well, thank you very much for coming down, George. Well, it's always my pleasure to see you. And I look forward to seeing you again in the future with different topics. Yes. One way or the other. One way or another. George Benda, Chelsea Group, former Chelsea Group, Renaissance business person. Now you know him better. Thank you so much. Thanks, Jay. Appreciate it.