After seventeen years and 815 editions of the Energy Rant, I am suspending my campaign, as politicians like to say.
The truth is, running a growing company doesn’t leave much room on the calendar anymore — the Rant kept getting pushed to Sundays and squeezed around Monday meetings. But make no mistake: writing this each week and knowing so many of you were on the other end reading it has been one of the true joys of my career.
Since the Rant launched in 2009, Michaels has grown over 10X. I inched my way to the top of the company:
- 2010 – I moved from Energy Division Manager to Managing Principal (shareholder)
- 2012 – Vice President
- 2016 – CEO and majority shareholder
Starting in 2009, most of our work was in Iowa and MinnesOHta, with some dabbling in Arizona, Nevada, and Ontario (the province). Now we are locked in and growing with multiple clients in Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Virginia, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, and dabbling in a few dozen other states.
I look forward to leading the next chapters of Michaels Energy and capitalizing on what I’ve waited for my entire career: the end of the line for lighting efficiency improvements. Now, it’s getting fun because it’s hard. I thrive on hard. If I don’t have a pile of challenges and opportunities to work on, I get anxious because something isn’t right. I love the challenge of the unknown and an undefined path – even a little chaos once in a while, because if you look around, chaos is opportunity in disguise.
I am hell-bent on building a world-class organization[1] because that’s what clients want. They’re not buying effort, activity, or reports. They demand results. Game on!
To everyone who’s read, replied, argued with me, or just quietly opened this thing every week for seventeen years — thank you. It’s meant more than you know.
Time will tell, but my guess is I will get the urge to drop an occasional Rant in the future, and it will be on my terms, not the calendar’s.
As the saying goes, “See you on down the road!”
[1] Commercial and industrial.
