Onsite Utility Services Capital is a team of energy, technology and financial professionals focused on helping every organization achieve significant reductions in energy consumption and reduce their carbon footprints.
Founded in 1993, the company provides businesses and institutions nationwide with the ability to improve their current and future financial security through energy consumption reduction, while simultaneously creating a safe and healthy indoor environment for tenants, occupants and students alike – all without any upfront cost to their clients through a comprehensive platform called ‘Energy Savings as-a-Service.’
Using their own capital rather than their clients’, the company invests in the onsite, energy-efficient technologies needed to reduce and better-manage energy consumption – even onsite generation systems as needed – and simply delivers the output and performance of those technologies to their clients as-a-service.
By offering a service agreement rather a traditional loan or lease, companies can get the energy efficiency upgrades they need without the balance sheet liability; the monthly service fee charged by the company includes all maintenance and monitoring of the technologies while guaranteeing peak performance.
The removal of all the traditional burdens of facility infrastructure improvements makes facility upgrades easy through Onsite Utility Services Capital’s innovative program.
The Innovative Solution to a Growing Need
Fritz Kreiss, Onsite’s CEO and Founder, has been providing energy services and solutions for 30 years. A Certified Energy Procurement Specialist and member of the Association of Energy Engineers, Fritz developed Onsite’s business model to be a holistic energy solution delivering a complete energy plan for their clients.
When Onsite Utility Services Capital was first formed in the early 1990s, they were a research and development group focused on the design and building of modular cogeneration systems.
Despite strong market interest, the company faced mounting challenges to get customer adoption of their solutions as prospective clients – despite their desire for the solution – continued to claim, “It’s not in the budget this year,” or, “We aren’t taking on any new debt.”
Interestingly, those issues continue to be among the main reasons why 65% of all facilities in the country have done little or nothing to improve their energy consumption.
So, in 2015 Onsite Utility Services Capital set out to find a way to change the method by which businesses and institutions can access energy-efficiency solutions: By entirely removing the capital expenditure and traditional debt barriers from the transaction.
To accomplish this, the company chose the ‘model of convenience’, which does not require making an expensive investment to obtain a product or service and rather provides them through ‘a service’ – much like Uber has done for transportation (pay simply to get from point A to point B without actually owning the vehicle) and eBooks have done for publishing (pay to read a book without owning the book itself).
Today, this is precisely how the company’s Energy Savings as a Service model operates: The company invests in facility infrastructure upgrades so its clients can pay only for what they want and need – such as lumens for lighting, or BTUs for heat, or clean ventilated air – and get them all for less than what they are paying now just for their basic utility services alone.
And after a bit of a learning curve regarding as-a-service solutions by the marketplace, Onsite Utility Services Capital today has seen its efforts to innovate the energy efficiency solutions model starting to grow very rapidly.
Achieving Energy Efficiency by Removing Debt Challenges
Traditionally, infrastructure improvements are capitalized or leveraged with solid lines of credit, which is exactly how energy efficiency providers have marketed their solutions: The provider starts with an audit of the facility, then proposes a solution and makes the business case for the solution, and closes with a cash sale price or a lease quote.
“And if there was capital in the budget, the sale was made. If not, that project ended up on a growing pile of other project proposals sitting on the prospect’s desk,” says Kreiss. “Energy Savings as a Service, or ESaaS, immediately removes this negative dynamic of trying to overcome the client’s budget or capex barrier, because we’re not asking for any capital at all from the client. So things like ROI don’t have to be justified because there isn’t any investment by the client in the first place.”
By only charging monthly service fees that are actually less than the energy and operating savings the upgrades provide, the Onsite’s clients gain positive cash flow and enjoy all the functional benefits of new technologies virtually instantly – clients don’t have to wait through multiple capex cycles to scale their savings.
ESaaS has provided Onsite’s national network of channel partners a tool they have never experienced before, which has dramatically improved both their conversion ratios and bottom lines. It has also helped ‘democratize’ the benefits of energy efficiency, allowing for small and medium-sized organizations to immediately consider implementing energy-efficient improvements without impacting their existing expense budgets.
Today, ESaaS has changed, “It’s not in the budget,” to “It’s already in the budget.”
Building Relationships as an Effective Business Model
Onsite Utility Services Capital recognized early on that it would need to scale its offering quickly to accommodate market demand. “Investors want size and volume, and building a long and consistent pipeline requires relationships and an existing client base,” says Kreiss. The company succeeded in building a national network of energy efficiency contractors, utility trade allies and energy procurement brokers who could deliver ESaaS projects from their own specific business focus.
In turn, Onsite Utility Services Capital could offer them the expertise to seek out other efficiency measures with their clients and expand into all the available energy efficiency opportunities available to those clients using the ESaaS platform.
In addition, as companies require local fulfillment partners for projects they self-originate or co-develop, Onsite Utility Services Capital has built a best-in-class supplier and service provider network supported by a powerful online support portal offering a huge library of informational, educational and marketing-based materials.
This relationship has created a two-way street for both Onsite and it’s partners that is as incredibly efficient as it is mutually beneficial.
The company has also recently started to partner with innovative new energy and re-commissioning retrofit technologies designed around the Internet of Things (IoT) that come complete with artificial intelligence learning capabilities, opening up a whole new market space.
Adding Value to Technology Innovations
Fritz emphasizes that even the best innovations in technology or service are worthless until they can be brought to the market and implemented. Making this happen takes capital – investment capital to get it to market, and funding capital to get it implemented.
In the energy efficiency sector, ESaaS provides the funding capital that removes the barrier to implementation, thus helping to make all kinds of energy-efficient innovations available to the mass market that otherwise would be outside their reach.
Solving Business Complexities
When ESaaS was first introduced to the market, it was not readily accepted as a method to implement energy efficiencies. Companies typically always purchased and then owned equipment or facility improvements rather than acquire them ‘as a service’, so ESaaS sounded initially to be a little ‘too good to be true’.
However, that has quickly and dramatically changed. Today, client confidence and market acceptance have skyrocketed as companies and institutions alike have started to not just understand how ESaaS operates and can benefit them, but shifting their facility upgrade decisions to providers who can deliver on that model.
The Future of Energy has Arrived
Onsite Utility Services Capital sees ESaaS as a driver that could as much as triple the rate of growth in implementing energy efficiency measures across the spectrum of private and public organizations. The company has just started offering ESaaS in Mexico and the Caribbean, and Fritz opines that the need for companies to conserve capital and reduce expenses is more crucial today than it has ever been before.
The fact that these measures also contribute to a reduction in a building or facility’s carbon footprint will continue to be an important business and institutional goal, but the economic benefits are going to keep driving demand exponentially higher. Onsite Utility Services Capital believes that this just the beginning of where energy efficiency is headed.
For the long-term, the company envisions solution providers participating in a sort of ‘industry roll-up’, consolidating to provide for even larger economies of scale, with more companies, municipalities, and institutions finally seeing the profound benefits energy efficiency provides, both economically and environmentally.
And Onsite Utility Services Capital is ready to continue leading the way.
