Scaling a business from zero to $1bn in sales

The predecessor companies of Zengo Energy experienced in only four years a rate of change that most companies will never see, or would take decades to experience. This accelerated development and our commercial success in navigating a start-up international organization through phenomenal growth within an extremely challenging external environment (not simply growing a start-up in a hot new sector but coping with the global credit crisis and wrenching regulatory changes in the European solar sector) forced us to move swiftly and adapt continuously to our environment.

This unusual management experience (and hugely successful commercial exit) has now been documented as a case study by London Business School - see the 2011 textbook entitled: International Private Equity (Wiley Desktop Editions) Eli Talmor (Author), Florin Vasvari (Author). See authors on this video: Video from London Business School authors

The key challenges faced and overcome included:

• • · Reading shifting external market signals in a new market and adapting the company’s strategy rapidly as this market shifted

  • · Scaling the team from six to eighty people in only two years – creating a core management team with diverse but complementary skills, growing local teams in several different European countries, structuring tasks and allocating responsibility to ensure an adaptable fast-moving organisation

  • · Co-ordinating complex project development, financing and construction tasks across an international group

  • · Direct interaction with and promotion of our business interests with external influencers such as regulatory bureaucrats, local communities, politicians and financiers

  • · Creating a strong corporate culture and motivating an expanding team to achieve great results

  • · Integrating a distinctive start-up with its own identity into a mature global-scale Californian technology company

Zengo Energy has assimilated the knowhow gained within this period and is capable of applying it to other organisations. Please contact us if you wish to consult on this topic.