Chapter 7 Case: Sustainable Business Entrepreneurship: Simply Green Biofuels

7.1 Biodiesel

Biodiesel

Source: Wikimedia, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bequer-B100-SOJA-SOYBEAM.jpg.

Biofuels have been around as long as cars have. At the start of the twentieth century, Henry Ford planned to fuel his Model Ts with ethanol, and the original diesel engine designed by Rudolph Diesel used peanut oil–based fuel. Discoveries of huge petroleum deposits kept gasoline and diesel at a low cost for the twentieth century, and biofuels were largely forgotten. However, with the rise in oil prices, along with growing concern about global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions from conventional fuels, biofuels have been regaining popularity recently. Gasoline and diesel are actually ancient biofuels. They are known as fossil fuels because they are made from decomposed plants and animals that have been buried underground for millions of years. Biofuels are similar except that they are produced from plants grown today.“Biofuels: The Original Car Fuel,” National Geographic, http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/biofuel-profile.

Biodiesel is a product that is derived from a renewable energy source, such as soybeans. The renewable energy source could also be other crops, such as corn, although corn is more typically made into ethanol for use by gasoline engines. It could also be recycled grease that comes from commercial fryers. Biodiesel produced from recycled oils and grease is considered a second-generation biofuel, whereas the soybean would be, if it was grown as a virgin product specifically for it, considered a first-generation biofuel. There also are third-generation biofuels based on algae.For more information on BioHeat and related products, see “Alcohol Can Be a Gas,” http://www.permaculture.com.

The greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction from using biofuels is not 100 percent when compared to fossil fuels. Carbon savings are partially offset by the energy that is needed for cultivation, harvesting, processing, and transportation of biofuels. This can represent a substantial fraction of the total energy released from processed biofuels and varies significantly between crops. In the worst-case scenario, the production process may actually take more energy than can be produced when the biofuels are used, which undermines the potential environmental benefits.“Biofuels—The Net Energy Debate,” SyntecBiofuel, http://www.syntecbiofuel.com/biofuels_net_energy_debate.php.

Second, there may be carbon emissions associated with changing the usage of land to biofuel crop cultivation. For instance, if areas that have not been previously cultivated, such as forest land, are converted to produce biofuels, then there may be significant immediate releases of carbon stored in the existing plant life and in the soil and also damage to biodiversity and the ecosystem. These land use–change effects may prevent biofuel plantations from generating an overall reduction in carbon emissions until many decades of crops have been produced.

7.2 The Challenges and Overcoming Them

After Andrew’s first meeting with Tim Keaveney, he realized quickly that he was facing several different challenges. The first—entering an established, matureAn industry that has been in existence for a long period of time featuring many competitors and relatively low profit margins. home heating oil industry—was going to be extremely difficult. Tim told Andrew, “Nobody starts a fuel business these days. I mean, the youngest fuel company in this area is 10 or 12 years old.” Fuel distribution to homes was a challenging industry to get into because traditionally they were multigenerational businesses with very loyal customers. There was no easy solution to this challenge. Andrew was simply willing to take a leap of faith and try to help transform the industry by offering a new product into the marketplace.

Not only was Andrew entering a mature industry, but he was entering an industry that he had no experience in. While his hydro-seeding business had provided him with experience in a service-based industry and experience running a business, he did not have experience in fuel procurement and delivery. Another challenge was capital. Any new business or business expansion faces this challenge—access to adequate capital. Simply Green was better positioned, in terms of financial position, than many other new businesses. Its new business expansion could be in part self-funded. Andrew Kellar, unlike many other entrepreneurs, was fortunate to have the hydro-seeding business, which, at the time, was one of the largest in the region and was generating positive net revenue of approximately $100,000 annually.

Simply Green started the biofuel home heating side of the business in April 2007. To most fuel providers, this would have seemed to be the worst time of year to start because it was toward the end of the heating season in the Northeast. But for Simply Green it made sense because the company had the ability to softly test the market through early adopter customers and learn from that experience. Andrew’s plan was to capture some revenue from the heating season market, go into the summer time, quickly reevaluate what was working and what needed improvement, and then move on into the next heating season.

This soft market entryAn approach for entering a new market by testing the market on a small scale, learning from the experience, and adjusting business approach prior to a wide-scale market entry. approach also helped with another challenge—educating their potential customers about their product and value propositionA business or marketing statement that summarizes why a consumer should buy a product or use a service.. Simply Green used different types of marketing and public relationsThe practice of managing communication between an organization and its public. to educate the public about their unique product offering. As Andrew describes it,

Sidebar

Early Adopters of Products

An early adopter is a person who embraces new technology before most other people do. Early adopters tend to buy new products sooner than most others. According to a theory called diffusion of innovations, formulated by Everett Rogers, early adopters make up 13.5 percent of the population. Early adopters, while eager to explore new products, are not the first to buy a new offering. That role, according to Rogers, is played by a small minority just under 3 percent of people called innovators. Laggards are at the other end of the spectrum. They are reluctant to embrace new technology because of disinterest, financial constraints, or fear.

Source: Wikimedia, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Diffusionofideas.PNG.

Another challenge was the licensing and the regulatory process of entering the highly regulated fuel industry. While Simply Green was providing biofuel, it was a blended product and it had conventional fuel in it so the company had to be regulated just like any other heating oil or diesel provider. Simply Green had to learn about and undertake many different types of licensing including at the state level, for hazardous material, and from the US Department of Transportation.

Simply Green already had experience with the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) licensing as they had just completed a vehicle audit. Andrew was already familiar with the licensing process, and the USDOT official who was involved with the audit made the audit more of an educational audit. During an audit, as Andrew was considering biofuel sales, the USDOT official was so intrigued by the potential Simply Green entry into biofuel provision that he became a customer and also then became an adviser to the company.

The lesson for Andrew was the importance of relations, contacts, and broader social networks for developing business opportunities. As Andrew describes it, “It was important not to be afraid to ask people that might know somebody or that might have an in with somebody that might have the information we were looking for.”

7.3 Getting the Business Off the Ground

When Simply Green’s biofuel business commenced in April 2007, Andrew started with family and friends as his first customers. Some of the other initial customers came from contacts from the hydro-seeding side of Simply Green’s business, including the USDOT official.

In the first six months, Simply Green expanded its customer base to fifty. Building from the first season’s customer base was mostly about education, getting potential customers familiar with Simply Green biofuel products; getting people to understand what biofuels were, its environmental benefits, and how it was easy to use; and convincing them that it was not going to negatively impact their vehicles or their homes. With outreach and education, people started to learn, develop interest, and trust and started to tell their friends. Some took the leap of faith and signed on to try BioHeat.

In its second year, Simply Green grew quickly. It started to grow fast, in part, because of the increased concern about the human influence on climate change after the 2006 release of the movie An Inconvenient Truth. As Andrew describes it, “When we were talking to potential customers about the environmental impact of different fuel options, people were seeing it on the big screen. It just helped pave the path a little bit easier for us to get down the education road. And we quickly started to see an increase in our customer base.”

Simply Green was entering an established market for fuel that had certain characteristics that the company had to understand and figure how to effectively compete in the context of these characteristics. While most of the competition was based on price, it was also subject to strong customer loyalty to dealers who had been delivering their fuel for a long time. A larger dealer might be making $0.60 a gallon over wholesale, versus $0.40 a gallon for a smaller establishment. Simply Green usually came in anywhere in the middle of these, as it was unknown whether customers would pay a premium for a more environmentally friendly product.

Simply Green pegged their price to range from $0.05 to $0.10 on either side of the conventional competition. And in addition to being able to address their customers’ environmental concerns, a benefit Simply Green’s product had over the conventional competition was that it burned cleaner in furnaces and car engines. It helped the system: either the engine in the vehicle or the heating system in the home or workplace. It allowed engines and furnaces to clean themselves, as the biofuel acted as a natural solvent. And this lowered the customer’s maintenance cost, extended the life of the furnace or engine, and increased the burning efficiency of the furnace or engine by about 5 percent. So any relatively small price premium for Simply Green biofuels could pay for itself.

In the first full year, Simply Green grew the customer base to about five hundred customers. In addition, Simply Green continued to engage in creative marketing and outreach. One of the best examples of this was Andrew making cold (unsolicited and without any prior connection) phone calls to music industry performers touring in the region whose fans and the performers themselves were expressing concerns about the environmental footprints of their performance tours. For Andrew this was fun and exciting. He was able to connect with Guster, Dave Matthews, Jack Johnson, and Farm Aid.

In May 2007, as Andrew describes it, “I saw that the band Guster was coming to this area. And I knew that they were pretty environmentally concerned with how they set up their concerts. So I put a call into this organization that was managing their concert venues, called Reverb. And the woman who runs it was the wife of one of the band members. Long story short, she and I grew up in the same town, and we didn’t realize, she was friends with my best friend’s older brother.” Again, Andrew was able to make a personal connection and turn social networking into a business benefit.

The Reverb representative (http://www.reverb.org/about) was very excited that Simply Green could deliver the biodiesel directly to Guster’s tour entourage. So Andrew brought the truck filled with biodiesel to their location and filled their tour buses and their tractor trailers. Guster’s handlers took a photo of the tour bus being filled from a Simply Green biofuels truck and the photo went viral in many publications and the Internet, the biggest publication being an issue of Rolling Stone.

After Guster, Simply Green fueled the tour buses for Dave Mathews, John Mayer, the Beastie Boys, Farm Aid, Kelly Clarkson, the Blue Man Group, Sheryl Crow, Willie Nelson, Jack Johnson, Phish, Coldplay, Maroon 5, and Styx.

This instantly gave Simply Green higher credibility and visibility. The perception of the fuel industry in general was the delivery driver that would come to your home, maybe your parents’ home, and maybe even your grandparents’ home. And that same company came to you every year. But Simply Green was trying to change the standard practice. They wanted it to become something different. They wanted to enable the public to be able to make a purchase motivated by environmental concerns and to have that be “hip and cool.” And once they got the Rolling Stone exposure, that credibility and market buzz carried through into their local press. A lot of local press started picking up on what Simply Green was trying to do.

As Andrew describes it,

It was not just the cover of Rolling Stone. Simply Green used community engagement and its commitment to serving the community to reach out to potential customers, to get noticed, and to establish its market presence. In April 2008, the company created a not-for-profit subsidiary, the Green Alliance, in the greater seacoast of New Hampshire area as a public relations and marketing division to educate the community on “being green.”

Simply Green also used its commitment to serve the community to build its customer base. In February 2008, the company serviced former Veilleux, Peron Fuel, and Price Rite customers after the companies stopped delivering fuel and went out of business in the middle of winter. For this, Andrew Kellar and the Simply Green team won the Environmental Hero award in Maine. Again in May 2008, Simply Green helped out households in need, offering special pricing for Rye Fuel customers that were unable to get deliveries of their prebuy fuel at the end of the heating season. And in July 2008, when fuel prices were peaking at $4 a gallon, Simply Green offered discount prices to large groups, such as neighborhoods, town co-ops, and employees of local businesses.

Growing the Business

In the fall of 2008, Simply Green expanded and diversified, adding a biodiesel division, opening up a gas station, and starting to do research into third-generation biofuels with scientists at the University of New Hampshire.

The gas station was a first of its kind. The station located at a busy intersection in Dover, New Hampshire, sold biofuel for automobiles and also included a congreenience store. The concept behind the congreenience store was to be a traditional convenience store with a green twist to it. The store had solar panels on the roof, used bamboo flooring, and sold local food. About 75 percent of all the products in the store came from within a one hundred mile radius, to support the local economy and local vendors. The station had two different types of biodiesel available at the pump, gasoline, which had a 10 percent blend of bio (ethanol), and a fully biofuel product.

With the station, Simply Green had the ability to further promote the sustainability mission and commitment of the company. The station became a highly visible showplace for Simply Green to educate more customers. There were more than one hundred people at the station every day and about 50 percent were new to the store, looking to fuel up their vehicles or get a cup of coffee, and thousands of others drove by every day. So that was an opportunity, every day, to educate.

Source: Simply Green.

With the congreenience store, community outreach, and other efforts, Simply Green’s customer base continued to grow at a steady pace. By April 2009, Simply Green had one thousand customers. And by September 2009, as Andrew describes it, “We were creeping towards profitability.”

7.4 The Keys to Success

Critical to the company’s success was its filling of a market niche, focus on core products, and effective messaging and education. Customers could simply, with no or minimal extra cost and very little risk, reduce their carbon footprint and feel good about it by buying Simply Green biofuel.

An important factor in Simply Green’s success was the highly creative and energetic market outreach led personally by the founding entrepreneur himself. The educational outreach took the approach that all events and opportunities to get the word out about Simply Green and biofuels were worthwhile.

Underpinning it all was the consistent and persistent branding. The branding was about being a sustainable business with a triple bottom line that included concern for the planet and people and was focused on helping customers act on their own concerns about the environment. This was sincere and it came off as such, and customers responded positively. As Andrew describes it, “We were really concerned about how we came across to our customers. We wanted to be as authentic and as transparent about our own practices, so that way our customers felt as though they were buying something from somebody, from a company that truly cared about the environment. We practiced what we were preaching. We were out there at events. We were supporting other businesses that were doing the right thing.”

7.5 Why No Profits?

By September 2011, the company had 1,500 heating oil customers and was delivering about a million gallons a year of biodiesel. Customers were concentrated in the seacoast of New Hampshire into southern Maine and down into northeastern Massachusetts. Simply Green’s market sharePercentage of a defined market (in terms of total revenue or total number of customers) captured by a service or product provider. within the heating oil industry was 10 percent to 12 percent and had grown fast, especially given the traditional customer to dealer relationship and that their product was a new one. Total revenue at the end of 2011 was more than $4 million. Of the total revenue, 60 percent to 70 percent was BioHeat and 20 percent to 30 percent biodiesel and the balance was the congreenience store (see details as follows).

By many measures, Simply Green could be characterized as successful. Then why, after four years, was it still operating in the red—that is, losing money? One factor was volatile oil prices and changing overall economic conditions. For example, in its second year (winter of 2008) the start-up company was negatively impacted by the unanticipated $4 a gallon oil. As is standard industry practice, Simply Green prebought ahead of the peak heating season from their wholesale fuel suppliers for a select percentage of their customers that wanted to prebuy their fuel.

Simply Green was contractually obligated to pick up those gallons at the fixed price. Historically, there would be some fluctuation in those prices versus what the retail spot pricing would be. But never was there such an exaggerated difference where a customer who had prebought would then call another company to get fuel from them because the market price was so much lower than the prebuy price they had locked in.

Many Simply Green customers locked the price at $4.50 a gallon, and then that winter, heating oil plummeted to $2. Simply Green could not force customers to take the fuel and they had not required their customers to commit to buying a minimum amount of fuel. Some Simply Green customers may have went to another oil dealer to get fuel at its market price, some may have just turned their heat way down and put on a sweater to reduce their oil consumption, and some people may have burned more wood. The loss between what Simply Green had paid for the peak price oil and what it could eventually sell ended up being more than $300,000.

This forced Andrew Kellar to take on two silent business partnersA partner that contributes capital to a business but that is not involved in day-to-day operations.. The partners took a 30 percent equity position in the company and contributed $150,000 to the business. Taking on the partners provided Simply Green with the financial resources that Andrew did not have and did not have access to. The business partners, however, did not have as much of an interest as Andrew in community engagement and the partners shifted the focus more toward the single bottom line of profitability.

The partners had a commitment to the environment and were conscientious of how they operated in the community; however, these were not as much in the forefront of their efforts according to Andrew Kellar. As Andrew describes it, “I get that in businesses sometimes you’re forced to get to a place where you really have to focus more on the main bottom line, until you can get to a place where you can have the luxury of expanding that.”

Source: Simply Green.

7.6 Limits of Always Focusing on Doing the Right Thing

Andrew Kellar’s priority to always do the right thing for the environment and people had implications. As Andrew describes it, “I think my biggest mistake was I stayed so focused on the environmental and social mission of Simply Green, that I failed to stay focused equally on the fundamentals of the business. And the fundamental are the numbers, the profits and the losses and the working capital to operate the business. I didn’t do my homework. I didn’t have the resources that I needed to effectively sustain the business.”

In particular Andrew neglected his need for capital and adequate cash resources (cash flow). He did not adequately anticipate the implications of different potential scenarios beyond his control, such as what if oil went to $4 and then down to $2 or by growing to one thousand customers, how was he going to manage $300,000 in accounts receivable over thirty days? He did not think through these potential scenarios, and he did not have the adequate financial resources on hand when these happened. What he needed to have done was in the early stages have a detailed business plan with “what ifs” for different scenarios and identify risks in his operations.

For Simply Green and any other company in the energy business, price volatility is one of the biggest risks. This is a particularly significant challenge for start-up and small companies with limited financial resources and little operating reserves.

This challenge also has a potential upside for Simply Green and the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries. For example, as fuel prices were rising rapidly again in the early spring of 2011, this again raised awareness about alternative energy, which can be a positive factor for the biofuel industry. But the volatility—the up and down of oil prices—as was experienced in 2008 and again in 2011, makes it a challenging operating environment for new energy companies trying to change the industry and customer preferences.

The final challenge was personal for the entrepreneur. Life became “too crazy,” as Andrew put it, and it became increasingly difficult to satisfy both his personal and professional lives. They were no longer aligned for Andrew.

The craziness of being an entrepreneur for Andrew included being responsible for 1,500 customers who could call at any time and responsible for drivers on the road twenty hours out of the day delivering customers their fuel. He had taken only one vacation during the four years of his business start-up. And even on the very occasional days off, there was always something that had to be taken care of. As Andrew describes it, “Being the owner, you can have amazing people around you, and most time, they can take care of most of it, but there’s always something that comes through that you need to take care of. And that was the craziness, that being pulled in a lot of different directions. At times, when as a young father, you might normally like to be home, going to a baseball game with your son, going to different events with your kids, that wasn’t an option.”

7.7 Conclusion

The Entrepreneur’s Life Takes a Different Turn

Andrew Kellar Surfing

Source: Simply Green.

In mid-2010, Andrew Kellar began to realize that, as an entrepreneur, his key strengths were in the creative development end, and he left Simply Green to pursue other opportunities.

As Andrew describes it,

There are some people that are meant to be operators of business long term, and there are people that are meant to be in startups, in the craziness of everything that has to do with starting up a business…I realized that that was where my strength was.

While there wasn’t a lot of challenge left for me, there was still plenty of challenges for Simply Green in the long term, managing a business with 1,500 customers, and trucks on the road 20 hours out of the day. That skill set was not where I saw my strengths. So it was time for me to make a change. It was time for me to look to my business partners to take over the business.

I felt that Simply Green had helped me to define a new industry in this small community and helped me to do something really special and something unique. While I thought Simply Green was bringing me closer to being that person I wanted to be, and that businessman I wanted to be, it wasn’t allowing me to have a balance between being an entrepreneur and other things. I wanted to move on to a different working environment, where I could leverage all the experience that I had gained over those four years.

Between the highs and the lows, and all of the excitement and challenges that we had, I felt that was something that needed to be shared with other entrepreneurs. And I really, really enjoyed being in this kind of green, or now called clean-tech sector, that I wanted to reach out to other younger entrepreneurs that were in that same market, and try to give back to them.

After leaving Simply Green, Andrew became an entrepreneur in residence at the University of New Hampshire’s Green Launching Pad (GLP) program (http://greenlaunchingpad.org). The GLP is a business accelerator program focused on assisting new and growing business in renewable energy and energy efficiency. In that role, Andrew is assisting sustainability-focused businesses in their start-up and early growth phases. He also became an advisor and engaged in development efforts for Revolution Energy (http://www.rev-en.com/company/about-us). Revolution Energy was a company that the GLP helped launch in 2010. The company assists in the financing of renewable energy projects with a focus on municipalities, schools, and colleges. Based on this work and his experience with Simply Green, Andrew was selected as a Mel King Community Fellow at MIT in 2012 (http://web.mit.edu/colab/people-mel-king-community-fellows.html). All of these allow Andrew to help others learn from his experience with Simply Green and enable him to continue to act on his commitment to sustainability.

Postscript: What Would Andrew Kellar Want Students to Know?

For Andrew, the next generation has the opportunity to focus on learning from his successes and mistakes and those of others in the first generation of sustainability entrepreneurs. What he suggests to students interested in being sustainable business entrepreneurs is to

• take advantage of the resources available to learn all you can about sustainability science, engineering, and business;
• try to get an internship with a local sustainable business;
• on your own or with a friend, try out a small sustainability project idea at your school and in communities.

As Andrew describes it, “There are a lot of great opportunities for young students, at the undergrad level up to the MBA level, to get involved in different way in sustainable businesses…(a)nd they’re not just stuffing envelopes. They’re actually getting involved with these businesses. We used to bring in interns, and we had our interns do a lot of in-depth work. It wasn’t mindless work, it was actually in-depth market analysis.”

Key Takeaways

• Success in sustainable business entrepreneurship requires commitment to sustainability and problem solving, creativity, innovation, and “day-to-day” business management skills.
• The entrepreneur, Andrew Kellar, started the company out of concern for the environment and for future generations.
• The entrepreneur entered a mature industry with no experience but with a new product.
• The entrepreneur used personal contacts, relations, and social networks to gather useful information and resources.
• The start-up successfully employed creative marketing and low cost public relations to grow the company, appealing to the public’s concern for the environment.
• The company was environmentally and socially focused but had to also focus on core business fundamentals, such as effective management of liquid, or cash, resources and strong customer service to be successful.
• Simply Green focused on the people and planet side of the triple bottom line and had to learn over time how to more effectively manage to achieve the profit side of the triple bottom line.
• The sustainable business founder lacked business training and skills that could have helped him to maintain ownership of the business. Commitment to and passion for sustainability are important and so are financial and other management skills.

Exercises

1. What factors contributed to Andrew Kellar starting the biodiesel business? Were you surprised at the reasons that he gave for starting this business? Do you think his decision to start the business was wise? Why or why not?
2. Discuss how Andrew Kellar is a social entrepreneur. What do you think were his strengths in running the company? What do you see as his main weaknesses? Discuss how an action that Andrew undertook was good for both sustainability and the business. Discuss how an action that Andrew undertook may have been good for sustainability but not good for the business.
3. Do you think that Andrew Kellar is well suited to be a successful entrepreneur? Why or why not?
4. What similarities do you think a sustainable business start-up shares with a “normal business” start-up? What differences do you think there are? Give an example of a business challenge that both Simply Green and a conventional fuel dealer share. Give an example of a business challenge that was unique to Simply Green and would not have affected a conventional fuel dealer from the chapter.
5. Discuss the charitable actions that Simply Green took in regards to customer accounts from failed fuel businesses in a triple bottom line context. Was this a smart business move? Why or why not?
6. Explain how Andrew Kellar used low-cost public relations to educate potential customers and promote Simply Green.
7. Describe how you might use personal contacts to start a business venture. What would that involve? How would you start? What type of people would be most useful to draw on for information and resources when starting a sustainable business?
8. Assess your skills and ability to manage a business start-up effectively. Do you have course work, training, or experience in financial and operations management? How are you at leading and motivating others, communicating and getting a message out, and organizing efforts and people at a workplace? Are you task oriented? Are you good with details?

7.8 Appendix: Simply Green Timeline

• April 12, 2007. First delivery of BioHeat and biodiesel by Simply Green.
• May 2007. First delivery to Guster and Reverb, spurring a flood of fueling services for musicians, which included Dave Mathews, John Mayer, the Beastie Boys, Farm Aid, Kelly Clarkson, the Blue Man Group, Sheryl Crow, Willie Nelson, Jack Johnson, Phish, Coldplay, Maroon 5, and Styx.
• June and July 2007. Simply Green finds its way into Rolling Stone and Billboard.
• December 2007. Simply Green is featured in Sundance Film Channel’s “Big Ideas for a Small Planet” with Guster and Reverb.
• January 2008. Simply Green hires its first employee.
• February 2008. Simply Green bails out former Veilleux, Peron Fuel, and Price Rite customers when the companies leave customers out in the cold after they allegedly stopped delivering fuel and went out of business.
• March 2008. Simply Green moves out of Andrew’s house into an actual office in Portsmouth and hires its second employee.
• April 2008. Simply Green creates the Green Alliance as a public relations and marketing division to educate the community on “being green” and hires Sarah Brown as the project director.
• May 2008. Simply Green is back to its old ways and starts to offer special pricing for Rye Fuel customers that were unable to get deliveries of their prebuy fuel at the end of the heating season.
• June 2008. Andrew Kellar and the Simply Green Team win the Environmental Hero award in Maine along with Governor Baldacci for their rescue mission for the residents of Maine left out in the cold by the Veilleux, Peron Fuel, and Price Rite scandal.
• June 2008. Andrew Kellar is invited to give the commencement speech at Berwick Academy.
• July 2008. Simply Green starts to offer discount prices to large groups, such as neighborhoods, town co-ops, and employees of local businesses, during a time when oil was on its way to $4 a gallon.
• October 2008. Simply Green opens the first biofuels and congreenience store in New England, offering gas and biodiesel at the pump and local products in the store.
• November 2008. Simply Green receives the Innovation Rock award by the New Hampshire Department of Resources and Economic Development and is given the first of many commendations by Governor Lynch.
• November 2008. Simply Green begins its research and development into third-generation biofuels in conjunction with the University of New Hampshire and starts to apply for grants to study algae as a feedstock to make biofuels.
• December 2008. Simply Green is named one of the top fifty hottest companies in the bioenergy sector worldwide.
• January 2009. Andrew Kellar is named one of the “25 Leaders for the Next 25 Years” by BusinessNH Magazine.
• April 2009. Simply Green marks a huge milestone by delivering BioHeat to more than one thousand customers around the seacoast of New Hampshire and Maine, signs on Coca-Cola and Public Service of New Hampshire for onsite fueling services, and hires its fifteenth employee.
• December 2009. Simply Green is named one of the top fifty hottest companies in the bioenergy sector worldwide for the second year in a row.
• January 2010. Simply Green is back at it again. Flynn’s Oil goes out of business on Christmas night and leaves customers without fuel, so another bailout plan is in place to help thousands of customers heat their homes at Christmas.
• April 2010. Simply Green announces the purchase of their new office, Regeneration Park in Portsmouth. Once construction is completed, Regeneration Park will be the “greenest” building on the seacoast.
• June 2010. Simply Green’s customers complete the 2,000,000 lb. “Carbon Challenge,” which results in planting the equivalent of 153,000 trees.
• August 2010. Simply Green is honored to have Congresswoman Shea-Porter and US Secretary of Labor Solis visit Regeneration Park and hold a press conference praising Simply Green for their efforts in the green movement.
• September 2010. Simply Green marks another milestone by delivering BioHeat to more than 1,500 customers around the seacoast of New Hampshire and Maine.
• November 2010. Andrew Kellar leaves Simply Green.
• February 2011. Andrew Kellar starts work with Revolution Energy, helping with blended (private, public, and tax incentivized) financing of large scale solar projects.
• May 2011. Andrew becomes entrepreneur in residence with the University of New Hampshire’s Green Launching Pad program.
• January 2012. Andrew Kellar begins yearlong activities as Mel King Community Fellow at MIT.