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It was 2005, four years after he co-founded EnerNOC Inc., and Tim Healy was doing some soul-searching about his future with the company.
The Boston-based energy management firm had been growing, and Healy, the company’s CEO, had had a role in hiring all of its employees.
Until No. 67.
“When that 67th person came on board, and I didn’t know that person, and I hadn’t interviewed that person, I said, ‘Wow, this is going to be different,’” Healy recalled.
Healy said he spent a full month reflecting on whether he was the right person to lead EnerNOC through the next stages of growth. Was he comfortable in this sort of environment? Could he put aside his entrepreneurial desires and instead focus on scaling up a company?
Ultimately, he realized he was the only man for the job at the company, which he founded in 2001 with a business school classmate, David Brewster, EnerNOC’s president.
“At the end of that four weeks, I said, ‘I’m in, and I’m in for the long haul,’” Healy recounted.
EnerNOC’s board of directors, however, had never doubted Healy, said board member T.J. Glauthier.
“There was never any question about whether Tim would stay on as the CEO,” said Glauthier, former deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy.
EnerNOC would go public in a $99 million IPO in 2007 and has gained the largest share of the nation’s demand-response market — becoming the poster child for the Massachusetts cleantech industry along the way. When a Massachusetts television ad promoting passage of an energy bill hit the air earlier this year, it featured Healy as the spokesperson.
Today, Healy is one of the few local tech company founders who has stayed on with his company after going public.
“Tim is a very strong spokesman both for the company and for the sector,” said Peter Rothstein, president of the New England Clean Energy Council. “He has clearly risen to the challenge of leading a growing public company.”
EnerNOC’s main business is its demand-response service, which pays companies to reduce their power during peak hours. The company in turn gets most of its revenue from grid operators, which include the operator of the New England grid, ISO New England. EnerNOC expects to receive $273 to $285 million in revenue in fiscal 2010.
As of June 30, the company reported having more than 4,800 megawatts of demand-response capacity under management — easily making it the market leader.
Healy, 41, said the idea of starting a business with environmentally friendly underpinnings had been on his mind long before EnerNOC. After graduating from Dartmouth College with a degree in government and economics in 1991, Healy said he put together a business plan to start a microbrewery in New Hampshire.
“We were going to have water from a special source and we were really going to promote the cleanliness of the water and some of the environmental attributes of the beer, and then 5 percent of the profits were going to go to some sort of environmental cause,” he said.
The business never got off the ground due to difficulty around building a micro-brewery in New Hampshire under state law, Healy said. Instead, Healy co-founded Student Advantage, a Boston-based affinity marketing company, in the early 1990s. But he left the company after just a few years.
“Boston beat me up a little bit,” he said. “I just remember feeling like I was an incredibly small fish in an incredibly huge pond — it was more like a huge ocean.”
Healy would go on to get experience through stints at Merrill Lynch, International Fuel Cells (now UTC Fuel Cells) in Connecticut, Wellesley-based VC firm Commonwealth Capital Ventures and Northern Power Systems Inc. in Vermont.
If you ask venture capitalist Scott Johnson, it was clear Healy had plenty of confidence his second time around in Boston. Johnson, managing partner at New Atlantic Ventures in Cambridge, recalled giving a proposal for a seed funding deal to Healy in December 2002 — a deal that was “going to be pretty dilutive.”
“He said, ‘No thank you,’ and went silent for two months,” Johnson said. “That’s Tim in a nutshell — he knows what he wants and goes after what he wants. ... He’s a ferocious negotiator.”
After ultimately reaching a funding deal with EnerNOC, Johnson joined the company’s board. On one occasion early on, Johnson recalls he was supposed to make an introduction to a potential customer for the company but missed the deadline.
“Tim called me up, and said, ‘This is unacceptable. If you said you’re going to do this, you need to do it,’” Johnson recalled. “That knocked me back on my heels. It’s that kind of bringing your ‘A game’ that’s enabled these guys to accomplish what they’ve accomplished.”
Healy lives in Concord with his wife, Jaimee, and four children, ages 2 to 10. Favorite pastimes are getting outdoors with the family along with coaching baseball or soccer teams for his children.
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