For three Durangoans, an interest in teaching others about solar power turned into a multimillion dollar business.
Their company, CalCom Solar, designs and installs solar panel arrays for the agriculture industry in California. It made $100,000 in revenue in 2012.
They will tell you timing, luck and the right employees made it possible to earn $30 million in 2015, making it the third fastest growing private company in the country, according to Inc. Magazine.
“We didn’t expect the success to be as big as it is,” founder Britt Bassett said.
Finding the right niche contributed greatly to the explosive growth. The company is offering growers a way to offset the rising electrical cost of pumping water to their crops during an extended drought, and an investment in their future, Bassett said.
“They will have a long-term payback and the payback looks really good,” he said.
For Bassett, a nuclear engineer, the journey started in 2009 when a new coal-fired power plant was proposed in New Mexico. He actively opposed the project then started researching solar power and the reasons it isn’t more widespread.
Through his advocacy work, he met Anne Markward and her husband, Doug Walker, who had built an off-the-grid solar house in 2001.
The house worked so well they wanted to teach others about solar, and they moved to New Zealand for a few years to do that.
They had met the would-be fourth founder of the business, Californian Glenn Bland, when they put the house up for sale in 2006 and he bought it. He liked solar so much he expanded his heating and air-conditioning business to include residential solar panels.
When Bland was asked to start teaching others how to do it, Markward and Walker moved back to the U.S. and the four founders started a school called Solar Seminars.
That’s when Bland’s friend asked them for help on a small agricultural solar project that powers two pumps. They designed, permitted and built it mostly themselves.
“It was so much fun to design that system,” Markward said.
That’s when they realized how valuable solar energy would be for agriculture users, and they focused on that market.
For some producers, electrical bills for water pumps will range from $50,000 to $200,000 monthly. Solar power can offset 95 percent of electric usage costs, Markward said.
“It just makes sense on paper. ... You don’t have to be green, you don’t have to think you are saving the world,” she said.
But it was a commitment to conservation and sustainability that kept the founders going before they could even afford to pay themselves.
“We all believe so strongly in climate change ... we have to work as hard as we can to mitigate it,” Markward said.
As testament to their commitment, they self-financed the company, which made hiring difficult.
“To get people of high caliber, we had to pay quite a bit and that was tough,” Walker said.
But the solar industry is going through consolidation, and as other solar companies have shut down their agriculture departments, it allowed CalCom Solar to hire people with expertise, including their current CEO.
“The best thing we did for our company was to step back from management,” Walker said.
To help recruit, they decided to make CalCom Solar an employee-owned company, so they get a say in decisions.
Now, the company employs 52 people full time, 11 of them are based in Durango. Counting the installation crews, which are contracted workers, they employ more than 100 people, Walker said.
“Because our home has always been here in Durango ... it’s always been really important to create work here,” Markward said.
After their exponential growth, they expect their revenue to double in 2016 to $60 million and for the company to see sustainable growth after that.
