In 2015, the Hillsborough County School District was looking to cut costs.
It was the aftermath of the recession and in a public school district where costs continued to climb, Gretchen Saunders, Hillsborough school's chief finance officer, was tasked with cutting the school's then $37 million electric bill.
"At that point the superintendent said, 'We're in the hole, we have to cut the electric bill," she said. "The Minimise team reached out to the operations folks, saying, 'This is the program we've been using around the world.' We had gone through the recession, we didn’t have a lot of money for light bulbs or anything."
Minimise, the Tampa-based energy management startup, wasn't planning to simply install LED light bulbs and leave. The company attaches a box to circuit breaker boxes to track how much energy is being spent and at what times, so the customer can adjust accordingly. Instead of being paid a flat rate or charging a fee, Minimise takes a portion of the money saved that otherwise would have been spent on the energy bill.
"Of course I was happy because we didn’t have to come up with money that we knew we didn’t have; we were too concerned about air conditioning," Saunders said. "We started this process and thought, 'There is no way we can afford this,' and we thought it was too good to be true."
The company was founded in 2011 and now spans seven countries, with its headquarters in Tampa.
"With technology advances, we are able to cloud compute as quickly as real time — like every two seconds — and reintroduce real-time energy monitoring as the backbone of our solution," Daniel Badran, founder of Minimise, said. "We're able to go into a facility and isolate energy consuming assets, such as lighting, air conditioning, and understand the percentage of consumption in real-time of every one of these components."
Hillsborough Schools is one of several big clients for Minimise: The company is in talks with the city of Clearwater and recently won an RFP for Sarasota County schools. The company has a 25-year contract with Hillsborough Schools.
"People say they love life but you would be hard-pressed to find me not smiling," Badran, a two-time cancer survivor, said. "It was something about that, that was worth sharing with the world and what a better way to do that in school districts with kids? And to make classrooms a brighter, happier, colder and warmer place, and doing it on the impact with the public budget?"
One of Minimise's biggest initiatives — and a large reason it won the contract with Hillsborough Schools — is the engagement it's able to provide students willing to learn about energy.
"They started coming to our conferences and handed out light bulbs," Saunders said. "They know we don't have a lot of money and the money we do have goes back to the classroom. They've done so much with the kids — the kids even wrote letters saying they love light bulbs. It's totally not like coming in, changing a light bulb and leaving."
Now, Saunders expects similar engagement from the school's other vendors.
"If this company stepped up to do this, it really raised the bar for us to say to new vendors, 'We're spending lots of money, we're the largest employer in the city, you have to step it up, too,'" she said. "Maybe they can't reduce the price, but maybe they help with a scholarship or the Great American Teach-In. It gives you better perspective, like what else can we ask for? Worst thing they say is no."
Minimise is hoping to become 120 employees strong in the next 12 months, all local.
"Over the past 12 months we've been absolutely focused on homegrown talent," Badran said. "Ideally we want to see a high-end labor pool grown within our market. That's important to us because it's a bit of a high end that we need to grow."
