Nine years after moving from Panama to the United States, Lake Elmo-based Eco BCG Corp. recently topped the list of Minnesota companies on the Inc. 5000, planting its flag at the No. 1 spot for engineering firms nationally and hitting No. 121 for all companies on the 2023 list.
Inc. 5000, which ranks the country's fastest-growing private companies every year, noted that Eco BCG saw 4,030% growth over three years with an annual revenue of $4.2 million.
How did this generational family company, once a consulting firm based in Panama, make such waves? It took a tide of internal changes.
In 2009, CEO and President Sergio Castillo inherited the company that his father started nearly a decade prior. The firm had a macroeconomic approach to consulting on sustainability. After Castillo took over, he restructured the business and now helps massive corporations meet their sustainability goals.
He left a 3M spinoff to take the helm and attended Duke University to get a master’s degree in environmental management early in his tenure.
The firm helps its customers, all of which are Fortune 500 companies or larger, design their sustainability strategy and deploy it in manufacturing. “I would say our main competitive advantage is that we incorporate best practices in sustainability with manufacturing processes,” Castillo told the Business Journal.
In one example published by Inc. 5000, Castillo said Eco BCG helped a major food company improve its efficiency when the company’s large tunnel ovens were not meeting product specifications.
Castillo’s firm looked at the ovens through a sustainability lens and created a heat-recovery system — the ovens were venting hot air and taking fresh air in to heat flue gases. Eco BCG installed a heat exchanger to help preheat the air, increasing moisture extraction capacity. This reduced natural gas usage by more than 50%, and the company was able to shut down more than half the burners while improving output.
Castillo credits a strong team for his firm’s success. The global company has about 68 people that represent seven nationalities. Most of the firm’s services are done in-house, from automation and control to design. Castillo said that gives his team the tools “to accommodate or customize based on the customer's needs.”
Other services include energy- and water-efficiency assessments, basic or extensive audits, carbon-neutrality audits and energy- and water-use tax credit studies.
Castillo is working on stabilizing the company and making processes more efficient as it works toward continued growth.
“I'm very humbled. … When you look at companies that have been on that list, you find companies like Microsoft, like Facebook, like Patagonia, companies that started in those lists when they were smaller and look at them today,” Castillo said. “So it's really an honor, and also an incentive, for us to continue doing what we're doing to strive to get better.”
