In this episode of B2B Marketing Methods, Terri Hoffman embarks on a fascinating journey with Keith Pivonski, a visionary in ecological engineering and green energy. Terri and Keith dive into Keith’s early career experiences and the inspiration behind his work, elaborating on overcoming financial and technical challenges, and highlighting the diverse applications of their groundbreaking solutions.
You’ll learn about Keith’s humble beginnings, how he learned from his parents’ careers, and how this knowledge transformed into a pivotal role at Underwood and Associates, focusing on stormwater management and environmental restoration. Keith also discusses the story of his innovation-driven venture, Energy Finders, which combines the principles of sustainable energy with ecological techniques.
This episode is a testament to the intersection of science, engineering, and community impact, offering deep insights into navigating startup challenges and advancing towards a green future.
To learn more about Keith, connect with him on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-pivonski-b8190699/
To connect with Marketing Refresh, visit: MarketingRefresh.com
Full Episode Transcript
Revolutionizing Ecological and Energy Solutions
[00:00:00] Terri Hoffman: Welcome to B2B Marketing Methods. I’m your host, Terri Hoffman, and I’m the CEO of Marketing Refresh. Let’s face it, embracing digital marketing is daunting. This podcast was created to make it more approachable. Join me as we talk to CEOs, sales leaders, and revenue growth experts who will share lessons learned and tips from their own journeys.
Hello and welcome to B2B Marketing Methods. I’m really excited today to have a guest. His name is Keith Pivonski. Keith has a really interesting story.
During his interview, we’re going to cover everything from navigating his career journey to being a partner in a firm that he is currently actively working in, how that led to starting a different company that has very strong ties to the first, how they have used digital marketing to build both of these businesses.
And I just think he has a very interesting story, a lot of relatable items to anyone who’s kind of at that strategic level, forming the direction of the company, establishing a vision. Keith is just a great guy.
In fact, Keith and I spent a full day together in his car, driving up and down the Maryland coastline, looking at some of his company projects together, and we still liked each other at the end of it and I’m really glad to have him on the show today.
So welcome Keith. Thank you for being here.
[00:01:22] Keith Pivonski: I couldn’t be happier to be here today. I’m excited to tell this story from inception. And for me, it goes all the way back to about the third grade. So it’s a pretty unique adaptation of where my career began underneath my mom’s wing, I’ll say.
[00:01:36] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, well, and that is exactly where I’d love to start.
I think the way that people kind of leverage their background and their interests to get to the point where they are is always really interesting and interesting to our audience. I’d love to have you talk about that.
Keith Pivonski’s Early Inspirations & Career Beginnings
[00:01:49] Terri Hoffman: What brought you to Underwood and Associates, which is, your , design, landscape design and engineering firm and then also Energy Finder.
So talk about how you got started, maybe going back into college and possibly even before college.
[00:02:05] Keith Pivonski: So , it’s funny. My dad is a builder. He built homes for 30 years as a custom home builder, and my mom was a public school teacher and a reading specialist.
And so with all the late nights dad would always work, I would walk over to my mom’s school when I was done at the other school and I would wait for her to be finished. And I happened to always wait outside and it just so happened that during those two years, the school was being retrofitted, and one of the first stormwater infrastructure ponds was being installed in Baltimore County at that time as part of the redevelopment.
And so that day, when my mom and I were driving home, I said, “Mom, why are they digging a big hole in the ground next to the parking lot? What’s the purpose?” And she said, “Well, we’re expanding the school, and since we took some of the homes of the frogs and the ducks and the animals, we’re gonna have to put back a small area that allows them to use their space that they had before we expanded the school.”
All I heard on that way home was somebody’s job is to build habitat for ducks and frogs, and that was just eye opening to me at seven, eight years old, that somebody had the ability to do that for a career. And I think I hung on to that for a long time in the back of my mind.
My dad would always take me hiking, and so the outdoors were naturally a place I gravitated towards. But it wasn’t until my teenage years and then transitioning into college that I said, “How do I apply this to the next 30 years? And how do I really find my niche within?” Whether it’s outdoors, infrastructure, stormwater management, I knew I wanted to be connected to the outdoors in some way.
And so I ended up studying ecosystem services and natural resource management at the university of Maryland. And I took the very first job that I was able to obtain outside of school, which was at Underwood and associates.
And so it’s been almost 12 years now. And I started as an intern, learning how to use the field survey equipment. We would lay out the stream restoration work from kind of inception from the design plan.
And so it was a great place for me to start looking at a set of plans, looking at a environmental condition that needed help, and bridging the gap between what I had just learned in school, and then how we were going to tackle that problem with this new technique, which we weren’t taught about. And so it was a little bit controversial and exciting at the same time, because this industry was really booming from about 2010 on and that’s right when I got my foot in the door.
And so I’ve watched it progress, even in these last 10 years, such that the projects are 3 and 4 times larger than they were when I first started. And that’s great for us, and it’s great for our partners and it’s great for the environment that we’re getting larger work done all within a shorter period of time in general.
[00:04:41] Terri Hoffman: I want to stop you there and ask you a question. I learned this during the day that I spent with you and I found it really interesting and fascinating, especially as a marketer and not as, you know, an engineer or somebody who has studied the field like you have .
Understanding Underwood and Associates’ Mission
[00:04:55] Terri Hoffman: What is like the big problem that Underwood and Associates solves?
[00:05:00] Keith Pivonski: Before humans were here, we had a lot of natural systems, forests, wetlands, swamps, bogs, streams, et cetera.
As humans developed that area where we want to spend our time, by the water or near resources, you know, food, water, shelter, et cetera. We’ve learned through the scientific research that we developed a lot of our macro and micro filters that happened to line the water’s edge. And in doing so, we put in a lot of homes and roads and pipes and infrastructure that now manipulates that water in a way that makes it more conducive for us to spend time in Baltimore, you know, with our families walking around all day.
And so while there’s positives associated with that, we’ve learned the negative implications of not allowing stormwater and the natural environment to do its functions as it did before people had developed a large part of the landscape.
So what Underwood does is we use nature based techniques to mimic the pre human condition in those areas as best we can. And so what I mean by that is if a giant highway was put in, like I 97 in Maryland, that 100 foot wide piece of road collects impervious storm water, and it has to dump it somewhere because it used to just soak into the ground there.
And so Underwood is creating a path for that water to flow in a non erosive fashion, while also having the capacity to infiltrate back into the ground to convert to groundwater as it would have 100 years ago or more.
[00:06:24] Terri Hoffman: Hopefully anybody who just heard that would be as fascinated as I am because it is such a blend of art and science that I really didn’t fully appreciate until I was there and got to spend the time with Keith and just see the end result of everything from like the beginning of a project to the end of a project.
It’s just things we don’t think about as users of these beautiful places. And the ability that you guys have to make your solutions look so natural, like it was always there, I think is incredibly challenging.
It’s that blending of the art and science so that it doesn’t maybe look like a lot of work was done, but there was a lot of work and time and thought, and design, and research on the local resources and natural, flow of, of the water back into the environment.
Right.
[00:07:13] Keith Pivonski: Exactly.
[00:07:15] Terri Hoffman: Yeah.
[00:07:15] Keith Pivonski: It’s so interesting that like out of sight out of mind is so true, especially with things in the environment. Because if we can’t see the subsurface condition and what water is doing below ground, why would we care? And that’s how people looked at it until we realized the water level at the Hoover Dam is lower every year, and that’s our generation’s problem to solve at this point.
So for me, I had a natural affinity towards all things environmental. And because my dad was a builder, this kind of leads into how Energy Finders came to life.
The Birth of Energy Finders
[00:07:43] Terri Hoffman: You’ve now spent what, 10 years at Underwood and Associates and have worked on a whole variety of stream restoration and shoreline restoration projects. How did you get the idea for Energy Finders?
Where did that idea come together? How did that happen?
[00:08:00] Keith Pivonski: So it’s interesting. There’s a few different energy companies that were starting to explore the notion of like floating solar or putting other energy technologies in a more stacked orientation, I would say.
And as we were looking at that on Underwood side and trying to respond to a few different research papers and PhDs that had reached out to us about some stormwater runoff issues on these large solar farms, I happened to connect with the CEO through the same legal team, and realized he was working on something proprietary that might not only solve their solar energy issue, but allow us to complement it with something that Underwood was doing, so we’re really getting to best use cases instead of just one.
It was an introduction through our legal team and our patent attorney after they helped Underwood obtain our patent, they were helping the CEO of Energy Finders obtain their patent for a new solar technology at the same time. And I happened to work in industrial electric for 18 months while I was taking my community college classes and so energy was always in the back of my mind, and I knew that as part of the green revolution per se, there would need to be a lot of advancements made on the energy side.
And it wasn’t until I realized I could put both passions into one box between Underwood and Energy Finders that I realized this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.
[00:09:16] Terri Hoffman: Okay. Well, first of all, that patent attorney deserves like the best Christmas present ever because he also connected you and me together.
He’s a very creative thinker.
So give us a little bit more information about that specific solution that Energy Finders has put together and how the businesses connect together?
[00:09:33] Keith Pivonski: That’s a great question . Whenever you have a great idea, the first thing anyone that’s actually brought something to market like that will tell you is: “Get it down to a sixth grade level,” because anytime you’re going to be talking to large groups of people, each one of their understanding of what you’re talking about is different.
And so the more simple you can get that narrative, the easier it is to market it, and the easier it is to help them understand why it may be disruptive or apply to their geography more so than another one.
So what eBox and what this solar technology is, is if you think about the sun and you think about a solar panel sitting on the top of a home, for every 100 photons that the sun releases that come screaming down to the earth surface, and they hit that solar panel, only 20 or 30 out of those 100 are able to convert to usable energy. And that is because light is refracted or bounced off that glass or off the silicone wafer system at the point of the contact interaction.
And so our CEO had an idea to create a space where we could funnel light inside where the solar panels are housed and the interior walls were to be very reflective and to allow that light to exist in somewhat of a state of perpetuity until that energy has a second chance to convert, and so while that sounds very complicated, I said, “Let me dumb that down. I’m going to call it club photon, and we’re going to say all the single photons that haven’t met their partner yet now have a new space where they can go and meet another photon or solar cell and convert to usable energy.”
Now people are starting to finally get it now that we’ve simplified the idea down to: light enters the box, light cannot leave the box, any light that is in the box will eventually convert to usable energy as long as that photon doesn’t disintegrate before it has the opportunity to. So it’s a unique adaptation of light engineering.
Innovative Solutions and Market Opportunities
[00:11:30] Terri Hoffman: Connect that back to Underwood and Associates. How does that help the projects that that firm of yours is working on?
[00:11:38] Keith Pivonski: It’s neat because all of the stormwater management and ecological restoration work came under criticism in the last 10 years for “How do we know how well this is working?” And that’s a fair question, right?
No matter what you’re doing. How do we actually know how well this is working? Are there proven reductions in output from input, you know, in terms of suspended sediment or solids or nitrogen? And the answer is yes, we can test that. And we need money. We need resources. We need PhDs and we need energy in order to put these sensors and test mechanisms into the streams and wetlands that we work in.
And so what attracted me to Energy Finders was I could install this remote eBox on any stream or wetland restoration that we’re doing, whether it’s an Island, whether it’s 20 miles from the nearest internet source, and we could have live monitoring from the energy that that eBox has created connected into our scientific instruments.
And so it was simply a, wow, this is a cheap way to get energy to run our research remotely without just using a single solar panel. And beyond that, the panels are protected inside of the box. And so there’s expected to be a longer shelf life, a higher efficiency, and there’s other needs for that energy on the site long term.
This can help support the research and data that we’re looking to collect to prove the efficacy of our work. And then the more and more I thought about it, I realized we have these urban environments where stormwater has nowhere to go. And my brain just kept leaping to the next adaptation.
What if we actually stacked that box on top of something that Underwood invented so that even the rain around the box can convert and you’re getting, you know, multiple land uses out of that same footprint?
And that was the birth of Underwood and Energy Finders. The realization that we need energy, we need data, we need these inputs and outputs that we can quantify within the scientific community, but we’ve struggled to be able to do that in remote locations until technology such as these came online.
[00:13:40] Terri Hoffman: Wow, that’s crazy. I believe if I’m not mistaken, you guys have now taken what you just described and have taken it a step even further right? Into developing unused areas or plots of land.
Every single time you tell the next thing to me about what you guys have done, I’m further wowed. It’s so creative and innovative, but why don’t you describe that next phase of innovation?
[00:14:08] Keith Pivonski: Sure. So as we were looking for pilot sites for this technology, we were saying, “Well, where should we use this beyond restoration sites? Everybody needs energy. This need is well beyond science.”
And so the first project site that I happened to find as an opportunity was in Baltimore and it was located parallel to an elementary school that’s about 70 years old. And so there’s little to no infrastructure around this school ; it’s just a , big brick school and a parking lot.
The original intention was to put the eBox pilot on the backside of the school and to help lower the school’s energy costs and to show them this can work in that setting.
At the same time, the land went up for sale across the street and it was a vacant brownfield lot that had a collapsed old house on it and a bunch of overgrown invasive trees on there.
And so I looked at it and I thought, “Hmm, if we really need to create enough energy and to manage this school’s needs in more than one way. How would we do it?” And it was so interesting because the whole school lot actually falls all in the direction of the lot we were able to purchase. And so any water resource manager would be looking at that and chomping at the bit with their hands going “Okay, all the storm water already falls to this low point. What if we were able to create a depressional area where we could invite all that stormwater, but still put a energy technology above it and supply even more energy to the school to complement the pilot that we were doing?”
And so we quickly realized there’s another market opportunity within vacant brownfield land where these sites are often looked at as eyesores or problematic in a way because not a lot of people know where to start with something with a collapsed unit on it. And in this case, the school was so receptive to our idea, it really motivated us to carry this forward as quickly as possible.
So I made a personal decision to buy the land with personal funds under the assumption that we will engineer, design, permit, and build a next generation green energy park of sorts that allows them to help manage their stormwater, connect in all of their downspouts and their parking lot runoff into the system that we’re creating and then also give us that opportunity to pilot our new technology in conjunction with that other infrastructure that will be installing.
It was just step three, right? As you say, we knew step one, we learned step two, and step three found us.
[00:16:29] Terri Hoffman: The way that you saw that when you looked at it because of your background, like you said any stormwater management person would see that in there, they would start salivating at the opportunity. But, I mean, most people would never be able to garner that type of insight just from looking.
[00:16:45] Keith Pivonski: And would I have ever had the idea if I didn’t spend a year watching my mom’s pond get built next to her school? Because I’m very much taking a small essence of that. And I’m just saying, well, it’s 20 years later.
It’s got to be better than a pond. You know, we have to move things forward. There’s more people on this planet every day. Resources are finite. Scarcity is a real thing. How are we going to address this? We’re not going to create more land unless we all move to Mars. So I’d rather have a better backup plan and that’s what I think we’re solving.
[00:17:12] Terri Hoffman: How did you move from seeing that opportunity, making that huge personal decision to make an investment in it, and then taking that and like maybe looking for other opportunities in the country where the exact same situation is happening?
[00:17:27] Keith Pivonski: It’s funny because a lot of the investors that we first started speaking with, they all had the same question ” Can you really replicate this? Or is this a one off situation where it just so happened to have a vacant lot next to a high energy consumer?” Because that is a huge part of the equation on how this works, right? You can have a piece of land. You can have a need for infrastructure, but If you’re going to build something that cost over a million dollars, and it’s going to create all this energy, you better have somebody ready to buy all that right away and it better not be connecting into the grid or you’re waiting 3 to 5 years in order to work through that interconnection process.
So, as we talk about the investment opportunity and the investors we spoke with, they wanted us to prove this wasn’t a one off site. And so we had to go find nine other sites all across the country that mimic this condition to prove there’s tens of thousands of these opportunities. Actually learned there’s 450,000 brownfield sites in the United States alone.
And to do anything with any of them is gonna require upwards of, about 500,000 to a million dollars in most cases. So it’s a multi-billion dollar market opportunity just to fix our vacant brownfield lands and so , our thought process was very much creating more value by selling that energy directly to the consumer that’s next to us, which is more efficient than running at tens of thousands of miles through high lines and grid infrastructure and having them be up charged by the billion dollar utility provider.
So it’s a unique mechanism to go in and say, “I’m going to create the energy you need and I’m going to connect it directly to the school and I’m not going to interfere with the grid in any way. We’re going to stay on the back side of that.” And what’s really neat is that if for some reason we don’t meet the demand, the school can still pull from the grid at any given time.
[00:19:13] Terri Hoffman: Would you say that the profile of these 10 other sites is pretty close to the school profile of the original genesis of the idea?
[00:19:21] Keith Pivonski: They’re all way bigger, which is awesome, right? I proved it at the one acre scale first, and I think I was a little bit nervous as to will this scale up to 5 acres or 10 acres or my a little bit off target? But it’s funny as you meet and talk with more people and you realize the idea and the market opportunity has these other layers and these people then want to get involved.
We learned that that opportunity was really beyond solar, beyond stormwater management. It was these ubiquitous human needs that we could put all into one land footprint and say, “Here’s how humans can manage this in the future in a way that we don’t need to keep clearing forest as quickly as we’re doing it right now, because we can actually do all this in one little square if we highly engineer it.”
[00:20:07] Terri Hoffman: Now, I kind of want to tie back to something you talked about earlier. The challenge of being innovative means you’ve got to boil this down to like the sixth grader level. So how do you go to market with this type of solution?
There are a lot of different tentacles to it, so to speak. You’re pretty early on in the development of this whole solution. What have been some of the challenges that you’ve encountered so far on the sales and marketing side?
[00:20:35] Keith Pivonski: I mean, to be brutally honest, I think the company would have already folded if we stayed all in on the eBox by itself, because it was very difficult to communicate without giving away the secret sauce as to how the technology works, as well.
How do you walk that line of not giving away trade secrets while informing the general public of how innovative or disruptive something is? Very, very challenging.
And so one of the ways we were actually able to combat that is we broke the development of the eBox into three separate categories where each engineering partner does not know what the other two engineering partners are working on. And so even if one is a third of our plan, they don’t have the other two thirds. And that was the vision of our CEO and how we would engineer it without that information getting out where a competitor could possibly come in and try to mimic it in the early phases of patent work. And so once our patent was filed, we felt a little more relaxed. We at least have a PCT and a line in the sand now that we can defend should that happen.
And so we’ve been able to tell a little bit more about how the technology works, but we needed to add the vacant real estate component. We needed to add storm water management and green infrastructure. And I haven’t even had a chance to tell you this yet. We’ve added a waste to energy component on our second site, which will be in Illinois.
I didn’t even know there was a waste energy technology coming to market that didn’t have emissions, and it was through this investor and through these dialogues that you have with the investor community that I met this individual, and he said, “I love everything you’re doing, I just want you to add a thing that I’m doing into it and I think it’s going to be even more valuable.”
And that is what helped me raise the millions of dollars that we needed to really launch the company now.
[00:22:20] Terri Hoffman: Wow. That’s incredible. The one thing that I always have appreciated about you is that you remain very open to how something you’re creating or working on could then be improved even further.
[00:22:34] Keith Pivonski: And that’s the struggle, the founder struggle, I think with so many in a way is it’s like, you’ve got it all in your head and you have to remind yourself at times that even if it’s perfect in your head, it’s not perfect.
There’s always another iteration of it. And it’s only through that engagement with other interdisciplinary experts that you start to go, wow, I was just at the tip of the iceberg and now these other brilliant folks are going to help me show the full iceberg. And that’s very much been my journey in terms of value creation and getting the narrative just right so that people understand why it’s worth doing ag tech parks, stormwater management, energy infrastructure, all within the same footprint.
Commercializing a Great Idea
[00:23:13] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, I think you made it over a hurdle that a lot of engineers or people who create great products aren’t able to clear. And that hurdle is how do I commercialize this great idea? Right? There are a lot of ideas that don’t ever get commercialized and I think one of the reasons could be because they’re not exactly sure how to communicate the value, they’re not sure how to apply that idea; and it seems like you’ve been able to really find more than one great application in way to commercialize this.
Would there be any other kind of big obstacles that you’ve run into so far that you’ve had to overcome when it comes to how to commercialize this whole idea?
[00:23:53] Keith Pivonski: I think we’re working through that next hurdle right now in terms of the JV partner that we’re signing on with as part of this investment into the company. They own 35 acres in Illinois already and so they had this vision for what they were going to do on that 35 acres, but they still had 10 to 12 acres left over that they had no vision for.
And it’s interesting that through that introduction, we were able to take the best of what we were both doing, but now the narrative has changed again. And so we have to really get it into a clear image that anyone could look at on a TV or a computer screen and say, “okay, I can see what they’re doing. I have a lot of questions, but what are , the essence of an ag tech park? What does that even mean? Agricultural technology? ” So we have to really get it down to the most ubiquitous human needs of food, shelter, water, and energy.
And that’s what we’ve been able to do now. On the marketing side is we realized we’re tapping into the three, four most human needs we could possibly have. So let’s not make it any more complicated than it already is. Water, energy, food, shelter. We can solve all that on one piece of land and that’s how we’re telling the marketing story now.
Ag Tech Parks: The Future of Sustainable Development
[00:25:04] Terri Hoffman: Wow. Okay. So you use the term called an ag tech park, can you just repeat the components of that? Cause it sounds like that’s a pretty key part of the whole value proposition, right?
[00:25:14] Keith Pivonski: Yeah, it is, and really, this this investor that was his nucleus, that was his background.
He saw the opportunity to link these techniques, where not only are we doing high hoop houses with vegetable farming or fruit farming, he saw the need to integrate public green space and leisure and other ways to bring the community and the people to this ag tech park so that we can not only see how we’re doing it, but integrate with it and have fun and spend time with our families and walk our dogs and, and enjoy that space.
And you would never think of business in the future would ever dedicate a small part of anything they were doing to the general public for free. But that was his vision and I respected it so much right out of the gate that I thought, wow, Underwood does this all the time too. We build these stormwater projects that have these natural walking trails and features that people gravitate towards inherently . Sometimes if they just see it, they pull over and they want to go walk it because they have never seen anything like it.
His idea of integrating that was a perfect match with Underwood. And then I realized there’s other ways to integrate water resource management within that vertical farming, and there’s other ways to use the energy of water flowing to tie back into the energy and the batteries.
It’s like, you almost have too many ideas and you need to narrow it down to 1 step at a time and then just keep problem solving and an ag tech park in essence is where we’re growing food, how are we growing that food, and what technologies are we using to make it more efficient to prevent weeds to prevent contamination to prevent human contact as much as possible?
That is what an ag tech park is and where it’s going. And as we worry about things like climate change, we’re realizing we need to manage our food production even more thoroughly because we can’t count on the rain as frequently, or we can’t count on the spikes and wind and temperature as we had historically.
And so I think this idea of an ag tech park is a need beyond all the other things that we’re doing because climate change and so many other reasons.
[00:27:25] Terri Hoffman: In your mind, do you see the ag tech park becoming something that spreads throughout the country?
[00:27:31] Keith Pivonski: He wants one in all 50 States within the next 10 years. And I said, “That includes Alaska. You know, like, is it really that viable that you could do that?” And the answer is yes. Now, maybe not in certain parts of Alaska and maybe the entire operation will be indoors in Alaska, but it’s not to say that it can’t be done anywhere. Think about things like food spoilage and the amount of miles that some of our food travels.
I think I learned when I was 15, that all the McDonald’s burgers come from Brazil. Think about the amount of land the United States has, we can’t even move our own ground beef to our own restaurant chain in a cheaper fashion than we can moving it from Brazil. How is that possible?
Ag tech parks are going to answer a lot of that and we could cut down the distance, all of our food moves, and we could cut down on spoilage in a huge way with the invention of the ag tech park.
[00:28:21] Terri Hoffman: A lot of the solutions that you’re describing, they sound like they may be driven by natural needs, right? They’re solving things that may not be the most commercialized way to solve them and could threaten the viability of a lot of traditional businesses or what has become the more modern way of solving these same things.
That, I would have to imagine, is somewhat of a PR or marketing issue for you as well. Have you started to run into that type of resistance in the development of these ideas? Like, “Come on, Keith, this sounds like granola tree hugger type stuff, right?” How could this be commercialized in a way that would advance and kind of move industries forward on a more commercial level?
[00:29:10] Keith Pivonski: So that’s part of how I think the vacant real estate opportunity ties into it, as well as targeting communities that have a dire need for innovation and jobs.
We’re looking at Montgomery, Illinois. As a town, it’s had two booms pre World War One,, post World War Two and hasn’t had one since. We’re looking to create that third boom by bringing a new type of innovation to a town that hasn’t had any innovation in 40 years. The need and how we’re going about coming to market is very direct, I would say, and there’s a lot of thought going into exactly which locations were picking.
And maybe historically they have strong populations, but maybe that that curve has started to plateau or even fall. And we’re looking at that data, and we’re making conscious decisions over where it makes sense to place these in relation to the grocery stores and the other sales avenues and retail avenues that we know would be nearby.
So I’ve learned a lot from the investor in terms of narrowing Montgomery, Illinois, for those exact reasons that you cited. He did have resistance and the other 2 towns that he originally proposed, and Montgomery was open arms to him and he became friends with the mayor and it’s progressed very quickly. But you’re exactly right.
There’s going to be a lot of opportunities. Where we see them as an opportunity and we learn, oh my gosh, this could be a lot harder than we think. Maybe the incumbent doesn’t even want us here and they’re willing to fight, you know, tooth and nail to keep us out of here. And that’s going to be a reality, but we’re going to face that in a lot of locations.
[00:30:38] Terri Hoffman: Unfortunately, if you have like very value driven solutions that are solving environmental issues, health issues, food issues, cost issues, even with all of those great things in place, there can still be other threats to existing ways of doing business that present another hurdle that you have to overcome.
It sounds like you’ve been able to carve out maybe a specific place or like profile of locations to start that need that job creation. They need some reinvigoration to their community that gives you like a really solid starting point.
So that’s pretty interesting. It’s very creative once again.
[00:31:18] Keith Pivonski: Like the fact that it’s fruits and vegetables is a major help. When I went to University of Maryland, there was actually a group of students that led in an uprising of sorts because they proved that any healthy option was 30 to 50 percent more on our entire campus. And the school had to respond to why that was the case and why you could go to PF Chang’s or McDonald’s for $9.75, but the minute you were down to the co op, a banana is $3.75.
How is this possible that anything healthy is so much more expensive? And so I think this is a major part of that question. How do we put healthier alternatives in the places that need innovation as well, because we all need healthier alternatives.
[00:31:56] Terri Hoffman: Right. If you watch the news, food costs are going up. Right? What you spend at the grocery store every week is a true problem for many, many Americans, and so I think if you’re able to find ways to create jobs and create opportunities and create experiences while also solving all of these other issues, it sounds like an amazing business model.
Innovative Solutions for Community Development
[00:32:17] Keith Pivonski: The traction is, you know, starting to prove itself we feel like. Our third location will be based in Texas, maybe 15 miles north of the Mexico border. But very much a small town of about 15,000, just enough of a population that it makes sense to create the amount of energy that we’ll be doing as part of this.
It’s actually a natural shrimp farming facility that we’re looking to partner with that they have over 1000 acres of land already, and they’re willing to work with us as part of a JV to dedicate a portion of that land to introducing the ag tech park and introducing these other energy and stormwater management techniques.
But this is a challenge maybe you didn’t bring up, but as a very real one, is the need for stormwater in Arizona the same as Maryland? Absolutely not, right? So if water management is in your value equation, can you apply that same value equation across the country? You really can’t.
We have to be very thoughtful upfront in just how much is water an issue here, just how much is food or air quality. Whatever micro issues we’re trying to address within the development of these ag tech parks, we take a lot of that into deep consideration. And so when you think about Arizona versus say, New England, we’re going to leverage and we’re going to tilt how that land is really being manipulated and used to fit that need a lot more.
So for Arizona, , if it has higher solar concentration and it has less water precipitation, we should put more panels and focus less on the water infrastructure that’s going underground beyond recycling it for the farming techniques.
So I view it as a never ending question as to how do we make this perfect for this area that we’re building something for the future.
[00:33:58] Terri Hoffman: Right, but it sounds like it always connects back to those basic human needs, right? You’re figuring out how are the basic human needs met. How does that adjust by the situation, by the geography, all of those different things so that you’re always finding the appropriate balance for that particular area.
[00:34:14] Keith Pivonski: Exactly. Yeah.
[00:34:15] Terri Hoffman: Well, those are a lot of common early stage go to market challenges, but it sounds like you’ve come up with a lot of great solutions for them.
Early Stage Company Challenges
[00:34:24] Terri Hoffman: What I didn’t really ask you much about is, how many employees does Energy Finders have? What point in the development of the company and kind of the overall organizational structure are you at this point?
[00:34:36] Keith Pivonski: So we are five people right now. A CEO, a CFO, a vice president, a grant writer, and then a investment banking mergers and acquisitions part time person that recently joined.
None of us were paid for the first year and a half to two years. And only as part of this new investment would we hope to be paid something for the first time. So that’s a huge thing to say and be transparent about when people are thinking “I want to do something innovative.”
Save up a lot of money before you go to start, because often you’re going to run into things you couldn’t have predicted.
So for our team, thankfully, each of us had accomplished something valuable to some degree before we came together with this idea, and it’s allowed us to operate in a slightly less stressful environment knowing we can take that extra risk because we have that little bit of a safety net that’s there.
I think many early teams don’t have that luxury by any means. They’re bootstrapping, they’re making ends meet on a week to week basis. And every startup eventually can fall into that valley. It’s the hardest valley to get out of. And, I think for the five of us, it was the journey through the valley that really created the value that now received the investment.
And so you have to be an open book kind of at all times to improve this further. Cause if an investor is not willing to invest on Tuesday, I can’t expect to come with the same information on Wednesday and land that investment. And you have to be honest with yourself about that.
Navigating Financial Struggles
[00:36:02] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, that’s a pretty significant challenge. All of the development, product development go to market issues. But then there’s the real one about finances, right?
Like, how do we get through this stretch financially so that we can eventually commercialize? What do you see as some of the key next steps?
[00:36:21] Keith Pivonski: Grants. Grants. Grants.
That’s the truth. But I say that because it was very much a pothole for us in the first 18 months as well because we were so confident that this was innovative enough that we would receive grants, and we just didn’t because we weren’t good enough storytellers. We couldn’t provide enough information to give them the confidence that the technology was going to work without giving away the whole technology. And so it was a struggle.
It was a really hard struggle and we’ve received no’s 99 out of a hundred times on what we were working on. And so with each of those no’s, it can be hard ’cause your confidence starts to erode a little bit and you’re just re-analyzing the problem , and saying, how do we win these grants? ‘Cause your best opportunity as a startup in most cases, to bridge that funding gap is to win those grants.
And it wasn’t until really these last six months that we’ve gotten the story and the value equations so concise that someone in a position of power and a grant authority realizes it and is willing to react to it. And we we were not there 18 months ago is the honest truth.
[00:37:25] Terri Hoffman: I think that’s a pretty typical cycle actually, and in terms of timing you know, in the marketing world, we would call that finding your product market fit. You had a lot of great ideas that could fit into multiple different types of products, and you had to find a market where that would fit, and you’ve arrived at that point and now you move out of that phase to, okay, how do we take this great product market fit and now begin to pilot it and then begin to scale it and create a business model that can start to grow and scale.
[00:37:59] Keith Pivonski: It’s ironic that what’s going to actually get eBox over the line is everything else that was added along the way. A never happens without BCDE.
And that’s, that was how the journey evolved for us. And so eBox is going to end up being probably the very last thing that gets installed on our first three pilot sites, because all the other technologies we’re introducing are ready and able to be turnkey and built tomorrow, if you have the funding.
And so my advice to anyone that may be trying to do something new for the first time would be find areas of overlap that you can get in motion so that they can see the other tangible pieces coming together and then they can understand why that last part is so necessary to make it a lot more valuable.
And I wish I had known that out of the gate because I would have thought about it all very differently.
Importance of Networking and Resilience
[00:38:47] Terri Hoffman: Keith, where would you say you have spent the most time trying to kind of tell the story and commercialize it? What have been the best platforms for you to start getting the story out?
[00:39:00] Keith Pivonski: I did three straight months of road shows at the beginning of the year, January, February, March. I was traveling constantly, pitching to large groups of either investors or doing one on one sessions. And I would say those one on one sessions were probably the most valuable time, on a minute to minute basis, because you’re having that personal conversation and connection at a one on one level and in a lot of ways that investor, that other person, is there to critique you and kind of tear you back down to the reality of why they should or shouldn’t invest. And for most of them, it’s always a no, and they’re looking for that one unicorn out of a hundred.
And so those conversations opened up my mind to how I can leverage debt financing or what tools I should be looking for within the 40 percent inflation reduction tax credits. The fact that a 10 percent brownfield restoration tax credit exists; I didn’t know that until a real estate developer told me during one of the one on one meetings.
And so you’re building a million dollar site and you’re not aware of a 10 percent tax credit that you’re eligible for. You’re making big, big mistakes. And that’s a part of your journey in those one on one meetings and there’s minutes that you just cited that stack up to create the value and to create great companies.
It’s thousands of little conversations. And so I would say those one on one conversations with people who have either already done it or at least already invested in something that was successful, they can give you the blueprints to things that maybe you’re not thinking of if you’re willing to give them the time and you’re willing to hear the criticism, because it’s fair.
[00:40:37] Terri Hoffman: That’s something that is very hard, especially when you’ve poured your heart and soul into coming up with this solution, it’s very hard to hear that criticism, but if you’re willing to take it, it should then take your solution to the next level and like, put you one step closer to being able to commercialize it. Right?
But it’s not easy to hear and I’m sure that was exhausting physically, but also really tough emotionally after you had spent hours and hours and hours developing these ideas, right?
[00:41:07] Keith Pivonski: Absolutely. You’re so convinced that the investor deck is perfect and the materials are perfect and those days I basically spent 12 straight hours meeting with investors all day long because I flew halfway across the country. I filled every time block that was available to maximize the opportunity to land the right investor. And if I hadn’t done that, I’d still be another 30, 40 percent behind on little tidbits that I took from my no’s.
“Your no’s stack into your eventual yes” is something else I would want to share with so many people. And so many great founders will say that “All my successes are built on failures.” And it’s so true. And failure isn’t just trying and failing. Failure is trying to pitch an investor for an hour and being so close to a yes and getting a no, and then telling you why it’s a no.
And if you can’t adapt to that, no, then you really shouldn’t pitch the next day because you’ve got a new question to answer.
[00:42:02] Terri Hoffman: This whole interview really has been kind of about an early stage development of a new idea, but what you just talked about applies to late stage companies, right? Where they’ve already got a commercialized product.
If you think about being in a business development or sales role, that is exactly how you have to approach your job. Right? And that same relationship you’re building, you could have 30 no’s with the same person and you’ve got to go back to your team and go back internally and figure out how to continue to address those to see, is this the right fit is, is what we’re selling and building and designing the right fit for this company or can we make adjustments to it? Or maybe it’s just not a fit and we need to move on. Right?
Always being willing to get back up there and have that next conversation and be open to what you’re going to hear is, is super important. That resiliency.
[00:42:51] Keith Pivonski: It’s a, it’s always the next door. Yep.
[00:42:52] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, exactly. Well, you’ve had a really good opportunity to connect what you learned from your mom and a couple of the aha moments you had with your mom, but we never had an opportunity to really come back and have you connect your dad’s career path and what you learned from your dad to where you are in the development of your businesses now. Like, how did that come together?
Personal Influences and Entrepreneurial Drive
[00:43:14] Terri Hoffman: How do you see the background you experienced and what you learned from your dad brought forward into what you’re doing now?
[00:43:21] Keith Pivonski: It’s, it’s a funny question , because I’m trying to actually recruit my dad now to review our permit applications for Energy, because he was a builder for 30 years, and he knows exactly what goes into a concrete pad application, regardless of what jurisdiction it’s in.
[00:43:36] Terri Hoffman: So then your dad needs to listen to this because this is your chance to recruit him.
[00:43:40] Keith Pivonski: Exactly. He was a custom home builder and then a project manager for University of Maryland medical system. And so, project management has been his entire 40 plus year career. And I’ve been a fly on the wall for 20 plus years of that.
And so my first memories of my dad or him at the big kitchen table with a thousand receipts spread out and the one light on and all these pieces of paper and moving things around.
I saw that at a very young age and I was like, that’s what it takes to win. You know? There’s a reason he’s up at nine doing this right now, but he’ll be gone before I wake up tomorrow. And so I had so much respect for his dedication within the construction and him running his own business.
That naturally planted the seed of, I think, me wanting to run my own business someday and seeing him do it successfully. So that was really step one, watching his dedication and passion and the success of the fruit of it. If he sold a house that he did well on, we got to take a vacation that year.
One year, it went horribly wrong and we didn’t take a vacation and none of us noticed cause you’re 10, but we were eating hot dogs a lot more that year than, you know, we would have ever realized until we were young adults.
So that’s a real part of the journey and watching him go from private business owner to then a role with the state of Maryland and managing these hundred million dollar lab renovations, it really inspired me to take these years of construction that are in my family’s DNA in so many ways, even beyond my dad, and apply that to something that I’m interested in, but can also have impact.
And I think millennials struggle a lot with impact in general, meaning we all want to impact. It’s becoming more challenging finding that career where you can have work life balance and impact and the thing we all, you know, want a little piece of. And so watching him and seeing how happy he was, not only chasing his passion, but impacting people’s families by giving them a beautiful home motivated me a lot to, to pursue the business owner career.
[00:45:40] Terri Hoffman: The same 10 year old Keith could have watched that and said, that looks like a lot. That it’s not for me. So that just says a lot about your personality too. I would definitely say one of your main characteristics is being up for a challenge. I think you love being challenged , and I think that’s such a core personality characteristic that is very important for an entrepreneur, but also for somebody who’s in sales or business development, right? Not stopping when something gets hard or there’s friction or you’re getting that, “no,” you’ve got to stay resilient and stay persistent and work hard and get through it. So that’s, that’s really cool.
I love the connection that you experienced in your career now between your mom and dad. I think that’s really neat that you see those connections.
[00:46:27] Keith Pivonski: My dad used to always say , “Humans were built to walk uphill” and I didn’t really know what he meant in the early days, but what I think he meant by that was no matter how intense of a challenge it is, humans inherently need some type of a challenge.
Challenge could be work. It could be something that we’re striving towards, something that’s in front of us that we’re constantly in pursuit of and I think moving the target is really the best thing we can always do because moving that target constantly raises the standard and pushes us as people towards the next adaptation of something.
And when my dad used to say, “walk uphill,” I thought it was a hiking reference. But I think he really was trying to say if you have a vision and you’re working up towards something, you’ll do better in general because we’re happier when we’re in pursuit of something.
And I learned that about myself at a teenage years. I was very unhappy if I wasn’t in pursuit of something.
And so you talked about the challenge and why my personality gravitates towards them. I’m a happier person when I’m struggling than when I’m not, which is an odd thing to say.
[00:47:32] Terri Hoffman: It is, but I think that is very true of entrepreneurs. I really do. Just the ones that I’ve gotten to know over the years, that’s pretty, pretty common personality trait. And I think if you’re not up for that, your days are going to be long and hard. Right?
Unfortunately our spouses have to listen to a lot of that or significant other has to listen to the griping we do about that struggle, but I’m with you, like, if I don’t have that struggle, my life doesn’t feel as purposeful. Striving towards that is what drives me it’s fun to figure that stuff out.
Fun and Personal Insights
[00:48:03] Terri Hoffman: I want to shift gears completely. I’ve got some fun questions that I like to close my interviews with. I can’t wait to hear your answers to these because they run the gamut pretty, pretty wide variety. So, I want to hear what’s your favorite trip that you’ve ever taken.
[00:48:18] Keith Pivonski: The glowworm caves in New Zealand.
[00:48:23] Terri Hoffman: Wow.
[00:48:24] Keith Pivonski: It was a 30 day landscape architecture class that I took in my winter semester at University of Maryland in 2013. In essence, there’s a specific type of worm that lights up and glows in a certain cave in New Zealand.
And you can only see it by going on this like gondola boat that has no engine and the guy who drives the boat literally pulls on a string to pull you through this cave and you’re not allowed to speak the entire time he’s manipulating this boat through the cave. And it was an outer worldly experience that I’ll never forget.
[00:48:57] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, that sounds amazing. Um, I wouldn’t be able to go. My husband would tease me that I wouldn’t be able to stop talking for that long of a period of time, but that, that sounds amazing.
This one’s music related.
If the artist or group is dead or alive, , who would you like to be able to say, “I saw them in concert”?
[00:49:15] Keith Pivonski: Either the Ramones at CBGB’s in New York in 1973, because I was a big punk rock fan growing up and they played with the New York Dolls in New York, they were like one of the first rock bands there.
I love The Who growing up and Keith moon was such a character, the drummer of The Who. I had always wished I had had the opportunity to see The Who and Keith Moon specifically live in concert because he was just absolute character from the videos that you watch of their early days and smashing all their instruments. They were one of the first bands that would just kind of go nuts at the end of their performance. And I loved it.
[00:49:50] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, , when you watch him, it looks like he’s got 12 arms playing somehow.
[00:49:55] Keith Pivonski: The Keith thing probably made me like it a little bit more too. Like you don’t know a lot of Keiths, but seeing one as one of the best drummers in the world, I was like, “Ooh, I could do something cool. He’s a Keith!”
[00:50:04] Terri Hoffman: that’s crazy. What about books? I really cannot wait to hear the answer to this question for you. Do you find yourself like having a number one book that you’re constantly recommending to people? And what would that book be? Any type of book.
[00:50:18] Keith Pivonski: I actually just read a book, which is probably my favorite book I’ve read in the last two years, and it’s called Loon Shots. L-O-O-N S-H-O-T-S. And it essentially is a account of all these different amazing inventions and, solutions or, techniques that ended up ending a war.
Basically, it’s these marvelous things that happened in human history that not a lot of us know the full story about. And this brilliant author not only connected it to his personal journey and his personal struggles, but he educates you on how impactful each of these little things that happened that you never even maybe knew happened dictated all of history beyond that.
One of his examples is the first, think it was a LIDAR. Basically the ships were using this in the forties in response to World War I, and they were able to detect submarines for the first time and this technology was just an off idea that was developed by a professor in a lab.
And it never would have happened if these exact right circumstances had came to life. And we probably wouldn’t have won World War II without that technology. And so the book takes this one moment of one professor with this one idea in a basement and by the end of that chapter, you understand how it’s largely in part responsible for the United States success.
And those are the types of books that I think I always gravitate towards something that just like your mind kind of explodes when you read.
[00:51:45] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. Well, especially after just spending this time with you, learning about the whole path that Energy Finders has been on. I can see why a book like that would really resonate with you. Those little ideas can have such a big, big impact. That’s really interesting. I’ll have to check out that book.
[00:52:00] Keith Pivonski: Zero to one is also a great book. I read both of them back to back and zero to one is basically talking about if you’re trying to start a new business, the hardest thing in the world to do is to go from zero revenue to create that first sale or value. And the book touches on that, but in large, it touches on kind of 20 to 30 of the most brilliant founders of the last few generations and parts of their story that defined their zero to one.
And so I think today’s call was very much a lot of what is Energy Finders zero to one. It had an idea and is pre revenue, but it now is about to start earning its first revenues as part of the development of these sites. We could very much have a chapter in the second iteration of that book, maybe in the years to come.
[00:52:43] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, there you go. This is going to be very hard for you to answer because it seems like you’re a person who always finds a personal connection to any job you’ve got, but what would you say is the best job you’ve ever had?
[00:52:55] Keith Pivonski: I really, really enjoy walking with the community members post project and seeing the animals that come to our sites after the restoration work that we do and I’m very much getting that same feeling from the work Energy Finders is now doing because I’ve watched the transformation to what it can be after the fact. And so now that I know we can parlay that with two or three other really important things that just take what Underwood does and extrapolates on it, I feel like I’m hitting my favorite part of my career at this time now, because it feels more impactful and the relationships and the networking that I’m doing all have a direct correlation to my goals.
And to be honest with you, networking was something I struggled with through high school, through college, and really through my first five to six years at Underwood. I didn’t put any time into networking. I didn’t build myself in any way. I was just interested in being a fly on the wall and trying to learn how this ecological engineering industry was being built and evolving. And the minute I wanted to do something innovative for myself I had to quickly learn your network is a huge part of your ability to do anything for the first time. It’s been both my favorite and my least favorite part the time I’ve had to put into networking, because it’s hard to find the time, but what you get out of it is impossible to estimate without doing it.
[00:54:19] Terri Hoffman: I love that you ended with that because that is also a huge challenge for people who are in a manufacturing role or some type of a tech role, right? You’re building a relationship with the technology or the solution, because that’s why you chose that field.
But then you have to remember, I also need to connect with the people who are in my overall ecosystem. And I’ve got to make sure that I’m building that network and the people who actually use these solutions.
But the other thing that I love about what you just said, is that where you really get gratification is when you see what you’re creating being used and the impact on the community and the people and animals and the whole environment around your solutions who are benefiting from it. That’s, that’s really cool.
[00:55:02] Keith Pivonski: Thank you. It’s certainly been a journey.
[00:55:05] Terri Hoffman: Thank you for being here, Keith. I really appreciate how open you were, and everything that you shared about your journey so far and super excited for you to see what comes next.
So thank you.
[00:55:14] Keith Pivonski: Thank you so much. My goal will be to see what Energy Finders can do with Marketing Refresh next, and we love the ideas and what your team has brought to us at Underwood and my hope is that we redefine that narrative for Energy Finders as well.
So thank you for the invitation. Look forward to working together for many years to come.
[00:55:31] Terri Hoffman: You’re welcome, Keith.
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