7.5 Why No Profits?

By September 2011, the company had 1,500 heating oil customers and was delivering about a million gallons a year of biodiesel. Customers were concentrated in the seacoast of New Hampshire into southern Maine and down into northeastern Massachusetts. Simply Green’s market sharePercentage of a defined market (in terms of total revenue or total number of customers) captured by a service or product provider. within the heating oil industry was 10 percent to 12 percent and had grown fast, especially given the traditional customer to dealer relationship and that their product was a new one. Total revenue at the end of 2011 was more than $4 million. Of the total revenue, 60 percent to 70 percent was BioHeat and 20 percent to 30 percent biodiesel and the balance was the congreenience store (see details as follows).

By many measures, Simply Green could be characterized as successful. Then why, after four years, was it still operating in the red—that is, losing money? One factor was volatile oil prices and changing overall economic conditions. For example, in its second year (winter of 2008) the start-up company was negatively impacted by the unanticipated $4 a gallon oil. As is standard industry practice, Simply Green prebought ahead of the peak heating season from their wholesale fuel suppliers for a select percentage of their customers that wanted to prebuy their fuel.

Simply Green was contractually obligated to pick up those gallons at the fixed price. Historically, there would be some fluctuation in those prices versus what the retail spot pricing would be. But never was there such an exaggerated difference where a customer who had prebought would then call another company to get fuel from them because the market price was so much lower than the prebuy price they had locked in.

Many Simply Green customers locked the price at $4.50 a gallon, and then that winter, heating oil plummeted to $2. Simply Green could not force customers to take the fuel and they had not required their customers to commit to buying a minimum amount of fuel. Some Simply Green customers may have went to another oil dealer to get fuel at its market price, some may have just turned their heat way down and put on a sweater to reduce their oil consumption, and some people may have burned more wood. The loss between what Simply Green had paid for the peak price oil and what it could eventually sell ended up being more than $300,000.

This forced Andrew Kellar to take on two silent business partnersA partner that contributes capital to a business but that is not involved in day-to-day operations.. The partners took a 30 percent equity position in the company and contributed $150,000 to the business. Taking on the partners provided Simply Green with the financial resources that Andrew did not have and did not have access to. The business partners, however, did not have as much of an interest as Andrew in community engagement and the partners shifted the focus more toward the single bottom line of profitability.

The partners had a commitment to the environment and were conscientious of how they operated in the community; however, these were not as much in the forefront of their efforts according to Andrew Kellar. As Andrew describes it, “I get that in businesses sometimes you’re forced to get to a place where you really have to focus more on the main bottom line, until you can get to a place where you can have the luxury of expanding that.”

Source: Simply Green.