Building MyHEAT

An Energy Efficiency Company Designed to Benefit Employees, Customers and Shareholders.

The world wastes more energy than it consumes every year. And since we consume a lot of energy, that leads to a lot of waste. At MyHEAT we strive to make energy visible to help make better use of our existing energy, no matter where it comes from. This is part one of a series of articles which will detail the way we work, what we have achieved, and our future plans for MyHEAT.

Around the world, the existing building stock consumes approximately 40% of our energy. There is a large and cost-effective energy pool available if we can reduce the loss of energy that occurs during heating and cooling. However, there are several barriers to accessing this potential, one of the biggest being a lack of interest from home and business owners.

In a significant portion of the world, energy is cheap enough that the concept of increasing efficiency is difficult to engage with at the individual level.  Yet there is also increased resistance to new pipelines, power generation, and even renewable installations of solar and wind farms which shows that there is a gap between what individuals care about and what our utilities need to continue to deliver economical and reliable energy.

The MyHEAT Advantage

MyHEAT addresses this gap by encouraging customers to reduce consumption by providing personalized visualizations of energy efficiency opportunities, eliciting consumer response through education and behavioural nudges. Our first product combines high-resolution thermal imagery and machine learning to create individual HEAT Maps and HEAT Ratings for every building in a city. You can learn more about MyHEAT’s products here.

By making energy visible and putting heat loss on the map,  information can be used to:

1. Motivate Home and Business Owners: Personalized thermal images empower building owners by providing them with the tools to see an invisible problem, building awareness of energy waste and efficiency opportunities. Comparative ratings build on social norms and the spirit of competition to motivate consumer action.
   
2. Motivate Community Action: City-wide heat loss maps present the opportunity to emphasise community-wide transitions by allowing homeowners to compare performance and strive for improvements across neighbourhoods and cities.
   
3. Target Conservation Efforts: Geospatial insights on building heat loss identify where energy efficiency efforts may be targeted for the largest impact. By giving utility planners the ability to identify and target desirable customers or service areas, funding can be used in a more efficient manner.

Inspiring a Culture of Innovation

We have a great initial product, with early adopter customers across Canada and the U.S.A. In order for us to deliver on our vision and significantly improve energy efficiency across the world, we need to focus on improving the lives of our employees, customers, and shareholders so that we can expand our product globally. To that end, these are the guiding principles in place to improve the lives of our employees, customers, and shareholders.  

1. Employees: We are closely following the principles outlined by Daniel Pink in Drive by ensuring all of our staff have autonomy, mastery, and purpose. We are working to create a culture where results and creativity are valued over methods and standards, and are fortunate to work in an industry that allows for that. We hire people who enjoy figuring out what needs to be done and then actually doing it.
   
   Our current work environment consists of a 4-day work week, with flexible start times, and a focus on responsibility versus micromanagement. This leads to super-charged engagement from all of our employees, and creative solutions to extremely difficult problems.
   
2. Customers: We are focused on building innovative products and user-friendly platforms that deliver value for our customers in three main areas:
   • Engagement with consumers on the benefits of energy efficiency
   • Promotion of energy efficient upgrades and building energy audits
   • Valuable geospatial insights on efficiency opportunities across service areas.
     
3. Shareholders: We are focused on being fiscally responsible with the money invested in MyHEAT and using our revenue and grants to grow the company as quickly as possible, while still holding true on our responsibilities to our employees and customers. By treating our shareholders as part of the team we ensure our goals are aligned.

Measuring Our Success

With an academic background in mathematics, I lean towards data-driven decision making. As such, we have designed various metrics to track our future success as a company.  In rough order of priority, here are the metrics we will use to drive our success.

1. Customer Results: How have we benefited our customers?

• Number of buildings available and viewed on the MyHEAT platform.
• Number of consumers engaged and conversion rates to customer resources.
• Average consumer time spent learning about energy efficiency opportunities.
• Reduction in energy consumption and incentive program participation.

2. Growth of Thermal Data Coverage: What is our reach?

• Number of customers live with the MyHEAT platform.
• Square kilometres, population, cities, buildings contained in thermal data collected and processed.

3. Company Growth: Are we positioned to succeed?

• Gross margin per customer.
• Cost of customer acquisition.
• Potential customer count in sales funnel.
• Forward annual revenue per employee.

Stay tuned for part two of this series where I will provide a baseline of where we are now on each of the above metrics.

To learn more about how to become a partner, contact solutions@myheat.ca

Written by:
Darren Jones, CEO at MyHEAT