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All,
My name is James Orsulak, I am Clean Energy’s Colorado Sales and Marketing Manager. I was invited to join the forum in an effort to hopefully provide some insight into the company, what we do, and why. My plan from here on out is try to get on the forum once a week to try and answer questions and take recommendations that might be posted and to give updates on developments in the industry. If you live in Denver and you dig CNG, I’ll take you to lunch, if you ski, let’s strap some skis to my GX and head up.
I began by browsing through all of the forums and postings on the site. I took notes and am going to make this first post is going to be a whopper (two sections) but I hope it will be a reference guide for commonly asked questions. Many of you have some very negative opinions of the company. These seem to primarily stem from our fuel pricing in your area. Hopefully I can address some of those concerns.
About me: I manager all our sales activities in the State of CO. I may not have answers to all your questions. Clean Energy is not perfect and we are certainly experiencing some growing pains. If I do not have an answer, I will tell you so and go and try and find an answer for you. Also, please feel free to use me as a resource; we have tons of info every part of the industry. I am happy to help in any way I can.
I will start by posting some answers to common questions.
The Company: founded in 1997 by Boone Pickens, the big guy is no longer involved too much with the company. He sits on our board, but is not our chairman. He is very busy, very nice, very charitable, and brilliant when it comes to energy matters. He does not own our company, although he does own a good deal of stock. We do. Every employee of CE owns stock in the company, along with several thousand other Americans. It is an American company and we believe NGVs are the future and we will fight hard to ensure that is the case. We also believe there is a lot of money to be made in this industry, as Americans we also have a desire to be insanely wealthy. I know I do. The sales staff works very hard at marketing the use of CNG and LNG to fleets. While we certainly have a growing consumer base, we have never tried to be a consumer fueling company. Every one of our sales people focuses only on fleets. Clean Energy provides customized alternative fuel fleet solutions. That is what we do. Our targets are geographically based or return to home fleets: airports, taxis, shuttles, trash trucks, buses, delivery trucks, port trucks, etc. We try with every new station to have a public access portion or order to expand the available refueling infrastructure. The sales staff is twice as crazy about NGVs as many of you; they eat, sleep and breathe CNG. They are out pounding on the doors of fleets everywhere preaching the clean, affordable, abundant, American story of natural gas for vehicles. Their job is to get fleets to use existing stations and primarily to convince large fleet to make a huge commitment of vehicles in return for a new fueling station. Our model is simple, you buy a whole bunch of NGVs, and we will do all the work for you, jump through any hoop you want and turn ourselves upside down to make sure you have a good experience. There are a lot of objections, and barriers to entry, clean energy has evolved to remove these. There is a huge mental change for a fleet to make to ensure success and it’s tough, many people just do not want to do the work. Change is hard for these old diesel guys especially. We write grants for them, finance their vehicles, explain the tax incentives, file the tax incentives, spec the stations, procure their vehicles, and then the real work begins: making sure they have a good experience with NG and will use it forever. We love this fuel as much as you guys do, believe me. We practice what we preach, we all drive NGVs and most of our spouses drive NGVs.
The $100 deposit for non-credit card (CC) stations: this is a security deposit, plain and simple. We did not used to have this in place and we got burned. It came about because the system charges the CC or debit card on file the following business day for a transaction. We had numerous instances where a person would charge a bunch of fuel and then cancel the CC. We then had to track them down or take them to small claims court. So we implemented the $100 fully refundable deposit and it has worked. I know it’s a pain and we are hoping to eventually have every station with CC access, but in the meantime this is what we are working with.
CC Access: It was brought up in a few of the postings we acquired several of our current sites from other smaller companies or utilities, which we did. If they did not already take CCs we have to use the CE card until it gets upgraded. And unfortunately we do not just upgrade everything, we wait until our sales force can put enough volume on it to justify the new $10K card reader. This is just the way it is, no upgrades until we get the old sites up to certain minimum volumes. Many of us do not completely agree with this, but it is the way it is. Once we get some decent volume on the site, we refurbish it, add CC access, sometimes a canopy and it becomes a “real” CE site. But it’s up to the sales guys to get people using it again. And a lot of these sites are not exactly profit centers; they are barely hanging on when we pick them up. We are working on it and we hope to have every single station in the US and Canada on CCs in the near future. This will also eliminate the deposit issue.
To be continued in part II
My name is James Orsulak, I am Clean Energy’s Colorado Sales and Marketing Manager. I was invited to join the forum in an effort to hopefully provide some insight into the company, what we do, and why. My plan from here on out is try to get on the forum once a week to try and answer questions and take recommendations that might be posted and to give updates on developments in the industry. If you live in Denver and you dig CNG, I’ll take you to lunch, if you ski, let’s strap some skis to my GX and head up.
I began by browsing through all of the forums and postings on the site. I took notes and am going to make this first post is going to be a whopper (two sections) but I hope it will be a reference guide for commonly asked questions. Many of you have some very negative opinions of the company. These seem to primarily stem from our fuel pricing in your area. Hopefully I can address some of those concerns.
About me: I manager all our sales activities in the State of CO. I may not have answers to all your questions. Clean Energy is not perfect and we are certainly experiencing some growing pains. If I do not have an answer, I will tell you so and go and try and find an answer for you. Also, please feel free to use me as a resource; we have tons of info every part of the industry. I am happy to help in any way I can.
I will start by posting some answers to common questions.
The Company: founded in 1997 by Boone Pickens, the big guy is no longer involved too much with the company. He sits on our board, but is not our chairman. He is very busy, very nice, very charitable, and brilliant when it comes to energy matters. He does not own our company, although he does own a good deal of stock. We do. Every employee of CE owns stock in the company, along with several thousand other Americans. It is an American company and we believe NGVs are the future and we will fight hard to ensure that is the case. We also believe there is a lot of money to be made in this industry, as Americans we also have a desire to be insanely wealthy. I know I do. The sales staff works very hard at marketing the use of CNG and LNG to fleets. While we certainly have a growing consumer base, we have never tried to be a consumer fueling company. Every one of our sales people focuses only on fleets. Clean Energy provides customized alternative fuel fleet solutions. That is what we do. Our targets are geographically based or return to home fleets: airports, taxis, shuttles, trash trucks, buses, delivery trucks, port trucks, etc. We try with every new station to have a public access portion or order to expand the available refueling infrastructure. The sales staff is twice as crazy about NGVs as many of you; they eat, sleep and breathe CNG. They are out pounding on the doors of fleets everywhere preaching the clean, affordable, abundant, American story of natural gas for vehicles. Their job is to get fleets to use existing stations and primarily to convince large fleet to make a huge commitment of vehicles in return for a new fueling station. Our model is simple, you buy a whole bunch of NGVs, and we will do all the work for you, jump through any hoop you want and turn ourselves upside down to make sure you have a good experience. There are a lot of objections, and barriers to entry, clean energy has evolved to remove these. There is a huge mental change for a fleet to make to ensure success and it’s tough, many people just do not want to do the work. Change is hard for these old diesel guys especially. We write grants for them, finance their vehicles, explain the tax incentives, file the tax incentives, spec the stations, procure their vehicles, and then the real work begins: making sure they have a good experience with NG and will use it forever. We love this fuel as much as you guys do, believe me. We practice what we preach, we all drive NGVs and most of our spouses drive NGVs.
The $100 deposit for non-credit card (CC) stations: this is a security deposit, plain and simple. We did not used to have this in place and we got burned. It came about because the system charges the CC or debit card on file the following business day for a transaction. We had numerous instances where a person would charge a bunch of fuel and then cancel the CC. We then had to track them down or take them to small claims court. So we implemented the $100 fully refundable deposit and it has worked. I know it’s a pain and we are hoping to eventually have every station with CC access, but in the meantime this is what we are working with.
CC Access: It was brought up in a few of the postings we acquired several of our current sites from other smaller companies or utilities, which we did. If they did not already take CCs we have to use the CE card until it gets upgraded. And unfortunately we do not just upgrade everything, we wait until our sales force can put enough volume on it to justify the new $10K card reader. This is just the way it is, no upgrades until we get the old sites up to certain minimum volumes. Many of us do not completely agree with this, but it is the way it is. Once we get some decent volume on the site, we refurbish it, add CC access, sometimes a canopy and it becomes a “real” CE site. But it’s up to the sales guys to get people using it again. And a lot of these sites are not exactly profit centers; they are barely hanging on when we pick them up. We are working on it and we hope to have every single station in the US and Canada on CCs in the near future. This will also eliminate the deposit issue.
To be continued in part II
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