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Dan Gould '90 started his first business when he was in the third grade, selling polished rocks to other children. Today, he is the president and chief executive officer of Synergy Investments, which designs and implements personalized, energy-efficient lighting and building systems.
An electrical engineering major, Gould decided to become an engineer to become a great businessman. “I had read that a lot of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies were engineers, so I thought that engineering must be a good foundation on which to build a business career,” he says.
Gould began as a sales engineer at Johnson Controls, which manufactures automatic temperature controls and computerized facility management systems for heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems. He loved his work, but the entrepreneur in him saw an opportunity for a spin-off company in energy services.
“At Johnson Controls we would audit all of the energy-using equipment in a facility and offer to upgrade or replace older models with energy-efficient equipment,” he explains. “Typically, half of the project would be to upgrade the lighting, since you can drastically cut your lighting electric bill while improving the lighting quality using new technologies. I thought that if retailers knew how much they could improve the lighting quality, energy savings would be just a side benefit.”
This proved to be true, and after a year of planning his new company, Gould finally took the jump, founding Synergy Investment in 1994 when he was twenty-five years old.
“Entrepreneurs are viewed as being great risk-takers, but the interesting thing is that to an entrepreneur, it is all very calculated that an endeavor will work. There could be a mistake and you can easily miscalculate, but I wasn't really concerned at the time,” he says.
Gould's first project, a Levi's Outlet by Design store, was such a success that the retail chain hired Synergy Investment to upgrade dozens of its other stores. “There is a quiet revolution of lighting upgrades taking place in all types of facilities around the country,” he says. “Hospitals, colleges, office buildings, and retailers are all upgrading the lighting for a variety of reasons. The major benefit is the reduced operating costs, but there are also other market forces driving the industry.”
In 1998, Gould took Synergy Investment to the next level, thanks to support from the Young Entrepreneurs' Organization, a group of business professionals under age forty who are the owners, founders, co-founders, or controlling shareholders of a company with annual sales of (US) $1 million or more (Synergy, based in Framingham, Mass., now does $9 million a year). After joining the group, Gould finally hired additional employees (for the first four years he was the only employee) and moved the business out of his home. This fall, the company was ranked number 219 on Inc. 500's list of the fastest-growing private companies.
To keep up with the growth, Gould continues to add employees, including four Union interns who worked at Synergy Investment over the December 2000 winter break. “The interns have been great,” he says. “It's challenging to have four interns absorbed into the organization quickly because it is hard for us to keep them productive. We give them a project and they knock it off in three hours and are back for more!”
Gould says that he loves running his own business because of the tremendous challenges involved. “This is the first time in my life that I have felt so mentally and physically challenged,” he says.
The challenges continue as he plans to grow the company to more than $15 million in sales within the next two years. “The market is really there to be grabbed,” he explains. “We have great employees, and I intend to let them do what they do best. There was a time a year ago when I would have been happy to sell the company, but now I'm enjoying it. I just want to keep the momentum going.”