When he was just five years old, Glenn Johnson, who grew up in Horseshoe Bay near the Gleneagles Golf Course, started collecting errant golf balls.
For many five-year-olds, that enterprise might have been an end in itself. But even then, Johnson wasn’t interested in doing something that didn’t make money. A natural-born entrepreneur, Johnson would clean the balls, pack them in egg cartons and sell them back to golfers.
By the time he was 12, he had saved $5,000, and he convinced his parents to let him invest it in a boat. He spent the winter cleaning and painting it, then sold it in the spring for three times what he had paid for it.
When he was 19, he bought a house with a secondary suite for $175,000, rented it out and then sold it three years later for $250,000.
It was that knack for identifying new business opportunities that would eventually lead him to where he is today: CEO of Endurance Wind Power, which is growing by leaps and bounds and expanding in new directions.
Since it was founded in 2007, the company’s head count has grown to 160 from six and doubled just in the last year, with about half of the new hires in Surrey.
The company has also posted 100% year-over-year growth.
To accommodate that growth, Endurance recently moved in to a new 40,000-square-foot complex in Surrey’s Campbell Heights North business park. That is in addition to a 40,000-square-foot plant it opened in the U.K. last year.
Part of what is driving that growth is the company’s move in a new direction as a distributed wind power developer.
“We’ve been an equipment manufacturing company – so more of a product engineering company,” Johnson said. “We’re not giving up our roots as a product engineering company, but we’re now becoming a financial engineering company.”
Until 2012, Endurance designed, built and sold wind turbines all over the world, making a one-time 30% markup with each sale. It builds two models; one sells for $400,000, the other for $900,000. To date, Endurance has installed more than 750 wind turbines.
Two years ago, Johnson identified what he believes is a huge new market within the distributed wind power sector.
Rather than just build and sell wind turbines, the company is now also developing and financing distributed wind power projects – many of them in the U.K. – and earning revenue from electricity sales. It already owns and operates 40 wind turbines.
“Instead of ship to sell, we now ship to own,” Johnson said.
“Every time we sell a turbine, you make a 30% margin and you get a nice hit of capital. When we install a turbine, we get that capital spread out over 20 years. That turbine pays for itself, say, in five years, and then [for] 15 years you’re collecting profit on that turbine.”
Distributed wind power is not to be confused with wind farms, which are typically large, utility-scale operations with up to dozens of large turbines generating power that is sold into the grid.
Distributed power is smaller in scale. A number of Endurance customers in the U.K. are dairy farms, which might have one or two wind turbines installed. The turbines can provide power directly to the farm or to the grid.
Brad Bardua – the former CFO for another fast-growing B.C. company, Avigilon Corp. (TSX: AVO) – said there’s a huge market for distributed wind power, which is why he took Johnson’s recent job offer to come aboard as Endurance’s new CFO.
“I started looking at the opportunity for Endurance in distributed wind,” Bardua said. “To me the market was huge. We’re at the bottom of a huge growth curve.”
Bardua spent two and a half years with Avigilon during a period of rapid growth, after the company went public in 2011.
“This is a very significant hire for us,” said Johnson, who added that going public is one option the company might consider to finance its growth.
“Having someone like Brad, who’s been a part of high-growth companies, public companies – growing public companies and taking companies public – was a perfect fit for us, because regardless of whether we stay private or go public, we’re in a high-growth mode,” Johnson said.Johnson wasn’t even sure that there was much of a business case for distributed wind power when he was first approached by co-founder Doug Hicks in 2006.
Hicks was a salesman with no experience in wind power. All he had was a conviction that there was a burgeoning market for distributed power, and he asked Johnson for advice.
Johnson, who had already built and sold a successful business, told Hicks what he thought he would need to do to prove his business case, and six months later Hicks came back with market data and two engineers who had designed a small, five-kilowatt wind turbine.
Johnson is no eco-evangelist. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions with clean wind power is nice, but if it didn’t make money, he wouldn’t be interested. But Johnson realized there was a business case for distributed power, especially in places like the U.K., and in other jurisdictions that offer incentives like feed-in tariffs.
So in the summer of 2007, Johnson and five partners raised $1.1 million – mostly from friends and family – and started Endurance Wind Power. Since then, 60 of Endurance’s employees have also invested in the company.
Johnson believes one of his strengths as a business leader is an ability to learn from others.
“I like to talk,” he said, “but I’m a pretty good listener, and I know when to sit and be quiet and watch.”
He credits his grandfather, Stan Thomas, as one of his greatest mentors. Johnson never bothered with university. He went straight from high school to work for his grandfather, who owned Delta Cable Television.
“I worked for him for about two years,” Johnson said. “Never had a vacation, didn’t have days off. I learned how to work.”
One of his grandfather’s suppliers – the Chicago-based division head of Antec Inc. – liked Johnson’s style and asked him to work for him. The company sold hardware – splitters, amplifiers, etc. – to large cable TV companies.
“I did that for two and a half years and realized that I was manager No. 252 of 500 in this billion-dollar organization,” Johnson said.
So, at the age of 23, he left and started his own company, Comsource Broadband Technologies.
“From 1993 to 2000 we built that into a $60 million revenue company with over 50 employees,” Johnson said.
In 2000 he sold the company for “several million dollars,” then started a merchant banking business with the profits. It was during this period that Hicks first approached him with the idea of building a company in the distributed wind power space.
Although he was never driven to get into wind power by a desire to save the planet, now that he has two young boys – aged eight and five – he takes some satisfaction in knowing that the business isn’t just making money; it’s also having a positive effect on the environment.
“We’ve taken [the equivalent of] 23,000 cars off the road by the turbines that we’ve installed to date, and we’re just a small company, just getting started,” Johnson said. “While I still stand by the fact that I’m an entrepreneur, and there has to be an economic value proposition, if you can do that along with the social responsibility, that’s huge.”
