CPOs and Procurement Specialization: Cam Shaw on How Transparent Energy Delivers the Best Unit Price for Energy

Q: Cam, tell us about your career in the energy business and how your past experience shapes your current role as National Director, Key Accounts at Transparent Energy.

A: I am blessed to have had a career in energy and procurement that has prepared me to work effectively with Chief Procurement Officers and other senior leaders at Fortune 500 companies. And, it’s exciting to apply 25+ years of experience in an industry that I love with a company that is revolutionizing energy procurement!

My journey started before electricity deregulation, in 1995, when I moved to Atlanta post-college to become part of a family business called Utilities Analyses, Inc. That business was formed by ex-utility executives to help commercial and industrial companies understand tariffs and use that knowledge to negotiate with their utilities. Remember, this was at a time when companies couldn’t procure energy at all – not power, not natural gas. But our understanding of tariffs and the tariff landscape helped our clients get better deals on energy.

I stayed with the company for 15 years until we were acquired by Procurian, then, eventually, Accenture. Over the course of that 15 years, electricity did deregulate, and we were in on the ground floor of energy procurement, demand-side management, and energy efficiency, basically doing all the things a ‘holistic energy management business’ would do to provide value to a customer. I became VP of Sales & Marketing and help land the key accounts that put us on the map, including Home Depot, UPS, and AT&T.

After the Accenture acquisition, I stayed in procurement, applying all I had learned in energy to indirect spend categories such as telecom, office supplies, logistics, and other related areas. A common thread between this work and what I had done in energy procurement is that it was all contingency based. I have always been driven by creating value for my clients and sharing in the benefits derived.

I’ve since worked at a number of other leaders in the energy software and advisory space and bring to my National Key Accounts role at Transparent Energy a strong working knowledge of CPOs and selling to large companies. This knowledge is enhanced greatly by extensive firsthand experience seeing how the right energy tools, in the right hands, can make a significant business impact.

Q: In your experience, what do you find Chief Procurement Officers are most looking for in a strategic vendor or advisor?

A: As IT and the Internet revolutionized business processes, the idea of large enterprise customers wanting to work with fewer, bigger software vendors with broad capabilities came into vogue. But I never found that to be the way that CPOs like to do business. Remember, CPOs buy across many different categories. They are motivated to find and get the best unit price for whatever they are buying. Given that, I have found CPO’s much prefer to work with specialists, the best procurement provider in each category, vs. a one-stop shop that is “a mile wide and an inch deep.”

This is particularly good news for Transparent Energy, because being the best at energy procurement – something I will elaborate on later, if given the chance – positions the company extremely well in the minds of CPOs as it pursues Fortune 500 and other large customers.

Q: So this seems like the ideal time to ask you why you decided to join Transparent Energy.

A: There are a lot of reasons really, and they cohere around the certainty I have that Transparent Energy delivers a service of great value to customers. That’s important to me.

I know from experience how tired the energy procurement process is at just about every other provider. They all do it the same way: they build up a relationship with a few retail energy suppliers and then shop their customer’s contract among them to get indicative pricing.

Transparent Energy’s process starts where the others end. Transparent Energy uses indicative- price gathering to pulse the market and educate (set expectations with) the customer before bringing qualified suppliers to a real-time auction event. These auctions are a huge differentiator for Transparent Energy, and they work unbelievably well. Over the course of a 15-20 minute auction, a dozen suppliers may collectively bid hundreds of times to win the contract, bidding the final price down – and with it, margin – with each successive bid.

Transparent Energy literally brings the market to the customer in the form of the auction, giving the customer unparalleled price discovery and a means to extract the best price from the market on any given day. This technology-driven process is also supported by the best market intelligence team and pricing desk in the business, meaning every step is enhanced by human expertise. I said before that CPOs want to work with specialists to get the best unit price in every spend category they manage. Transparent Energy has developed the best mouse trap, supported by the best people, to deliver the best unit price for energy. Period.

Like I said before, I want to believe in what I’m selling. Transparent Energy makes that easy for both me and the customer.

Q: What are you telling customers and prospects now about energy markets as we head into a new year and a new administration?

A: CPOs, and the big companies they buy on behalf of, are always looking to thread the needle on price and risk. So, when we advise customers and prospects on the energy market and best times to buy, we let the data do the talking. This is an excellent time to buy energy: natural gas prices – a good proxy for the electricity market – are trading near historic lows. And we’ve been saying for months that upside risk far outweighs the downside, meaning, at current price levels, it’s much harder for prices to go much lower than it is for them to spike as they have in recent years due to weather, geopolitics, or global LNG demand.

My advice is let’s talk now so we can prepare to get you into the market quickly and intelligently.

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Cam Shaw can be reached at cshaw@transparentedge.com