Value Creation: Why I Joined Transparent Energy 

by Mike Vondle, Senior Business Development Manager 

As someone who literally grew up in the energy industry at the time of electricity deregulation, I know a lot about commodity selling, energy procurement, and energy-procurement best practices. For those of you who don’t know me, I started selling lighting, then got in on the ground floor selling energy supply – both power and gas – as the Pennsylvania electricity market opened up. 

From there I established a beachhead in California and Texas for Direct Energy with big-name brand energy buyers (McDonalds, Albertson’s, Anheuser Busch, just to name a few) and helped write the book, based on amazing, synergistic teamwork with people like Stephanie Huhn and Nancy Gardner (whom I am delighted to be joining again), on turning these beachheads into thriving, long-lived national accounts.  

I’ve seen it all and done it all on the “supply side” of energy and have learned a lot of valuable lessons along the way. One thing I’ve learned is that winning, building, and continually nourishing long-lived national accounts is all about delivering value – and one key to that is providing regional energy-market expertise to your client and doing so in their time zone. It’s a little of the old “Think Globally, Act Locally” ethos that embraces the idea of providing value “on the ground” wherever your clients are, and for Fortune 500 and other large energy buyers, that means everywhere they operate. 

I’m deeply impressed with the energy market intelligence and expertise Transparent Energy delivers every day to its clients across North America, and that’s one reason I have joined the company. An even bigger reason is the amazing tool set Transparent Energy has developed, a multi-million-dollar platform, including a one-of-a-kind “live auction” capability, that it has built from the ground up to do just one thing: help its customers extract the best prices, and the most value, from energy markets. 

I’m like a kid in a candy store.  

I have never in my career had access to such a powerful process and platform that brings in every major retail energy supplier and puts them into a live auction that requires them to shed margin to win the customer’s business.  

The paper RFP is dead. Transparent Energy is leading the way forward with a one-of-a-kind digital process that reliably spurs hundreds of bids from numerous suppliers in real time, so that over the course of 30 minutes a customer sees: 

• How the market is pricing (talk about price discovery!) 

• Margin compression as suppliers bid down their price to win the business. 

• Every bid from every supplier – total transparency – and a bullet-proof audit trail along with it to help justify final decisions. 

All of this creates exceptionally more value for the customer (the energy buyer) than I have ever had access to. This is transformative.  

For those of you who know me – and for those of you who don’t – I am not a shy guy. I love what Transparent Energy is doing. They create value every time, value that helps our customers thrive and gets their people promoted.  

Can you tell that I’m excited? Put me in, Coach!