Building a new energy business requires a great deal of courage, skill and the ability to overcome inevitable obstacles. This is proven by Enevo Group, a Romanian engineering and automation company, whose business case is summarized by Cristian Pîrvulescu, the company’s founder and CEO, in an interview for energynomics.ro Magazine. The domestic market was not one of the priorities for Enevo Group, the company management sharing the strong belief that local expertise – either inherited, acquired or newly created – will meet the requirements on any meridian. The company is now carefully scrutinizing the market, domestic horizons included.
If you were to choose one feature that best characterizes Enevo Group, what would that feature be?
This company was founded on the curiosity to find the best solution for any problem, even when the problem itself is not easy to define. This curiosity, relying on a solid and diverse knowledge base, allows us to be audacious enough so as not to panic when a solution is not immediately apparent, and fueled our involvement in projects in which we have achieved special and interesting outcomes. When answers to questions have a strong reasoning behind, one will find that a solution is actually available and that it isn’t that complicated. Of course, I am not only talking about the technicalities behind our projects, but about a state of mind that we tried to cultivate: originality.
How easy or how difficult did you find it to start on the path of entrepreneurship? If you were in the same situation again, would you make a different decision?
It can never be easy, but our decision came as an inevitable response to the curiosity of our founders. The establishment of Enevo Group is not my first entrepreneurial initiative. My first happened when I was a student. With my current partner, Radu Brașoveanu, we identified the best opportunity to change from students to entrepreneurs: the emission allowances market, which was at that time being shaped into an immediate reality in the European Union and worldwide.
The idea was fresh, there was no competition, and we had done our literature search thoroughly on the subject. We quickly established a company and spent intense nights on substantiating our business plan. In less than two years, transactions in the range of tens of billions of Euros were being completed on specialized exchanges in this area. My partner recently received a letter from the bank where we had deposited the minimum share capital for this company, in order for the amount to be returned. Ten years have gone by, the account was never changed into a current account, and the company has been deleted from the register, for lack of activity. From a revolutionary idea with fantastic potential, we got 200 lei to be returned and a payment notification for the Radio-TV tax.
After we graduated, my partner got hired by a local company where he achieved an exquisite level of technical specialization after which he left to Australia, while I got hired in one of the most important energy companies in Romania. We are now working together again, we have nearly 50 employees and collaborators, we export Romanian engineering on three continents and we rely on a competitive team, in the context in which the market is flooded by tens of reputed companies with exceptional capacities, or even thousands of them, just a click away. In time, we have learnt some of the things that one can only learn from experience, unless you are one of the geniuses that revolutionize thinking, economy and the society. We have learnt that for the usual people, who always want to do more, the mere idea is not enough. An idea needs to be planted into a mature way of thinking, to be backed up by experience and to be exposed to a context in which one can really be capable to make a difference.
Did you find operational funding quickly? What were the most difficult stages you have covered so far and how did you overcome inherent obstacles?
The initial funding is a nut hard-to-crack for many companies that are just getting started. It wasn’t easy, obviously. But I wouldn’t say this was the most difficult obstacle we had to overcome. First you put everything on the line with enthusiasm and try to scale the business not according to its potential, but according to the available resources you have. More difficult stages are those when you have to consolidate and develop, increase the complexity of the services you have to offer, extend your geographical market and interest areas towards other industries. Hence the need to expand the team, acquire new skills or facilities. In our field, investments include much more than the initial investment. If we stayed at a size of 5-6 people, where we started, this wouldn’t have been a problem, but this was not the idea, and this is why we grew up to 30 people quite quickly. The hard part is to become psychologically accommodated to the idea that, in addition to what you risked yourself, you are now responsible to keep a promise made to many people.
We have quite fast increased the scale of our projects, another thing that makes the already difficult gymnastics of the balance sheet even more complicated. We chose to grow organically and develop smoothly, with a decision making process that was neither too quick, nor too slow. Everything is to stay connected. This is how we managed to overcome all obstacles safely, first of all due to the trust we tried to create inside our organization and among our partners, whether suppliers or clients.
You don’t really negotiate with the “general economic environment” – you actually take it as such and if there’s something that pulls you down, you try to find something else, at least as strong, to pull the other way. Ever since we started, the solution for us was represented by the foreign markets; we identified diverse markets in order not to become captive in punctual economic circumstances. There is too much to say about obstacles in the business environment, but we choose to stay focused on opportunities. This approach is more effective for the business.
How well does Enevo Group fit in the engineering and industrial automation industry in the country and abroad, competing against companies with a long tradition, trying to get to clients that are reluctant to change?
We are best recommended by the combination of curiosity, tenacity and technical knowledge. The issues our clients face are often related to finding the correct definition of the question, before trying to find an answer. Therefore, the solutions we offer are not out-of-the-box solutions that are readily available on the shelf, regardless of the customer walking into the shop. There is guidance and discovery involved, and we go through it with our client, so that, in the end, the solution is as customized as possible. When exporting, in particular on large markets such as Saudi Arabia, we afford and even wish to accept projects that more reputed companies tend to avoid, because the client has not clearly formulated its requirements from the very beginning.
We have diversified our skills and increased the complexity of our services to a great extent. The fact that from the very beginning we were working in complex power systems or for one of the largest industrial groups in the world or that we have been contracted by the largest equipment suppliers in the world probably suggests quite well that we have highly rated skill sets.
Has Romanian energy entrepreneurship, as it is today, reached its plateau or could it become a more visible presence in the economy, with little support?
It is certain that the energy business community has plenty of growth potential, both in Romania and for export. The development of the local market depends on the parallel development of public policies and on a strategy creating synergies between the administrative vision, the vision of entrepreneurs and technological development. The market in Romania is now rather difficult, with many serious projects in Power Point presentations, but too few of them up and running.
Abroad, however, I dare to say that Romania is highly competitive in the energy industry. Romania still has experience and knowledge pillars that can be leveraged. But I am afraid that we will rather export exceptionally talented specialists instead of exceptional services. I believe that the success of Romanian engineering export lies in the capacity of companies to create partnerships to contract complex and lengthy projects on effervescent markets such as the ones in the Middle East, Asia or Africa.
Each company has a portfolio of reference projects of which it is proud. What does Enevo have in its portfolio and what is the structure of your turnover?
We are proud of several special projects in energy and industrial automations. We are now working on two large-size projects in Saudi Arabia: the turnkey refurbishment of a medium voltage substation and an energy efficiency project in one of the largest steel plants in the Middle East, part of SABIC group. We have partnered with strong local companies and we are very proud that, where we are now, when it comes to automation and SCADA projects, beneficiaries seek the “Romanians from Enevo”.
Also, in addition to several energy dispatchers that we have developed as turnkey projects and in addition to control applications for more than 500 MW in renewable energy installations, we have been involved in some pilot projects where innovation was needed. One example would be a command and control application for a desalination plant that was commissioned recently in Qatar, developed for and together with another company in Romania. In 2015, more than 70% of Enevo Group turnover was generated from exports. We anticipate the same level to be maintained in the following years. I think there are opportunities at national level as well, but the potential in emerging markets and the Middle East, regardless of the latest geopolitical issues or the inherent cultural differences, largely exceeds the opportunities we have back home.
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The full version of this article can be read in printed edition of energynomics.ro Magazine, issued in May 2016.
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