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Revenue Spark CEO Steve Messere to Speak Before Congress

Founder and CEO, Revenue Spark Inc.

Small Businesses and Broadband: An Engine for Economic Growth and Job Creation.

May 12, 2010

Chairwoman Velázquez, Ranking Member Graves, Members of the Committee:

Thank you for inviting me to discuss the role of broadband as an engine for job growth and, more specifically, my company’s role in supporting America’s drive towards an economic future that’s both prosperous and sustainable.

My name is Steve Messere and I’m the Founder & CEO of Revenue Spark. Revenue Spark is a company that’s dedicated to creating and fostering relationships between sustainable-technology companies – these are the companies that are creating new opportunities on an almost daily basis through the spirit of invention and innovation that has traditionally defined what it means to be American.

Just like railroads, telegraph and telephone transformed American business, broadband is similarly transforming the way American companies do business today.

Revenue Spark’s Mission is to Increase Sales and Grow Jobs

Revenue Spark is the world’s first sales outsourcing firm to dedicate our entire focus to helping sustainable technology companies succeed in the marketplace. We do this through a combination of new technologies that didn’t even exist five years ago.

The core of our operations is domestic sales outsourcing. Domestic sales outsourcing avoids the pitfalls of hiring new business development staff. Typical hiring procedures yield a failure rate of over 50% in the first six months – for a new business, this can be easily mean the difference between success and failure.

Domestic sales outsourcing also transfers the time-consuming tasks associated with researching and establishing sales leads. Lead development conversion work varies by industry, product and service. The challenge for most businesses is deciding on how to staff a team that can overcome these hurdles and provide reliable, repeatable revenue.

Transformational Change in Business Computing

We are in the midst of a real paradigm change in how computer information is handled. Five years ago, individuals were dependent on their own personal computers to save and store information; now, information is increasingly shared over far-flung computer networks.

This new “cloud computing” means that instantaneous cooperation is now possible between different individuals regardless of where they might be located – this translates into increased productivity.

As we all know, increased productivity means a better bottom line, and a better bottom line means more and better jobs.

Whether this happens via SalesForce, Google Documents, Skype, Jigsaw, Web Conference, Twitter, iPod or any number of new technologies, it all means the same thing: We are changing the way we do business – almost on a daily basis. And all of these technologies rely on a fast, reliable and accessible broadband connection.

The Internet Removes Economic & Geographic Barriers to Work

At Revenue Spark, we are, in effect, a “virtual company.” For us, the term “Company Headquarters” is almost irrelevant – we do almost everything via “telecommuting.”

All members of the Revenue Spark sales development team have a proven track record of success in the sales outsourcing business. In addition, all members have spent on average over 15 years in professional sales positions for market-leading companies offering products or services to business customers.

Telecommuting allows us to attract the best, at their best – and the advantages for us and for society are many:

Fuller employment (by being able to employ people for whom “getting to the office” could be an obstacle)
Less strain on infrastructure and the reduction of traffic congestion
Increased Productivity
Reduction in turnover and absenteeism
Reduction in carbon footprint and energy use
Expansion of talent pool
Improvement in work-life balance
Handle business over multiple timezones
Put recently displaced workers back to work

For example, if 53% of white-collar employees could telework just two days a week, we could collectively save 9.7 billion gallons of gas and $38.2 billion a year.

Without low-cost, universally-accessible broadband, none of this is possible.

Sustainable Capitalism - A New Model of Economic Growth

At Revenue Spark we believe that capitalism is ready to make a change from the traditional assumptions that natural resources are unlimited to a new model of free market consumption and production that takes into consideration the limitations of our global natural resources. Instead, the new economic model seeks new resources that can be used more efficiently or produced in a consistently renewable way.

Sustainable Capitalism also refocuses American economic development on domestic manufacturing – production of tangible products made and sold right here in the USA. This means jobs – good jobs – American jobs.

The impact is far-reaching and permeates every aspect of our lives – and broadband is the glue that holds it all together.

Five Rs’: Renew, Refine, Recycle, Remarket, Rethink

Our clients are thinkers, engineers, visionaries. Thought leaders in their respective fields who know the old model, the old way of doing things, is on the way out. And now, moving forward, new technology in hand, they simply need a guide through the desert every company must face when bringing their product to market.

At Revenue Spark our market focus is on addressing these very innovations, these disruptive technologies: infinitely-renewable sustainable products and services that demonstrate real, distinct competitive advantage over the old guards of "finite-resource-based" capitalism. We’ve defined five (5) specific categories – five “Rs,” if you will - that we believe comprise the prime areas of innovation in sustainable technology today: Renew, Refine, Recycle, Remarket, Rethink.

Revenue Spark provides our services using a team of virtual employees accessing the best web-based tools to provide a highly effective service at a reasonable price.

I’d like to go through some brief case studies of how each of our “Five Rs” of sustainable technology is working in the real world, in American companies, creating American jobs and using the Internet to tell their stories.

Renewable Energy

Renewable energy is the harnessing of natural resources--sunlight, wind, tide, all infinitely renewable--in order to repower applications that are currently using non-renewable resources. Additionally, plants grow and produce biomass--also renewable--which can then be utilized directly as fuel or to produce biofuels.

But some of the most important breakthroughs will come from American ingenuity, working smarter and not just harder, meet Wind Analytics a New York based company that makes small scale wind installations smarter, more efficient and more profitable.

Wind energy increases exponentially with wind speed - double the speed and you get eight (8) times the energy. This is important to know because there’s very little energy in low speed winds, but energy grows rapidly as speed increases. Small changes can thus make the difference between an unproductive turbine installation and a highly successful and profitable one.

Refine - Energy Savings

Of course energy efficiency doesn't just involve pushing electricity around in a more intelligent fashion--moving physical product from point A to point B more efficiently is also a huge part of the process. A freight train can move a ton of freight 436 miles on a single gallon of fuel; and hence, if more freight is moved via train, we have an obvious, tremendous reduction in non-renewable fuel. The use of zero-emission electric trucks, in place of the thousands of traditional diesel vehicles currently in use, would dramatically improve fuel savings.

And thus the value chain becomes ever more optimized and the savings in these unpredictable expenses can be used by businesses to increase the bottom line – and create more jobs.

Case Study: Chris Maddern and Shadd Bieber - Energy Solutions International (ESI) – NY

PBJax, a medical office facility in Jacksonville, Florida, was experiencing long-standing, baffling facilities management break downs that increased day-to-day operations costs to 40% higher than comparable buildings in the area, causing high bank lending terms (which were based on occupancy rates of less than 90%), preventing new tenant leasing contracts and exposing the coop to significant health code violations from local authorities.

ESI determined that the building’s design had not accounted for occupant usage and that the placement of climate monitoring equipment was far from ideal. This caused very high costs of day-to-day operations and their tenant suites were too hot, too cold or too humid for health care operations and prevented profitable new leasing contracts.

Coupled with the low occupancy level (67%), this created a financial situation for the company that forced their bank to charge them unfavorably high rates. This had a direct and significant negative impact on the firm’s profitability.

ESI managed the optimization and re-installation of the climate monitoring equipment which immediately reduced monthly energy costs by 24.5%. This resulted in break-even ROI within 3-1/2 months and increased tenant occupancy to 93%. With the more favorable terms now available from their bank, the company started showing a profit within 12 months.

Recycling

Recycling is all about repurposing what you put out. Not letting waste bleed out into the environment, but rather turning it around and recycling it back into the front end of your process. "Cradle to Cradle" is a new term oft used in waste optimization: this as an approach to industrial design which mimics the actual process of nature's cycle--a constant recycling of materials, then (both natural and synthetic)--which is not just more efficient, but indeed, essentially waste-free. It's a holistic approach, one modeling human industry on nature, and one that will become ever more important in the coming sustainable era.

Let me introduce Plasma Waste Recycling (PWR) - www.plasma-wr.com, an Alabama-based company with a powerful new approach to turning waste into energy and valuable by-products.

Municipal solid waste (MSW), everyday household trash and garbage, consists of items such as product packaging, grass clippings, furniture, clothing, bottles, food scraps, newspapers, appliances, paint, and batteries. The US EPA states that, "Currently, in the United States, 32 percent [of MSW] is recovered and recycled or composted, 14 percent is burned at combustion facilities, and the remaining 54 percent is disposed of in landfills."

PWR offers an environmentally sound and technologically advanced waste-to-energy solution for the disposal of MSW that can make landfills a thing of the past.

Remarket - The Green Consumer Market

“Green Lifestyles” is a catchall phrase that refers to companies that produce products (renewable energy products, efficiency products, waste optimization products) that not only offer a prolonged sustainability, but are intended specifically and directly for consumer use.

A great example of a new consumer application is offered by SOMS Technolgies - www.microgreenfilter.com a New York-based company.

The microGreenTM oil filter is the most advanced technological leap in engine filtration in 30 years. It replaces a conventional oil filter assembly without requiring any modifications to the engine or filter housing. By continuously filtering a small portion of the engine oil through the patented microfilter system, the microGreenTM filtration system allows your vehicle to operate up to 30,000 miles without changing the engine oil, 4x longer than standard filters. This means a 70% reduction in oil use, 50% reduction in filter use, a net savings less oil waste for companies and municipalities to manage.

Rethinking - Forming New Strategic Alliances

Rethinking business means taking a comprehensive look at your whole business, top to bottom, and applying the “five Rs” – Renew, Refine, Reuse, Remarket and Rethink -- in moving towards a more sustainable approach. Taking the savings generated from more efficient manufacturing process, and turning that into a new revenue streams and creating more jobs.

For more than twenty years, J. Ottman Consulting (www.greenmarketing.com), a New York-based firm, has been advising the leaders and innovators in rethinking their businesses.

In 1989, Jacquie Ottman set up shop and pioneered green marketing. She wrote three award-winning books on the subject long before most of today's green marketers had ever heard of the term. Today, she is a sought-after speaker on green marketing and eco-innovation at conferences in North America, South America, Europe and Asia and at corporate forums run by IBM, 3M, Philips Electronics and GE, among many others.

Her book, Green Marketing: Opportunity for Innovation 2nd Edition, is considered the "definitive work on the subject" by the American Marketing Association. Named one of the top business books of the year, it has been translated into six languages.

The Whole is More than the Sum of Its Parts

These case studies represent a tiny sliver of the many successful, sustainable technologies we’ve identified at Revenue Spark. But when multiple greentech technologies are combined and integrated into a coordinated whole, the overall positive impact both on the environment and on our economy is magnified exponentially.

But this can represent transformational change. For example, a recent initiative by Global Green’s Coalition for Resource Recovery (CoRR) aimed at diverting prepared food packaging from the nation’s landfills - recycling a simple paper cup - required cooperation and coordination between all the companies in the value chain:

Quick Service Restaurants, Havi Global Solutions (Burger King and McDonald’s provider), coffee purveyors Starbucks and Tim Horton’s, paper products suppliers MeadWestvaco, International Paper, Duro Bag, Interstate Container, Solo Cup, Dopaco, Huhtamaki, Georgia-Pacific, Duro Bag, Action Carting, Pactiv - and more.

Broadband was – and is – an essential tool for the large-scale integration necessary to achieve this kind of powerful synergy between both large and small companies. It takes split-second accuracy, timing and coordination that would be unthinkable without robust broadband communication capability.

Broadband is the New Main Street

Small and mid-sized companies are the engines of economic growth in the US – and they’re dependent on the Internet to bring their ideas to market. Broadband is the new “Main Street” – not just “Main Street, USA,” but everywhere in the world.

For us at Revenue Spark, the Internet is an indispensable tool to do what we do best - tell stories. Because that’s really what we do. We tell a story – a true story – about new technologies, the boundless creative accomplishments of American innovators – this is a story as old as America itself.

But there’s a new chapter that’s being written even as we sit here – a tale of otherwise-undiscoverable technologies, of how America can flourish and grow in a way that’s sensible, sustainable and yet preserves our precious resources for our children, and our childrens’ children – not just here in the US, but all over the world, for all over the world. And, of course, it’s a story about jobs – good jobs – jobs with a future.

It’s a great story. If you tell it by telephone, you can communicate with, at best, a few people at once. With the Internet, you can communicate with millions.

We use Websites, Blogs, Twitter, Google Documents, Google Buzz, VOIP, Skype and more – and that’s just what’s available today; who knows what’s next?

If given the choice between having telephone service or Internet, the vast majority of the companies we work with would choose the Internet without hesitation – that is the very definition of a sea change in how American companies do business.

All these tools (and more) serve to increase efficiency – which means a better bottom line – which means more jobs – good jobs. The jobs of today and tomorrow, not the jobs of yesterday.

In Conclusion

Chairwoman Valázquez, Ranking Member Graves, and Members of the Committee, thank you the opportunity to testify today. I appreciate the opportunity to share Revenue Spark’s efforts to help drive the expansion of vital industries for the future of the United States and the world.

We look forward to helping our sustainable technology clients, business partners and employee to find financial rewards, market opportunities and competitive advantages powered by a low-cost, universally accessible broadband technologies.

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