Never give up

Jugaad Innovators are often faced with criticism when they share their ideas with the world. By nature most of the humans are resistant to change. When an idea is brought to them, the first reaction of most of the people would be negative. It is the Jugaad Innovator’s job to stay focus and never give up. This quality was demonstrated very well by Enrique Gomez Junco, a Mexican engineer turned Jugaad entrepreneur.

Junco was driven by a vision to create a sustainable energy business. In 1988 he set up a company called Celsol to sell thermosolar panels to Mexican businesses. But he found it hard to break the market. Market was dominated by monopolies, and he found difficult to find capital for Celsol.

Rather than getting disappointed by this, Junco shut Celsol and started a new venture, Optima Energia in 2000. His plan was to sell effective energy solutions to buildings that used a lot of energy. But Optima’s value proposition did not impress the facility managers. It required a large upfront investment that would not yield significant returns in the short term. Junco again had to face a setback.

He had realized that as an engineer he had fallen in love with the technology but he had forgotten about the customers and their needs. What his customers needed was not the technology but only to save their money. It was not the concept that was rejected, it was just the investment required was very high.

Armed with this insight, in 2004 he went back to the drawing board to reinvent his company’s value proposition. Rather than merely selling a technology, Optima began offering an integrated solution to risk-averse commercial building operators.
Optima signed a performance based contract with the clients where the initial investment will be done by Optima. The funding for these will be done by leading financial companies that were tied with Optima. The client would use the initial savings in energy costs generated by the project to pay back Optima’s capital investment. All additional savings will be split half between Optima and the client.

Since the founding Optima has consulted more than 120 different clients and implemented the solutions in more than 50 facilities. The firm has saved its customers’ $100 million (Rs. 500 crore), 4.1 liters of natural gas, 23 crore kilowatts of electricity, 1.6 crore cubic metres of water and 1.4 crore liters of diesel. Optima has won various awards across the globe for being an eco friendly company.