Today, Doug Marcille tells his story only in terms of the days he was just about sure his company was going to go out of business.
The first such day came at the onset of 2003, shortly after Marcille joined U.S. Gas & Electric Inc. He’d come aboard the company as chief financial officer because he loved the business model at the natural gas reseller, but it didn’t take long to see something was wrong.
“The retail end at the time was really kind of a mess, to say the least,” says Marcille, now the company’s president and CEO. “The company was selling fixed-price contracts that were underwater, the market had moved against those contracts, and the company wasn’t hedging or doing any other risk management, so I actually closed the retail gas business on the fourth day I was at the company.”
Marcille did what he could, fixing the retail gas model and slowly building the company back up. But, just as he thought things were going to turn, he got a knock from the SEC in the fall of 2003, which started an informal inquiry into the way additional capital was raised using private placements in 2002 and early 2003.
“I’d never had a knock on the door like that before, and I did not know what would happen,” he says. “You can imagine getting that knock and thinking it’s the end of the world.”
It very nearly was the end of the world for USG&E. The company had sales of less than $2.8 million in 2004, as it was crippled by a standstill agreement with the SEC. Marcille had to completely retrench, cutting the company from 50 people to just two by 2005. Suddenly the lonely top executive of a two-person company, Marcille had to grow the company organically.
That process wasn’t easy, but Marcille started by making the personnel cuts to keep USG&E alive and then slowly built it back up on the backs of known talent. As he started to get the company above water, he leveraged his good relationships to spark growth.
