By Andrew Wagaman
The Morning Call (Allentown, Pa.)
WWR Article Summary (tl;dr) SaLisa Berrien is the founder of “COI Energy.” Her professional accomplishments are impressive but it is her personal journey to the top (and what she is doing now to give back) that will blow you away.
The Morning Call (Allentown, Pa.)
The utility company of the future will be an energy bank, enabling customers to cash-in on unused electric capacity by making it available to other customers who need it.
Utilities will be the intermediary facilitating the transaction and reducing energy waste in the process.
So believes SaLisa Berrien, a Bethlehem native, 1987 Allen High School graduate, former PPL Corp. engineer and now an entrepreneur who launched a startup called COI Energy Services in early 2016.
Based at the University of South Florida’s Tampa Bay Technology Incubator, COI Energy offers software that helps utility companies take full advantage of smart grids, or electrical supply networks that can react to patterns and changes in energy usage.
This past week, Berrien submitted patent paperwork for the COI Energy Optimizer.
Her signature technology is a digital portal that makes it easy for commercial customers to communicate with their utility, and allows utilities to better manage demand response, renewable energy and energy efficiency programs.
She calls it the “Uber of Energy.”
COI’s first 16 months have been equal parts exhilarating and scary for Berrien, a successful mechanical engineer and businesswoman who has spent her entire career in the energy sector.
New challenges have included keeping her perfectionism in check, knowing when to seek financing and determining the trustworthiness of potential partners.
As CEO, Berrien has has embraced those challenges and says she’s surrounded herself with people who share a vision of Tampa as the next big technology hub.
She lives in Tampa, but until April owned a home in Upper Macungie and still returns to the Lehigh Valley regularly.
“I think we’re building something great here, and I want to be part of the story,” she said.
Life, not death
There was a time when none of it seemed possible for Berrien. She learned as a teenager to seek out positive and ambitious social circles as a means of survival.
When she was 14 years old in the early 1980s, Berrien said, she became pregnant as the result of a sexual assault.
A few months after her daughter was born, they moved into Valley Youth House, an Allentown-based nonprofit that assists abused, neglected and homeless youth and their families.
School was a refuge, Berrien said, but the once-Honor Roll student nearly flunked out her sophomore year.
Rock bottom kept falling out beneath her as one unfortunate event followed on the heels of another.
She doubted her life was going anywhere, and she seriously considered ending it.
Berrien still remembers a revelation she had one late summer day while crossing the street at Five Points in Bethlehem.
For as bad as things were, she still had the freedom to perceive her circumstances as temporary and surmountable.
She made a choice to believe in herself and seek out like-minded people.
“I surrounded myself with people who were speaking life and not death,” she said.
Around the same time, an Allen High college algebra teacher named Barbara Irvine recognized Berrien’s aptitude for STEM subjects and encouraged the teenage mom to become an engineer.
Irvine, also a city councilwoman, arranged for Berrien to spend a day shadowing Allentown’s city engineer.
That led to a summer job working for the department.
Irvine, who died this year, also encouraged Berrien to apply for a summer bioengineering program for gifted students at Lehigh University.
She was accepted, and she relished the intellectually stimulating environment.
Berrien graduated from Allen on time — and on the Honor Roll. She was awarded a scholarship to to the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering and decided to bring her daughter with her.
Berrien coordinated her class schedule around her daughter’s school hours, but they sometimes wound up attending evening courses together.
Berrien graduated from the rigorous mechanical engineering program in four years. Crucial to her success, she said, was taking advantage of mentoring programs and her involvement with the National Society of Black Engineers,
Society of Women Engineers, and the engineering school student cabinet — groups that “were very supportive during those years.” She also helped bring to campus a sorority for black women in STEM and was the first president of the Pitt chapter.
“I think it’s very critical to be connected with a group of people that’s going in a direction that you want to go,” she said. “I made sure I was in those circles.”
An energy career
Berrien was quickly hired in 1991 by the Allentown company she still calls PP&L. Her job was marketing electric technologies to commercial customers using gas and oil.
Pennsylvania had not yet deregulated the energy market, but Berrien says PPL approached customer service as if competition was stiff. She took away a key lesson from her years there: without the customer, you don’t exist.
On the brink of deregulation, other regional energy companies such as PECO Energy were concerned they would lose customers to PPL because of its reputation for customer service and satisfaction. PECO hired Berrien away to join a team tasked with changing the company’s image.
A few years later, a former boss at PPL recruited her to ConEdison Solutions to help the New York-based utility company make the transition into newly deregulated markets as well.
Gail Workman, then ConEd’s director of sales, thought Berrien was right for the job because her engineering know-how and communication skills allow her to gain the trust of customers.
“It was like building a brand new company,” said Workman, now senior vice president of hydrocarbon exports for Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners. “But I knew she had the ability and desire to take on new challenges, and I knew she wasn’t afraid of anything.”
Berrien later earned an executive MBA from St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia 1999 and got “startup fever” working for EnerNoc Inc., an energy intelligence software company. She attended the NASDAQ market bell ceremony when EnerNOC went public in 2007.
Giving back
Berrien is perhaps most proud of her philanthropy. In 1995, just a few years out of college, she launched Students Together Striving For Excellence, or STRIVE Inc.
The nonprofit has provided support and more than $50,000 in scholarship money to at-risk high school students primarily in the Allentown and Bethlehem Area school districts. In 2013, she launched COI Ladder Institute, which focuses on on developing and empowering women and millennials.
In addition, Berrien helped create the Karl H. Lewis Engineering Impact Alumni Endowed Fund for black students at Pitt, named for the professor who mentored her during her college years.
Berrien is also on Valley Youth House’s Board of Directors. Lesley Fallon, Valley Youth House board chairwoman and also a member of COI’s advisory board, said Berrien returns to the Lehigh Valley for most meetings and goes out of her way to help the children.
At a meeting, Fallon recalled, a teenage mom in attendance began lamenting the obstacles to getting her life on track. Berrien cut her off.
“She said, ‘That’s B.S. If I can do it, you can do it,'” Fallon said. “SaLisa’s living proof that you can grow beyond your circumstances… she’s extremely nice and good-hearted, but she also doesn’t take crap from anybody.
That’s the way she is with the girls, and that’s the way she is in business.”
Moving forward, Berrien and COI Energy are studying customer behavior patterns so its platform can develop more predictive analytics and nudge customers to engage with their utility.
The key to success, she said, is listening when customers say what they want — not simply innovating for the sake of innovating.
“At the end of day, our customers want to be delighted,” she said. “If we are able to anticipate what they want, and we’re able to make things simple for them, that’s where the delight happens.”
BIO BOX: SaLisa Berrien
–Bethlehem native
–1987 William Allen High School graduate
–PPL engineer 1991-1995
–CEO of COI Energy Services, based in Tampa, Fla.
–Member of Valley Youth House Board of Directors
–Founder of STRIVE Inc. youth organization
