Seahorse Power Company
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Jim Poss who owns Seahorse Power Company (SPC) realized at a young age that he wanted to help the environment, which led him to obtaining a duel degree in environmental science and policy, and geology with a minor in engineering. Shortly after graduating he began to work for Solectria as a sales engineer. Solectria was based in Massachussets and helped manufacture sustainable vehicles. After trying to bring his business plans and new ideas to his manager at Solectria, and being shut down numerous times he decided it was time to move on and head back to school to obtain an MBA. While attending school he decided to send out a proposal to a company known as Spire Corporation, which consisted of his idea of a solar-powered trash compactor, and got a job writing business plans for Spire. After consistently trying to bring up his proposal and getting told no he decided to venture else where, and partnered up with an engineering student, Jeff Satwicz. Who helped him begin Seahorse Power Company, and realized that the only way to get into the sustainable energy business would be to focus on wind energy. He then figured out a way to collect wind and its data by using buoys that could be moved to different areas to get a holistic amount of data. Unfortunately, this would cost a great deal and there was too much risk for investors to be interested.
Poss then partnered with Alexander Perera a first-year MBA student to start coming up with a business plan for trash compactors. After gaining his initial investment from savings and his parents he began to work on getting funding for a patent. They managed to acquire cheap garbage compactors, and sell their first solar powered garbage compactor prototype to a ski resort in Vail, Colorado for $6000 even though it cost $10,000 to produce. After getting the machine running in Colorado it ended up working, and they made the necessary changes before getting ready to produce 20 more of these machines. They managed to come up with a business plan that could cut costs down so they could sell these machines at $2500 a piece, however they were still very short on funding. While looking for investors, and trying to get their pending patents approved they began working on another project that was a smaller compaction dumpster known as the SunPack Hippo.
Although Seahorse Power Company has been able to bring down their costs to sell each compactor at $2500 a piece, and sold almost half of their 20 compactors that they plan on producing. They still have yet to find the funding, have not even begun production, and still have a pending patent. They have made a small amount of the cash they need by winning business plan competitions and proposing the DAQ Buoy to keep investors interested, but they have yet to settle a deal with any investors. Many have proposed offers, and they are still very strict on what they will agree upon when going into business. In the end of the case it said that SPC