#1 Elektrik

This year, over 29 gigawatts of solar are being installed in the United States. Elektrik has provided materials for 4.5 of those gigawatts. 

   In 2022, President Joe Biden passed the Inflation Reduction Act bill, allocating $350 billion to transform 20 percent of energy production to solar and wind. That created the perfect opportunity for Elektrik.

   Elektrik, based in Orem, is a marketplace for electrical parts that help build utility-scale solar farms, battery storage, wind farms and data centers. Where builders have often researched for weeks to find the right parts, Elektrik makes it almost as easy as “add to cart.” 

   Now, Mario Dealba and his team are hitting seven figures in sales. Buying electrical equipment has never been so energy efficient.

After receiving my MBA, I took a technical sales job in the electrical industry. People would send 20 emails to simply figure out one part number or price. This seemed inefficient. I had friends doing startups, so I thought, “Maybe I could start a company doing something like Amazon for this antiquated electric industry.”

When people read articles like this one for BusinessQ, it makes people believe anything’s possible, but sometimes they forget to tell you how hard it is — and it’s freaking hard. You have to be willing to do your “5 to 1.” You finish work at 5 p.m., and you have to be willing to sit in your basement to code until 1 a.m. on many days.

I got lucky and was accepted into a Techstars chapter (a three-month startup accelerator). Then, in 2021, six months after we really started, we got a pre-seed injection of $1 million from Album VC. Also, some of our key team members started to join. The first hire was somebody with a similar skill set to mine who knew the industry super well. Tim Tyrrell became my partner and our COO. 

Mitchell Caffey came in as our chief estimator about six months after Tim. He came to help us speed up the process in quoting things. Now, instead of people having to do estimations and send us a bill of materials (shopping cart), they could send us the schematics and Mitchell would build their bill of materials. It gave us such an edge against all of our competition. 

Suddenly, things got difficult. My co-founder had left, and nobody was giving us any money for a seed series. It was nuts. Matt Weir joined us in early 2022 as director of operations and brought order to a fast-moving operation.

We focused on sales and finished the year with about an 800 percent growth in gross revenue. Moving forward, 2023 has been nothing short of amazing. 

Isaac Duarte, our lead engineer, joined the company and completely revamped our technical efforts in helping us rebuild our website. He’s bridging the gap between demand and supply.

Up to now, we have done around $7 million in sales and expect to double it by the end of the year. We are now providing the materials for one of the biggest solar farms west of the Mississippi, and it’s here in Utah.

Last year, John Mayfield with Album VC said to me in a board meeting, “Mario, don’t build a company for the VCs. Build it for your customer — just deliver what they want.” I think that took the shackles off and helped us pick up momentum. 

We stopped worrying about the website getting hits. Rather, if a customer reached out to us, we started saying, “Let’s travel to him. Let’s take him out to dinner. Let’s really sell.” Rather than building, we focused on selling — it was a concerted effort — and that’s what changed the trajectory. 

Our country needs to diversify the way it generates power; it needs to protect the way it distributes power. You cannot build an electrical grid or modernize it fast unless you have a fast supply chain of products: cables, cable connections, transformers, etc. You need a very agile marketplace. 

Something like Elektrik needed to come along, and it did. We are the marketplace where people can find supplies to build the electrical grid. We are powering the industry.