Innovation

Goby, Inc is a company that has the capability to change the way a company handles real estate energy usage. Traditionally, a company may not be fully aware of how much energy they are using, the types of energy they are using, and how they can make their energy usage more sustainable. These companies were also not capable of knowing the day to day usage of their energy sources. To disrupt the norm, Goby, Inc created an online platform where they report energy and sustainability metrics to a company in real time. The company is capable of tracking the day to day expenses that come as a result of inefficient energy usage and waste.

Inspiration

The inspiration behind Goby, Inc was to create a company that provided businesses a way to engage in sustainable practices when funding for an internal sustainability department is not feasible. The company originally specialized in sustainability consulting, but as time and technology has progressed, Goby, Inc has incorporated new online technology into their services to provide a modern means to giving information behind the energy metrics of a company's real estate assets.

Overall impact

Goby, Inc works with commercial real estate corporations so it has a large bandwidth of businesses it can impact. The company works with millions of real estate property and empowers asset owners and portfolio managers to help their respective businesses decrease their carbon emissions and increase their energy efficiency. Through Goby's technological innovation, they provide these companies sustainability metrics in order to further appeal to their stakeholders, increase the valuation of the company's properties and to provide metrics to the general public showing all the good they are doing for the world and their people.

Brian Trainor, a Data Analyst of Sustainable Reporting at Goby, Inc broke down the different roles within the company. Trainor stated " I do more of the quantitative side of things, mainly focusing on key indicators as well as carbon emissions and energy efficiency calculations." Trainor said the other part of the business equation is "the consultants that take care of the qualitative side of things such as health and well-being as well as providing insight on how to better invest your money."

Goby, Inc is a small company that has a large impact. The company works with one operation buildings for LEED projects, Grebs portfolio level benchmarking systems, carbon disclosure projects, and a variety of sustainability assessments. Through these projects, Goby, Inc can also provide the metrics to help companies get on the Dow Jones sustainability index.

There is a lot of value for businesses to work with Goby, Inc. Through the assistance of Goby, Inc, a company's assets can be valued more in resale. If the company's endeavor becomes a LEED certified project, they will be able to track their energy efficiency projects and show payback rates over time of energy metrics such as waste and water. The value is providing hard metrics that show that the company's overall energy efficiency is increasing, which in turn leads to a higher resale value. Due to the operational turnover of real estate from company to company, this is becoming a more important topic in asset valuation for asset and portfolio managers in these transactions. At the end of the day, the company aims to make their assets more energy efficient so they ultimately make money off of their assets.

Business benefit

Goby provides a company a hands-off approach to coming up with sustainability metrics. Goby collects all the company's bills and paperwork and takes care of reporting all the metrics. Goby is also beneficial to work with because it essentially provides a company a sustainability team. Trainor states that "some companies do not have the budget to create their own sustainability teams internally or they do not have the knowledge base to get the right people in place." Goby' technological innovation also provides the company a visual representation of their sustainability metrics through their online cloud-based platform. Trainor states that "the company can log in anytime so the convenience of having a cloud-based platform can be accessed from anytime and anywhere. Goby also offers an executive level app where the company can see the portfolio in real time and see how their building is performing."

Goby is also a small, nimble company so it is more than capable of adapting to each client's specific needs. Trainor further elaborated by saying "we have a lot of really talented people to do that so that if you have special projects such as one-operations that are unique to you, we have a lot of good product people and data analysts and consultants that can help you out and create something that is special in design for you."
For example, Goby created a benchmarking system for a company that wanted to create their own benchmarking system that defined their own sustainability metrics within their portfolio between one hundred buildings.

Social and environmental benefit

The biggest benefit that Goby, Inc provides is helping a company increase their energy efficiency by reducing costs from utilities. Trainor interestingly said, "When I just started working at this space I learned that people don't really know how much they use or how much they're really spending on it because the real estate industry is pretty disjointed." Goby is providing metrics so that the individuals managing these large portfolios can make better decisions by advising them place efficiency projects in the most cost effective and most environmentally impactful way. For example, a company could own two buildings in different regions of the country. Although these building would use the same amount of energy, the source of the energy could be different which would lead to different amount of the building's carbon impact. Goby, Inc identifies those buildings which use high energy or are energy inefficient and develops way in which each building can reduce their carbon impact by reducing carbon emissions, allowing the company to most effectively direct their investments to making each one of their buildings as energy efficient as possible.

Interview

Brian Trainor, Data Analyst, Sustainability Reporting