6 minute read
Going Solo: Improve Your Energy Efficiency
TECHNOLOGY TOGETHER, SOLO CAN IMPROVE YOUR EFFICIENCY
BY EVELYN LASLUISA
Solo is a company of professionals dedicated to help businesses move toward a sustainable future through energy-efficient upgrades. Consisting of a network of seasoned energy experts, Solo is equipped to help you transform the way you use energy through a myriad of services, including turnkey lighting upgrades, solar and energy storage, and electric vehicle charging, to name a few.
Our goal is to facilitate the implementation of these upgrades while informing you about their benefits. It is especially crucial now to rethink our approach to energy, and it can all start by scheduling your first energy audit.
After you schedule an energy audit with us, one of our engineers will evaluate your business and propose energy-saving changes. If you already have desired changes in mind, we’d love to hear them.
It is our priority to ensure your satisfaction while guiding you through this process. This means we will oversee the design and implementation of your project. Even after its completion, we offer training on the new technologies and post-installation support.
Having been present in the energy field for years, we boast a network of trusted providers and partners who are key in allowing for quality products and saving opportunities.
Our expertise in navigating incentive programs further controls costs and increases savings. All these things combined help us achieve our goal to reduce operational costs and on-site maintenance burdens.
For the last four years, we have partnered with ConEdison as part of their Neighborhood Program, which is designed to help residents and business owners in select neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens reduce their energy usage and save on their electric bills through lighting and HVAC upgrades.
More than 8,800 local businesses are already participating and taking advantage of incentivized energy upgrades.
Decreasing energy consumption in these areas that are seeing vast increases in electric demand is vital to keep electricity services for everyone reliable. As a participating contractor, Solo has been able to make no-cost upgrades in more than 1,200 buildings, saving each building thousands of dollars in electric costs year after year.
By scheduling an energy audit, you may discover that your building qualifies for a 100 percent subsidized lighting upgrade.
As the Queens representative at Solo, I oversee lighting upgrades under the Neighborhood Program for small and medium businesses. Any business that currently has incandescent or fluorescent bulbs and is within the select region qualifies to receive an incentivized upgrade to LED lights.
Switching to LED lights will lower your energy cost, reduce maintenance time, and provide better quality light. Upgrading to brighter LED lights can also improve your mood and provide safety and security by maintaining well-lit areas in your business.
The benefits are not only limited to your finances and safety, but the planet as well. A slight environmentally conscious change in the grand scheme of things can seem insignificant, but it has the power to lead to bigger changes.
This is the direction we need to be moving to ensure a hospitable and thriving world for all of us and we want to team up with you in this effort.
Evelyn Lasluisa is an Energy Efficiency Representative with Solo.
HELPING NEW BUSINESS DURING PANDEMIC
BY BILL SWEET
In unusual times, help can come from unexpected quarters.
As more and more diners gobbled up Yumpling’s Taiwanese-style fried chicken and dumplings from a food truck in Midtown Manhattan, the eatery’s Queens-based owner Howie Jeon decided to make the leap and expand his fleet.
He originally envisioned a centralized kitchen with about a dozen employees, targeting a spring 2020 opening. But as with many business plans last year, the pandemic threw a wrench in that.
“COVID hit, and that turned everything upside down,” he said.
That might have been the end of the story, but for help from an unexpected source which allowed Jeon to switch gears and open Yumpling as a sit-down restaurant with curbside service in August 2020.
The unexpected source? A nointerest loan from the Hebrew Free Loan Society (HFLS), a longtime nonprofit lender serving lowerincome New Yorkers. When he first heard about HFLS’s interest-free loans, Jeon’s reaction was a common one: Are you sure, because I’m not Jewish?
It’s a refrain familiar to Shlomo Haft, director of Microenterprise for HFLS. He says he routinely has to mimic the old viral ad for Levy’s Jewish Rye and remind people, “you don’t have to be Jewish.”
Since its founding in 1892, HFLS has disseminated $350 million in zero-interest, no-fee loans to nearly one million borrowers. Despite the society’s name, tied to the group’s origins in the Jewish community and values rooted in Biblical injunctions against lending at interest, HFLS is a wholly nonsectarian lender.
Since revamping its small business loans program in 2005, HFLS has disbursed more than $16 million in interest-free financing to over 500 entrepreneurs, including 80 loans totaling $2 million in Queens.
Since March 2020, when coronavirus crippled the city, HFLS has disbursed over 100 loans totaling over $3 million to small businesses in the five boroughs and surrounding counties, including $450,000 to 20 Queens small business entrepreneurs.
Pandemic support in Queens has included loans to help out a graphic designer, children’s daycare provider, nail salon, barbershop, and laundromat. The $50,000 loan from the HFLS was the only outside money Yumpling took for their build-out costs, which amounted to several thousand dollars more than he expected.
For Andrei Danetiu, owner of Lidia’s Play Cafe in Ridgewood, an HFLS loan allowed him to keep necessities like rent, electricity, and insurance covered during the shutdown so he could avoid getting slammed with expenses, even as the business re-opened at reduced capacity in the summer.
“They’ve helped me during a period when I needed help, and I couldn’t get help from anybody else,” Danetiu said.
Longtime residents of Ridgewood, Danetiu and his wife opted to ditch their office careers as a business analyst and office manager to establish a neighborhood cafe catering to parents of small children. They opened in 2019.
“When we had our daughter Lidia, we began to view things through a lens that only parents with small children could understand,” he said. They needed a pleasant, child-friendly space that offered diversion for the littles and room for parents to relax and enjoy a cup of coffee.
“We envisioned a Montessoriinspired play space and a cafe with an all-natural menu,” he added. “We wanted to distinguish ourselves.”
While damage wrought by the pandemic and the associated shutdowns continue to ripple throughout the economy, Danetiu noted that the forced pause might have provided an opportunity for some.
“You never have time to think about what you’re doing if you’re working all the time,” he said. “I think there are a lot of individuals who are starting businesses and following their dreams because they’ve had time to research.”
Having been involved with a number of these loans over the years, Haft said successful entrepreneurs usually share some factors in common.
He recommends that before starting a business, an entrepreneur work in a related business or industry. Second, having an alternate source of income, whether through a part-time job or a partner or spouse with an unrelated job, puts you at an advantage.
“You can invest all the profits into expanding the business, and won’t need to drain the business of capital during its start-up stage,” Haft said.
