Alan Hope

Alan Hope was the first employee at Powers of Arkansas, which was formed in 1985. Twenty years later, Hope was president, CEO and owner of the company, but it wasn’t a simple path from field engineer to the top spot.
Hope was always interested in a career in energy efficiency. He was inspired by his father, a civil engineer who spent time working on ways to make cars run more efficiently.
In 1984, Hope graduated with an industrial engineering degree from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He took a position with MCC Powers in Little Rock. A year later, that company was sold and became Powers of Arkansas.
From 1985 to 1997, he worked his way up from field engineer to vice president of the company. He wanted to buy Powers of Arkansas, but the owner wasn’t interested in selling, so Hope took a position with TME Inc. of Little Rock, where he went from president of TME’s Energy Services Division to being CFO by 2005.
During that time, several employees from Powers approached Hope, asking him to return to the company. Hope eventually did buy the company in 2005, but by that point, there were problems.
“Powers was in a decline,” Hope said. “The previous owner was getting up in age, and they were really struggling financially and in keeping customers happy, making money and doing the things you have to do to stay in business.”
Hope hired back some Powers employees who had left, including Rick Lewis, vice president of service. The leadership team “took the company apart and then put it back together in a sound financial manner of doing business with the single purpose of making our customers happy and making sure they’re taken care of well,” Hope said.
“The first year I had it in 2005, I went to all the customers, sat down and listened to their stories of why we weren’t very good and made some promises that we would get better, and we were able to do that,” Hope said.

Previous Honorees