Utilities across the US Rely on Columbus-Based Company to Help Keep the Lights On

Utility companies in 23 states rely on a solution developed here in Central Ohio to find and repair power outages efficiently and quickly.  Mitch McLeod established ARCOS Inc. in 1993 as a custom software company.  Four years later, Alliant Energy approached him about building an application to help manage the crews called out to repair lines during power outages. Two years after that, two more utility companies came to ARCOS and asked for what Alliant Energy had.

Unprepared to market the product full-force, McLeod went to the Ohio Foundation for Entrepreneurial Education and rewrote his business plan.  Market research conducted as part of his plan revealed that most utility companies were using manual call-out processes using notebooks and spreadsheets, or home-grown systems to manage their crews and response teams.

McLeod set out to develop a SaaS solution – the ARCOS Crew Callout – to automate the process for identifying available line crews, to contact utility workers at home and to allow them to electronically report into work.

Company revenues have been growing at about 20 percent a year during the past two years, and McLeod is projecting 30 percent growth in 2010. At the same time, the company has nearly doubled headcount in the last year, with 18 employees now as compared to 10 in January 2009.

For more on this Central Ohio innovation success story, see the current issue of hiVelocity