If Mike Gordon had thought about the ideal time to launch a company, he might never have started ConsumerPowerline.

The entrepreneur, 50, formed the New York energy management company seven years ago just as the high-tech industry was hitting the skids and clean technology was not yet in vogue.

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Today Gordon, who is also ConsumerPowerline's CEO, is very much in the right place at the right time as U.S. companies get serious about using technology to conserve energy, save costs and do their bit to protect the environment. The New York company offers corporate customers an incentive-based system for reducing their power consumption during peak demand times.

But in 2000, getting the startup off the ground was the least of Gordon's problems. He had no income, his family of four was living in Philadelphia in a one-bedroom apartment, and he had racked up $200,000 in credit card debt trying to launch the company. Even more troubling: Gordon's infant son needed open-heart surgery, and the medical bills were massive.

Against such odds, starting a new company amounted to the most distant of long shots, says Gordon, who studied liberal arts at the Binghamton University, State University of New York. (He later earned a masters in Public Administration from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and an M.B.A. from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.) "I might have taken a regular job if I had been lucky enough to be offered one," he recalled recently from ConsumerPowerline's headquarters in lower Manhattan.

Instead, Gordon fought his health insurer to pay the more than $100,000 for his son's surgery and persuaded his wife to continue bankrolling the company project on their credit cards.

"Every entrepreneur is going to go through a time when it seems that people just don't get it," he says today.

Gordon didn't deliberately choose to base ConsumerPowerline in New York. Rather, having lived his whole life in the area, he saw no reason to move elsewhere, especially since the city's overburdened power grid offered the ideal environment for the company to prove the value of its services. He dismisses some of the usual gripes about operating a technology company in New York, where banks and other financial institutions monopolize engineering talent. "I am not the kind of person who will go to networking events three nights a week, family be damned," says Gordon, whose hobbies include coaching his children's soccer teams and singing with a vocal group that raises money for environmental causes. "I believe that if you've got a really unique business idea, doing something that is quite valuable, it doesn't need to take over 100% of your life."

ConsumerPowerline's value comes in helping companies audit their energy usage and diagnosing ways to cut consumption. The company uses proprietary software to forecast an enterprise's future energy demand and potential savings from making basic operational changes, such as closing down a few elevator banks or switching from daytime lighting to maintenance lighting.

The process starts with ConsumerPowerline engineers reviewing a new customer's facilities. The team then proposes a plan for conserving energy during periods of peak usage, such as a hot summer day in New York.

ConsumerPowerline then auctions on behalf of its customers any megawatts of electricity it saves back to local utilities, with energy companies bidding for it as long as six months before the power is due to be used. ConsumerPowerline charges no up-front fees for its services, instead generating revenue from selling energy and sharing the money, typically under a 50-50 split, with customers.

The company has a diverse roster of more than 500 customers, including Douglas Elliman Property Management, Equity Office Properties Trust, Forest City Ratner Cos., Macy's Inc., Morgan Stanley, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Sears Holdings Corp. the Massachusetts state government and Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. The privately held concern, which has 35 employees, generates cash and produces annual revenue of $10 million to $20 million. Indeed, ConsumerPowerline has been profitable for most of its history, Gordon says.

Over the years Gordon has financed ConsumerPowerline himself and with some modest angel funding, subsisting on well under $1 million. That changed in September, when the company raised its first institutional round, landing $17 million in Series A funding from Expansion Capital Partners LLC of San Francisco and Bessemer Venture Partners of Wellesley Hills, Mass.

Gordon prefers to say that ConsumerPowerline "accepted" the venture capital, since it had previously rejected a number of funding offers. This time, the company decided to raise money to capitalize on an opportunity today in the energy industry that Gordon describes as both "enormous and time-sensitive."

"ConsumerPowerline is doing some of the hardest work, integrating deeply with customers to help them control power demand," says Justin Label, the lead Bessemer partner on the venture deal, who confirms that Bessemer approached Gordon. "Mike is an extraordinary entrepreneur in his very detailed knowledge, his very creative mind and his ability to build a company of this size with an extremely low amount of invested capital."

Despite the vote of confidence, the competitive landscape has bloomed in recent years. Regional rivals for ConsumerPowerline include Comverge Inc. of East Hanover, N.J., GridPoint Inc. of Washington and EnerNoc Inc., a Boston company that went public in May.

Gordon says ConsumerPowerline's edge is that it makes saving energy a business rather than a cause. His focus is less on environmental concerns than on issues such as how the electricity grid works, why blackouts occur and how financial incentives can spur corporations and other power customers to voluntarily reduce usage. "Years ago, most of the people we were engaging with were asking me, "What the heck are you talking about?" Now the assumption is, "This is a company that has it all together," even though the business is developing in ways that they don't understand."

Gordon, who maintains that instinct is more important in starting a business than pure technical expertise, is himself part visionary, part nuts-and-bolts guy. He has another quality unusual among the type A personalities that drive many entrepreneurs: humility.

In working to build ConsumerPowerline, Gordon says he made a conscious decision to acknowledge that there were parts of the business that he didn't understand. Instead of beating himself up over the company's early struggles, he focused instead on its strengths.

If many entrepreneurs rank the day a business earned its first dollar or raised its first venture round as key milestones, Gordon is nostalgic about Valentine's Day of 2001, but for altogether different reasons. Under mounting financial and personal pressure, he spent the day writing letters of gratitude to several close friends and family members expressing his appreciation for all their support. "I had family members telling me that perhaps I was a genius, but perhaps I was insane," he recalls. "I had to decide whether I would walk away embittered with a dream deferred or take the time to appreciate everything around me."

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