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Local Voices

New Energy Services Company, "A Breath of Fresh Air" at Norwalk, CT location

Norwalk, CT – Abest Power & Gas, a newly formed energy services company, opens their Connecticut office at 50 Washington St, Norwalk with a dynamic and improved service model for customers.

“Thanks to our partnership with Corporate Resource Services (Stock Symbol: CRRS), a diversified staffing, recruiting and consulting services firm, we can offer customers a complete smart product in a market that has been pretty battered by a lot of misrepresentation,” says Trevor Herbest, Abest COO.

Herbest, an energy sector veteran, long recognized that customers were not being adequately serviced in the newly deregulated energy markets, due to a lack of financing, infrastructure and resources among many start-ups.  So he was excited to meet Frank Rosa, another energy sector veteran, who was starting a new venture, Abest Power & Gas, in partnership with CRRS.

“It was like a breath of fresh air,” says Herbest.  “Frank’s partnership with CRRS means that Abest inherits all the infrastructure and resources of a growing, financially sound firm with a national footprint, and all the resources of a publicly traded company.  It means Abest can operate ‘lean’ which is imperative to offer consumers a competitive smart product.“

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Herbest, like Rosa, brings years of industry experience to the job.  He was one of the first to offer lower priced electricity in the state of Connecticut back when less than 5% of the state was using a competitive supplier.   As EVP and COO at Public Power & Utility, one of the largest licensed electricity suppliers in CT from 2007 through 2011, Herbest helped expand that company to over 3 ISO’s, over six states and more than a dozen utilities, while serving 200,000 customers.

“Abest’s combined experience, as well as CRRS’s financial security, accelerates our ability to secure financing to completely hedge our consumers’ energy,” he says.  “This is what really separates us from competitors, who have to secure financing through growth and expensive money which is then passed down to the consumer.”

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Connecticut deregulated its wholesale electricity market in 1998.  As of 2011 fourteen states, including Connecticut, currently permit all or most retail electric company customers to choose their electric supplier.  In Connecticut, 41.8% of all customers have chosen competitive suppliers, among the highest in the country, and these customers account for more than two-thirds of the electricity sold in the state. Only Texas has a higher migration rate.  

“One of the key aspects to our success is that we have worked backwards,” says Herbest.  “We put in over 6 months of diligence, instead of going out and enrolling a bunch of customers with no clear management plan, and then reacting.  We aligned ourselves with the proper platforms in customer service, and proprietary software that allows us to be extremely accurate in forecasting our consumers’ energy portfolio.  We also provide a fair compensation structure and communication tools to assist our representatives in promoting our products to create longevity with our consumers and product representatives.”

Abest Power & Gas offers consumers industry experience, superior customer service, the personal touch (direct access to the president and executive team) and the financial strength as a subsidiary of CRRS, who operates 231 offices across 42 states and expects close to a billion dollars in revenue for 2013.

“Even though we are a subsidiary of CRRS headquartered in Manhattan, we chose to set up operations in Norwalk in order to come back to Connecticut and help finish what we started here.”

For more information visit www.abestpower.com or call 1.888.98.POWER (888-987-6937)

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