Caffeine & Algorithms

My name is Bill Ward, and I’m fascinated and inspired by blue ocean business opportunities. Like the blacker soil, greener grass and trees, and the bluer skies we get by transitioning away from conventional agriculture to regenerative agriculture. As well as every other nature-based climate solution business opportunity, where we’re creating new markets, and/or developing game changing science, products and services that can convert old linear economy problems into sustainable circular economy solutions.

I enjoy creating new companies and new markets. I love the Wild Wild West Show of disruption and the ensuing chaos that must then be returned to a more stable order by the new sustainable sheriff in town. All of that and more translates into me being pretty dadgum good at building businesses that can do things that have never been done before. Here are a couple of examples.

Mr. Coffee Concepts (1994-1999 Charlotte, NC) was a startup created by Mr. Coffee, an appliance manufacturer in Cleveland, Ohio, and S&D Coffee, a coffee roaster in Charlotte, NC. My dear friend and mentor, Rox Bailey was the CEO, and my title was Director of New Programs, Products and Markets. Basically, everything with a learning curve landed on my desk, like creating the first Mr. Coffee branded website way back in 1994.

We pioneered the sale of coffee and coffeemakers for hotel rooms. We were also the first company to sell coffee and coffeemakers through the rapidly consolidating office products channel of the 1990s: OfficeMax, Office Depot and Staples. Over a five-year period, we grew that young company from zero to $22M a year in sales with a good percentage of that being recurring revenue.

BuildFax (1999-2019 Asheville, NC & Austin, TX): This company was founded by me and three other co-founders. I was the Chairman (1999-2019) and the CEO (1999-2012). We started out making software for city and county building departments called BluePrince.

With BluePrince, contractors could apply for building permits online. Building inspectors could input inspection results from the field in real time via their laptops and contractors could get those inspection results in real time on their cell phones. The goal was to create a 21st century building department.

One of our innovations was that a BluePrince customer of ours, York County, SC (across the state line from Charlotte, NC), was the first building department in the United States to let contractors pay for building permits online using PayPal.

We soon realized that we’d generate more revenue by focusing on the building department data: city and county building permits and inspections as well as contractor and subcontractor data for new construction and remodeling, as it related to both residential and commercial structures.

Even if the city and county building departments had to give us the data via FOIA open records requests, they didn’t have to be quick or reasonable about it. Early on it seemed like every building department had different ways of entering and storing their data so it was extremely difficult to standardize and productize.

A few years and several million dollars later we did figure it out and began selling our construction data to insurers, lenders, realtors, home inspectors, forensic engineers, property attorneys, home buyers and sellers, property investors, home improvement retailers, hedge funds, and others. Lots of folks called our BuildFax Report, the CarFax Report for real estate.

We sold the BluePrince business in 2013 and changed our corporate name to BuildFax, which was acquired in October of 2019 by Verisk, a major B2B player in the insurance space, and one of our longtime customers. I worked for Verisk from October 2019 to August 2021, helping to enhance their competitive intelligence capabilities. Verisk is a publicly traded company that generated revenues of $2.82B in 2024.

When I stepped away from Verisk and evaluated the business landscape, it seemed to me that the greatest existential threats that humanity faced, as well as the most intriguing business opportunities, were those related to the climate crisis. I believe that the Green Revolution, decarbonizing the economy and reversing the effects of global warming, will be the biggest economic opportunity of this century.

Unlocking the Value of Nature

Nature’s economy provides more value annually than the entire financial economy today and is potentially worth 5-10 times more in asset value.

The good news is that there are viable nature-based climate solutions currently available and being developed. We just need to create catalysts and accelerators so we can get to speed & scale sooner.