John Campion is not too comfortable in a suit. The co-founder and CEO of APR Energy, a $1.2 billion company that provides temporary power in areas recovering from disaster or experiencing electricity shortfalls, didn’t finish high school and never went to college. He was held back twice in grade school, an experience that was both frustrating and humiliating. “You’ll never amount to much,” one teacher told him.  But Campion is motivated to show the naysayers that they were wrong. Preferably by flying over their houses in one of his private jets and pointing his middle finger upward.  In spite—or perhaps because—of his learning challenges, he was always resourceful and creative, an out-of-the-box thinker and tinkerer, with a knack for electricity. His first break was a job as a lighting guy for ShowLites, which provided power for rock shows.  John Campion. Photo courtesy of APR Energy.  In 1987 Campion created Showpower with fellow roadie Laurence Anderson to provide temporary power to rock shows. Their first major client was Michael Jackson, whose power requirements for the Bad tour exceeded the capacity of most local venues. In 1999 they sold Showpower to GE Energy Rentals. A few years later the pair moved to Alstom, where they created a temporary power rental service, Alstom Power Rentals. In 2004 they bought the business from Alstom and eventually turned it into APR Energy. Last year APR reported $308.3 million in revenues.  “The real joy in life,” says Campion, flashing me a Jack Nicholson smile, “is that the pop stars I used to work for are now renting out my airplane.”  Coming from rock n’ roll touring gave Campion and Anderson a unique advantage when it came to building and growing their energy company. In rock n’ roll, you take a show from one part of the world to another in a matter of hours, moving thousands of tons of equipment and hundreds of people. “Say you do a show in Miami on Sunday and you’re doing another stadium show in Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday,” says Campion. “The rock star will walk on that stage at 8 o’clock in Rio de Janeiro. And the exact same light will hit him in the exact same place. That’s the equivalent of taking a dart and throwing it out of an airplane and hitting a dartboard somewhere below, bull’s eye. It’s that difficult. And you’re doing it with a hundred percent repeatability.”  Like a rock show, APR comes in with their equipment and sets up a temporary power plant on short notice. In 2012, APR set up operation of a 120-megawatt power plant in Cyprus—enough to power about 120,000 American homes—in less than 30 days. Last year in Libya, they built a 450-megawatt plant. Normally, a permanent plant that size would take four to five years to build and to operate. APR did it in 120 days. A plant in Myanmar will soon provide electricity to six million people.  At their Jacksonville, Florida headquarters, monitors around the open office space count down to “showtime,” which in APR’s case is when the power switch is turned on. When I visited their office, one of the projects showed as being thirty-two days, nine hours, forty minutes and 49 seconds away from COD, or Commercial Operation Date.  The monitors reinforce the sense of urgency that pervades the organization. APR’s contracts stipulate a late fee if APR misses their delivery deadline, just as rock bands receive a fine if their shows goes on after the pre-determined curfew. That contractual clause makes clear that the power—like the proverbial show—must go on. “We’re not afraid of strange locations, we’re not afraid of what’s going to be there when we get there or what’s not going to be there. We just go and do it,” says Campion.  APR relies on another core competence of rock shows: modularity. When they built Showpower, Campion and Anderson designed their equipment with transportability in mind. Their generators, designed by Campion’s brother Edmund, were built so that two could fit into a 20-foot air-freight container for Michael Jackson’s Bad tour. “To construct and destruct in a very fast rhythm and move it on a repetitive basis and have the quality of performance there each and every time, day-over-day, week-over-week, year-over-year became ingrained in us,” says Laurence Anderson, now APR’s President and Chief Operating Officer.  When they created APR, they applied the same philosophy to temporary energy. “What we were able to do is take a large power plant and break it down into smaller components,” Anderson tells me. If a client needs a large power plant, APR will configure it from ten or more of these blocks. For a medium-sized plant, they might use five. “We can arrange them in almost any way that we need to, thereby staying with the standard we’ve created, yet be flexible enough to meet the customer’s needs using the space that they have available.”  They refer to it as the Lego concept. “In the rock ‘n’ roll industry,” says Campion, “the mandate would be: it’s a 10-truck tour. So everything is built and designed to fit into 10 trucks.” An advantage of the Lego concept is that when you’re done packing, you know immediately if you’ve left something behind because of a hole in the truck.  Another debt to rock n’ roll touring culture is preoccupation with failure, a concept that is familiar to other kinds of high-reliability organizations, such as aircraft carriers and nuclear power plants. Road people obsess about what could go wrong, as does APR. After all, if they’re doing an installation deep in the Sahara dessert, they can’t go to Home Depot to pick up missing supplies.  “Our experience of assessing our risk in every aspect of what we’re doing as we’re building something, as we’re shipping something, as we’re buying something, and how do we prepare for an unlikely event that may happen,” says Anderson, “That came from our past where you have an 8:00 o’clock performance and you’ve got to have a plan B, C, D, E and F. Because the show is happening at 8:00.”  When none of those contingency plans apply, roadies improvise. They think on their feet. That’s a mindset Anderson and Campion have instilled in the APR culture as well. “You have a mind that you’ve developed towards change and openness and that fluid environment of ‘Something is going to mess you up and you don’t know what it is,’” says Anderson.  Campion likes to tell the story of one of his mentors, the late Joe Baptista, a veteran stage manager. “Joe Bap was very cool. A carton of Pall Malls—not filtered—a bottle of Ballantine Whiskey and he’s set. Joe Bap would say, ‘How are you doing?’ and I’d say, ‘I’m having problems.’ ‘Can you solve them with money and manpower?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Then you don’t have any problems.’” In rock n’ roll, people don’t fret about problems—they focus on solutions.  It doesn’t even have to be their problem.  Angola site before clean up. Photo courtesy of APR Energy  In Angola, APR had a site in the middle of a densely populated community. They noticed that the garbage was piled up on the streets and alleys. So they asked the local officials where the garbage would go if it were picked up. “We’d already rented earth-moving equipment because we were putting together the site,” says Silvio Cavaceppi, VP of marketing and communications. “So we decided to spend a Sunday afternoon and clean up the neighborhood.” They cleared 482 tons of garbage. Problem solved, rock n’ roll style.  Angola site after APR clean up. Photo courtesy of APR Energy  For more about the intersection of rock n’ roll and business hit “follow” on the top of this page.
The founders of APR Energy applied unorthodox methods from the rock n’ roll touring industry to build and grow their company.