#147 Exploring the Future of Facility Management with Ryan Baker
The low-hanging fruit
is gone.
Ryan Baker's first job in the energy business was filing paperwork. Sixteen years later he develops projects for a regional ESCO — and he's candid that the easy savings that used to carry a project aren't there anymore. What fills the gap is the conversation.
#147Exploring the Future of Facility Management with Ryan Baker
Started as an intern doing his duties in the file room. Project manager, lead engineer, sales engineer — and now project development.
Ascendant is a regional ESCO focused on K-12 and local government in and around Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois.
Born out of the BFW/Marcum family of companies, Ascendant inherited relationships three decades deep. "They're a 30-year-old client."
Getting seven kids healthy and happy to adulthood is, in Ryan's words, the crescendo on his legacy. The work comes second.
From the file room to the front of the room.
Ryan's route through the ESCO business ran through crawl spaces, a Navy contract on the Florida Panhandle, and a lot of Monday-morning flights. Click any stop on the timeline.
Evansville A meat-and-potatoes town in southern Indiana +
Age 16 Crawl spaces and attics for the family HVAC business +
College Engineering at USI, and an internship in a file room +
~5 yrs The Florida Panhandle, and trial by fire on federal projects +
Home Back to Evansville as a Monday-through-Friday plane guy +
16 yrs PM, lead engineer, sales engineer — federal to K-12 to cogen +
2026 Ascendant Facility Partners — a regional ESCO, engineering first +
We can't fix everything — but here's your top five, and we're going to take care of three of them.Ryan Baker · on what an honest ESCO conversation sounds like now
"Everybody loves the term in our industry. It's not there anymore. You gotta dig."
Ten years ago an LED retrofit could carry the whole project. Now it's lighting controls, exterior lighting that adds load while the ESCO still has to claim savings, and a design-build lever to pull when the efficiency math alone doesn't get there. A lot of dominoes, Ryan says, moved around to create one solution.
Four conversations Ryan is having right now.
With superintendents, with city councils, with the young engineers in his office, and with an accountant who asked him a question he couldn't answer. Tap any tab to switch.
Are we putting new HVAC on a building they plan to shutter in five years?
Ryan's customers keep telling him Ascendant is "a refreshing conversation," and he's careful about what that does and doesn't mean. They aren't reinventing the wheel. What's different is the starting point: an engineering focus, and solutions that build onto the district's or the city's five-, ten-, and fifteen-year plan.
He raises his hand as guilty of the alternative — the one-off project that looks good on paper on the ESCO side but may not be the best move for a school system that is, or isn't, growing. Thirty years of history from the BFW/Marcum family means Ascendant often knows where a client has been and where they're trying to go before the first meeting.
What makes it refreshing
- Solutions that fit the facility plan, not just the payback
- Honest scoping: "that's not in our wheelhouse — do this instead"
- Inheriting 30-year relationships as year-one clients
- Underpromise, overdeliver — and get the paperwork right
What he's guilty of himself
- One-off projects that pencil but don't fit a 10-year plan
- Playing the numbers game instead of the solutions game
- Treating the ESCO as a panacea — "we're not gonna fix everything"
- Selling equipment onto buildings with a short remaining life
The low-hanging fruit is gone. You gotta dig.
Energy performance contracts looked different fifteen years ago, and Ryan is blunt about why: there's less low-hanging fruit. It's not a surface-level LED solution anymore. It's lighting controls. It's a customer who wants to add lighting to a dim parking lot — new load — while the ESCO still has to claim energy savings on the project.
So the work has become a lot of dominoes moved around to create one solution, with a construction and design-build side as another lever to pull. Having a couple of arrows in the quiver is what lets him sit in a workshop with a city council and say "yes, we can handle that" — or "that's not us, here's what we think you should do."
What fills the gap now
- Lighting controls, not just fixtures
- Design-build and renovation as part of the same package
- Stacking measures so the strong ones carry the weak ones
- Saying which of the top five problems you'll actually fix
What no longer works
- Letting an LED retrofit subsidize everything else
- Ignoring that customers are adding load, not just cutting it
- Selling energy efficiency as the only tool in the box
- Promising the whole list when three is the honest number
"What four steps do I take to become a senior project manager?"
Jim asked Ryan to compare what he wanted at 22 to what the early-career people in his office want now. Salary is still great, PTO is still great — but two things have moved up the list. The first is flexibility, a loose term that covers remote work, hybrid, and the trend back to the office. Ryan has been a remote guy his whole career and still admits mentorship is hard to absorb from a distance.
The second is a clearly defined career path — and defined means specific. What are the four steps to senior PM? To senior performance engineer? Is there a four-year plan, and where's the fork between management and the sales side? Jim's addition: none of it matters unless the say/do ratio is one to one.
What attracts and keeps them
- Flexibility that's actually negotiated, not assumed
- A career path with named steps and a rough timeline
- Cross-functional training and continuing ed that happens
- Watching the spreadsheet kids' work reach a real superintendent
What burns them out
- "This year slipped because we got busy"
- Three years later than the three years you told them
- Development that's "intentional" only in the interview
- Expecting the leader to do all the investing — it goes both ways
Customers want the easy button. "Are you a turnkey package?"
Ryan has watched the industry pivot before — a heavy investment in natural gas projects, then gas prices fell. Energy efficiency will always be around, he says, but increasingly it's a tool that doesn't quite get the whole job done on its own. The evolution he sees is toward turnkey: the same partner who changes the light bulbs can also build the building and renovate the one next door.
Above where he sits, he knows there's a larger ecosystem shifting too — the private equity side of the ESCO industry — but his answers stay pointed at the customer. And on technology, he's not Chicken Little: AI will lean hard into data analytics, real-time smart-meter data is scaling down from the college campus to the high school, and the open question is what to do with all of it.
Where it's heading
- Turnkey packages for a campus, a district, a city
- Design-build and renovation married to efficiency
- Real-time analytics on smaller and smaller buildings
- AI spotting the air handler that's been running too long
What he's not worried about
- AI reading utility bills and replacing engineers — "I don't see that at all"
- Efficiency disappearing as a market
- Data centers, good or bad — "I'm in the middle of that conversation"
- Jim's version: not AI replacing you, but someone who embraces it
Most of us are adding load. You guys are behind the scenesAn accountant, to Ryan — on the question he couldn't answer: how many kilowatt-hours have you saved?
taking load off.
Six questions worth expanding.
The threads Jim and Ryan went deepest on — pulled from across the conversation. Click any question to expand.
01What does a superintendent mean by "a refreshing conversation"? +
Not a new wheel. Ryan says any other ESCO would recognize the playbook. The difference is the frame: an engineering focus, and solutions built onto the customer's five-, ten-, and fifteen-year plan rather than a project sized to this year's budget.
The test question he asks out loud: are we putting HVAC on a building they're going to shutter in five years? A lot of the conversation is long-term planning, and a lot of that comes from the history Ascendant inherited — customers BFW/Marcum has served for thirty years who become Ascendant's year-one clients.
We know what their past looked like. We know where they're trying to go. It really helps us tailor a solution around that.
02If LEDs no longer carry a project, what does? +
Ryan's list starts with lighting controls, but the more revealing example is exterior lighting. A customer wants to light a dim parking lot — that's adding load — and the ESCO still has to claim energy savings on the project. Making that work is a lot of dominoes moved around to create one solution.
The other answer is a different lever entirely: the construction and design-build side of the business. Having a couple of arrows in the quiver is what lets him sit in a workshop session and say yes, or say honestly that something isn't in the wheelhouse.
This is not a panacea. We're not gonna fix everything. But here's your top five, and we're gonna take care of three of them.
03What did the accountant ask him? +
Ryan had admitted he isn't as energy-efficient at home as someone in his line of work probably should be. The person he was talking to — not in the ESCO space, in accounting — asked how many kilowatt-hours he'd saved over his career. He had no idea.
The follow-up stuck with him: most of us are adding load, and your industry is behind the scenes taking load off. In a moment when AI and data centers dominate the energy conversation, Ryan says he'd never thought of the ESCO business as the yin to that yang.
04What do early-career engineers actually want? +
Two things keep coming up in his office. Flexibility — a loose term that covers remote, hybrid, and the trend back to the office. And a clearly defined career path, which Ryan would have claimed to have at 22 before his own went off like a bottle rocket.
Defined, to this generation, means specific: what four steps get me to senior project manager? To senior performance engineer? Is there a four-year plan? Where's the fork between management and sales? Times change and workloads change, but clear communication about goals and expectations up front is what he thinks attracts and retains top talent. He'll also tell you mentorship is hard to take remotely.
05What is the say/do ratio, and why does development slip? +
Jim's addition to the career-path conversation: the hardest part is following through. Someone lays out a clear path and an investment plan, and two years later the employee is wondering what happened to it. Leadership comes down to a say/do ratio of one to one.
Ryan has lived the other side — "it's three years later, guys, than the three years you told me." The slip is rarely malicious: this year got busy, nobody did continuing ed, nobody got cross-trained, or it got slow and the funds weren't there. Having sat through it makes him more direct now. And Jim notes it runs both ways: the employee has to put in the same work.
Intentional employee development — three buzzwords you can say in any interview. That one-to-one ratio after the fact is crucial.
06Where does AI actually fit in an ESCO? +
Data analytics, mostly. Whether through HVAC controls or utility-bill analysis, the industry is still waiting on the utility to hand over a bill. Real-time analytics used to be a large-college-campus thing; now a wireless controller and smart-meter data are showing up at the high school.
His bigger question was always: we've got all this data — now what? That's where he sees AI funnel in, spotting the air handler with the long run time and turning it into an opportunity. Control systems have had algorithms for years; this is that, continuing to evolve. He doesn't buy the Chicken Little version where AI reads utility bills and nobody needs engineers.
It's gonna open up more opportunities to say: hey, there's an issue, here's a solution for that.
The four questions every BEP guest gets.
Ryan had seen the list ahead of time and tried to talk his way into a gym habit he doesn't have. Tap any card to see how he actually answered.
Concepts worth knowing before you listen.
The episode moves fast through some specialized vocabulary. If any of these terms are new, tap for a 90-second primer — no prior industry knowledge assumed.
Ryan Baker
Ryan is a senior business development engineer at Ascendant Facility Partners, LLC, a guaranteed-energy-savings company based in Paducah, Kentucky. Ascendant was born out of Marcum Engineering and the BFW family of companies and serves K-12 districts, local government, healthcare, and public agencies in and around Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois.
Born and raised in Evansville, Indiana, Ryan worked crawl spaces and attics for his stepdad's residential HVAC company from age sixteen and kept a foot in the trade through his engineering studies at the University of Southern Indiana. He entered the ESCO business as an intern — starting in the file room — and over sixteen years has worked as a project manager, lead engineer, and sales engineer on federal, K-12, local-government, renewable natural gas, and cogeneration projects, including a five-year stint on Navy work in the Florida Panhandle.
He lives in Evansville with his wife and their seven kids.
Senior Business Development Engineer · Ascendant Facility Partners, LLC — a regional ESCO in Paducah, KY, led by Managing Principal Russ Litsinger.
What an ESCO actually is.
An energy services company designs, builds, and often finances improvements to a building — new HVAC, lighting, controls, envelope work — and gets paid, in whole or in part, out of the energy those improvements save. It's a contractor, an engineer, and a financial partner rolled into one, which is why Ryan describes the job as putting puzzle pieces together.
Most ESCO work is in the public sector: schools, cities, counties, universities, and federal facilities, where capital budgets are thin and infrastructure is old. A regional ESCO like Ascendant focuses on a few states and a few building types and leans on relationships that are, in some cases, decades old.
Ryan calls Ascendant "a regional ESCO" focused on K-12 and local government in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois — and, he jokes, anyone who pings him on LinkedIn.
Guaranteed energy savings, explained.
A school district needs a boiler replaced and has no bond issue to pay for it. Under a guaranteed energy savings contract, the ESCO designs and installs the improvements and puts a savings number in writing. If the building doesn't save what was promised, the ESCO pays the difference. That guarantee is what lets the district finance the work against savings that haven't happened yet.
The catch Ryan describes: every measure in the project has to earn its place in that guarantee. When a customer wants to add exterior lighting — new load — the ESCO still has to find enough savings elsewhere to keep the whole package guaranteed. That's the domino game.
Ascendant describes itself as a Guaranteed Energy Savings Company partner. Ryan's honest version of the pitch: "here's your top five, and we're gonna take care of three of them."
Why "low-hanging fruit" mattered so much.
In a performance contract, measures get bundled. A few of them pay back fast; most of them don't. For about a decade, LED lighting was the measure that paid back so fast it could subsidize everything else in the bundle — the new chiller, the controls upgrade, the roof. Engineers called it the low-hanging fruit, and it made a lot of marginal projects pencil.
Now most buildings already have LEDs. The fast-payback measure is gone from the bundle, and the remaining measures have to stand on their own or find a new subsidy: lighting controls, better data, tax incentives, or a design-build scope that changes the economics entirely. That's what Ryan means by "you gotta dig."
"Everybody loves the term in our industry. It's not there anymore." The episode's hook, and the reason Ryan says today's ESCO conversation is about solutions rather than surface-level savings.
Real-time meter data and what to do with it.
Traditionally an ESCO learns how a building performed when the utility bill arrives a month later. Smart meters and wireless controllers change that: consumption shows up in fifteen-minute intervals, in near real time, and increasingly from small buildings — a high school, not just a college energy center.
The hard part isn't collecting it. It's the question Ryan keeps coming back to: we've got all this data, now what? Control systems have had rules for years that flag an air handler running too long. The promise of AI in this space is doing that across every trend, every building, all the time — and turning each anomaly into a fix.
Ryan expects the industry to lean heavily on AI for analytics, not to replace engineers. Jim's framing: AI won't take your job, but someone who embraces it might.
