Home / Blog / EMC25 Houston Takeaways Business & Leadership Apr 26, 2026 8 min read 10 Lessons From EMC25 Houston Every Business Owner Needs
I went mostly for one of my Texas energy clients. What stuck with me on the drive back to Austin had less to do with megawatts and more to do with how to run a small business in 2026.
Matt Kundo Marketing Consultant mkdm agent
Sure, go ahead What do you do? >
Conversations may be logged to improve service. Privacy policy
I just got back from two days in Houston at EMC25, the 25th Annual Energy Marketing Conference. About 400 people, 60-plus speakers across panels and keynotes, a fastball pitch competition, and the kind of hallway conversations that actually make these things worthwhile.
I went mostly for one of my Texas energy clients. But what stuck with me on the drive back to Austin had less to do with megawatts and more to do with how to run a small business in 2026. Hiring, customer experience, AI, retention, risk, leadership. The themes ran across every panel, regardless of which corner of the energy market the speaker came from.
Quick note on process before I get into it. I took a huge volume of notes across two days. To turn that pile into something readable, I used an LLM to help organize the notes and shape the structure of this post. The takeaways, the framing, and the opinions are mine. The AI helped me get out of my own way and stop staring at a blank page.
Here are ten EMC25 Houston takeaways I think any business owner can use.
1. Hire for attitude, not aptitude
The keynote was Neville Raghee, CEO of Sunrise Energy Holdings. 23 years in retail energy. Co-founded and sold three companies before this current one. His framing on hiring was about as direct as it gets:
"Hire for attitude, not for aptitude. Because aptitude can be trained, attitude cannot."
I've run a solo shop for years and brought in contractors as I needed help. Every time I've gotten a hire wrong, the person looked great on paper and had the wrong energy. Every time I've gotten it right, the person was genuinely curious and asked questions I had not thought of yet.
For any small business owner reading this, that's the takeaway. Skill set is the floor. Attitude is the ceiling.
2. Build for adaptability, not prediction
Neville's other big point was that he stopped trying to predict the market about ten years ago and started building an organization that could adapt to it.
"Instead of trying to predict the future, we will just build an organization that is adaptable and can change as the market and the industry changes."
This hit home. I've watched marketing platforms come and go. I've watched Google overhaul SEO three times. I've watched AI search (AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity) basically rewrite the rules of organic visibility in 18 months. If you want a deeper dive on that specific shift, I wrote a full playbook on how to rank in AI Overviews.
The clients I see winning aren't the ones with the perfect five-year plan. They're the ones who can shift in 30 days when something actually changes.
3. The customer wants four very simple things
This was my favorite part of the keynote. Neville on what customers actually want, in his own words:
"One: give me a fair rate. Two: don't shock me when I get my monthly bill. Three: don't screw me at renewal. And four: I'm not going to call you frequently, but when I do pick up the damn phone."
Translate that to any business. A fair price. No surprises. Fair treatment when I renew or come back. A real human when I have a problem. That's it. That's the whole game.
A lot of businesses overcomplicate the customer experience. Loyalty programs, gamification, complex tiers, push notifications. Most customers would trade all of it for those four things done well.
4. Don't charge loyal customers more than new ones
Same keynote, but this one deserves its own section because it's so common everywhere I look:
"Every customer gets a renewal rate that is equal or lower to a new customer coming in from the same channel."
Neville said his retention is the highest in the industry and his churn is the lowest. The "loyalty premium" most companies charge existing customers (cable, insurance, software, you name it) is leaving money on the table in the form of churn and brand damage.
If you've never run the math on what a 5-point churn improvement does to LTV, this is your sign.
5. Hedge discipline is not optional
This came up across multiple panels. Sanjeev from ERCOT put it most succinctly during the markets panel:
"Hedge, hedge, hedge."
Translated out of energy speak, don't bet the farm on any single channel, supplier, or assumption. In marketing, that means don't run all your leads through Meta or all your traffic through Google. In ops, it means don't have one person who's the only one who knows how something works. In finance, it means don't lean on a single client for half your revenue.
The point isn't to be conservative. The point is to make sure one bad month or one platform change doesn't end the company.
6. Mobile apps are eating call centers
Brian Hines, formerly of Vistra Energy, shared a stat that stopped the room. Mobile app usage at Vistra went from about 17% to about 85% over the last few years. Customers don't want to call anymore. They want to open an app and self-serve.
The bigger point a few panelists made: your customers don't compare you to your competitors anymore. They compare you to Amazon. If your checkout, your support portal, or your enrollment flow feels worse than ordering a phone case at midnight, you have a churn problem you have not noticed yet.
7. AI's biggest wins are operational, not flashy
There was an entire panel on AI and retail energy. The smartest takes weren't about customer-facing chatbots. They were about embedded AI. Tools running inside the stack, making decisions on real data, retiring the spreadsheets nobody wants to maintain anymore. If you want a broader view on where AI is moving the needle for marketers and operators, I covered that in my piece on AI applications in digital marketing.
Mike Perella, CEO of Enegy, opened his fastball pitch with a slide called "the death of spreadsheets" and a line that got the room laughing because it was so true:
"You've got eight million formulas and they're always wrong."
Every business I work with has a version of this. A spreadsheet someone built three years ago that nobody fully understands but everyone depends on. The first wave of practical AI value at most small businesses isn't going to be a customer chatbot. It's going to be killing the broken spreadsheet.
8. Radical simplicity beats clever pricing
Andrew Meyer, founder of Arbor, made the case that the path forward in retail energy is radical transparency on rates. No teaser pricing. No hidden adders. No fine print on renewal.
The same principle applies anywhere a customer feels confused or burned. Confusion is friction, and friction kills conversion. Every time I've audited a landing page, an enrollment flow, or a pricing table for a client, the highest-leverage move is almost always "simplify this until a tired customer can understand it on their phone in ten seconds."
If you can't explain your offer in one sentence and your pricing in one screen, you have a problem that no amount of paid media will fix.
9. Data has to be trustworthy before it's useful
A data governance expert on one of the AI panels reframed the whole role of data teams in a way I keep thinking about:
"Data governance should evolve from a 'Department of No' to a 'Department of So.'"
The job of data isn't to gatekeep. It's to enable. Every business I work with is sitting on a pile of data they don't fully trust, which means they don't fully act on it. The fix is rarely more dashboards. It's getting to one source of truth that the team actually believes.
For my own clients, this is exactly why I push so hard on clean GA4, clean conversion tracking, and a single reporting view. If the team doesn't trust the numbers, no amount of "data-driven decisions" is actually going to happen.
10. The black swans are not so rare anymore
Frank McGovern, founder of ClearView Energy, made a comment in passing that stuck with me. He said the "hundred-year" disruptive events keep showing up every few years now.
Texas alone has had Winter Storm Uri, COVID, the AI demand surge, and a wave of regulatory changes in the span of five years. None of those were on anyone's 2019 plan.
The lesson isn't to predict the next one. The lesson is to keep your business nimble enough to absorb a shock without breaking. Diversified revenue, low fixed costs, real cash reserves, and people who can adapt. The same lessons that show up in literally every great business book of the last 50 years, but applied with a little more urgency.
Bonus: don't burn the boats
I'll close with the line from Neville's keynote that I keep coming back to:
"Never burn the boats, but act like you have. Always have a plan B, but act like you don't."
That's a pretty good north star for running a small business in 2026. Build like you're betting everything on it. Plan like you might need to pivot tomorrow. Don't get so attached to the current version of the business that you miss the chance to evolve into the next one.
So what do I do with all this?
If I had to boil ten lessons down into one, it would be this. Hire well, build for change, treat your existing customers like they matter more than your new ones, and use AI to retire the boring stuff so you can focus on the work that actually moves the business.
Not every conference produces a list this long. EMC25 did, and I think most of it travels just fine outside the energy industry.
If any of these takeaways hit a nerve and you want to talk through what they look like for your business, reach out through the contact form and I'll set up a call.
This recap is based on public panels and keynote sessions at EMC25 Houston, April 20-21, 2026. Quotes are from public sessions only. I used an LLM to help organize my conference notes and structure this post. Opinions and takeaways are my own. Hero photo by Jeswin Thomas on Unsplash. Conference photo by Carlos Gil on Unsplash. Trusted by marketing teams at 
Originally published at mattkundodigitalmarketing.com
Top comments (0)