108 Business View Magazine - July 2016
Greenergy
The zero difference
Paavo Salmi was not in the home building business. In
fact, he calls himself “an online sales and marketing
guy. Everything starts with marketing and sales; with-
out sales there is no need for a product.” So how did
someone who busied himself during the 1990s build-
ing the first online reservation engine on the web so
that people could book their own Hawaiian vacations,
wind up designing, building, and selling the latest in
high-performance, zero-energy homes?
Well, like all entrepreneurs, he saw an opening in a
marketplace that nobody else was filling, and thought
that he could fill it himself. He joined forces with two
other seasoned, business professionals -Jim Durda
and Chuck Burkett - and formed Greenergy. “We had
three partners, originally,” Salmi says, “and none of
