Derrick May Shares How Leaders Can Turn Energy From a Cost Into an Asset

Energy, for most organizations, appears on the balance sheet as an expense. It could entail anything from electricity, fuel, heating, cooling, logistics, to the operational power required to keep systems running. Derrick May, President and CEO of Optimum Energy Partners, believes that this kind of framing is outdated. In his view, leaders who treat energy solely as a cost center miss one of the most underused levers for creating value in the long term.

Handled well, energy becomes a strategic asset. Studying it closely informs how you operate, where you invest, how you manage risk, and how credible you are with customers, employees, and capital partners.

May leads Optimum Energy Partners, a Dallas-based independent energy company focused on acquisition, exploration, development, and production. His background spans more than two decades across private equity, investment banking, and company management, giving him a perspective shaped as much by capital discipline as by operational reality. Given his expertise, he does not limit energy to one sector alone. Any organization that uses power, moves goods, operates facilities, or depends on digital infrastructure has an energy strategy.

The Strategy Inside an Expense Line

The first shift May encourages leaders to make is conceptual. It is to stop seeing energy as a fixed overhead category and start seeing it as a system of decisions.

A company’s energy profile reflects choices about where it should be established, what kind of equipment it should be using, the kind of design that should go in the build. Apart from that it also includes choices of supplier contracts, maintenance, technology, scheduling, and risk tolerance. These choices are made separately by different departments. It all culminates into the same pattern; departments optimize their own budgets and the organization pays a collective penalty for the resultant fragmentation.

The coordination between the departments becomes a greater problem than energy in itself. All the information can be found isolated in silos. Invoices lie with finance while operations record downtime. Facilities sees equipment and the leadership sees a quarterly number. The full picture lies with no one and that is where the focus needs to be drawn.

Energy costs fluctuate and that makes it all the more important to assess the fragmentation. Prices will continue moving and regulations will evolve, while the weather conditions remain unpredictable. Operations might also demand change. A business that treats energy as a passive expense is constantly reacting. A business that treats it as an asset can adapt to, and sometimes profit from the same volatility that unsettles competitors.

Energy as a Form of Operational Intelligence

Derrick May’s more nuanced point of view is that energy data goes beyond being a sustainability metric and should be considered as operational intelligence.

Issues are visible in financial reports a lot later than they are revealed in consumption patterns. A sudden increase in usage could be indicative of failing equipment, or even an operational bottleneck. On the other hand, a decline in energy used per unit of output can signal improving productivity and a robust process in place.

According to Derrick, energy shows you the real picture of how a business is actually running. If you ignore it, you are managing with incomplete information. Its relevance increases as organizations become more digital. A company may celebrate a new software deployment while overlooking the infrastructure and power requirements that make it viable at scale.

Asking how energy consumption should be reduced is not often the right question to ask. We should instead ask if our energy usage pattern is robust enough to be future ready.

Resilience Is the New Efficiency

Efficiency has long been the yardstick for energy management. Use less, spend less. May does not dismiss that logic, but he believes it is too restrictive for the current environment.

The more valuable objective is resilience. With resilience comes the ability to maintain performance through disruption. Power interruptions, supply-chain shocks, extreme weather, cyber incidents, and volatile input costs no longer feel like rare exceptions, as one must understand that they are recurring features of modern business. While efficiency asks how little you can use, resilience asks whether you can keep functioning when conditions change. This might seem interrelated, but they are really not.

A resilient energy strategy may include diversified supply arrangements, on-site generation, storage, demand flexibility, better forecasting, and contingency planning. It may also involve redesigning workflows so critical functions can operate through disruption and not have to be shut down entirely.

An important fact to consider is that resilience often looks inefficient on a spreadsheet before it proves invaluable in a crisis. The value of maintaining backups and alternate routes becomes obvious when competitors face outages or cost spikes. What might look cheap on paper might cost a lot when the need arises, which is why nothing must be taken for granted.

The Human Side of Energy Leadership

Energy strategy is often discussed in technical language. Derrick May believes that language can obscure a more human issue, that energy also shapes people’s experience of and at work.

Facilities that are too hot, too cold, poorly lit, or unreliable, affect concentration. People working in such conditions lose motivation and morale. Field teams and operational staff are impacted by unreliable systems more directly than executives reviewing dashboards. When energy reliability improves, it will manifest as fewer frustrations among the workforce.

There is a tendency to treat energy as infrastructure, and people as separate categories. But people experience infrastructure every day. Building and maintaining reliable systems means your teams can focus on the work. When they are not able to do so, people spend their energy solving problems that should never have reached them.

This idea has implications for leadership communication as well. Employees are more likely to support operational changes when they understand the reason behind them. Being included in decisions changes even disruptive initiatives to shared goals.

A Practical Leadership Agenda

Derrick May is not implying that every organization needs a dramatic transformation. He recommends a more disciplined starting point. He outlines how companies can:

• Assign clear ownership for energy-related decisions across all departments.
• Connect consumption data with production, service, downtime, and cost data and identify collective patterns.
• Evaluate resilience alongside efficiency and assess the cost of disruption.
• Prioritize investments that improve asset life rather than chasing isolated savings.
• Communicate the operational rationale for energy decisions
• Make employees understand the connection between reliable systems and their own work.

The objective is to increase awareness about energy efficiency. It is also the need to act and build robust systems before small inefficiencies become structural weaknesses.

Conclusion

May’s broader message is that energy is becoming a leadership issue and it is too naive to delegate it as a facilities issue. An organization’s strength will not be determined on the basis of who has the lower immediate bills. In fact, it will rely on a thorough understanding of energy as a system. A strong organization will mine data to improve decisions, and build operations capable of performing under uncertainty.

“Every business already has an energy strategy,” May says. “The only question is whether it is intentional. Leaders who make it intentional turn a cost they cannot avoid into an asset they can use.” The most valuable insight is in understanding that energy is a mirror of operational health, and, when approached with discipline, can be a source of durable competitive advantage.

FAQ:

1. Who is Derrick May?

Derrick May is the President and CEO of Optimum Energy Partners, a Dallas-based independent energy company focused on the acquisition, exploration, development, and production of oil and natural gas properties.

2. How can businesses turn energy costs into strategic assets?

Businesses can treat energy as a strategic asset by analyzing consumption patterns.  It can collate energy data with operational performance and coordinate decisions across departments. It should also invest in efficient systems that benefit the entire organization.

3. Why does Derrick May emphasize energy resilience over efficiency alone?

Derrick May believes that energy management should go beyond reducing consumption and expenses. Energy resilience helps businesses maintain operations during power interruptions and price fluctuations.