June 22, 2023
The Reincarnation of Revolution Lighting
To our surprise this company is still around and claims to be doing a lot of business
We thought Revolution Lighting Technologies went away, but they didn’t. And shame on us, because the company today issued a statement that it has “backlog and revenue approaching $100 million.”
Any company doing that much lighting business today should definitely be on our radar, but it wasn’t until we saw a marketing press release announcing that “Revolution Lighting Technologies is now Energy Source Group, an Energy Savings Company.” Shame on us for not knowing that this company was still active and that it’s business is seemingly thriving.
Many lighting people recall Revolution Lighting as a Connecticut company that made some noise during the LED revolution 10+ years ago. It chased commercial LED lamp business while also having specialty products in the signage and pool categories, too. The publicly traded company reported a high-water mark of $172 million in sales in 2017 – but that number was seemingly inflated.
SEC Sanctions
In unspectacular fashion the company faced some rather serious and public challenges when in September 2020, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Revolution Lighting and four of its executives with accounting fraud as they reportedly inflated the company's revenues for four years. The executives include CEO Robert LaPenta, former CFO James DePalma, and former CFOs of the company's largest division, Allen Garner and Dan O'Neal.
The SEC alleged that from late 2014 to mid-2018, the company and its executives employed a "bill and hold" sales strategy, which involved improper revenue recognition. The executives allegedly pressured sales personnel to record anticipated future sales as current sales, leading to uncompleted sales and misleading revenue figures. Garner is further accused of providing backdated documents to the company's auditor to conceal the practice.
The accused men consented to judgments without admitting guilt, agreeing to permanent injunctions and penalties amounting to a total of $1.6 million. Specifically, Revolution Lighting agreed to pay $1.25 million, LaPenta agreed to pay $192,768, DePalma agreed to pay $100,000, and both Garner and O'Neal agreed to pay $25,000 each. Garner also agreed to a five-year ban from acting as a public company officer or director.
As an aside, LaPenta has an impressive business pedigree as one of the “three original L’s” of Lockheed Martin spinoff, L-3 Communications. In 2015 the Yonkers, New York native gave $15 million to his alma mater, Iona College. At the time it was the college’s largest donation ever.
Today’s announcement
And now, Revolution Lighting is Energy Source Group. The company logo maintained the same graphic and font from the Revolution days, and seemed to just update the text with the new name. Some of the same executive leadership is still in place, too. Robert LaPenta is Chairman, CEO & President while Dan O’Neal is cited as President Multifamily.
Today’s press release explains “To better reflect the current business and company capabilities, Revolution Lighting is changing its name to Energy Source Group.” But shedding the old Revolution Lighting name is probably not a bad idea, either.
The company operates four subsidiaries: Energy Source, Tristate LED, Seesmart and Value Lighting.
