The Billion Dollar Club - Honorable Mention (Direct Selling News)

  Written by Phyllis Frost on Mar 19, 2009 3:55 pm

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Although this company did not qualify for membership in the billion-dollar club, their annual sales and dynamic growth indicate they will soon join.

Ignite $800+ Million

Dallas-based private company Ignite is a subsidiary of electricity and natural gas provider Stream Energy. When Texas’s electricity market was deregulated four years ago, Stream Energy saw an opportunity. It chose direct selling as its marketing method, and Ignite was born in 2005. Already, the company is predicting more than $800 million in revenue for 2008.

“When Stream Energy entered the Texas market in 2005, roughly 10 percent of consumers had changed providers from their incumbents,” says Founder of Ignite and Co-Founder of Stream Energy Chris Domhoff. “Now, 50 percent of consumers have changed, and many of those customers went with Stream Energy/Ignite.”

In the January 2009 Direct Selling News, Domhoff attributed these impressive numbers to a product that’s a necessity, saying, “One of the great things about Ignite is that we offer a product that is habitually used and everyone must have, regardless of how the economy is performing.“

Stream Energy Chairman Rob Snyder says Ignite has benefited from the current economic downturn “since an increasing number of people have been investigating new avenues for earning income and providing a ‘fallback’ career.

“As to the parent company, Stream Energy itself, the firm has been almost wholly unaffected by the economic downturn insofar as, during periods of recession, consumers consistently pay their utility bills before purchasing items of discretionary spending,” Snyder says.

In 2008, Ignite expanded into Georgia, competing in that state’s natural gas market. The company already boasts approximately 2 percent of the market and 20,000 independent associates.

“In 2009, Stream Energy and Ignite intend to enhance their existing market positions in Texas for electricity services and Georgia for natural gas services,” Snyder says. DSN

Name of Company: Ignite
Type of Company: Private, subsidiary of Stream Energy
Number of Employees: 350
Number of Markets: Two
Retail Sales: $606 million in retail sales for 2007; over $800 million in retail sales for 2008

Direct Selling News has accumulated this information from various sources, including interviews, press releases, online sources such as Lexis Nexis and Hoover’s Online and public-company earnings reports. The companies included on this list are ones we were able to confirm through our research; there may be others with revenue of more than $1 billion. No company was intentionally omitted.

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