REURASIA marks ten years of service and growth

I did not set out to start a company.

In 2016, AREVA closed its bioenergy activities. I was working in that department, part of a team sent to Asia to build biomass power plants. I had spent years in construction management — India, Thailand, then the Philippines, where we built one of the first biomass plants in the country, in Nueva Ecija. It was demanding work in the way site work is always demanding, and I was good at it, and I expected to keep doing it.

Then the department was gone.

Carla Abesamis and I had worked together through that period. We decided to try to continue. That is the whole origin story — there was no business plan, no market thesis, no moment of vision. If AREVA had stayed, I would in all likelihood still be working for AREVA today. I became an entrepreneur by mistake.

What I discovered afterwards is that the mistake suited me. I learn something every day and I cannot tolerate routine. I like building structures that outlast the person who built them. REURASIA became the vehicle for that — a way of multiplying whatever positive effect I am able to have. Carla and I later married. She has been part of this company completely, from the first day to this one.

What I got wrong

The hardest part of the first years was not the projects. The engineering was familiar. What was not familiar was everything standing around a project manager that allows him to work: HR, procurement, legal, marketing, business development, cash.

Inside a large group like AREVA, I was confident. When a plant started up, I had the feeling that it had been built thanks to my involvement. Running my own company taught me that the truth is considerably more humble. People had worked for years before I ever reached that site — securing the mandate, negotiating the contract, hiring the team, financing the equipment, clearing the permits. I arrived at the visible part and mistook it for the whole.

That correction changed what I thought the company was for. Today our work is to bring clients to that moment — the one I used to think began when I stepped on site.

The projects

There were two founders in 2016. There are forty-five of us today, and more than seventy-five project references behind us. A few of them mark the turns.

At Nestlé’s Cabuyao facility, we operate and maintain an 18 TPH biomass boiler for BECIS, with twenty-one operators and technicians on site handling fuel, maintenance, steam production and ash. It is the clearest expression of what we became: not a consultancy that delivers a report and leaves, but a company that stays and runs the asset.

In Bayawan, we supported a 3 MWe bagasse cogeneration plant and its interconnection for a sugar mill. For Chodai, basic engineering on a coconut processing and cogeneration project. For Knauf, boiler safety assessments across the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, China and Japan. With HDF, feasibility work for green hydrogen power on off-grid islands; with B.Grimm and EnPrime, owner’s engineer services on the Areco 2 solar project; through BRED and ADL, a 250,000 t/y biomass pellet platform.

The pattern that matters to me is continuity. Clients rarely fail because a technology does not exist. They fail because the data, the permits, the procurement, the site execution and the O&M were never aligned early enough, and by the time anyone notices, correcting it is expensive.

Trust

Trust is at the centre of everything we do, and it is the subject I have thought about most in ten years — complicated further, in this region, by working across cultures every day.

A client trusts us by paying us. He believes we will deliver what we promised. To honour that, I have to entrust our team, our subcontractors and our suppliers to deliver in turn. If any link in that chain breaks, the company enters a very difficult state: management spends its time checking and cross-checking, and more energy goes into preventing employees from doing something wrong than into delivering what we promised. A company in that state can survive. It cannot do good work.

It has to run both ways. Employees must trust that their leaders will make the right and measured calls, including the hard ones — that I am technically competent, and that I have the company’s interest and their own in mind when I decide. In return, I need to be able to rely on them to follow when it is time to follow, and to challenge me when I am wrong.

None of this is natural. It is easier not to trust a stranger than to trust that he can do his job. So I approach it deliberately: set out very clearly what is expected, identify the gaps in knowledge quickly — because no employee can deliver if they are not equipped to — and review informally and often until we are confident the person can perform the work. Then give them the time and space to do it on their own.

After two or three months, you know. If the problem is technical, it is manageable — that is what training is for. If the problem is attitude, it cannot be changed without an effort that damages everything around it, and the honest decision is to part ways.

Building a systematic company

Writing down what I expect from people — precisely enough that anyone can read it without me in the room — is what led us to build our management system.

What I wanted was a company that runs on rules rather than on personalities, mine included. Three things sit underneath that.

Meritocracy. People advance on what they deliver, not on how close they sit to the founders. In a small company that is not automatic. It has to be designed, and then defended.

Objectivity. Decisions made against defined criteria and evidence rather than impressions. Whether we bid a project, whether a supplier qualifies, whether someone is ready for more responsibility — every one of those improves when the standard exists before the case does.

Transparency. Records anyone can look at. Our people see their tasks, project data, their training record, quality control and safety statistics. Clients see clean records, a register of decisions, real progress, who is mobilised on site and the hours logged.

We built a platform to carry all of this — 118 documented processes across eleven families, from business development through operations, HR, finance, quality and safety. The rule we hold ourselves to is that using it must always be faster than doing the same work by hand or in a spreadsheet. Otherwise it is bureaucracy wearing a better name.

But the platform is only a tool. What matters is the habit it enforces: output that is consistent regardless of who happens to be assigned, and a company that does not need me in every conversation to function correctly.

That is also what makes growth possible. A company held together by the founder’s attention can never be larger than that attention. A company held together by clear standards can take on more work, bring in new people, and still deliver the same thing.

What comes next

I am more confident about the years ahead than I was about any of the ten behind us, and the reason is waste.

The Philippines throws away an enormous quantity of organic material every day — from food processing plants, sugar mills, rice mills, poultry farms, markets, and the landfills that receive what nobody sorted. Almost all of it is treated as a cost. Someone pays to haul it, someone pays to bury it, and then the same company pays again for the fuel it burns to make process heat. Meanwhile the buried fraction quietly produces methane that nobody captures.

That is not a waste problem. It is a misallocated energy problem, and it is the largest one in this country that nobody is seriously competing to solve.

Three things are changing at once.

The first is price. Through the Green Energy Auction, the state has started to put a real, contracted value on renewable capacity. Waste-to-energy stops being an environmental gesture the moment there is a tariff to underwrite it, because that is what turns a disposal cost into a financeable asset.

The second is physics, and it is the argument we make most often: power is not heat. An archipelago of thousands of islands with dispersed industrial loads and expensive imported fuel cannot run on solar panels alone. Solar and wind produce electricity when the weather allows. They do not produce steam at two in the morning for a plant that has to keep running. Dispatchable heat, generated on site from material the client already owns, is not a worse version of the energy transition. For industry, it is the only version that works.

The third is capital. We now have financing secured from Germany to deploy fifteen micro-digester units at remote landfill sites — modular, containerised, delivered and operated by us. It matters far beyond fifteen machines. It proves a model where the host does not have to find the capital: we install the equipment, we run it for ten years, and the site converts its own waste into its own energy without a balance sheet decision that would otherwise never be approved. That is what unlocks the hundreds of sites behind the first fifteen, and it reaches places the grid has always served badly.

None of that is available to a company that only writes reports. Financing of this kind exists because someone credible carries the operating risk for a decade. We can carry it because we have spent ten years learning to operate — the boiler at Cabuyao, the plants before it, the twenty-one people who show up to a shift. The consultancy earned us the right to be trusted with the assets. The assets are what will build the next ten years.

Philippines first. Cambodia and Vietnam after that, when we are genuinely ready and not before.

Why this is worth doing

I want to be honest about what kind of company this is, because the right people should recognise themselves in it and the wrong ones should not.

We are not a comfortable place to work. The problems are unglamorous — moisture content, feedstock contamination, permits, a pump that fails on a Sunday in a province eight hours from Manila. You will be given real responsibility earlier than you expect and judged on what you deliver rather than on how long you have been here. If you want routine, this is the wrong company.

But there is a particular satisfaction in this work that I have not found elsewhere. You can stand in front of a plant that exists because of decisions you made, that is still running years later, that turned something a town was paying to bury into electricity and heat for people who needed it. Most careers do not offer that. Ours does, several times over, and there is far more of it coming than we currently have people to do.

REURASIA is not really a capitalist company, in the sense that word usually carries. It is a group of people working together, doing their best to leave this country — and this region — in better condition than they found it. That is the version of it I recognise, and the reason I intend to still be doing this in another ten years.

To Carla, to everyone who has worked here over these ten years, and to the clients who trusted us before we had a track record to justify it — thank you.

The next ten start now, and there is room for more of us.

— Maxime Droit, CEO and co-founder, REURASIA Management Corporation