Bringing it to a boil.

• Author: Gray, Tim
• Position: RUNNER-UP - Company overview

STORM TECHNOLOGIES INC.

Headquarters: Albemarle

CEO: Dick Storm

Employees: 42

Founded: 1992

Projected 2009 revenue: $8 million

Business: Consultant to the power industry and maker of boiler parts

A chance car ride in the '80s helped Dick Storm shape the business he would start. Returning to Charlotte, his flight was diverted to Greensboro by bad weather. Arriving after midnight, he and a fellow passenger decided to rent a car together. His companion turned out to be Ken Iverson, the CEO who made Charlotte-based Nucor Corp. the nation's leading steel maker and, arguably, saved the U.S. steel industry. "I started to read up on Nucor after that," Storm says. "It was like, 'Holy cow, I ought to pay attention to this guy.'"

Inspired partly by Iverson's example, Storm, too, has made a mission of modernizing a sometimes-hidebound industry. He's an expert on increasing the efficiency of coal-fired power plants, and his company consults with electric companies and makes parts for their boilers. "Our shtick is, 'Burn coal well,'" he says. Storm Technologies' old-school expertise helps customers meet new-era challenges. By helping power plants run their boilers better, it enables them to operate more cleanly. Dick Storm chuckles at the irony--he's politically conservative and skeptical of some environmental mandates, deriding Al Gore as a nut and global warming as a hoax. Yet his business benefits when the government cracks down on power-plant emissions. "The tighter they make the laws, the more opportunities we have."

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Storm, 66, got interested in power generation at an age most boys are falling in love with cars. He attended a trade school in Pennsylvania that, at the time, trained working-class kids to be machinists. "They had a power-plant operators course, and I was hooked." He went on to earn a professional license in engineering without ever finishing his bachelor's, despite taking night classes at several universities. His career as a builder and operator of coal-fired power plants took him from Ohio to Florida and eventually North Carolina and a job at now-defunct Oakboro-based Flame Refractories Inc. where he oversaw a team of consulting engineers. "By 1992, Flame...