Powering down: lowering energy bills and keeping cybercrooks at bay is all in a day's work for two Charlotte businessmen with expertise at keeping buildings on the cutting edge.

• Author: Duckwall, Jane
• Position: The Future of North Carolina: REAL ESTATE

In 2014, the federal government's 99-year-old General Services Administration headquarters at 1800 F St. NW in Washington, had more than 1,000 air conditioners sticking out of windows. Those window units are now gone, along with any notions that you can't teach an old building new tricks. Now, the six-story structure "is one of the smartest buildings anywhere," says Tom Shircliff, 50, whose Charlotte-based consulting business helped bring the GSA headquarters into the 21st century.

Shircliff and Rob Murchison, 46, co-founded Intelligent Buildings LLC in 2004. Shircliff had worked in telecommunications before getting involved in real-estate technology for a developer in 2002. Murchison, who started writing spaceship-launch programs on his TRS80 computer at age 13, had been immersed in IT jobs his entire career and was also captivated by emerging smart-building technology.

Despite common interests and a shared city, they didn't know each other until 11 years ago, when a smart-building guru from Cisco Systems suggested they meet. "He said, 'There are not 10 people in the country focused on smart buildings--and two of you live in Charlotte,"' Shircliff says. "You should have lunch."

They did, and their shared outlook about life, family and "smart real estate" compelled them to launch Intelligent Buildings. Since then, they have developed strategies and set standards for energy efficiency, sustainability and building-systems security for commercial and government properties in 85 cities in the U.S. and Canada. "We wrote the smart-building standards for both the U.S. and Canadian governments," Murchison says. Last year, they expanded to Singapore, working with business and government clients in the Asian nation.

While smartening-up buildings has become a huge business, with far more than 10 people involved, Intelligent Buildings is holding its own. Sales totaled $5.9 million in 2014, nearly triple from three years earlier. Inc. magazine ranked the company 2,034 on its list of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies. It has 26 employees, and clients include giant Microsoft Corp., which hired Intelligent Buildings to save energy and money at various sites, including the 15-million-square-foot headquarters campus in Redmond, Wash. "We expect savings of over 14% from our global portfolio," aided by the Charlotte consultants, says Darrell Smith, director of facilities and energy.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

With smart buildings, computerized systems...