You’ve probably been in that room. Everyone agrees on what needs to happen. The board commits. The plan looks solid. Then you get back to operations and reality hits—the energy consultant’s recommendations don’t account for your 24/7 production constraints. The financing won’t pencil for the regenerative design everyone loved. The net-zero building spec looks perfect until you get contractor bids.
Six months later, you’re still running the same way you were before the meeting.
The problem isn’t the plan. It’s the gap between planning and doing.
Where Are You Starting From?
Organizations like yours come to this work from different places, but there’s usually a common thread: you’re committed to transformation that matters, and you keep hitting walls between vision and execution.
Maybe you’re under pressure from above. The board wants carbon neutrality by 2030. Customers are demanding supply chain transparency. Regulations are tightening. You understand why this matters, but most consultants hand you a strategy deck that dies in implementation. You need partners who can bridge the gap between what should happen and what can happen given your operational reality.
Maybe you’re already pioneering. You’ve been implementing high-performance design or operational sustainability while others were still talking about it. But you’re hitting limits—technical questions beyond your team’s expertise, financing structures that don’t fit what you’re trying to do, feeling isolated because so few people understand what you’re attempting. You need partners who can match your ambition with technical depth.
Maybe you’re navigating risk. You’re a developer who sees the potential in net-zero communities but keeps hitting walls with contractors who can’t deliver the performance or can’t hit the price point. Or you’re a facilities director tasked with deep energy retrofits but can’t afford operational disruption. You need partners who understand both the opportunity and the real-world constraints.
Maybe you’re stuck between disciplines. Your sustainability goals require integrating energy, water, operations, and building systems—but those teams don’t naturally talk to each other. The energy expert optimizes one variable. The water consultant optimizes another. Nobody’s looking at how the systems interact. You need partners who can see the whole picture and design solutions where benefits cascade rather than conflict.
Wherever you’re starting from, you share something in common: you’re serious about transformation, you’re willing to do the work, and you need partners who can close the gap between strategy and execution.
The Execution Gap
Organizations pursuing meaningful change typically encounter the same disconnects:
Between strategy and operations. The decarbonization roadmap looks great until you try to implement it without shutting down production. The net-zero design is beautiful until it has to pencil financially. The retrofit plan makes sense until you realize you can’t take the building offline.
Between disciplines. The building scientist optimizes the envelope. The mechanical engineer optimizes the HVAC. The water engineer optimizes drainage. Each solution works in isolation, but nobody’s looking at how they interact—or where the real breakthroughs hide in the intersections.
Between design and construction. The drawings promise extraordinary performance. Then the contractor builds what they know how to build, and the performance never materializes. Or the contractor wants to deliver high-performance work but doesn’t have the technical support to de-risk the approach.
Between vision and financing. The project pencils at scale, but nobody will finance the first one. Or the transition makes long-term sense, but cash flow doesn’t work during the transition years. Or the technology is proven but the financial models haven’t caught up.
Most consultants work on one side of these gaps. Most contractors work on the other side. Organizations like yours are left bridging them alone.
What If the Same Team Could Do Both?
KeenWorks exists in the space most people can’t occupy—between technical depth and construction capability, between systems thinking and operational execution, between strategic vision and financial viability.
We’re both licensed general contractor and strategic consultant. Both building scientist and systems thinker. Both technical expert and implementation partner.
Which means when we design a decarbonization roadmap for a manufacturing facility, we’re designing something we could build. When we develop net-zero communities, we’re accountable for whether they perform. When we propose operational transformations, we understand the constraints of running continuous operations.
The solutions we recommend? We’ve stress-tested them against the constraints that kill most plans: budget, operations, labor availability, existing infrastructure, organizational capacity.
This isn’t about having more capabilities than other consultants. It’s about having capabilities that typically remain separated—and knowing how to integrate them so solutions work in practice, not just in theory.
How We Work With Organizations Like Yours
We Start by Understanding the Whole System
Every engagement begins with understanding context—the technical components, operational constraints, stakeholder relationships, organizational culture, and broader environment. This perspective reveals leverage points where targeted interventions produce outsized results, rather than optimizing single variables in isolation.
We Bridge Disciplines That Usually Stay Separated
The challenges our clients face sit at intersections—energy and water, building performance and operational efficiency, technology and organization. We bring expertise across these domains and, more importantly, understand how they interact. That’s where breakthrough solutions live.
We Stay Accountable for Outcomes
This isn’t about delivering recommendations and moving on. Whether we’re executing construction ourselves or guiding organizational transformation, we stay engaged until the promised outcomes materialize. We’re accountable for results, not just reports.
We Build Internal Capability
The goal isn’t creating dependency. It’s transferring knowledge, developing your team’s capabilities, and establishing systems that let you continue the journey independently. Organizations should need us less over time, not more.
We Think in Decades, Not Quarters
The solutions we design have to work through changing climate conditions, evolving markets, and future generations. This means considering lifecycle costs, climate adaptation, material recovery, and long-term resilience. Today’s decisions should serve decades, not just the next budget cycle.
Where We Focus Our Work
Our work concentrates in two sectors where integrated thinking creates breakthrough value, supported by seven core competencies that typically remain siloed.
Two Core Sectors
Manufacturing & Services: Industrial organizations pursuing operational decarbonization, resource efficiency, and sustainability leadership through energy and water conservation, ISO management systems, and strategic environmental performance.
Leaders in this space often face regulatory pressure and stakeholder demands for measurable emissions reductions. They need comprehensive roadmaps that integrate energy efficiency, renewable generation, electrification, and circular economy principles—while maintaining production reliability and hitting ROI targets. The challenge isn’t understanding what needs to happen; it’s making it happen without disrupting operations.
Regenerative Communities: Developers, municipalities, and impact investors creating high-performance, resilient communities through net-zero energy design, compact affordable housing, and integrated regenerative systems.
Development teams committed to regenerative principles often hit walls between vision and execution. They need integrated design that delivers net-zero energy, water independence, and resilience—at price points that work financially and with performance guaranteed by people who understand construction reality. The challenge isn’t the technology; it’s delivering it at scale with conventional financing and labor markets.
Seven Core Competencies
These capabilities support our work across both sectors:
Integrated Technical Expertise: We work across building science, energy systems, water management, and operational performance—creating solutions that work because they account for how systems interact, not just how individual components perform.
Contractor + Advisor Advantage: As both licensed general contractor and strategic consultant, we bridge the gap between vision and implementation. We design solutions we could build ourselves, and we build with full understanding of strategic intent.
Systems Thinking & Strategic Clarity: We apply rigorous systems analysis to map interconnections, identify leverage points, and design interventions that create cascading positive effects—then translate this complexity into clear, actionable strategies.
High-Performance Building & Development: We deliver net-zero energy buildings, Passive House design, deep energy retrofits, integrated water systems, and resilient housing that dramatically reduces environmental impact while enhancing occupant experience.
Regenerative Communities & Sustainability Strategy: We help organizations and communities move beyond sustainability toward regeneration—creating systems that restore ecological health, rebuild community resilience, and align human activity with living systems.
Operational Transformation & Technology Integration: We optimize organizational performance through management systems, digital tools, and strategic technology deployment—recognizing that environmental excellence and operational excellence are inseparable.
Emerging Technology & Investment Advisory: We provide independent assessment of clean technologies, construction systems, and investment opportunities—helping clients navigate innovation while managing risk.
Why Organizations Choose to Work With Us
Integration: We connect capabilities that typically remain separate—technical design and construction execution, building science and operational systems, strategy and implementation, analysis and action.
Experience: We’ve worked across scales from individual buildings to regional systems, across sectors from manufacturing to community development, across technologies from passive design to emerging innovations.
Independence: We provide objective analysis and advice, free from product sales incentives or predetermined solutions. Our recommendations serve client goals, not revenue targets.
Accountability: As contractors, we know the difference between designs that work on paper and designs that work when built. We’re accountable for outcomes because we implement what we recommend.
Regenerative Commitment: We’re not interested in helping organizations be marginally less bad. We’re committed to transformations that restore ecological health, build community resilience, and create lasting positive change.
Current Focus Areas
We’re currently concentrating on initiatives where our integrated capabilities create distinctive value:
High-Performance Residential: Developing compact (1200-1800 sf), super-efficient homes that achieve net-zero or Passive House performance at accessible price points—proving that extraordinary building performance and housing affordability can coexist.
Industrial Decarbonization: Partnering with manufacturers and service organizations to develop and implement comprehensive decarbonization roadmaps that integrate energy efficiency, renewable generation, electrification, and circular economy principles.
Regenerative Community Planning: Working with municipalities and developers to design community-scale systems that integrate high-performance buildings, renewable energy, water independence, food production, and social connectivity.
What Happens Next
If you’re pursuing transformation and hitting walls in execution, let’s have a conversation about your specific situation.
We’re interested in learning about your challenges and exploring whether our capabilities align with your needs. No predetermined solutions—just honest discussion about:
- Where you’re trying to go
- What’s blocking progress
- Whether working together makes sense
- What that might look like
We’re particularly focused on connecting with:
- Manufacturing and service organizations pursuing comprehensive decarbonization
- Developers and municipalities committed to regenerative community development
- Impact investors deploying capital in sustainable infrastructure and regenerative systems
- Organizations pursuing high-performance building at scale
The challenges ahead are significant, but so are the opportunities. The transformation you’re working toward is possible. The question is whether you have partners who can help close the gap between strategy and execution.
Note: Agricultural and food systems work is handled through our sister company, Environmental Intelligence Inc.
Explore Our Work
Visit our sector pages to understand how we serve specific industries and challenges:
Or explore our competency pages to understand our capabilities in depth:
- Integrated Technical Expertise
- Contractor + Advisor Advantage
- Systems Thinking & Strategic Clarity
- High-Performance Building & Development
- Regenerative Communities & Sustainability Strategy
- Operational Transformation & Technology Integration
- Emerging Technology & Investment Advisory
Connect With Us
We’re ready when you are.