The BAF Technologies story is a “green” story, to be sure; compressed natural gas for cars is much easier on the environment than petroleum-based fuels. And it is cheaper, with CNG costing about a dollar a gallon less than gasoline. Usually, all that would be more than enough for BAF to get the mainstream media’s attention.

But BAF president John Bacon is casting his company’s appeal as something much more valuable; namely, national security.

“It’s domestic fuel,” Bacon told me. “We don’t have to go outside the United States for the fuel. We have over 200 years of natural gas in the United States right now. So by staying here, we keep our dollars at home, we don’t do business with people that don’t like us a whole lot, and we keep our country safe.”

CNG is an alternative fuel option that has received much attention from government agencies and private analysts. More companies will soon be under pressure to find more cost-effective ways to maintain vehicle fleets. Municipal entities, utilities and public transportation outlets will also be looking to upgrade their vehicles to run a form of CNG, so BAF Technologies sees itself as being in a very sweet spot in the entrepreneurial process.

Our cameras visited BAF’s installation facility in Dallas to watch them switch out traditional gas tanks for CNG systems. The customer? A major telecommunications company that has already heard the siren call of alternative fuels. So the A-list companies on the Fortune 1000 have gotten the word; natural gas for cars can be greener and more economical for a company’s bottom line.

But with fresh unrest racing its way around the oil-producing nations of the Middle East, Bacon’s strategy for CNG as a safeguard against foreign oil dependence suddenly takes on new meaning.

- Renay San Miguel

You can be forgiven if you think that Dallas Drain Company is just another plumbing outfit. After all, they deal with drainage issues for homes and offices, and that’s plumbing work, right?

Indeed, the company’s roots are in plumbing – the company’s founder worked 27 years for one of the bigger plumbing companies in Dallas. But after just one meeting with Kevin Travis, Dallas Drain’s president and CEO, you would come away thinking that his company is on the leading edge of technology and engineering, thanks to his knowledge of water and what it can do to structures and foundations.

And you would also hear the pride he has in his staff, which he consults with regularly for ideas on water drainage solutions. “These guys who work with us, they’re artisans, pure craftsmen,” Travis told me. “Everyone has been with me for a very long time. There’s very little turnover.”

Besides keeping the right personnel, Travis has also invested heavily in homegrown research and development, going so far as to build a golf course-style sand trap behind the Dallas Drain Company offices so he can study new ways of draining traps. His company is in the right part of the country for working on water drainage; one out of every five foundation failures occurs in Texas, according to Dallas Drain. That may be why he’s set up several testing areas around his offices, complete with cameras and monitoring equipment as he and his team try to design innovative ways of drawing water away from buildings, or keeping tree roots from wrapping around and through underground pipes.

“We’re doing stuff no one has even heard of before,” Travis said. “Most of it is learned from practical applications – just fixing problems. A lot of the stuff that we see is needed is not really available commercially, so we either modify it or make our own.”

The innovation gives Kevin a chance to use his engineering background, and his solutions and success are added to the long line of entrepreneurs who build businesses by identifying problems – and then go and fix them.

- Renay San Miguel

Meredith Emmerich is one of the best examples of a spokesperson for Mitsubishi Electric Cooling and Heating Solutions, and not just because she happens to be the company’s director of applications support. She’s also a mom, and the anecdotes she tells about finding the right climate control balance in her own home are some of the best testimonials for what Mitsubishi Electric’s technological wizardry can accomplish for residential users.

The story that hit home with me involved the individual zoning capabilities for every room of a house that her company’s products deliver for consumers. “So at night I like to keep it a little cool – 69 degrees in my room,” Emmerich said. “But my baby’s nursery, it can be 73 degrees. So you have that capability to customize your room to how you live in your home.  No traditional centralized heating or cooling system can do that.”

Of course, our spark360 story also includes interviews with those who don’t work for Mitsubishi Electric testifying to how features like ductless air conditioning, exclusive filtration systems and other innovative technology help them stay healthy in their own homes.

“The idea of the Mr. Slim (air conditioner) having the ability to have a filter that was an anti-allergen filter was a selling point,” said Kelly Lee.

“For health reasons, it’s been a benefit,” added Evelyn Kennedy. “I have a tendency to have allergies, particularly in the summer.  I do not have that anymore and I really have not had a severe nasal infection at all.”

When you work on the kinds of stories we do at spark360, you always look for outside, independent support in terms of testimonials. You would expect company employees to rave about their own products, right? But in new mother Meredith’s case, her words can highlight another key selling point for Mitsubishi Electric: she practices what she preaches.

- Renay San Miguel

Jon Suder’s business card lists him as an attorney/partner in the Fort Worth law firm of Friedman, Suder & Cooke. But it became clear following our spark360 interview with him that he carries a secondary title: student of history.

Our interview quickly turned into a master’s class for me in intellectual property litigation, its role in the founding of our country and how it has impacted the march of technological progress. As a tech reporter for three major media outlets during my journalism career, I was already somewhat familiar with the latter category; I knew how jealously hardware and software companies guarded their secrets and how the coming of the internet had had its own effect on ideas, innovation, patents and IP protection. But I learned more about just how much founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin believed in intellectual property rights, and how that conviction worked its way into the United States Constitution.

After all, Jefferson and Franklin weren’t just architects of democracy: they were also inventors. Jefferson engineered designs for farm plows, devices for encrypting communications and furniture pieces, among other things. And you’ve no doubt heard of the Franklin stove.

You would expect Suder and law firm co-shareholder Mike Cooke to know their intellectual property litigation history. But they both have the gift of explaining complex property litigation concepts and defenses in easy-to-understand terms – again, something you could have guessed considering their jobs are to convince juries comprised of average citizens why a company believed its technology patents had been stolen by another entity.

What also comes through in their history lessons is their own belief in standing up for those IP rights when a company believes they’ve been violated. These issues can mean life or death for entrepreneurs and their struggling start-ups, and Suder and Cooke are convinced that by pursuing intellectual property litigation complaints, they’re not just addressing issues of justice – they’re also helping to stoke the engine of the U.S. economy, which has received a lot of its fuel over the past 100 years or so from the brainpower exhibited by some inventor or engineer in a cold, dark garage or a small, crowded dorm room.

Think Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Dell, Microsoft; history is full of such examples.

- Renay San Miguel

Starting a new business is always a roll of the dice, no matter which way the economic winds are blowing at the time. But the construction of Honda Cars of Katy’s 50,000 square-foot facility in the Houston suburbs has to qualify as an entrepreneurial leap of faith.

The dealership was built in 2007, about the time that the nation’s economy engine started misfiring. “Our timing was just awesome,” says Honda Cars of Katy general manager Chris Morrison with more than a hint of irony. “We built at the most expensive time you can build a store. And then ‘09 came and everything got tough. But we’ve managed to do pretty well.”

How well? Despite being a relatively new dealership, the auto maker has already bestowed Morrison’s business with its coveted President’s Award that honors outstanding fiscal performance and customer service. People still need a new Honda car every now and then, and Morrison is there to help them with that choice. He’s accomplished that by opening a dealership that he likens to a Neiman Marcus in terms of looking like a high-end retail experience, but keeping his focus on customer happiness with highly-trained employees and an emphasis on top-quality service and repairs.

I was particularly impressed with the NASCAR-style oil changes in the Express Center, which puts a technician above and below each car. And even though I’ve never worked in an auto service bay, I’ve spent many a Texas summer broiling in the heat, and Houston’s climate from July through September can be especially brutal when you add shirt-soaking humidity. So I’m guessing the technicians at Honda Cars of Katy do appreciate the air conditioning that makes climbing under a new or used Honda car that much less intimidating. I’m betting it’s also made the dealer the kind of Honda service Houston residents can rely on for quick maintenance and repairs.

This is Morrison’s second opportunity to open up a new car dealership; he worked his way up from dealer floor sales associate to leadership roles in the Dallas-Fort Worth area – also a hotbed for auto sales competition. “I’ve been very lucky,” he told me. “I’ve only worked for three stores in my life.”

Luck. It’s a part of the small/medium business owner strategy, whether they realize it or not. Thanks to those same rules, it also plays a role in any leap of faith.

- Renay San Miguel

I’ve covered enough real-life trials and courtroom dramas in my journalism career, so I was already aware that the televised version of Law and Order (cue familiar “dun dun” sound here) is somewhat different from what takes place in courthouses around the country every day.

While I’m sure that last-minute, dramatic revelations and exciting cop chases do indeed happen during the course of some trails, what you don’t see on your big-screen TV is all the work, research and technology that goes into making a case against someone or some entity. That was the big takeaway for me when the spark360 crew showed up at the North Dallas offices of personal injury claim lawyers Frenkel & Frenkel.

The two brothers who are the firm’s co-founders, Scott and Mark Frenkel, had their assistants bring in automobile mockups, full-size x-rays showing horrendous injuries, videotapes of high-speed crash tests. And then there were the cutting-edge 3D animations and computer graphics that showed how far someone was thrown from a vehicle and what an ejection like that does to the human body. When you couple all that with experienced physicians adding their testimony to the images, you’ve got some pretty compelling evidence for a jury considering a case where someone was hurt because of somebody else’s negligence.

It takes a lot of work, time and money to come up with the technological aids that can help juries make up their minds about drunk driving lawsuits and other cases. Frenkel & Frenkel attorneys believe they have to make those kinds of investments to even the odds for their clients, who are sometimes taking on large corporations with their nursing home neglect lawsuits or their physician malpractice lawsuits. The big companies have teams of attorneys and enough manpower to go around; Frenkel & Frenkel knows this because both brothers started their careers working on the defense side of these kinds of cases by representing hospitals, doctors and corporations.

So the real work of bringing a case like that to trial may not be as exciting as the mysteries solved within an hour’s time on your television. But the results – justice for clients, some sense of closure for those who have suffered a death or long-lasting injury – can be as dramatic.

- Renay San Miguel

The contractor training room at Mitsubishi Electric Cooling and Heating Solutions headquarters just north of Atlanta isn’t just for contractor training. It also makes for a nice showroom.

On display: more than three decades of revolutionary technology.

The spark360 team was allowed to film some of the training sessions going on in the room for our reports on Mitsubishi Electric Cooling and Heating Solutions for professional and home customers. And as is usually the case on our business profiles, the contractors and distributors who will be selling and servicing the company’s products weren’t the only ones getting some training. The spark360 crew learned a lot about variable refrigerant flow (VRF) zoning, compressors built with INVERTER technology and CITY MULTI controls because we got to see them demonstrated via the capable instruction of Mitsubishi Electric senior applications specialist Joe Bush.

Mind you, we didn’t learn enough to actually install and maintain Mitsubishi Electric’s cooling and heating units, so we won’t be quitting our day jobs anytime soon to go work on things like ductless air conditioning. But the room’s demonstration units, featuring cutaways that allow you to peek inside the maze of circuitry and motherboards powering the company’s products, give you some idea of the innovative technology that Mitsubishi Electric delivers to its customers – particularly its professional audience, which includes architects and engineers who can factor in the way those products save money and energy into account when they are designing new commercial buildings.

It’s also clear that the company believes in providing the best customer service through the extensive training it gives to its certified contractors and distributors. I got a glimpse of some of the training materials and listened to one of the company’s trainers during a session; Mitsubishi Electric is serious about making sure those who will be selling, installing and occasionally repairing its products know them inside and out.

- Renay San Miguel

Rene` Isip will be the first to tell you that he doesn’t take anything for granted in the uber-competitive Dallas-Fort Worth auto dealer marketplace.

The owner of Toyota of Lewisville, one of the largest DFW Toyota dealerships, is a self-made man in this particular industry. Isip worked his way up from dealer floor sales associate to sales manager to finance manager to, finally, the corner office at his own dealership. “I learned this business from the ground up,” he tells me. “I didn’t win the lottery nor have wealthy parents who were able to help me with the funding.” He does have a business partner, but he’s understandably proud to have done most of the hard work by himself to get to this point in his career; hence his reluctance to rest on any laurels or tread water in this business. “That’s why the customers are so important to me.”

Not that Isip fits any stereotypes associated with auto dealerships. He was pleasantly low-key and unassuming when we spoke before our interview on the spark360 virtual set. But he clearly has a passion for his business and is always looking for ways to stand out from the crowd; witness his move to win the naming rights for the Toyota of Lewisville Railroad Park near his dealership. That sports complex, just shy of 300 acres, has four football fields, four baseball fields, four soccer fields, three lakes, dog parks and a walking trail. It’s a brilliant business move to ensure the connection between community and business.

And when I suggested a possible use of technology to help customers check on their status at his Toyota parts and service department, Isip perked right up and immediately started talking it up with the people he brought with him (remember Rene`, if this works out, I get 10 percent!)

Just kidding. It would be enough to see the idea put into practice at a dealership run by an auto dealership owner who’s always looking for a way to race ahead of the competition. It might be because he always remembers what it takes to make that first sale on a dealer floor.

- Renay San Miguel

Cliché demons, get thee behind me. I was strongly pulled toward using the well-worn phrase “practice what you preach” in relation to our spark360 profile on The CEO Institute, Lane Kramer’s Dallas-based business mentoring group that combines executive coaching with Biblical values.

But thankfully, there’s really no preaching involved here. Kramer is refreshingly stereotype-free when it comes to talking about how his Christian CEO peer group can help senior executives deal with growing their business in positive ways. That’s very important in these divisive times in our nation’s history.

Whether it’s journalism or content marketing, one must tread carefully when dealing with issues of faith – faith in personal lives, faith in the workplace. Discussing Christian faith integration in business plans can conjure up a lot of misconceptions and inaccuracies to those who might be skeptical about such things. And given these post-ironic times we live in, not to mention various past scandals involving those who claimed to judge lest they be judged, such skepticism waits right around the corner, ready to pounce.

Kramer is also aware of these attitudes. “We have to be careful about what claims we make,” he warns. “We don’t tell anybody that your business profitability is going to triple in the next 90 days. But essentially, if you take Biblical principles and apply them to a business, the business is going to perform better. The people will get along better, the employees will function as a more cohesive team, they’ll do a better job of taking care of the customer, and the result of all that is that the shareholders ultimately win.”

Makes sense from both a business perspective, and a “people” perspective. And it makes it easier for me to send clichés back to cliché hell where they belong.

- Renay San Miguel

One thing I’ve discovered to be true after 30 years in the broadcasting business: the people who say they have no desire whatsoever to go in front of a camera are the ones who truly look and sound the best on camera.

Such is the case with Chris Malone, the delivery coordinator for Friendly Chevrolet. The owner/CEO of the Dallas Chevrolet dealership, Mark Eddins, had told me that she was a real asset for his company in that she was attractive, well-spoken and fulfilled a unique role at Friendly – she is the employee designated with helping new or used car buyers get acquainted with their purchases. That job usually goes to whoever sold you a car at other dealerships, but Friendly goes the extra mile, so to speak, with Chris’s job. She provides a full personal orientation to customers, giving information on everything from warranties and service contacts to how to program your satellite radio.

Eddins had told me that Chris makes such a good first impression on customers with her charm, her knowledge and her good manners that they often come back to the dealership bearing gifts of flowers, wine and other goodies – and not just the men, mind you. If that doesn’t qualify Chris as a secret customer service weapon for Friendly, then I don’t know what does.

But all you have to do is get her in front of the camera. And then convince her that she’ll be great on camera. This we were able to do, and I credit our producer/director/editor extraordinaire Steve Miller and photographer Tom Graybael with being able to put her at ease during the shoot. The interview went well, and I hope she’s happy with the results. I know Eddins will be pleased; she’s a great spokesperson for his business.

The auto sales business obviously relies on the personal touch; people like to buy from people they like, no matter what is being sold. If the idea is to put customers first, then you couldn’t ask for a better representative – a face for the company on the screen – than Chris Malone.

- Renay San Miguel