Last Updated on August 2, 2025 by Owen McGab Enaohwo
The Impact of Implementing SweetProcess at a Glance
- Scaled from 15+ to 40+ employees in under 5 years
- Centralized documentation across HR, IT, and operations
- Cut employee onboarding time by more than 50%
- Created a self-service knowledge base used daily by the team
- Freed up leadership hours to focus on growth and client delivery
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Building a Sustainable Future, One Energy Solution at a Time
While other founders built traditional consulting firms, Ted Pope set out to do something different. He assembled a team of out-of-the-box thinkers with one mission: to reshape the future of energy.
Co-founded by Ted and Whitney Pope, 2050 Partners is a professional services company specializing in decarbonization, energy efficiency, and regulatory consulting. Their clients, including utilities, governments, national labs, and nonprofits, rely on them to help solve some of the most complex challenges in the energy space.
This isn’t work that gets solved in a few calls and checklists. It requires deep research, cross-sector coordination, and a team that understands over 100 technical systems, from building codes to industrial appliance standards.
But with this complexity comes the need for structure. And as 2050 Partners grew, that structure was missing.
2050 Partners’ Reality Before SweetProcess
When the company was still a lean 15-person team, much of the administrative work, from HR to IT, subcontractor invoicing, and compliance, fell on the shoulders of a few individuals.
Processes were documented in Word documents and scattered spreadsheets. Onboarding new team members involved lengthy lectures from Ted and frequent back-and-forth emails. Delegating tasks to staff was risky, especially when procedures hadn’t been written down or were easily forgotten.
“As I get older, I get more forgetful,” Ted joked. “It became clear we needed to start documenting our procedures… You can’t do it effectively by word of mouth.”
They were growing fast. 2050 Partners had a vision to reach 50 employees in five years, and they were already onboarding more subcontractors to meet the rising demand from clients.
The business needed a solution that could help them keep up with the growth and scale successfully.
Discovering SweetProcess As the Perfect Tool for Growth
Ted was no stranger to business process systems. He admits he’s a bit of a process-mapping nerd. But after joining Collective 54, a mastermind group for professional services founders, he realized something deeper:
“Every founder I spoke to said the same thing: you need to document your repeated processes, particularly as you try to grow and scale. If we didn’t do that, we wouldn’t be where we are.”
This was a major requirement for business growth.
At the time, 2050 Partners was working with Bill Gallagher, a seasoned scaling coach—someone who specializes in helping growing companies scale sustainably. SweetProcess came up during a conversation, and it immediately clicked. The team checked out several tools, including Trainual and other SaaS products, but SweetProcess stood out.
He said, “It’s a simple tool that’s very powerful, and it did exactly what we wanted it to. A lot of the other tools had a lot more features and stuff stapled to them, and that drove up costs and wasn’t interesting to us. SweetProcess was a well-crafted solution to our situation.”
The team signed up and brought in Ted’s old friend from Cornell University, Shelby Spock, to help implement the system. She spent months documenting procedures and streamlining operations, and the results were incredible.
Experiencing the SweetProcess Effect
Once 2050 Partners began using SweetProcess, the entire story took a swift turn for the better. They began to see immediate results, and in the long run, a major impact that positively affected the company’s growth. Let’s check out some of the major highlights.
1. Automated Employee Onboarding
Before SweetProcess, employee onboarding involved long hours of live training. Now, each new hire is assigned a series of tasks preloaded with links, videos, instructions, and context. Employees go at their own pace, complete checklists, and leave feedback, all tracked in real time.
In Ted’s words, “One of the closing features was that once you define a procedure, which is a series of steps you have to take to do something, you can then assign that procedure to anyone in the company and see their progress when they’re 10% or 90% done.”
This sped up the onboarding process and reduced the time Ted spent onboarding new employees. He had more time to focus on growing the business.
“Before we joined SweetProcess, that was me lecturing away for three or four hours on boring myself to death talking about cybersecurity and IT issues and how we do our network and all that stuff.”
Not only did this speed up onboarding, but it ensured consistency. Every new team member was trained the same way.
2. Streamlined Admin Workflows
Subcontractor management, which used to be a major operational pain due to the numerous administrative steps involved, has become easier.
With so many specialists contracted for specific projects (like elevator systems or heat pumps), there are hundreds of moving parts. SweetProcess gave the team structured, repeatable workflows for processing subcontracts, submitting invoices, and handling compliance.
This was helpful because some of the subcontractors were brought in only once or twice a year.
Ted explained, “For someone who only does something once or twice a year, you forget everything you’re supposed to do. People see it as [a] relief that they get this paint-by-numbers checklist to follow to do the exercise, and it points them to resources and background documents.”
3. A Central Knowledge Base
Perhaps the most important benefit? Building a knowledge base that didn’t depend on one person’s memory. No more IT tutorials from Ted. No more searching for Word docs. No more emailing the admin team for “that one link.”
Employees now have a knowledge base they can always access when they need to understand a task or even forget what they’re supposed to do.
As Ted explains, this shift freed him from constantly being the go-to person for answers:
“New employees are going to forget a bunch of stuff they learned in the first few days. They don’t have to call me up as a company leader and bug me with questions. They can go back into SweetProcess and get the information they need to be reminded how to do something.”
Looking Ahead: What’s Next for 2050 Partners?
Today, 2050 Partners is a team of over 40 people with a clear system for scaling.
Their next goal is to document more of their client-facing project processes. While much of their work is bespoke with large, multiyear energy consulting contracts, there are still repeatable elements they plan to bring into SweetProcess.
Ted revealed in the interview, “We started with admin and HR. Next, we’re working on repeat tasks across projects, things like kickoffs, reporting, and stakeholder engagement.”
By gradually building their internal system, 2050 Partners is laying the foundation not just to grow, but to grow without chaos.
Build Systems That Help Your Business Scale
This is Ted’s advice for any growing business.
“If you’re planning to grow, even just a little, start documenting now. It feels daunting, but it’s the best decision we made.”
SweetProcess gave 2050 Partners a straightforward way to grow without sacrificing quality. It turned guesswork into clarity, bottlenecks into workflows, and manual admin into self-serve processes.