CES STORIES | INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY
How Rochelle Fernands helped build CES — one steady hand, one honest word, one mission at a time.
There’s a moment in the early days of Customized Energy Solutions that Rochelle Fernands tells quietly, almost in passing. Stephen — her husband, and the company’s founder — was grinding through the slow, uncertain work of landing that first client. The living room had become a makeshift office. The rent on their old house was paid in sweat equity: patching walls, painting rooms, pulling up carpet that, she laughs, was genuinely gross. And then one morning, Stephen came to her and said he was thinking about getting a paper route.
“That didn’t make any sense,” Rochelle says simply. “His energy was going to be siphoned off and he was going to be tired. This is what he needed to be doing.”
She told him no. Stay the course. He did.
Twenty-seven years later, that instinct — to see clearly, speak plainly, and hold steady — is still Rochelle’s gift to the people around her. It’s just that now, the people she steadies aren’t only her husband. They’re leaders across industries, women navigating the loneliness of leadership, and communities in India, Zambia, and Uganda who are discovering what electricity can unlock.
A Road That Started Overseas
Rochelle grew up as a foreign service kid — her father was an agricultural attaché posted through India, Nigeria, Denmark, and the Philippines. Watching developing countries up close, seeing what basic infrastructure either unlocks or denies to ordinary people, left a mark she carries to this day.
When she and Stephen married in grad school, the plan wasn’t energy markets. It was ministry work in the MENA region. She was working at PECO Energy writing scripts to help confused callers understand what Pennsylvania’s new deregulation law actually meant for them. “Am I no longer with PECO? Can I do whatever I want?” she recalls people asking. Her job was to patiently translate a complicated new reality into plain language. It was, in retrospect, good practice for a lifetime of doing exactly that.
Meanwhile, Stephen was off on a month-long trip to Peru. He came back with a new idea. “He said, ‘I have none of the skills of a church planter, but I have all the skills of a businessman,’” Rochelle recalls, smiling.
She wasn’t surprised. She’d always known who he was. Even as a boy growing up on Cape Cod, Stephen would pick blueberries, have his mom bake a cake, load it into his red wagon, and go door-to-door through the neighborhood selling it. By sixteen, he owned and operated a bike rental shop for tourists — bought from the original owner.
Rochelle describes him with a phrase she coined herself: not an introvert, not an extrovert, but a “work-avert” — someone who gets his energy from solving problems.
She encouraged him to get a job at PECO. And when the moment came to leave and start something of his own, she encouraged that too.
The Mentor Who Paved the Way
Rochelle doesn’t talk long about herself before she starts talking about someone else. At PECO, that person was Linda Roth — her mentor, and one of the reasons she didn’t bump into many walls in what was, in 1997, a very male-dominated industry.
“She would take Drexel interns and say, just sit at the end of my desk, do your work, and listen to how I do things,” Rochelle says. “She paved the way. Because I had her, I didn’t face a lot.”
When Linda moved from PECO to SCT — Systems and Computer Technology — Rochelle followed her. The thread continued: SCT would later become one of CES’s early clients. The mentor who shaped Rochelle’s career inadvertently helped shape CES’s first client relationships too.
It’s a kind of mentorship Rochelle absorbed and made her own. Her superpower, she’ll tell you after a thoughtful pause, is mentoring leaders — specifically the ones who have to hold everything together for everyone else and rarely get asked how they’re doing.
“Leaders are expected to have all the answers. Nobody’s saying, how are you doing?” she says. “To have a space where someone checks in — just talking through the pressures, having somewhere safe to go — I think that’s really important.”
The Pivot, and What Followed
When she was six months pregnant with twins, Rochelle was laid off from her project manager role at SCT. It settled a question the couple had held loosely: whoever earned more would keep working; whoever earned less would stay home. In that moment, the math was clear.
She raised the kids. She helped with demand side response work in CES’s early days. She went back for a master’s in counseling. And she quietly became one of Stephen’s most important thought partners — not as a business advisor, exactly, but as the person who could hear the same topic come up three times and ask the question nobody else would: “What’s really going on with that?”
She travels with Stephen to the communities CES CARES supports — Nagaland, Zambia, Uganda. That last one almost didn’t happen by design. Rochelle and Stephen were already in Uganda visiting their daughter, who was there volunteering, when Stephen reached out to Nitin. It turned out that he was also in the country at the time. They met. And suddenly, Uganda was underway.
Having grown up watching her father work in agriculture across developing countries, Rochelle understands viscerally what electricity changes. “Teachers will stay in regions that have electricity because they can charge cell phones,” she explains. “It affects education. It affects whether people need to leave their communities to find work. Levels of deep poverty are very tied to lack of electricity.”
Stretch Yourself — You Can Figure It Out
When Rochelle gives advice to young women, she comes with research. Studies show that women generally need to feel 80% confident before taking on a new role; men are comfortable stepping in at 20%.
“Don’t only take positions you’re 80% sure you can handle,” she says. “Challenge yourself. Stretch yourself. There are mentors out there who will help you close the gaps. Find one. And if you’re in a position to be a mentor — be one.”
And a final fun thing, offered with a smile: at the CES India talent show, Rochelle sat down and showed everyone her hidden talent behind a full drum kit and played with the band.
“I was there when the company started. I was there when it found the right mix of people and really started gaining traction. The company truly is its associates — and I hope Customized is an exciting place for growth, opportunity, and impact.”
— Rochelle Fernands, CES
