But from the start, Noco has been an energy company, and these days, it’s even more so. Through acquisitions and hiring, the company has added 17 lines of business to cover every aspect of energy service – from supplying home heating oil and natural gas to performing home energy assessments and installing insulation.

And it wants consumers to know it.

“If you ask people in the market now, what do you know about Noco, they’ll talk about gas stations, convenience stores, big storage tanks and things like that,” said Michael Casciano, Noco president. “But we have pivoted the whole company really around our purpose, which is to optimize energy and reduce cost with an environmentally friendly solution.”

Noco started in 1933 as R.B. Newman Fuel Co., when patriarch Reginald B. Newman began delivering coal to residential customers with a single truck. It formed a heating and cooling division in 1982, then added electricity and residential natural gas in 2006.

“We’ve been servicing residential customers, but their needs have changed. The market has changed, and more than ever,” Casciano said. “Energy costs are front and center for families. It’s just a big part of their budget.”

So in recent years, Noco has transformed its residential business around a new focus. And the sale of its fleet of gas stations to Speedway gave the company an influx of cash with which to do it.

“We pivoted and said, ‘We’re delivering these products into the home, but what are we really delivering beyond the product? And that’s when we came to our purpose,” Casciano said. “We want to deliver energy savings and reduce costs so much so that some of our products cannibalize higher margin products.”

That is, if Noco succeeds in its new focus on products that deliver energy savings, Noco will actually sell less of its oil and gas to consumers. It’s something some people at the company are still trying to wrap their heads around.

“We install geothermal, which is a major energy savings. Using electric, most of the time we’re displacing a boiler or a traditional furnace,” Casciano said. “Certainly when it’s home heating oil, our fuels guys and our fuels division, they’re really mad at the geothermal guys because they’re taking one of their high-margin customers out of the market.”

In 2020, Noco acquired Warm & Fuzzy home heating and cooling, then Buffalo River Compost and Shanor Electric Supply, and expanded into community solar.

What followed was a string of acquisitions and hiring Noco needed to branch out into everything from geothermal heating and cooling and home generators to plumbing and air purifiers.

“We have two strategies. One is to buy and one is to make,” Casciano said. “So we will either buy a company and bring that expertise and their technicians and their vans and everything right into us quickly. The other is to hire the experts and then build around them.”

Noco recently added plumbing because the company saw a need for it among its customers. So it hired a master plumber that has licenses in every county of Western New York, brought on his five workers, and will continue to construct a plumbing division around them.

Next year, the company plans to add residential electric vehicle chargers, even windows and doors.

“There’s not a single thing that our customers should need related to energy that they can’t get from Noco. Not a single thing, including advice,” Casciano said.

Noco performs free home energy audits, and it wants to be able to perform every upgrade a consumer needs to make their home more efficient.

“We’re going to bring the insulation. That’s why we acquired an insulation company,” Casciano said. “If we’re going to do geothermal or a high-efficiency furnace or an air-source heat pump, I can’t stay away from windows, because what good is it if we insulate your home but you have windows that are poorly rated?”

The company also is working internally on proprietary software that will allow it to give customers an in-depth look at their return on investment for making energy upgrades.

“We can say, ‘This is your situation. Let’s check off what you want to do, what the costs will be, what the incentives will be, what the monthly savings will be, and what we want to do at the end,” Casciano said.

The analysis will use data from a variety of sources and produce real numbers.

“And we want to give you one way to finance it all,” he said. “So for instance, what if I can give you insulation, a new furnace and air conditioner, and let’s just say it was going to save you for $200 a month, and I can give you a financing product that costs $190 a month?”

The company, headquartered on Sheridan Drive in the Town of Tonawanda, is still family owned and operated with R.B. Newman’s grandson Jim at the helm as chairman. It employs more than 400 people, and does business from Western New York to Albany.

Now, it’s working to get the word out about the evolution of its residential offerings, and trying to change that popular perception from Noco: the gas station peopl to Noco: the everything energy people.

It has partnered with FARM marketing agency in Lancaster for a big advertising push, including television and radio commercials, and a social media campaign.

“We need to change the perception of the audience – that they offer all these other lines of business as well, and that you can go to them for multiple things,” said Ashley Lewis, FARM president and owner. “So that’s why, at the end of the commercial – and you’ll see on any of the billboards and some of the other ads that we have put together – it says, ‘That’s right, Noco’.”

At the center of the ad campaign are commercials that feature Noco’s different lines of business as individual characters. The television commercial “Noco at Home” features characters such as Furnace, Propane and A/C arguing over who hasn’t paid their share of the rent.

“They all have their own personality and persona,” Lewis said. “It gave us license to be able to do this long term. And we can introduce the different lines of business separately, and have different commercials and different advertisements that kind of speak to the different types of business.”