Shonté Davidson is the CEO of Better Together Brain Trust (BT2) Energy, a turnkey contractor for EV charging, energy efficiency and electrification. Davidson was recently a finalist in MFN’s Sustainability Challenge accelerator program, and was named one of MassLive’s 2025 Black Leaders of Massachusetts.

You’ve been working in energy efficiency for 11 years. When did you decide it was time to transition into entrepreneurship and what inspired BT2 Energy?

I spent about eleven years working in the energy sector, primarily focused on energy efficiency and program implementation. In my last role, I served as a Program Manager for a supplier diversity program at the largest electric utility in the region. In that position, my job was to help expand opportunities for diverse businesses within the clean energy supply chain.

Over the course of about five years within the energy efficiency department, I worked closely with organizations like the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts (BECMA), Greentown Labs, and other ecosystem partners that were trying to increase participation of minority- and women-owned businesses in the energy transition. A big part of my work involved helping build pipelines for diverse contractors, vendors, and entrepreneurs who could participate in programs related to energy efficiency, electrification, and clean energy deployment.

During those conversations, something interesting kept happening. Leaders in the ecosystem would often ask me, “Shonté, have you ever thought about starting your own company? There are not many people like you who actually own businesses in the clean energy infrastructure space.”

At first, I did not see myself as an entrepreneur. But after hearing that message repeatedly, I began to realize there was a real gap in the market. The clean energy transition was accelerating, but the ownership of the companies installing and deploying the infrastructure did not reflect the communities being served.

That realization was really the catalyst. I began to see entrepreneurship not just as a career move, but as an opportunity to build something that could both participate in the market and change it. That is what ultimately led to the creation of BT2 Energy. The company was founded with the idea that the clean energy transition should be something we build together, and that diverse businesses should not just participate in the energy transition, but help lead it.

What resources have you tapped along the way?

There are so many! MFN was a big one. Their coursework really helped us crystallize our mission. MFN also introduced us to Woman of Color Entrepreneurs, another functional program that provided us with different resources and a lot of know-how. I’m always a big fan of saying yes to a program because the content that you get, the time you can just focus on your business, and the people that you meet, it’s truly beneficial.

There’s real value in meeting new people. When you get to know someone before you team up with them, you have that time to develop chemistry. I think back to the completion of BECMA’s first kickstarter in 2021, when I asked one of the facilitators, Nicole Voudren, now BT2’s President, to go into business with me, and she said no. BECMA gave us that introduction, and a year later, after we really got to know each other, she finally said yes.

It’s been almost three years since you launched BT2 Energy back in May 2023. What has changed between its initial founding and today?

Back when we started, we had fully adapted to hustle culture. There were only two of us, and we were trying to really be everything to everyone. Then, a couple months after BT2 Energy was founded, we became one of the significant contractors (curbside EV charging stations) for the city of Boston, and that provided us the credibility we needed to go out and work on other projects. Instead of hustling, we got strong about our systems, our processes, the clients we wanted to have and the company we wanted to be.

A lot of people only think of us as an EV company but we are so much more than that. We’ve also been building capabilities in decarbonization, and slowly breaking into storage. So, now we’re fighting this interesting problem of being known as an electrical contractor that does EV only, when really we’re a full suite climate provider. And it’s been really fun working to change people’s perception of who we are.

Sometimes I think there’s hesitation to work with smaller and newer companies like BT2 Energy. But, as a smaller company, we can be nimble and provide really unique solutions. So, take a chance and get to know us!

Shonté’s Parting Words:

Thank you for this opportunity to share our story. I think one of the things we do well is acknowledge the people and organizations who help us. We say thank you publicly and privately, and we say it often.