Melissa Helphingstine

Melissa Helphingstine is Primera’s program reporting and client management expert with a passion for building relationships with her clients. “As soon as she able to truly understand the clients, that’s when she able to provide them with the tools and packaged solutions that address their most-pressing issues,” she explains. Melissa’s ability to provide the clients with tailored solutions is the result of more than 10 years of program management experience, including energy program design and bench-marking, portfolio balancing and optimization, reporting, environmental policy, sustainable solutions, contract procurement and negotiations; regulatory compliance, and quality assurance and control.

Melissa studied landscape architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before earning a masters degree in environmental policy at the University of Illinois at Springfield while working for the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. It was there that she started to hone her consulting skill set while focusing on energy efficiency and sustainability issues. She left the IEPA in 2005 to pursue a successful program management career. Since joining Primera in 2014, she’s been instrumental in implementing and managing a Project Management Office (PMO) effort in support of a five-year, $1-billion annual spend for a local utility. Her oversight and ability to manage detailed reporting practices helps the clients ensure the entire portfolio meets its goals and metrics.