Twenty years of Evergreen Home Performance

Table of contents

• The house that started it
• The early years
• More than a contractor
• Growing with Maine
• Evergreen today
• The next 20 years

The house that started it

Before Evergreen, Richard Burbank was a chef. He trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and built a career in fine cuisine and food service management, work that runs on exacting preparation and attention to detail.

Then he and his wife Sammy bought an 1880s home in Rockland, and Maine winters introduced themselves.

Like a lot of old Maine houses, it was cold, drafty, and expensive to heat. Richard started digging into why. The answers led him to building science, the study of how a house actually works: how heat, air, and moisture move through a building, and why fixing the right things in the right order matters.

Fixing his own house turned into a calling. In 2006, the same year Maine launched its Home Performance with Energy Star program, Richard and Sammy founded Evergreen Home Performance, one of the first home performance contractors in the state.

The early years

Evergreen started as a one-man operation. Within a few years it was a 15-person company, and the people who joined in those early years shaped what Evergreen became. Brian Schortz came aboard in 2008. Brian Robinson and Elise Brown joined in 2009, and Elise became a partner in the business in 2011.

In December 2009, an Evergreen project in Camden became the first home in Maine to qualify for the new Efficiency Maine Home Energy Savings Program incentive. The homeowners cut their heating and hot water use by 36 percent and saved about $900 a year.

That project set a pattern that has defined Evergreen ever since: do the diagnostic work first, fix the right things, prove the results with testing, and help homeowners get every rebate dollar they qualify for.

More than a contractor

From the beginning, Evergreen treated education as part of the job. Richard taught building science to local students and to people entering the trade, and the company ran its own winter Building Science Class to train new technicians in a field that barely existed in Maine yet. Evergreen volunteered on test-outs for Midcoast Habitat for Humanity projects, verifying that new homes performed the way they should.

That commitment reached beyond Maine, too. Richard serves on the board of Efficiency First, a national home performance trade group, and has spent years advocating for state and federal energy efficiency policy that helps Maine homeowners afford these upgrades.

Growing with Maine

For its first decade, Evergreen was a midcoast company, working out of Rockland. As demand grew in southern Maine, so did Evergreen. In 2016, Richard and his family moved to Falmouth, and the company expanded to serve the Portland area, eventually opening its Portland office on Riverside Street.

The services grew along with the map. What started with insulation and air sealing now covers the whole house: home energy audits, attic and wall insulation, basement waterproofing, crawl space encapsulation, and radon mitigation. Different services, same idea. The house is a system, and it should be safe, dry, warm, and efficient from basement to attic.

Evergreen today

Twenty years in, the numbers tell part of the story.

In 2025, Efficiency Maine recognized Evergreen as the top contractor in the state for insulation rebates, meaning Evergreen helped more Mainers insulate their homes with rebate support than any other contractor.

The company Richard and Sammy started is no longer a one-family business. Today Evergreen is owned by Richard and three longtime team members: Elise Brown, Brian Robinson, and Brian Schortz. Nine Evergreen employees have been with the company for more than a decade. In a trade where crews turn over constantly, a quarter of the team has stayed ten years or longer.

The next 20 years

The values that guide Evergreen haven’t changed since the Rockland days: do the right thing, strive for excellence, and prioritize relationships.

What’s ahead looks a lot like what got us here: growing the team, training the next generation of building science professionals, and taking care of the older homes that make Maine what it is.