BCI Spotlight
Samantha Hart believes the most critical infrastructure we can build isn’t physical. It’s the trust between utilities and the people they serve. As CEO of Milepost, a women-owned firm working at the intersection of energy, trust and community, she leads a consultancy built on a deliberate premise: that stakeholder value matters more than shareholder returns, and that an energy program only works if the people it’s meant to serve believe in it.
That conviction is reshaping where Milepost works. Under Samantha’s leadership, the firm is extending its services beyond utilities to state and local agencies — a deliberate push to widen the public-private partnerships that energy programs depend on. The logic is straightforward: a utility program, a municipal plan and a state initiative aimed at the same community too often run on separate tracks, leaving the resident at the end of all three to make sense of it. Building relationships across those agencies is how a fragmented set of programs starts behaving like a system. It’s the same problem Beacon Climate works on from the community side, approached from the institutional one.
Samantha came to energy by an unusually practical route. A serial entrepreneur with a background spanning education, the nonprofit sector and the concrete industry, she joined Milepost in 2019 as Director of Development and Innovation, where she founded the company’s Innovation department and built its first turnkey product — educational materials that utility clients could deliver to elementary school students. She also led the firm away from traditional sales toward what she calls “up-serving,” an approach that made consulting accessible to smaller organizations larger firms tend to pass over. She became CEO and owner in 2024, taking the company through its transition to women-owned business status and launching a corporate stock grant program that extended ownership to six employees.
Her expertise runs from strategic energy management and program design to community-based social marketing, facilitation and grant writing — a combination that explains how she moves between a technical conversation and a community meeting without changing registers. She has been a member of the American Public Power Association since 2020 and has served on its Customer Connections Conference Committee, and she sits on the U2030 Advisory and is a member of the Women’s International Network of Utility Professionals. She also runs Hart Property Advisors, a family business providing capital planning and reserve studies for community associations, faith centers and recreational facilities.
Samantha holds an M.S. in Sustainable Practice with a focus on green building from Lipscomb University and a B.S. in Concrete Industry Management from Middle Tennessee State University.