The mission
Tom's mission
“My purpose is to take the money from the old world and use it to build a new world.”
A legacy for present and future generations.
Tom Cummins's mission is to create enormous energy throughout the world — and to help combat the evil in it.
Through the companies, and through philanthropy, he works to bring balance back to this world: helping people along the way achieve success, financial power, and stability.
He works every day, non-stop, across the world, to create a better tomorrow for the next generation.
Why
The floor he starts from
The mission begins where the story begins — below zero. Tom's own arithmetic for his starting line is not zero but something like minus thirty: a childhood he came out of barely able to read, an arrest at twenty-two, companies built, lost, and built again. Nobody handed him stability. He made it — one written plan, one working week at a time.
That is the why of everything else on this page. A man who rebuilt from nothing holds it as operating fact — not as a slogan — that anyone can. So the mission is never charity performed at a distance. It is the floor he stood on, extended to other people: food when they are hungry, work when they are ready, teaching when they ask, and the written tools he actually used, given away. The line he repeats most explains the stamina: “The secret is to love what you do.”
The work
Feed people, teach people, write it down
Under Tom's leadership, American Power & Gas donated one million meals through Feeding America during COVID-19 — and pledges the equivalent of 250 meals for every new customer.
The meals are the anchor of the record, and the verified center of it. Around them sits the quieter register of the same instinct: gifts sponsored for Toys for Tots, homes built with Habitat for Humanity, meals provided through food banks.
Then there is the teaching, which he treats as philanthropy of a different kind. He has delivered more than 380 lectures, seminars, and workshops on sales, financial discipline, and building companies that run on written policy. And the mentorship runs closer than any stage: at Progressive Energy Consultants, the business-to-business energy consultancy he co-created, Debbie Joyce trained under the apprenticeship of Tom and his partner Jim Bridgeforth — and took over the helm as President. That is what the teaching is for: successors, not applause.
And the tools themselves are free. The written policies his companies actually run on, the plain-English weekly financial plan, the monthly letters — given away, with nothing for sale behind them. Feed people, teach people, write it down: ask what the mission looks like in practice, and that is the whole answer.
Lectures, seminars & workshops
380+
delivered to date
The people
Helping a lot of people along the way
The mission does not photograph as strategy; it photographs as people. The packed seminar halls where the lessons land, the embrace in the aisle afterward, the teams standing in front of the buildings they fill.
The purpose
Why he won't stop
Every single year, city to city, country to country, the work is the same: impact people. Help them succeed. Hand over the tools — everything he has learned about building, everything that worked — so others can run with it. He is not going to stop until he has helped build a better world for all of us.
Ask him why, and the answer is bigger than business. Tom's philosophy is simple to say and enormous to live by: we are spiritual beings. The world we build is the world we — and everyone after us — will have to live in. Someone who is six years old today will be sixty someday. The future is not an abstraction; it is an address.
Now that I'm in my sixties, one day I'm going to be six. So I'm working toward building a better future for the world — for the next generation, and for myself, as I come back to a better world. That is my purpose. That's why I work so hard at producing energy every single day — so we can use that energy to build a better world.
A world to build. A new world.
The legacy
For the next generation
What gets left behind is not a monument. It is a working system: companies still operating on two continents, meals pledged with every new customer, and a library of written discipline — policies, plans, letters — published free for anyone ready to build.
The invitation has been in his own words for years: “I want you to be part of something big, and I want you to be big in that something big.” The letter arrives monthly. The door for questions is open.