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With decades of OEM experience, we provide no-nonsense guidance that helps clients make better decisions.
© 2026 Gas Turbine Coach, LLC
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Tom Freeman grew up watching his father coach football, teaching fundamentals, building game plans, and getting the most out of every player on the field. It left an impression: figure out what your people need, be straight with them, and help them win. Four decades later, Tom had built a career doing exactly that, just in a very different arena.
Tom started as an engineer at Pratt & Whitney, working on propulsion systems for advanced X-planes, from fighters to hypersonics. The kind of programs where getting it wrong isn't an option. That's where he learned how to solve hard problems under pressure. It's also where he learned gas turbines, because a jet engine and an industrial gas turbine are essentially the same machine. One pushes an airplane through the sky, the other spins a generator to make electricity.
He then spent twenty-six years at GE (now GE Vernova), rising from engineering into global commercial leadership roles supporting the heavy-duty gas turbine fleet that keeps power grids running worldwide. He led customer engineering for hundreds of turbines across every continent, negotiated long-term service agreements worth hundreds of millions, and helped clients evaluate new builds, optimize performance, navigate emissions regulations, and make billion-dollar investment decisions.
But something kept happening. Clients didn't just call Tom for the technical answers. They called because he'd tell them the truth, push back when something didn't make sense, and explain things in plain language instead of hiding behind jargon. He'd help them see around corners.
He was coaching. He just didn't call it that yet.
When Tom retired from GE in mid-2025, he could have taken his forty years of experience and gone fishing. Instead, he launched Gas Turbine Coach because there was a gap in the market that bothered him, as well as a great opportunity.
Power plant owners, developers, and investors were making high-stakes decisions about gas turbines, combined cycle plants, and new data center power infrastructure. Many were relying on the OEMs themselves for guidance, the same companies selling them equipment and service contracts. Others were hiring massive engineering firms that charged accordingly and moved slowly.
What they needed was someone who had been inside the OEM, understood the technology cold, and could give them an honest, independent answer without the conflicts of interest, corporate overhead, or drawn-out timelines. Just decades of hard-won expertise applied directly to the problem at hand.
Gas Turbine Coach didn't stay a one-man operation for long. Tom brought on Pat Flynn, a thirty-one-year energy industry veteran, as Managing Partner, and the model keeps expanding with a growing bench of senior experts who can be deployed on projects as needed. Each brings deep specialization in areas like performance engineering, emissions, M&A due diligence, and power project development.
What holds the team together isn't a corporate handbook. It's a shared belief that the best way to serve clients is to be the advisor they actually trust, the one who gives them the unvarnished assessment, the practical recommendation, and the follow-through to make sure it gets done right.
The firm works across four sectors. For power plant owners and operators, that means plant assessment, performance evaluation, LTSA review and negotiation, and greenfield and brownfield ideation. For financial institutions, it's technical due diligence, market and risk evaluation, and M&A advisory support. On the policy and government side, the team covers energy market trends, public policy advocacy, and ISO/RTO and regulatory engagement. And for OEMs and vendors, Gas Turbine Coach provides market positioning and go-to-market strategy, sales growth support, and product strategy and execution.
A typical engagement might be a heat rate optimization study that finds $1.5 million in annual fuel savings across two plants, or an independent technical review that gives a private equity firm the confidence to close a deal or walk away from a bad one. It could also mean helping a data center developer select the right generation technology for a complex site with multiple power sources.
These aren't theoretical exercises. They're real decisions with real money on the line, and Tom's team has been on both sides of them for decades.
Tom's father understood something fundamental about coaching: it's not about having all the answers yourself. It's about knowing what questions to ask, putting the right people in the right positions, and helping your team perform at its best when the stakes are highest.
That's what Gas Turbine Coach does, just with gas turbines instead of goal lines.
If you're making a critical decision about power generation assets and want an experienced, independent perspective, get in touch. The first conversation is always free. That's how Coach does it.