I Built a Million Dollar Sustainability Firm. Then I Lost It. Here's What Net Zero Actually Costs

Hey, thanks so much for listening. I would love to be able to help you more on what it is that you are listening to and why you're listening to, to me. If you could click on the link in the show notes, that would be awesome because it will help me define what it is that we should be talking about on this podcast. I built a million-dollar sustainability firm, and then I lost it. Here's what net zero actually costs. If you're building a sustainability business, or you're a CFO who just got a net zero quote that made your eyes water, I need 9 minutes of your time because I'm about to show you exactly why genuine climate work costs. What it costs, and what happens to a business that refuses to charge for it. I know because that business was mine. I built a sustainability consultancy to over $1 million in annual revenue. Profitable, growing, real product-market fit. And I lost it. My family went into debt to keep it alive, not because we were bad at the work, We're actually very good at it, but because the market won't pay what real climate action actually costs. Stay with me, because by the end of this you'll understand something most people in this industry only learn the hard way: the real price of net zero, and the one mistake that quietly kills good sustainability businesses. I made that mistake. for 20 years. I'll show you exactly where it cost me. Where it started. Let me take you back to 2003, because to understand why this business died, you have to see how it was built. I was a one person on a bike cycling around London, helping organisations become more environmental. My nickname at some companies was the Green Man, Because I turn up on a bicycle, and yes, the bike was green. It was great work, but I was pushing water up a hill for a very long time. Nobody was thinking seriously about sustainability. The market just wasn't there yet. Then 2008 happened, the financial crash, and something shifted. People started thinking about sustainability differently. CSR emerged. Organizations suddenly cared about their environmental impact. The tide was finally turning. I hired my first consultant, Emma Littlewood. We disagreed on plenty, but we agreed on the one thing that mattered: organizations needed to change. We had real respect for each other. That tension made us both better. By 2015, we had a team doing carbon reporting, but they were drowning in spreadsheets. Every client project meant weeks of manual data entry, calculations, version control nightmares. So we built a software. We called it Compare Footprint, and we launched it in 2018. The numbers looked great. And here's where the story gets interesting. The numbers were strong. Green Element grew from £800,000 in revenue to £1 million, to £1.2 million, to £1.5 million. Compare Your Footprint went from £18,000 to £250,000 to £550,000, both growing steadily. We had product-market fit. We knew it worked. We knew the market was there, but we couldn't get investment. The venture capital world back then had a simple rule. You can't have a software company with a consultancy attached. Those don't coexist, they said. You need pure software. So we split them into 2 separate legal entities, hoping that that would unlock funding.

It didn't.

We weren't eligible for EIS investment because I had already had an established consultancy. The funding rules just weren't designed for someone building a software on the back of 15 years of genuine experience. So I did what founders do. I ploughed all the profits from the consultancy into the software. I barely paid myself, and my family went into debt. We had 2 young kids. My partner was watching me pour everything into this business, and I remember asking myself, is this worth it? Should I keep going? But I could see something. The software was working. It was solving a real problem. The growth was consistent. So I kept going. What net zero actually costs. Now here's the part I really want you to understand because this is the number that explains everything. This is why your net zero quote looks the way it does. Running a genuine sustainability consultancy is expensive. Not expensive the way that most businesses are expensive. Expensive because you're hiring people with real expertise, environmental management degrees, Chartered environmentalist credentials, people certified in ISO 14001, ISO 50001, the GHG Protocol, science-based targets. You're paying for rigor. And then you do the work properly. Real carbon accounting, proper science-based target setting, Scope 3 emission mapping, supply chain auditing. The work that actually reduces the emissions, not the work that just looks good on a web page. That work costs real money. A proper carbon footprint assessment, done right, costs £20,000, £30,000, sometimes £50,000 or more. Because you need weeks of work, a certified consultant, rigorous data verification, and you need to go upstream into supply chains, which is genuinely complex. But most organisations think sustainability should cost a few thousand. or be free. Because it's the right thing to do. Because it's nice to have. And here's the central tension: the organisations that need this work most, and the ones with huge supply chains and real environmental impacts, often have the smallest budgets for it. They say, we need to cut our emissions, but we can only spend £5,000 on this. And they're surprised when you tell them what you're asking for actually requires £25,000 of work. There's a gap, a growing gap between what the work is actually worth and what the market is willing to pay. And if you're genuinely committed to climate action, not greenwashing, not a tree planting scheme in someone else's country, You can't compromise on quality to hit a price point. You just can't. The fall. So what happened? Well, then 2020 hit. COVID Lockdown. And strangely, consultancy work doubled almost overnight. Organisations were suddenly forced to think about survival, resilience, the medium term. For a moment, it looked like everything was about to pay off. By 2024, I was stretched too thin running the consultancy while trying to scale the software. I brought in a CEO to take some of the weight. But the real problem wasn't leadership. The team were confused about priorities, and I could feel the cracks forming. And here's the thing, the business was profitable. We were good at what we did. We weren't failing because the model was broken or because we were incompetent. We were failing because cash flow was running out, and we had no investment to bridge We were growing too fast and we didn't have the cash. That's the structural problem. That's what killed it. Looking back, I can see the deeper mistake. We were serving 2 different markets: software for smaller businesses, consultancy for larger enterprises, and we never charged enough for either. We'd come from a time when we were notoriously undercharged. And we never fully corrected it. Our ideal client profile was wrong, and we priced as if our work was worth less than it was. So what this means for you. So if you're a CFO or a business leader trying to build a credible net-zero strategy, here's what I need you to hear. The risk you're managing here is bigger than cybersecurity. The difference is that cyber is a short-term threat. Climate risk is a medium to long-term one, which makes it far easier to ignore. Right up until it isn't. Real net zero is expensive, not because anyone's trying to rip you off, but because genuine climate action requires rigour, expertise, time, and investment. A software platform that gives you dodgy emissions data and calls it strategy will cost you less upfront, but it will cost you far more in regulatory risk, in lost stakeholder credibility, and in actual climate impact. You'll miss your targets. You'll face audit failures. You'll create greenwashing liability. My past business didn't fail because the approach was wrong. It failed because most of the market isn't yet willing to pay what genuine climate action costs. Organizations want net zero. They want it at a discount. The businesses I work with now through 51 to Carbon Zero understand this. They're FTSE, NASDAQ, and XTRA-listed organizations. Their CFOs know that climate risk is business risk, that cutting corners on sustainability data is like cooking the books. on your financial reporting. It's not a saving. It's a liability you can't afford. And honestly, I didn't frame the last business's closure as a failure. 25 years of work. 500 organisations helped. A podcast with over 200 episodes. And between 30,000 to 40,000 followers, and a software that's automated what used to take weeks, and a team of genuinely brilliant people, that's not failure. That's a foundation. So let me leave this with you. I'm going to leave you 3 things. If you're a founder building a sustainability business, price your work on what it's actually worth, not on what you think the market will pay. You'll serve better clients, attract better partners, and you'll sleep better at night. If you're a CFO building a net-zero strategy, invest in the right expertise now. The upfront cost is real. The cost of cutting corners is far higher, and it lands later. When it's much harder to fix. And if you're a sustainability profession— professional— and if you're a sustainability professional watching this as a consultant, an advisor, trust your own judgment. It is often better than the authority in the room. This channel is where I share what 25 years and one hard lesson actually taught me honest conversations about what works in climate strategy and what doesn't. If that's useful to you, subscribe. It's the only way to make sure you see the next one. And if you're an expert who works with businesses on this, I'm building a referral network of practitioners who do this work properly. People who understand that real climate action is an investment, not a cost centre. There's a link in the description. Come and see what we're building. And I'll see you in the next one.

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