Five Years of Building What Actually Matters
We didn’t start Climeaction to build a company. We started it to do work we could stand behind, and learned what that really takes along the way.
Five years ago, We didn't set out to build a company. I set out to do work I could actually stand behind.
My previous employer - an energy management firm I'd spent years building a career inside - was acquired by a fossil fuel company. That was the moment. Not dramatic. No resignation speech, no carefully worded LinkedIn post. Just a quiet decision, supported by family that I wasn't going to let someone else's plans define what I did next. So in 2021, I started Climeaction out of Cork with Joe, a wise, seasoned business leader, who seen the opportunity in working together and the potential, and was confident enough in the opportunity and our combined experience to make it work and back it financially. His confidence was based on experience, mine based on the kind of confidence that only exists before you properly understand what you've gotten yourself into.
We were not, by any stretch, a global carbon intelligence company on day one. We were a few people in a room with a mission, a logo, and an outstanding ability to underestimate what lay ahead.
That gap between what we were and what we eventually became is the story of the last five years. I want to tell it properly - which means telling it in a way that would make anyone who was actually there nod, rather than quietly close the tab
Year One: Earning the right to exist
We started with micro businesses and SMEs. Not the glamorous end of the market. No boardrooms, no multinationals, no journalists calling. Just small businesses trying to understand their energy bills and sometimes their carbon footprint for the first time.
It was exactly the right place to start, even if it did not feel like it. In truth, I did not have much choice. Competition clauses mattered and I took that seriously. But working with SMEs teaches you things you cannot learn anywhere else. What actually stops action, what language lands, and how wide the gap really is between a sustainability strategy and a company trying to make payroll on Friday. We were useful. That had to be enough.
Jerry Murphy and Annie Duffy were there from the beginning. In meetings, on the road, helping turn something that was mostly still an idea into something real. The kind of people who did not need managing, which is exactly what you need when you are building, running, and explaining a company all at once. We grew and learned together and that has lasted.
Year Two: A signal that something was working
By 2022 the team had grown to seven consultants and we'd expanded into larger businesses, working with many well known brands in the Food & Drinks sector. The SFA gave us their Emerging Small Business award. I want to be honest about what that meant: a lot. When you're in year two and still working out whether you have a business or just a very intense and expensive hobby, recognition from people who understand the reality of it - the early mornings, the spreadsheet-as-strategy phase, the amount of your own money that quietly disappears - lands differently than any revenue milestone.
Tim, Paul, Mara, Carmen joined that year - people who joined early, when joining early meant something. When the pitch was mostly conviction and the evidence was still being assembled. To those people in particular: I don't take it lightly.
Year Three: The growth that tests everything
2023 was the year things went in every direction at once, including several directions we hadn't planned for.
The team doubled to sixteen. We added ESG support and B Corp consultancy. We achieved B Corp certification ourselves - a process I'd recommend to anyone who wants a rigorous, occasionally humbling look at whether their organization actually practices what it preaches, or just has a nice slide about it. We served 275 new companies that year alone and cleared four hundred clients in total by December.
On paper: success. In practice: the experience of scaling a professional services firm, which is less like a rocket ship and more like trying to renovate a house while people are still living in it, while also trying to add a second floor, while the building inspector keeps changing the rules. More people means more complexity. More services means more risk of spreading yourself thin. More clients means the margin for error in your processes shrinks at exactly the moment your processes are still being written on the back of something. More people also means more responsibilities and less time for working on the business.
There were months in 2023 where I felt the organization pulling in three directions at once. We held it together and the feeling started to develop again that I needed to be more in control of my destiny, so we completed a management buyout in November. The buyout changed who owned the direction of the business, but did leave us with a lack of experience and restraint at the top - that wasn't something I had accounted for. In December we raised €2.3M in investment to enable our growth and push our boundaries on what was possible. The investment gave us the resource to do something we'd been circling for a while: stop being only a consultancy, move to being an end to end solutions provider and start building a product.
Completing an MBO, Raising Investment and going through Due Diligence, all while trying to maintain and scale a business was one of the hardest things I have done - luckily I had a strong management team, good family and friend support, who kept the show on the road while that all happened and for that I will be forever thankful.
Year Four: Growth, Internationalization and the wheels came off the bus
March 2024 brought a trip to the USA with Enterprise Ireland - our first toe in the water to see if our dream could become a reality. Their St. Patrick's Day trip across Boston and Washington DC, followed by an event in New York, gave me the confidence and most importantly the context to understand the potential. It's funny how one conversation can be the difference in whether you make a decision - no it wasn't the Taoiseach Leo Vradkar at the time, who I spoke with for 30 mins, or the CEOs of other businesses that have done great things here, it was a simple conversation with a priest - Father Liam Bergin at a consulate event in Boston. That conversation, made me realize how close to home Boston really is and how that even if the states appeared so far away, really if I took the leap, I'm only in the next parish over from Kerry and could always come home.
In June - I set off to the states to start to build, by August 2024 we had our team, our office - the first client took until December but we did it. The timing, as I've said publicly, was not ideal. Trump's election campaign was building momentum, and with it a large question mark over the future of climate policy in the world's largest economy. You could not have picked a worse moment, in hindsight, to plant a flag in the American sustainability market.
Several people told me this at the time. They were not wrong. I opened the office anyway, which is either evidence of conviction or stubbornness, and I'm genuinely not sure which. Probably both, on alternating days.
What I'd say now: the companies doing this work aren't waiting for governments. The organizations with net-zero commitments made them publicly, to shareholders and customers and anyone else who would listen, and those commitments don't quietly dissolve because the political temperature changes. Over the last six months, the US business has been thriving. Brendan Place has led that operation with a steadiness that the situation absolutely required, and which I was grateful for every single week.
On the strategy - from consultancy to end to end solutions and software. The consultancy model is a good business. It is also a fundamentally constrained one - revenue scales with headcount, and there are hard limits to how fast you can grow before quality suffers. If we were serious about real impact on global emissions, not just helping a few hundred companies identify opportunities but actually changing how factories make their products in a low carbon way and change how entire agricultural supply chains measure their footprint, and deliver action, we needed a projects business and we needed software.
That's where our Projects Business, ESGo and VSAg came from. The ability to turn ideas to action and two software platforms that accelerate action.
VSAg is the most promising - It's a full infrastructure for Manufacturers in the food industry, could be leveraged by governments and has global potential to change how data is aggregated from farms. The premise is simple - A mobile app that uses AI and video to gather emissions data from farmers, including in regions where reliable data barely exists. The insight isn't complicated: most of the world's farmers have a mobile phone before they have a carbon calculator. We're meeting them where they are, which is usually somewhere with better WiFi than you'd expect. Because we designed it around video, we can get data from people with literacy challenges, educate them and scales across languages, cultures and regions at a speed no other solution can that I have seen to date.
Our ambition at this point was significant. Our ability to execute on it was, generously, a work in progress. But I'd be doing a disservice to this anniversary if I skipped over what starting to happen on the inside that year, because it matters more than any of the external milestones.
We had a management structure that was, in theory, designed to let the business scale without everything running through me. Decentralized. Empowered. All the right language. In practice, it didn't work. The structure failed - I chose the wrong leader, accountability was unclear, trust was eroded, decisions slowed to a crawl, and the gap between what we said was happening and what was actually happening on the ground widened in ways I didn't catch early enough. The business was growing on the outside while something quietly wasn't right on the inside, and that combination, if you let it run, is how companies get into serious trouble.
Year Five: Rebuilding the foundations
Rebuilding from that point was one of the hardest things I've done in five years. Not because it involved difficult conversations, I can handle those, but because some of it involved good people in the wrong roles, and accepting that the organization I'd built was no longer fit for what came next. There's a particular kind of difficult that comes with that realization, and no amount of consultancy experience fully prepares you for it when it's your own company.
When people leave, for whatever reason, whether the fit has shifted, the organization has shifted, or they simply grew into something that needed more space than we could give, or we needed to downsize in particular areas of the business to build back better, it's rarely clean and it's never as tidy as the public version. Some brilliant people have passed through Climeaction who are no longer here. Some left because we grew past the shape that suited them. Some left because the controlled chaos of a scaling startup is, quite reasonably, not what everyone signed up for, and some left because we failed to deliver on our sales targets in their region or their roles. I'm grateful for what every one of them contributed. The organization they helped build is the foundation of what we're working from now.
The team today, more intentional and with clearer lines, has been rebuilt properly. Charis Aherne, who leads our agricultural impact work, is exactly the kind of operator this phase of the company needs. Someone who knows the difference between a good idea and a thing that will actually get done, and has little patience for the gap between the two. Her team, especially Charlotte and Ari, have the right mix of youth, passion and seriousness around their work. If something is going to be done, it needs to be done right, no compromise. Oisin, who leads our consultancy business, I have worked with since he was a graduate. He learned from the same experts I did and has many of the same qualities I had in my earlier career. A passion for industrial decarbonization, a curiosity and love for doing things better, and the understanding that writing reports is useless unless you can back up your idea with data, know how to implement it, and build trust with customers. Without all those elements, nothing will get done. He is probably stronger at the detail than I ever was or will be, but that's what we need to get to where we need to be. He is also better at making Pizzas, but we won't go down that road.
James, who recently joined us as Design Lead, came along the same path as Oisin and myself, but diverged into a more professional design pathway which enables us to leverage his experience to build our projects business. Nigel, who leads on Projects, has over 35 years experience doing what needs to be done. There are others like them, pushing forward at a pace that if any of our management slow down, they'll pass them out. Andrew on Process, Julia on just about everything we throw at her, Ethan and Chris, two Irish American engineers who get s**t done, and Taynara, our first person in Brazil, who is showing us all how market penetration should work. On our commercial team, Barry has been a breath of fresh air. Patience, strategy, professionalism and a constant positive influence. And Leon, an old friend, who started in Marketing but has done more for the business in Sales, Software Product Management, AI integration and process improvement than anyone could have imagined. I knew when I was sitting on the beach in Spain scrolling through Instagram that he was going places, and that's why I gave him the call. One of the best decisions in five years.
We have many more people contributing in spades. In Q1 of this year alone we have added over 50 years of experience to the team. They know who they are, and frankly so does anyone who has worked alongside them.
What five years actually looks like
There's a version of this story that reads well in a press release: small Cork firm, big ambitions, awards, investment, global multinational clients, €2.8 million raised between investment and grants, US office opened, agricultural software launched. All of that is true. All of it made for a decent headline.
There's also the version where a management structure collapses and you spend the better part of a year figuring out what you actually have and chasing your tail financially because you over extended with the wrong team. Where you open a US office at the worst possible political moment and watch it slowly, stubbornly become one of your strongest revenue streams. Where a software pivot is two years in and you can see it slowly starting to take shape. Where good people leave and you learn something uncomfortable about yourself each time.
Both versions are accurate. The second one is more useful, and probably more interesting for anyone going on this journey.
The mission hasn't changed: eliminate carbon emissions wherever the work needs doing, in industrial decarbonization, in agricultural supply chains, in markets where the data doesn't yet exist - before it's too late for any of it to matter. What's changed is how much I understand about how hard that is, and how dependent every inch of progress is on the people around you. Choose them wisely - Easier said than done but five years of lessons will surely help us in the next five.
Five years in, I am more grateful and more clear-eyed than I've ever been. Which is, I think, exactly what five years is supposed to do to you - even if you'd never have agreed to it in advance.
Now we get back to work.
