While corporate Britain was hiring armies of sustainability consultants to write glossy reports, Mark Sait was quietly getting on with the job and knocking millions of pounds off the energy bills of the nation's hotels, hospitals and schools.
The founder of SaveMoneyCutCarbon is refreshingly honest about his motivations. Ask him if he has always been an environmentalist and the answer is a flat "no".
What drives him and his multi-million-pound business is a simple proposition: help other people save money.
Speaking exclusively to GB News, he shared: "If you walk into a business and ask: 'Do you want to cut carbon?' There'd be a very small proportion of people who knew what you were talking about.
"But if you ask: 'Do you want to knock 25 per cent off your energy bill?' Everyone understands that."
He puts the same challenge to people today. Everyone knows what £1,000 off a household energy bill looks like, or £100,000 off a commercial one.
However, he noted that: "If I say to someone: 'What does a ton of carbon look like?' Most people will reply that they do not know".
According to Mr Strait, this is why the company's name puts the words in the order it does. Saving money comes first. Cutting carbon is "an amazing byproduct"; important, but not the sales pitch.
"If you're running a business today, particularly hospitality, margins are incredibly tight. You're trying to survive. You don't want someone coming in going: 'Hey, let's save the planet'."
Through his consultancy firm, Mr Sait provides other firms with guidance on how they can both cut costs and save the environment by introducing Net Zero-friendly technologies to their operations.
The story begins in a Los Angeles bar. Some 15 years ago, Mr Sait was running a business spun out of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working alongside "incredibly intelligent people that put men on the moon and built satellites."
Over a beer one evening, one of them predicted the world would soon be gripped by rows over carbon emissions and that conflict over water shortages would follow.
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An engineer by background, Mr Sait returned to the UK intrigued. Having previously built a substantial business working across the private sector, he went back to the big brands he knew and asked a blunt question: what is your energy bill?
He remembers sitting across from the manager of a 200-bedroom London hotel who told him £50,000. Mr Sait wrote it down as an annual figure, only to be corrected that it was for the month.
Today that same hotel would be paying closer to £1million a year, the second biggest cost in the business after staff, he says.
The idea for "another crazy business idea" crystallised at the kitchen tableover a glass of wine. SaveMoneyCutCarbon was born in 2012: one place where businesses and households could sort out their energy bills without wading through "snake oil".
Mr Sait is unsparing about what happened to the corporate world in the years that followed: the COP26 era, when ESG became boardroom orthodoxy. Companies rushed to hire teams of sustainability experts.
In his words, those experts did little more than "write documents and set targets". While they produced booklets, his firm kept delivering, resulting in savings a finance director can see on a bill. Fast forward to today, the founder believes the reckoning has arrived.
"A lot of the big boardrooms have gone: hang on, we've spent all this money on ESG and booklets, and we're not seeing much actually happen."
The result is a flow of business towards the firms that can point to a decarbonised building rather than a PowerPoint and SaveMoneyCutCarbon is reaping the benefit.
The company has proved remarkably resilient to the shocks that have battered the rest of the economy. When war in Ukraine, turmoil in the Middle East or upheaval at home sends energy prices soaring, Mr Sait's phone rings more, not less.
"It's a tailwind for us, not a headwind. More and more people come to us and share that if they don't get their energy or water bills down, they're out of business."
That help has built the kind of customer loyalty most firms can only dream of. Major hotel groups and hospitals have stayed with the company for ten years, coming back "because they trust what we do and what we deliver".
Sitting between clients and manufacturers, the firm sees its job as sorting the genuine kit from the gimmicks by "taking the snake oil away" and being judged on nothing but the savings it delivers.
Backing that growth has meant raising tens of millions of pounds in investment to build what Mr Sait calls a "zero to one" business.
In other words, doing for energy and water what the great aggregators did for their industries, serving everyone from a household placing a single online order to multi-million-pound projects across the country.
All these years later, the predictions made over a beer in Los Angeles of soaring energy bills and water under strain have largely come true.
Mr Sait bet that British businesses would act not because they were lectured into it, but because the numbers made sense. His company's bulging order book suggests he called it right.
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