How Neil Yeoh bootstrapped a climate business to $1 million
One person is not going to solve all of the challenges that come with climate change.
It’s going to take thousands, if not millions, of people to solve the challenges that we face now and in the future.
Even today, we need a lot more people to be solving these challenges.
That’s where Neil Yeoh and the OnePointFive team come in.
OnePointFive connects and develops Climate Experts in Residence.
Today, OnePointFive acts as an agency of Climate Experts in Residence and helps others become those Climate Experts in Residence through their OPF Academy.
In just 4 years, OnePointFive earned over $1 million in annual revenue.
Let’s dive into how Neil and his team at OnePointFive got there.
The story of OnePointFive
The start of Neil Yeoh’s career
Neil has quite the academic background. Neil has his undergraduate degree in robotics and business from the University of Adelaide in Australia, then obtained his MBA from Oxford, and eventually received a Masters of Environmental Management from Yale.
When it comes to being a founder, Neil has a unique combination of education and experience that gives him enough specific expertise but at the same time, a skillset that many would call a generalist skillset.
After graduating from the University of Adelaide, Neil was a consultant at KPMG and after a few years, went back to school at Oxford in London for his MBA.
From there, Neil joined Echoing Green, a non-profit that is focused on developing the next generation of social impact leaders. At Echoing Green, Neil managed a $8.5 million fund for climate startups and projects. He saw over 2,000 different climate ventures and ended up funding a few dozen of them.
That’s where Neil noticed something in particular: money is helpful for these climate solutions, but they need a lot more.
These ventures need expertise and knowledge in all sorts of different areas to actually create the solutions and impact they were hoping to create.
That’s where OnePointFive comes in.
The start of OnePointFive
It’s now 2020, and Neil is a student at Yale where he meets his now founding partner, Matthias Muehlbauer. Matthias was a former consultant (or recovering consultant as Neil put it in my chat with him) and was also involved in climate startups while at Yale.
Given that both Neil and Matthias were recovering consultants, they didn’t want to start one thing in particular: a consultancy.
Instead they decided to start OnePointFive as a marketplace business for climate projects and consultants. They wanted to play on hard mode (marketplace businesses being some of the least successful business models out there).
As Neil mentioned in my conversation with him, they started OnePointFive as a marketplace based out of “ignorance”. They didn’t realize how hard it was to create a two-sided marketplace business and as Neil put it, it’s like starting a “three businesses in one”. There’s the supply, the demand, and the matching.
This marketplace was always a tough thing to get momentum with.
To help keep the lights on, the OnePointFive team ended up starting the one thing they didn’t want to start: a consultancy.
In Neil’s words, “I could learn into what I hated and innovate in that space”. Fair enough, Neil.
The consultancy worked while the marketplace wasn’t. It kept the lights on and if you’re still able to pay the bills, you can keep a company going (obviously).
By the end of 2020 (OnePointFive started February of 2020), they had over $100k in revenue for the year. 99% of that revenue coming from consulting projects. The marketplace wasn’t gaining any momentum.
By the end of 2021, OnePointFive had over $250k in annual revenue and by 2022, they had over $450k in annual revenue.
That all seems great until you realize the core product they wanted to start represented 1% or less of their revenue. Three years in and the marketplace still didn’t have any momentum.
Pivoting OnePointFive into EdTech
In 2023, the marketplace had value for OnePointFive but it was only for building their network of experts.
Essentially, OnePointFive would find projects and then instead of matching projects to experts, they would need to take on the project themselves because it was way easier to just hire the experts for part or all of the project and have it all cohesive under OnePointFive.
They ended up hiring one person to manage this expert network and immediately, that person ran a large survey to learn more about who was in this expert network.
Through insights from this survey, the hundreds of applicants they would receive to internship opportunities at OnePointFive, and their own realizations all at the same time, Matthias and Neil realized one key insight.
They were spending 50% of their time just educating their expert network.
This is because within climate work, there’s a lot of new innovation and regulations that one person can’t know it all, especially early in someone’s career in climate.
That led to OnePointFive launching the OPF Academy overnight.
The OPF Academy is an accelerator for professionals to develop their sustainability skills to help other businesses grow without destroying the planet.
Just by posting a landing page and sharing to their small network at the time, OPF Academy had over 300 applicants.
Keeping in mind - OPF isn’t just a $99 course. It’s roughly $1,500 to go through it.
They ended up having 90 people in cohort 1 which represents about $90,000 in revenue.
OnePointFive has kept OPF Academy going and is just finishing up Cohort 5 of the OPF Academy and had over 180 people participate.
They’ve also kept the part of the business they didn’t want to start: the consultancy.
By the end of 2023, OnePointFive had over $1.1 million revenue from OPF Academy and consulting projects.
For 2024, they are on pace for $2 million in annual revenue.
The growth strategies of OnePointFive
As mentioned in last week’s deep dive with Asia Orangio, there’s no silver bullet to growth. The main priority is prioritizing the right actions to take for growth. Here are the three main strategies Neil Yeoh and the OnePointFive team took to grow OnePointFive to $1.1 million in revenue.
Personal Networks
Neil and Matthias started OnePointFive with some pretty powerful personal networks behind them. First, they were at Yale and were developing a lot of strong relationships there in the climate industry. Second, they had previous experience working for other climate and sustainability ventures. Those experiences and opportunities gave Neil and Matthias networks before they needed them to build OnePointFive.
Those experiences also gave Neil credibility when going out to that network. OnePointFive didn’t have a brand when starting out. They only had Neil and Matthias’ personal brands and reputations to gain clients and that worked in the early days.
To get away from their personal brands a bit, OnePointFive had to complete projects at a high level, but they also used their personal brands to get the OnePointFive brand out there more.
For example, they would leverage their personal networks to become contributors at well known brands like Forbes and the World Economic Forum. In the articles and content they would create with those brands, it would say things like “Neil Yeoh, CEO at OnePointFive”.
You might not realize it at a first glance, but after a while of seeing Neil’s content, you’re going to take OnePointFive more seriously since he’s posting more and these well known brands are continuing to affiliate themselves with Neil and the OnePointFive brand.
After OnePointFive had taken off a bit, Neil started to create more and more content. Specifically content that would be posted on LinkedIn.
This was partly due to Neil being part of the Linkedin Creator Accelerator Program and learning how to be a creator on Linkedin straight from the source, but also because as Neil put it “people are looking for jobs” on LinkedIn.
Whether you’re employer or aspiring employee in climate, you’re going to be either looking for climate talent or be looking for opportunities to work in climate. The target customers of OnePointFive are all on LinkedIn.
Due to Neil taking LinkedIn more seriously, LinkedIn today is now the top growth channel for OnePointFive.
In 2020, they only had about 1,000 followers on LinkedIn and today they have 10,000 followers on the OnePointFive LinkedIn page. That’s not including Neil’s personal following on Linkedin which is over 14,000 followers.
Networks & Subnetworks
As mentioned above, personal networks were crucial for OnePointFive to get their first $250k in revenue.
The way OnePointFive has expanded outside of their personal networks is where the true magic is.
Even though the marketplace model for OnePointFive never worked, it naturally forced them to create a network of experts that they still use today. This network of experts is crucial for them as they continue to grow their consulting side of the business. They need to be able to tap into the network to fit all of the needs of the wide variety of climate projects they get from organizations.
What’s clever about this network is that OPF Academy creates a flywheel of growth for this network for both sides of their business: organizations and expert network (Neil, maybe you really did create a two-sided marketplace!).
With the OPF Academy, they’ve created a flywheel of growth as seen in the graphic below.
They teach aspiring climate professionals and help them get their first climate jobs. That helps them build trust and become experts or thought leaders in the climate space, especially for those looking for opportunities or creating opportunities in climate.
As students graduate from OPF Academy, they have more climate experts in the world and in their expert network.
Those students get jobs and now work for organizations that may need OnePointFive’s fractional support because as mentioned throughout this deep dive, one person can’t know it all about climate. OnePointFive can be a source of paid support for the students that now have jobs at organizations.
With OnePointFive supporting organizations and climate experts, you naturally have a lot of conversations happening about OnePointFive as they are acting as a hub for a lot of this climate work.
The more people talk about OnePointFive, the more people want to join their OPF Academy and the more organizations know they can go to OnePointFive for fractional help for climate experts.
OnePointFive’s current mission is to train 100,000 professionals by 2030 in climate and if they accomplish that (or even get a fraction of that honestly), they have an even more significant business in the future (at least a 8-figure business).
One tidbit that that I enjoyed in talking to Neil was his response to the question I asked of “is it easier now to run OnePointFive or was it easier in the beginning?” and his response was a good way of describing it.
He essentially said it’s like a video game. The levels get harder as you progress through the game, but because you’re improving, you can still move forward and overcome those more difficult challenges.