Growing Green

The Castlefield Group is helping companies boost their positive environmental impact.

by Daniel Metz photography courtesy of Golf Kitchen

THE STUDIES ARE IN. We are at a critical decision point: Embrace a green future or leave our great-grandchildren a planet that looks more like a desert. Yet worldwide, environmental progress is slowed by a fear of economic repercussions—how will a green future affect the bottom line?

The Castlefield Group envisions a future full of businesses thriving in the green economy. Members Nick Barrow and Bradley Kirkland founded their company in 2020 as an advisory firm helping companies with an emphasis on environmental sustainability and innovation maximize their impact through inorganic strategies, increasing their market share through mergers and acquisitions. They provide support and guidance for fledgling companies based on decades of combined experience, because they can see the writing on the wall: “Our great grandchildren will either look at us as the generation who set the world back on a sustainable path, or as the generation who blew our last best chance to do so,” says Barrow. “We have to be the people who make the right choice and business has to be at the forefront of driving environmental impact reduction.”

As longtime friends and experts in business management, Barrow and Kirkland noticed a gap in the market, and they stepped in. Barrow is a Mergers & Acquisitions professional with experience in the US and UK as a corporate officer, business owner, and entrepreneur. Kirkland has also been a business owner for nearly twenty years and has served as an active Angel Investor for a decade. He’s been a mentor and a speaker for businesses in over half a dozen countries across the globe. “We acknowledged within ourselves our ambition to try and make a positive impact on the world,” says Barrow. “We felt that the best way we could do that was to help companies who wanted to make a difference and compound our own impact through their impact.”

Barrow and Kirkland chose inorganic growth strategies because they are focused on small companies with promising visions. Billion-dollar companies may have ready access to resources for enacting change, but many green visionaries don’t. They may not have run a business before, or find themselves punching far above their weight. “We have to believe in the founder and the team,” says Barrow, “We have to trust them, and they have to be people who we would enjoy working with, but in our experience, the real value is having a unique mindset that brings about change.”

That’s where Castlefield Group comes in. “We work with business owners to develop a profile of what an ideal acquisition target would look like, find those companies, contact and qualify them, and do the heavy lifting to get a deal done for our client,” says Kirkland. “We ran businesses, and we know that most business owners would like the opportunity to grow their company by making acquisitions, but the truth is that most of them don’t know where to start.”

Their client list includes a company developing an organic fertilizer solution to rapidly replace synthetic nitrogen, with the potential to reverse the damaging effects of over-farming and reduce carbon output from fertilizer production by over 90 percent. Another client is revolutionizing freshwater microbiome extraction by developing a method to dramatically increase both the volume and variety of available microorganisms—a vital process for the continued development of medications and cures for global health advancement.

If you’re looking for advice and assistance, you’re not alone. “We have found that inorganic growth strategy is a message that resonates with business owners,” says Kirkland. “Most of our clients come from referrals.” Yet they remain strict in their mission. “We focus on clients whose founding principles mean that their businesses inherently align their environmental and economic objectives. We are quite selective about who we work with—we know what our clients look like and we tend to stick quite closely to our ideal client profile.”

For Barrow, Castlefield’s work is of utmost importance. “As we look at ways to impact the world that our children and future grandchildren will grow up in, there are few things that are more addressable yet critical than environmental direction. The innovation and momentum are ripe, interest is broad, and the timing is dire.” castlefieldgroup.com DT