Welcoming Dan Leverington, founder of The Ocelli Group, to Purposely Podcast.

The Ocelli Group is a for-profit business built around a clear purpose: connecting organisations that need to do sustainability work with the right partners to deliver it. Dan sits in the middle, not as a consultant doing the work himself, but as a connector who understands both sides of the equation and knows how to bring them together. The name comes from the secondary visual system bees use to navigate by the sun. It is a fitting metaphor for a business built on seeing just over the horizon.

Dan grew up around mining and heavy industry in Australia, which gave him an early and unromantic view of how extraction economies work. A university project on the Murray-Darling Basin introduced him to ecological economics and the idea that threats to nature carry real economic consequences. That tension between industry and environment has run through his career ever since.

His path to founding The Ocelli Group ran through engineering recruitment in Queensland's LNG sector, tech startups, time in the US, and a co-owned media company focused on B Corps and renewable energy businesses. Across all of it, the same pattern: he was always the person in the middle, figuring out who had the problem and who had the solution. When mandatory climate reporting began to create urgent demand for sustainability partners across Australia, he saw a gap that matched exactly what he was built to do.

The business model is built on referral fees from partners rather than charges to clients, which keeps the value exchange clean and the incentives aligned. Dan facilitates the introductory calls himself, which means he gets to see in real time whether his read of both sides was accurate. His first deal closed in three weeks. He is candid that nothing since has moved that fast, and that the first 18 to 24 months were difficult as the market caught up with where he could already see it heading.

This conversation covers the realities of building a connector business from scratch, including the trust problem people warned him about, the discipline required to work both sides of a marketplace simultaneously, and what it actually feels like to leave a stable career and back your own thesis. Dan talks about the weight of that decision on his family, the importance of honest timelines, and how he learned over time to give himself permission to step back.

He is also the host of the Green Fix Podcast and the author of Honeydrops, a weekly newsletter that started with six recipients and has since become a platform for making sense of the sustainability landscape in plain language. Both have become genuine business development assets, not just content for its own sake.

On ESG, Dan is direct. The term takes a kicking, he says, because leaders have spent careers putting difficult things in the externalities bucket. What is changing is that those externalities are starting to sit on the balance sheet.

Key Themes

What it means to build a connector business, and why the model works when trust is earned

Mandatory climate reporting as a market catalyst and what it revealed about the gap Ocelli was built to fill

Why ESG gets a kicking, and how to have the sustainability conversation in a language that moves CFOs

The reality of founding a business: bumpy not linear, and the weight it places on family

Being too early: the upside of arriving before the market is ready

Content as a business asset: Green Fix Podcast and the Honeydrops newsletter

From coal country to climate economy: the career arc behind the business

This episode of Purposely is brought to you by Benevity and Trust Investments.