After 14 years in the Navy, retiring as a Lieutenant Commander,...

After 14 years in the Navy, retiring as a Lieutenant Commander, and 13 years building and selling two successful businesses, Mark formed Ilum-a-Lite with 2 other partners.

Ilum-a-Lite pioneered the introduction of new technology to save energy on lighting. It took the hard road of developing the solution then educating the market at a time when the market was not receptive to being educated. The result was annual savings of tens of thousands of dollars, with clients recouping the cost of their investments in as little as 12 to 18 months.

In 2001, Mark took over as CEO. Recognising there was far more demand for retrofitting fluorescent lights overseas rather than in Australia, he immediately implemented an aggressive export strategy. This included exporting to China, via a 51% owned joint venture, and taking his products to seven continents.

Mark’s go to market approach was to provide customers with financial, rather than green solutions.

Despite its bottom-line approach, Ilum-a-lite also led the way in corporate responsibility. Long before airlines and car companies started offering their customers carbon offsets, Mark began planting a tree for each tonne of greenhouse gas saved by his customers. This program continues today and helped win the company a position as finalist in the Telstra Business Awards and Mark became a finalist in the Ernst and Young Entrpreneur of the year in 2011.

In 2011 Ilum-a-Lite attracted venture capital investment from two Victorian cleantech funds which further helped the company to grow and offer increasingly sophisticated lighting upgrades to government, retail, infrastructure, hospitals and education sector. By 2016 the company under Mark's stewardship was performing multi million upgrades for large EPC projects.

Ilum-a-Lite was acquired by ASX listed Greenearth Energy in 2016. Mark continues as MD with an exciting future growth strategy to implement.

Specialties: Lighting, energy efficiency, business development