Envolve founder Mark Thien says he's created a niche venture by catering only to sustainable-based businesses.

A newspaper reporter-turned-marketing pro, Mark Thien knows how to tell a good story. He has built a solid career listening to what a subject or client has had to say, and conveying that as accurately and enticingly as possible.

His last venture, Think Media, used a mix of marketing and media to help clients achieve this. But in 2008, he began making moves toward a new kind of marketing company, one that served the growing earth-minded niche in the business community.

“A traditional agency might get a call here or there for a clean air campaign and then six months down the road a call from a watershed association,” Thien says. “They will do good work, but you are not going to be able to leverage all you are doing into the success of that project.”

However, deciding to launch a business model that catered only to sustainable-based businesses was not an easy decision for Thien to make, and he took more than a year to make sure it was a sound one. Was there enough business to survive? Would it fly?

“I wanted to be sure what I was doing – which was leveraging all my traditional branding and marketing background into this sustainability-in-business category – was viable,” Thien says. “I was committed to building a purebred, sustainability consulting company. The only thing we would touch would be clients in conservation, environment or sustainability.”

It was a bold step, but one that has paid off for Thien and his company, Envolve Strategies, Inc.

After what he calls an incubation year, he now has a few employees, a network of quality contractors and a rotating stable of customers like Bridgestone America, Lipscomb University and the Environmental Defense Fund. Each knows that his focus, paired with his journalistic core, can make for a powerful tool.

“What drives my business is that insatiable journalist hunger for information and expressing the proper message,” he says. “I have carried that as my card of strength into every job I ever have. And that is what has really founded this agency: to help these companies tell their stories, express their progress and identify the areas they really need to be working in.”

Getting the intent of brand correct is important to Thien. It is more than slapping a green label on something and lumping it in with the wave of other businesses catching the trend. In fact, for him and his clients it isn’t a trend at all.

And it isn’t a practice he only preaches. Envolve is by nature a sustainable company all on its own.

“At Think Media, over a period of eight years or so, I worked out this whole virtual office, small-office concept,” he says. ‘What we bring at Envolve to a client, there is no overhead. There is no waste in our business, which is a bit unique for the marketing world where you fill up a building with 60-70 people strong. And a lot of those people are overpaid and a lot of those people are playing solitaire on the computer. We just work.”