Sean Martin is the CEO of Martin Group and Blu Skye Alum

Twenty years ago, Blu Skye was born with an audacious belief: that we could walk into C-suites of the world’s largest companies and show them sources of value their collective centuries of business experience had overlooked. It wasn’t just bold - it bordered on absurd. Yet that very audacity became our superpower.

The impact speaks for itself. We helped Walmart launch a sustainability journey that transformed them into a leader in the eyes of ESG investors, generating billions in ROI. We helped to conceive and launch the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, now representing nearly a trillion dollars in annual apparel and footwear revenues across 250+ global members. With Alcoa, we orchestrated a cross-sector consortium aligning 77 organizations on ambitious recycling goals, culminating in a multi-million dollar commitment at the Clinton Global Initiative.

But numbers and initiatives only tell part of the story. The real magic of Blu Skye lay in how we transformed mindsets, one leader at a time. I remember watching Andy Ruben, then Walmart’s head of strategy, in an early meeting. Everything about Andy was fast - especially his thinking. As we discussed carbon and waste as sources of untapped value, he was already mapping possibilities across Walmart’s vast ecosystem, from shipping to packaging to building efficiency.

Then came a moment I’ll never forget. During the meeting, Andy ate an apple - core, seeds and all. When I commented on it, he explained that he’d realized even this small choice eliminated waste. “At Walmart’s scale,” he said, “these little decisions add up.” Here was one of Walmart’s top strategists, who would soon become their first Chief Sustainability Officer, embodying the ‘sustainability lens’ so personally that it changed how he ate an apple. That’s how deeply the sustainability mindset could take hold.

We had developed cutting-edge tools and approaches - calculating carbon footprints before most had heard the term, benchmarking “next practices” that seemed fringe then but are common now. But our real genius lay in dancing at the intersection of faith and insight - believing we could find sustainable value, then generating the insights to prove it.

I experienced this transformation myself while leading our support of Christopher Corpuel with Hilton. Christopher ultimately became Hilton’s first VP of Sustainability. I remember the butterflies before presenting our recommendations to their executive team, unsure if they’d politely show us the door. Instead, they embraced our full suite of ideas, launching Hilton on what became an industry-leading sustainability journey. In that moment, I felt the power of our audacity - the power to create futures that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

I’m forever indebted to Jib, our CEO, for seeing in me the potential to be the advisor to CEOs that I am today - even before I could see it myself. And therein lies perhaps Blu Skye’s greatest gift: we saw potential in our clients before they could see it themselves. Our job was simply to help them view their world through the lens we already saw them through.

Twenty years later, that legacy lives on through countless leaders who never quite took off their “sustainability lens.” They’ve gone on to lead sustainability initiatives, launch purpose-driven companies, and reshape entire industries. But more than that, they’ve maintained that audacity of faith - the belief that by seeing the world differently, we can create futures that seemed impossible before.

That’s the true legacy of Blu Skye: not just the billions in value created or the groundbreaking initiatives launched, but the leaders transformed by the audacity to believe they could reshape their corner of the world for the better. And they did.