Scott Thomas Fischer.

For about a decade I worked a corporate job, helping small and midsize businesses with the back-office machinery that keeps them running, building relationships and solving problems. What I valued most was the trust that came from genuinely caring about the outcome.

I bought my house in Nutley in 2006. It was built in 1892, balloon frame, and the main part of it had no insulation at all. It leaked so much air that years later, when we were running training exercises there, we could not pull the house down to fifty pascals with a blower door. There was simply too much of it open to the outdoors. I talked with several contractors in those early years. Every one of them wanted to talk about a different mechanical system, and not one of them brought up insulation. Steve Austin had just bought an older house in Glen Rock and was dealing with the same thing.

It took me years after we started the company to finish my own house. When I finally did the whole job, through what was then New Jersey Home Performance with ENERGY STAR, I got to feel the difference as a homeowner rather than as a contractor. Our second floor used to be unbearable by the time we went up to bed in the summer, because the air conditioning could never catch up. Now the system cycles the way it is supposed to. A house from 1892 will never meet the airtightness standards we build to today, but it is a much better place to live than it was.

We compared notes and decided the whole experience was broken in a way somebody could fix. In 2010, with two people and our first few homeowners, we started Ciel Power.

In 2016 I wrote #HOME: 101 Ways to Improve Your Home's Comfort & Energy Efficiency, a practical field guide for any homeowner who wants to start. That same year, ABC World News Tonight came to Ridgewood, NJ to film a live audit with me on the "Your Money" segment.

The company found its footing through the New Jersey Meadowlands business accelerator, and in 2012 we partnered with Highland Park on a town-wide energy program, the first of its kind for us. It became a model we have since brought to communities across New Jersey. Along the way the company completed more than five thousand home energy assessments and grew into a team I am proud of, from the auditors who climb into the attics to the people who guide a family through every step. Our work has been recognized as ENERGY STAR Contractor of the Year four times and named by PSE&G among the top contractors in the state, and while the awards are gratifying, what I value more is that the method has held up: look at the whole house, tell the truth, and treat comfort and health as part of the job rather than an upsell.

More and more of my own time now goes into the technology beneath all of this. I have never seen a line between caring about the planet and running a disciplined business. The two need each other, and software is often what joins them. So we built a customer platform that lets a homeowner see and follow their own audit, tools that read a year of utility bills and explain them in plain language, and an internal operating system that helps us keep hundreds of projects compliant, funded, and on schedule. It is the same curiosity as always, pointed at a new material. I want the sustainable choice to be the easy one, and increasingly that is an engineering problem as much as a building-science one.

The Studio at Kearny Point came next, a creative and production venture for original work that carries the message further than any single home or book can.

All of it shares one name, one sun, and one idea: that wellness, sustainability, efficiency, and creativity are the same project.