This is why greenwashing fears keep good companies silent

Thank you for inviting me.

Well, so I started off in banking and financial services and then really after having my daughter back in 2014, when I returned into banking, I realized it didn't really work for me. And so I left Barclays and I moved into a leadership role at a small business in a totally different sector of a newly set up family members club, which had a restaurant, a nursery, lessons and event space. So totally different industry. but it was more about the people I was working with at that time. And I guess the point I was in my life around wanting to find out about becoming a better citizen and a better future ancestor, as we say. And so that was when I started changing my behavior, I guess, working for small businesses. And then when we moved back to the UK from Singapore in 2021, it felt like the right time to set up my own business. Having prepared, done some research before we moved back as a family, I felt there was probably quite a gap in the market to support small and medium sized businesses in the UK with sustainability, bringing together my background from a change perspective, from a business operating perspective, and then having run small businesses and understood the real pressures you're under from a cash flow perspective, often month to month, determining where to invest your capital. So that's why we set up Sustainable Business Ventures. It also helped me juggle my family commitments, being very frank, I didn't think going back into a top four consultancy was for me at the time.

I agree. think one of the challenges actually is that once you've worked for a big corporate, you see lots of benefits because you don't realise until you leave how many experts you're surrounded by when you have a problem with finance or HR, there's always someone to go to. Whereas in a small medium sized business, you are often the person who has to know everything and you're relying on friends for expertise. And that was kind of one of the gaps as well. But also I think the other thing is once you start running your own business or working in a smaller business where you have more agency, I think going back into a bigger one where you can't set the rules is also a bit more challenging.

Of course. Well, let's start with that definition, I guess. So I think one of the biggest challenges in this sector is that there have been so many different language. is so much. There is so much. Stop that. Let's start again. I think one of the problems in sustainability is that there are so many terms that are thrown around, which don't really mean anything to anybody outside of sustainability. So when I look at sustainability, the first thing is the financial sustainability. So How is your business operating day to day? And are you confident that you are able to meet your obligations in the following month, quarter, years ahead? That's the first thing. When you break sustainability down from an investor perspective, they often talk about environment, social and governance. And those are the three pillars I generally work within with my clients to help them define. what are their negative and positive impacts around the environment. So what resources are coming in, what resources are going out, what is being wasted, how can we better utilize your resources. On the social side, that's really around how you're interacting with your community. That's not just your employees, that's your shareholders, it's your investors, it's the community you operate within. Are you hiring locally? Do you give young people opportunity? to enable older people who maybe have been made redundant to come in? How are you treating people? And so both of these, and actually similarly with governance, they're all two way processes, which is what I find so interesting. And then governance, so people often think governance is boring or tedious or all about adding layers, but actually it's around protecting your business because if you don't have the right governance in place, poor decisions can be made. and those will generally have negative impacts for the business. Similarly, people often think of an example would be the summer we've just had. So most businesses will say, sustainability doesn't matter to me. And then you have a heat wave. And I was affected by this. My children's school decided to close at 1 p.m. and we were given less than 24 hours notice of that. Now, if you're running a small or medium sized business. You can't really afford for your employees to suddenly give you less than 24 hours notice to say, sorry, I can't come in because the schools are closed and my kids are at home and I don't have childcare and I can't afford childcare and I can't bring my kids to work because I'm in a warehouse. And that's the reality of what we're doing. This isn't about throwing money at different issues for the sake of it. It's around understanding your situation, understanding your business risks. Also, I often start by looking at a company's accounting. Where are you spending the most money? Because then we can work around developing a strategy for whether it be we focus in on environment or social or governance. But I can give help companies with an action plan to decide which areas can we focus on, which will either reduce your costs or identify new client segments or improve employee retention or just ensure that maybe a gap or a problem that's arisen before won't arise again.

There were so many! So I think going really simply, if you look at your costs, the best thing to do is so for example, electricity, a lot of companies will be playing huge amounts of money for electricity and gas, and they probably haven't reviewed their energy tariffs in a year, three years, five years. The first thing I often suggest is you review your energy tariff because quite often the renewable tariffs that are offered by some of the big names, but also there are so many small companies in the UK now, Good Energy, Octopus, that's a brilliant place to start and you'll often save money. The second thing I would look at is around your employee base. So do you need first of all, as many skilled people in full time roles? Now that might be quite controversial, but I think it's really important as a small and medium sized business, you're very to ensure you've got your right skill sets at all levels in the organisation. And I think one of the things that's been brilliant in the last 10 years in particular is the growth of agencies that offer fractional support, whether it be in sustainability, marketing, finance, legal, compliance, it enables a medium sized business to access skills that they wouldn't otherwise have previously been able to do without the full time cost of a finance direct. and then the third thing that I think is really important is make sure you're aware of what regulations are coming up. There are so many regulations around sustainability in particular that are coming through and that was one of the reasons I set up the business because I felt that all the laws that came out in 24 and 25 that were going to impact the large corporates as a small and medium-sized business who supplies those corporates that would filter through your supply chain. Unfortunately, from my perspective as a business perspective, a lot of that legislation was pushed back and has been continued to be pushing back. But actually, if we look at 2026, we've had simpler recycling legislation go live in March. A lot of companies aren't compliant. We've had packaging and packaging waste regulation come in on the 12th of August in Europe. A lot of companies won't be aware of that. And all of those things create business risks.

So I think it's really interesting. On one side, the demand has massively dropped due to the geopolitical situation and certain individuals in Western countries not thinking that sustainability should be a priority and still belittling whether climate change even exists, which is something I think I find incredible. And I'm sure many of your listeners will find incredible. So on one extreme, you have companies that are totally disengaging with all of this. at the same time as seeing increasing issues with the world around them, flooding, risk, et cetera. On the other side, there are a small but growing number of large companies that are expecting far more from their suppliers. And they're the companies I work with. So those are the companies where they've suddenly had a client tender request come in that's really important to their business. And the tender requests you submit your net zero plan. or what is your diversity, equity and inclusion plan? Or what is your gender pay gap balance at all levels in the organization? Or what is your waste? How much is your waste is recycled? How much is reused, etc. So that's often when I come in is when there is a very specific business need. And actually, for me, that's often a really great way to start working with a business because actually, then we can work on a very specific project and a target. sustainability, journey is quite an overused word, but actually sustainability is a journey. One of the things that's the challenge is that the industry is evolving very quickly. Demands are evolving quickly as legislation gets implemented. So if you look at something like B Corp, which a lot of people will have heard of from a B to C perspective, or if you look at B B ratings agency, Ecovadas, To maintain your score year on year, you have to be doing more and more, which is why the companies that aren't doing anything at the moment, when they first open those requests, they're often filled with panic. Because actually not that they're not doing the stuff that's meant to be done, but it's often not documented, or it's not reported, or it's just the way they do business. And so that's often a panic point for companies that I try and help them.

Yeah, of course. So as an example, quite often founder businesses will grow and grow and grow. And then they'll either want to, assume they're going to pass them on to a family member. And then actually that family person doesn't want to do that because they want to go into legal or something else. And in those situations, because they've grown the business themselves, they often don't have an objective viewpoint of the business. They're focused very much on the balance sheet. And they're not necessarily looking at the business from an outside in, they're looking at from an inside out. So they can often only see the positives. Not that that's a negative because obviously that's why business founders are so special because they know their business is inside out. What I do is come in and review things and I'd always provide that preemptive questions that investors would ask. So, you know, how many clients do you have? How diversified are your revenue streams? from a cost base, what are your issues? If we look at the current instability from a geopolitical perspective, are you reliant on raw materials? Where are those from? Given there's a shift to producing things onshore and showing clearer supply chains that are less impacted by shipping routes, et cetera, what have you done around that? What's your business risk register? So I can help a business owner. structured look at the whole business and I do always take a sustainability approach because I think that drives business excellence to be frank and I think you know that's one of the things I spend a lot of my time getting over is sustainability and business excellence and good business processes all go hand in hand almost sometimes I've spoken to people who have told me that I should stop talking about sustainability and just focus on business excellence because actually that's what I'm doing and they feel that sustainability actually like drags me down as it were, and reduces the attractiveness of kind of my business to clients because people don't care. But yeah, so once we've kind of reviewed an organization, and then we've identified maybe what areas are lacking. So are there any policy and process and governance areas that could raise concerns? Have we got stable staffing? Do we have a stable revenue stream? Are we in control of our costs? Then we can start looking at who is the type of person to purchase this business? Have they got ideas of who they would want to approach? Have other people approached them in the past? And then I can either leave them to it or I can come alongside to provide support through those discussions. And I also have through my financial services network and background, a number of different individuals that I would refer my clients to, to get very specific advice, whether it be on the tax side. or the transition process because that isn't my expertise, the detail, it's very much more positioning them with the right information and the right story to help them sell their business to the people that they are looking to sell their business to.

They have, but I think there's a lot of... The challenge, I think, in this industry is that people feel, whether you're greenwashing, whether you're greenhushing, which is the opposite way you're doing actually really good stuff, but you're scared someone's going to find a gap in it so then you don't tell anybody about it. In the current political climate is that people aren't sure what to talk about and what not to talk about. And this is where I think some sustainability professionals have created a rod for their own back. because what we should be doing is celebrating any small step in the right direction by any organization to reduce plastic, to reduce energy usage, to put solar panels on, to become a living wage employer, et cetera, et cetera. And instead, what often happens is someone will do something and will go, that's great, but, or, well, great that you're talking about this, what about that? And that doesn't create an ambition loop where you're seeing positive action, reinforce positive behavior, and you end up with this brilliant feedback loop. So I think this is where the sustainability industry, as it were, is struggling because they just don't know really how to position themselves. I think the green hushing, the green washing, some of it is valid. But I would always say to clients, declare everything, right? Declare what you're not doing very well, as long as you can explain why. So you know you need to move to a more expensive input, but you can't do that at the moment because you know your customers will not be able to afford that price increase. That's one example. You can review your processes as long as you can explain what you're doing across your environment, social and governance areas. to demonstrate that you are not only looking at profit, but that you are of your wider impact of the environment and the people and the communities you're serving.

So I probably would have made sure I had guaranteed clients lined up before doing this. I, on a personal level, massively underestimated how difficult it would be to win regular new client business, given the economic environment and the changes that have happened since 2021. It has been very tricky for me and a lot of other sustainability consultants. So one of the things I really focus on is collaboration. So when I moved back from Singapore, having been away for 12 years, and having previously very much had a financial services network, I had to throw myself into meeting people locally, understanding what the Federation of Small Businesses are doing, various women's networks, etc, to try and grow the business. And it is it has been really, really challenging. I'm lucky that I found some friends who set up financial services businesses that have needed help to again support their client tenders, etc. And so I've worked with them and that's been brilliant, but that's mainly been on a project basis. And I work with the UK and Ireland arm of a global logistics company and they have been absolutely brilliant because actually that is a great case study of how I went in to do a discovery workshop with them two and a half years ago. and now I'm basically operating as a fractional chief sustainability officer and through the ESG steering committee we have which is representation across all areas of the business we are very much driving business excellence although in some ways it's still tagged ESG and sustainability but it's all about putting sustainability at the heart of the business.

Thank you. Well, they can contact me on LinkedIn and then they can also look at the sustainablebusinessventures.co.uk website. So on that there is a quiz that you can click on, which is freely available that allows you to probably within two minutes self-evaluate where you think your business is in lots of areas across environment, social and governance. And then once you've got that report, which as I said is free and it's emailed to you at the end of it, you can then have a look at those results and contact me for a free no obligation call. I aim to have a 30 minute call and can normally provide two or three direct actions that people can take just from having looked at that questionnaire. And then if they want to do more sort of actual engagement. I then run sort of one to two hour discovery sessions and I generally say that needs to be with your leadership team because we focus on where are there existing problems in the business or where are we spending too much etc so that we can then identify with the high priority areas to work on and then I move into standard consulting mode which I'm sure most of your listeners are known of which is understanding your current state. defining where we feel the opportunities would be in your future target state and then providing a roadmap of clear steps to get there, which we then cost out. So short term tactical, long term strategic and identifying where the business opportunities exist. So are we going to reduce our costs or are we by taking this approach and embedding sustainability? Are we going to be able to access new client revenue streams, for example, that we wouldn't have been available to us before?

Thanks very much for time.