How can going green help an SME save money?
James: I think a very common question for any SME will be, how can I save money as I go down this path of sustainability?
David: Saving money is an important aspect of sustainability.
But I always sense-check people at that point and say ‘look, you need to be careful.
This is not just about saving money. This is also about creating commercial growth.’
That's why sustainability has to be aligned to your core business.
What you want to do is:
Grow your business,
Grow your revenue,
Maximise your profit through efficiencies and
Save money where appropriate.
If you take commercial solar - it normally pays back in three to five years, and then (if done properly) you get 35 years of free electricity.
Talk about competitive advantage!
35 years of free electricity!
If you take EV charging, there's an opportunity to potentially make money on actually charging members of the public to charge at your point. So it's an incremental revenue stream. Actually EVs are going to be cheaper to run in the mid to long term, as we know they're cheaper to run. The challenge is that they're expensive to buy at the moment.
If you take waste reduction, you take packaging waste, for example. One of the very first projects I did (30 years ago) was to to reduce cardboard boxes. The company was making lots of cardboard boxes. We took 10 millimetres off the size of the cardboard box, and saved £100,000.
So reducing waste is the classic principle of sustainability, which is why it goes together with profitability: always try and reduce what you've got as much as possible.
If you can re-use it rather than throw it away, that's fantastic.
If you can't throw it away, then you have to go ahead and recycle it.
So those things all save money.