Sustainable from the Start-(up)

BIZ Experiences UK talks with Rebecca Oatley, co-founder of London based communiacations company, The Wilful Group, about all things sustainability.

How are you incorporating sustainability into your business model?
The great thing about being a startup is that you can build your business to incorporate sustainability from the start. We did with Wilful by building the business to the core pillars of B Corp. So instead of just financial growth and the resources to fuel that growth, we also set other success targets, with goals and metrics against environmental, community, people/team, customers and then ensuring that we had good governance in place against all of the above. We now set targets and strategies against all of these goals in our business plans.

How do you balance environmental goals with the financial pressures of running a start-up?
If you're building a business with positive or neutral environmental benefits in from the start, your fundamental business choices are based on environmental value as much as financial value. The great thing about the movement towards Net Zero over the last few years is that so many great companies have been established sustainably and so you can start to evolve your supply chain knowing that these companies are making zero or very low negative impact on the planet. For example, we knew that digital emissions could be a big environmental impact from our marketing and communications agency, so we chose Ecosend as our email marketing partner. Ecosend minimises its environmental impact at every stage of the email process and then reports on what it has done. This means that we can keep track of our impact by working with them. We have also implemented emissions tracking for all of our digital activity using the Microsoft Emissions tracking system. These do cost more but being able to measure, report and manage the carbon impact of our business improves its value to partners, customers and the market significantly, and by building this in from the start means that you can plan your investment accordingly rather than having to find the budget from somewhere else.

Are investors expecting more from startups in terms of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices?
Absolutely. We work with many VC and PE firms who are using ESG principles to understand the long term opportunity and impact of their startup portfolio. For example, one of our clients, Future Business Partnership has built its whole investment model around ethically-aligned capital. When it launched a few years ago, it achieved the highest score of any UK business in its first impact assessment because it build its business and its investment model around the principles of B Corp.