Small Business Sustainability Plans
Develop a Sustainability Plan to Position Your Business Ahead of Your Competitors
Developing a sustainability plan is hard work due to constantly changing regulations and social and environmental trends. Ethos’s small business sustainability experts ensure that every plan we create is up to date on all the latest sustainability topics, optimized for branding and risk reduction.
Business sustainability is here to stay. Talk to our expert on how to set up a sustainability plan for your small business.
Make sure your small business is ready for the next decade
Our sustainability consulting services for small businesses will ensure that you and your team are prepared for a more sustainability-conscious world. Increasingly, consumers are considering the environmental sustainability of the products they buy. Our experts can help small business owners develop a sustainability program that will position them ahead of their competitors while drawing in more customers.
Developing a sustainability plan is hard work due to constantly changing regulations and social and environmental trends. Ethos’s small business sustainability experts ensure that every plan we create is up to date on all the latest sustainability topics, optimized for branding and risk reduction.
Environmental Sustainability Program Outcomes
It is important for any small business to assess its current environmental impact. From there, our experts identify key hotspots that have the biggest impact on the business’s environmental sustainability, as well as those that are most likely to negatively impact the business’s branding. We work with small business owners to tackle the most important issues first, creating a long-term sustainability plan that transitions over time to create a totally sustainable business.
Why you need a small business sustainability plan
Sustainability is a growing concern for consumers when choosing what products to buy. Globally over 60% of consumers use sustainability as a criterion when making spending decisions. This is especially true for younger generations whose buying power will have an even greater impact as the years go on. It is vitally important for businesses of any size, but especially small businesses, to develop and publish a long-term strategic sustainability plan to take advantage of this ever-evolving trend.
Additionally, as the effects of climate change continue to have negative impacts on communities all over the world, businesses can expect an growing series of regulations to be implemented that limit the carbon footprint and environmental impacts of businesses of all sizes. Make sure your small business isn’t caught unprepared by staying ahead of the curve with a long-term sustainability plan.
Steps to create a small business sustainability plan
Assessment
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Therefore, the first step in creating a high-quality small business sustainability plan is a sustainability assessment. In this assessment, the environmental impact of the business is measured, as well as the business’s ability to lower its footprint while increasing resiliency to environmental risks. After the assessment, small business owners will have a complete understanding of their business’s environmental, social, and governance-related impacts.
The assessment also determines overall resiliency issues that may be present for the small business, like supply chain and environmental vulnerabilities.
Prioritization
Not all sustainability issues are of equal importance to every business. This is especially true for small business owners who must carefully decide how to make their business more sustainable without drastically increasing costs. Ethos’s small business sustainability experts solve this problem by conducting a materiality assessment designed to determine which issues need to be tackled first, in order to best make use of a business’s resources in lowering its footprint.
The Ethos team also conducts a stakeholder priority assessment, meant to determine which issues are most important to a business’s managers, employees, neighbors, and customers. Our sustainability consulting services for small businesses help owners in the prioritization process, and it allows them to choose issues to tackle that not only lower their impact but also increase their brand value.
Project Development
After identifying which impact areas should be tackled first, Ethos sustainability experts will help business owners develop projects that tackle these issues with as little expense as possible. Projects can range from changing which lightbulbs are used in retail spaces, to investigating the carbon emissions associated with their supply chain, to developing a marketing strategy for existing sustainability efforts. At Ethos, we have a database of hundreds of projects that a company can implement to tackle a myriad of issues covered by ESG reporting frameworks.
Our small business experts will work with business owners to choose the projects that best fit their brand and financial situation or help them to develop new projects unique to the business’s circumstances. Ethos projects are designed to get the maximum reduction in a negative impact for the least amount of expenditure. With an Ethos small business sustainability program, you know you’ll be getting the most bang for your buck.
Publication
The final step in creating a small business sustainability plan is publication. By publishing the plan, a business creates trust between its owners and stakeholders, by signaling their commitment to the ESG goals outlined in the plan. Small business sustainability plans provide excellent marketing materials, demonstrating to customers the steps that the business is taking towards environmental sustainability. Sustainability plans also serve as a road map to the future, outlining current carbon reduction projects as well as those that will be implemented in the future.
Ethos’s small business sustainability experts recommend using three-year intervals for sustainability planning, allowing for strategic changes to the business’s sustainability efforts as technology and social trends evolve.