Greening your business
The importance of having a sustainable business and how Altus Impact can help you become one.
Altus Impact partners have experienced all the buzz and excitement of working as a small business start-up. We are the next generation of movers-and-shakers; the people and organizations that shake-up the world and change the business paradigms.
The start-up and small business culture puts innovation, agility and high service standards at the heart of the business proposition. It is also renowned for aspiring to create a positive impact on its community of stakeholders and the planet’s environment.
A sustainable business makes business sense
Shaping your start-up into becoming a positive impact company can be professionally fulfilling, but it also makes good business sense.
- Strengthen brand reputation with strong sustainability credentials - enabling you to strengthen brand values to stand out in crowded markets, have a story to tell to loyal customers, charge a premium for your products or services to increase your profits and gain access ethical consumer markets. Brand reputation can also help to attract committed shareholders.
- Manage risk more effectively- understanding your business’s impacts and dependencies on the environment helps you to identify regulatory, supply and brand risks, such as looming scarcities in your supply chain, and how these risks can be mitigated. It also helps you to ensure more efficient resource utilisation throughout your supply chains
- Engage and retain employees - putting environmental and social values at the heart of your business helps to engage and motivate employees and commits them to your business for longer.
- Attract investors & grow your business faster - if you need to raise capital, being a green or social business can make your prospectus more attractive to the rapidly growing market of impact investing - lenders who focus also on the social and environmental performance of businesses.
- Do more with less - analysing your operational inputs and outputs to reduce energy and material use and wastage (eco-efficiency) improves competitiveness.
- Nurture innovation - driving sustainability in your business can instil a creative culture of environmental problem solving and product development through innovation.
Special report: What's nature's worth to your business?
Does your business contribute to a more inclusive, greener and resilient economy?
Altus Impact can put your company at the forefront of sustainability leadership by helping you integrate nature's values into your operations using the Natural Capital Protocol.
Investing in your sustainability credentials
Navigating the myriad environmental certification schemes, local and national regulations and international agreements, analyzing the full life cycle impacts of your products or even understanding how to market your products to the growing conscious consumer market can be complex and expensive.
For start-ups and small businesses cash flow is often tight and your priority is naturally on iterating your product or service or delivering on your client's needs, rather than sitting there laboriously sifting through the 160 million pages on Google when your searched for 'sustainability'.
Altus Impact can help you by providing excellent (and just right amount of) strategic and/or technical advice to help you make effective decisions, and allow you to concentrate on growing your business.
We also understand that transforming to sustainable business is a journey, not a destination. The route you take is specific to your business and then just when you think you've got there, the goal has evolved. But setting out with sustainability principles baked into your business can save a lot of pain further down the road!
When it comes to BRAND LOYALTY
environmental performance
ranks [almost] as strongly as function and performance
Altus Impact can assist your start-up, social enterprise or small business by:
- Providing strategic sustainability advice and support, including step-by-step assistance in your sustainability/CSR strategy visioning, development and implementation as well as policy scanning services to help you understand the impacts or benefits of major trends, such as the Paris Agreement on climate change and the SDGs and help you meet regulations.
- Applying technical services that can help you identify and quantify the material impacts and dependencies on the environment across your company's entire supply chain increasing your eco-efficiency and at the same time your brand value. We can also help you determine your ecological footprint.
- Exposing you to new tools to evaluate your sustainability goals, such as adoption of the Natural Capital Protocol.
- Creating an evaluation & diagnostics framework to monitor your progress.
- Providing strategic and bespoke communications advice to help you sell your positive message and create maximum impact, include robust internal and external interactive reporting methods.
- Developing an on-going partnership to continually strengthen your sustainability credentials as your business scales-up.
- Designing sustainability dashboards and self-reporting tools.
Check out our Impact through Information, Impact through Communication and Impact through Capacity Building services for more. Or contact us directly for more information as to how we may be able to assist you.
We also offer a dedicated Partnership for Sustainability scheme for SMEs (also in Spanish, también en español) and Start Up Sustainability scheme for start ups.