Posted On:August 20, 2022

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How Small Business Owners Can Develop a Business Sustainability Plan

Business Sustainability Plan

The adoption of sustainable practices not only improves a business’s bottom line, but also helps to improve brand reputation, reduce cost, attract high-quality employees, and improve investments. As such, many global businesses are developing sustainability plans.

If you are a business owner and you’re ready to develop your own business sustainability plan, then this is the perfect guide for you! By following the steps outlined in this article, you’ll be able to develop a truly sustainable business.

How to create a Business Sustainability Plan

Step 1: Learn about Sustainability

The first step in creating a business sustainability plan is to ensure that you completely understand the notion of sustainability and how it can be applied to business processes.

To assist with this, there are several online guides and/or courses that you can take to boost your knowledge and shift your mindset away from the old, linear ‘take – make – waste’ business perspectives. This would also be a good time to learn about local environmental laws and the international standards that exist for the industry that your business falls within.

To begin searching for this information, it would be a great idea to start by accessing the website of your country’s leading environmental agency or government department.

Step 2: Assess Your Business

Now that you have gained a better understanding of sustainability, sustainable business practices, local environmental laws, and international standards, it is a good idea to check your compliance with these existing laws and standards.

Take note of any areas within which your business fails to meet these requirements, and research cost-effective ways in which your compliance can be improved, for example, by hiring a sustainability consultant or investing in better technology.

To help you to get started with this step, you can ask yourself the following questions:

  • How much energy/water does my company use?
  • How much waste does my company create? Is it hazardous?
  • How eco-friendly are our buildings?
  • Do our products use materials that are eco-friendly or sustainably sourced?
  • Do we offer employee training in sustainability? Do we have a green team?
  • Can we reduce business travel and/or offset our carbon emissions?

Step 3: Create a Mission Statement

Now that you are aware of your current situation, it is a good idea to visualise where you would like to be.

You can do this by creating an overlying sustainability goal, or by going deeper and creating a vision for all your business departments.

Once a draft of the vision is created, it would be a good idea to present this vision to your employees and give them the opportunity to provide suggestions and feedback so that they can feel better connected to the vision and take ownership.

Step 4: Find Opportunities & Build an Action Plan

Now that you have a good understanding of sustainability, your business’s current standpoint, and your company’s general goals for the future, it is time for you to create a detailed list of planned initiatives including information about timelines, expected cost, and the people needed to push this project forward.

Once this is done, you can actively step into the spirit of innovation and start implementing these initiatives to improve your business practices. While this step may seem daunting at first, the good news is that you can ensure that this is a team effort, with different staff members having different responsibilities.

Step 5: Implement Changes

Now that you have identified options for improved sustainability, it is time to take the most important step – Implementation! This should be done within a planned timescale to ensure that your goals are met as quickly as is feasible.

You can begin this process by changing your current business policies or creating new policies to align with your new goals and identified opportunities.

Following this, you can move on to bigger steps such as purchasing and installing new technologies. It is important to note that this step is the most challenging and that there will be situations where troubleshooting is required, however, you will likely learn from any difficulties encountered and develop stronger policies with any new information that you learn.

Once you successfully implement the changes you planned for, you can then communicate your new sustainability initiatives to your stakeholders such as clients and investors.

However, it is important to ensure that you do not make any unqualified claims when going public, this will ensure that you do not mislead anyone and avoid the issue of greenwashing. Once your environmental marketing is done properly, public relations rewards are sure to occur.

Step 6: Monitor and review performance

To ensure that the practices that you implemented are being implemented on time and achieving the results that you anticipated, it is important to develop metrics to track their success. This could be as simple as comparing your previous energy bill to your new energy bill after implementing planned changes. A decrease in your energy bill would show success.

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