Sustainability to Attract Talent, Employees, and Investors — Chris Caldwell

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing? But you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done? I think Doxa Talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have talent. Talk to Doxatant and you won't be disappointed. Go to doxatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxatant.com Bill g. One more time. Docsatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today. So we're talking about sustainability, the value, your business, right? Maybe you're a fan of sustainability. If so, you'll dig the show. But if you're not, if you're a skeptic or if you're not a skeptic, but you just like, who cares? You know, I care about business. So what is there any value? We say there is. Listen in. You'll hear how, where and why. Everybody, my name is Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. We bring our show to you every week and we've got hundreds of shows now on everything to do with growing your business, getting the strategy right, getting the team right, and certainly that relates to our topic today. But also then executing consistent, consistently well and optimizing the cash in your business so that you have room to grow. You can take advantage of changes in the world and that kind of thing. So that is the whole show. You find all our show, all of our programs, coaching programs for every stage of company from very early stage, maybe not quite startup, but everything kind of beyond that, up through billions of dollars, all that and morecoach.com all right, so I'm going to bring in Chris Caldwell, who's on video already. Chris, welcome to the show.

Thanks very much, Bill. It's great to be on. Real pleasure.

Chris joins us from a favorite town of mine, London. I'm outside of San Francisco right now and he's near Hyde park where Bruce Springsteen is getting ready to play.

Absolutely, yeah. As soon as we finish up, we'll be wandering up to catch a bit of the bus. Can't wait.

That's awesome, awesome, awesome. So much fun. Summertime in London is just the best. Of course, I've had a great time even in February in London. So I think, I think you just have to, you know, the right mindset for the season. So for our listeners, Chris Caldwell is the CEO of United Renewables and they are a renewable energy developer, clean tech investment company and he's passionate about all things to do with sustainability. Right. Things that matter for the planet as a whole, things that matter for the people and communities that we interact with and the way that we run our companies and and so we thought we'd have him on the show and talk about all of that show. Welcome to the show, Chris. Right, thanks very much, Bill.

Thanks very much.

So talk to us about you have a background that wasn't just renewable energy. Right. Started very different place. Tell us kind of the story arc. How did you come to your personal journey? How'd you come here running this business? Doing this?

Yeah, no, great, great. Thanks for, thanks for the invitation to speak. So I started out life, corporate life as a lawyer of all things. I actually started before that did an undergraduate in economics and there's a lot of people who don't do undergraduate in economics find out you don't really know what to there's no jobs there. So you go into consulting or you go into law. Went into law. That was great for a couple of years. Got a chance to do a three months of common to investment bank and that's three months turned to a 10 year stint. It was great. Enjoyed a lot. I got pretty high up the ladder, got running a desk in a big investment back in London. Then the big financial crisis, the great financial crisis and it just gave that from to you continually being on a hamster wheel, just running and running, running, chasing quarterly earning, quarterly earning and always trying to achieve and strive purely on a financial basis. It just gave that moment to kind of go maybe, maybe there's more to life than this. So I took the advantage to take a pause, went off to London business school, did an MBA and left London Business School as a founder. So started out renewable energy investment business. So tapped into my old City of London contacts, raised some capital and started to build wind turbines and then started to build solar and started building then just kept on stacking, stacking in technology, stacking geographies and yeah, that's 10, 11 years now. Few very scary moments as I'm sure any founder will tell you. But yeah, don't regret it. Don't regret a day. It's your best decision ever, best professional decision ever made was step out and do that.

Yeah, well I, I, one of the things I like about the business is that you're not focused just on One thing, right, you start with wind turbines, but you're in solar, you're another. There's not like one way to solve these problems. Right. Multifaceted, different times. Right. Sometimes the wind blows, sometimes shines.

Yeah, absolutely. And we are facing. The reason that I got into renewables was because I recognized this was one like for me it's the greatest challenge of our generation. We needed something, the energy is something we need to get right. But also, I think it's also a great wealth creation opportunity. So like there's, there's, there's, there's a need, a human needs, a societal needs and there's, there's a way to kind of, you know, put, put food in the table for family as well. So kind of it takes, yeah, it ticks all the boxes. You're having children. Focus you in a bit more on that. But once you get into the world of real sustainability, you get more and more tracks kind of get up and more and more passages get up and down where you start to look at biodiversity, you start to look at different technologies. And that's why we're now in quite seriously clean tech investment as well, which is backing new technologies and backing new entrepreneurs to be able to take them to the next level and hopefully trying to kind make differences in other ways. Not just building renewables, but also trying to kind of move us up the technological momentum that we need to get up to.

You know, it's interesting, sustainability right at its heart is efficient, is implies profitability. Right? Waste, wasteful single use. Like anything that all doesn't seem efficient, doesn't seem smart. Like fundamentally from business. Sometimes people feel like it's all a hippie do gooder kind of thing. But I think it just makes sense a lot of times to be pursuing something. Why would we consume something that burns, that pollutes, that's wasteful. If we could do something that is less so, is more consistent, is, is sort of ever good. I mean look, if the sun gets out, we're all dead. But as long as that sun is shining in the sky, we've got both solar energy plus we're also generating wind and waves and things like that.

Yeah, absolutely. No, yes, sustainability to, to my mind it's, it's, it's what you need to do. It's basically just long term strategic planning. Like it's the step you need to take to survive through and thrive in the long term. Like it's, it allows you to stop and avert the showstoppers. Like there's things that if you don't have a look at them as if you don't kind of go back to, to like Milton Friedman's type economics of just looking at the, at the next quarter quarterly growth, quarter profits. You can miss out and that's a massive oversimplification, I understand, but you can miss out on longer term trends, longer term issues. It might make sense for you to for example be polluting your local river right now because it's, it's costing you nothing. Just so you're throwing your waste into, into this river and this month, next month, month after. For as long as you get away with it, you're making more money than you would. But if you take a longer term view of it, you're going to, at some point someone's going to go, hey, look what you've done, you've killed all the fish, you're poisoning our water and it'll come back and bite you. Like reputation wise, you're not going to survive it. So your customers will turn on you. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 months down the road, maybe a year down the road you'll be fine and then you won't be and then it'll all be taken out from me. So for me that's the first thing, like you're stopping those showstoppers. Second is if you're looking for, if you're trying to build the relationships that you need with all stakeholders, not just your shareholders. Shareholders are important but like with your employees, with your suppliers, with your regulators, with your customers, of course you will get longer term revenue growth. Ian McKinsey have done a recent study which has shown you get a 47% outperformance in revenue growth over a 15 year period. That's pretty good as long as you're looking after your other stakeholders. So if you put those two things together, you can be surviving for your business can go for a long time and you'll be making more money while you're doing it. Well, what's the value of anyone's business? The value of anyone's business are its long term cash flows, like the sum of all of those cash flows. Put all those cash flows together, you have more because you're around for longer and you're earning more because you're looking after the people you need to look after. Put two of them together, you get a higher value business. To me it's a no brainer.

Yeah, it does seem like you are undermining the future value or jeopardizing the value. So while you may not get caught or pay for it. Today, the long term value of your company is undermined by doing things, things like that because at some point somebody's going to be like yeah, you're, you're doing something that isn't. And I think there was maybe a time where we didn't know better. Like where we just, we were insufficiently aware of the implications of things and things were getting thrown away and we weren't thinking of where that might be and we were what it was and what was going on.

Yeah, yeah. It's not, not just about you know, climbers and waste though. Like it's also things like using child labor down your, down your supply chain. Like things that everybody knows. And even, and even like this, it isn't a lack of awareness that people will like people will know instinctively that's what and people like will say you know, you should be doing it. But if you're just focused on profits then if that, that's, that's your, your myopic decision. Well that's the profit maximizing decisions in the short run. And if people are going to find out that maybe, maybe a longer run kind of profits make decision but in this day and age you cannot get away with it is not socially acceptable.

Yeah, you could, you, you could suffer irreparable PR damage which then has impact not only in your customer base and press investment, but also on your employees, your ability to recruit, retain people. Right?

Yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah yeah. Your employees are fundamentally, they're your business. And unless you have happy employees, employees bringing, bring their best selves into work, you're going to be underperforming from your potential. And again for me the best one of the taking things from a current day situation like 80% of all businesses are complaining or that are saying that it's difficult to be recruiting like now. It's like trying to find people is hard. Economies in Europe and Europe and the US are pretty much at full employment. So getting, getting people is difficult but the demographics are running are getting even tougher. It's like 2030, you're gonna, we're gonna have 85 million workers. Skilled workers shortage. That's a lot of people that need jobs. ChatGPT is not going to sort out for us. It just, it just isn't. And 2/3 of them are going to be millennials or Gen Z. And how do, how do we you know, get millennials and Gen Z kind of interested? Like Millennials Gen Z are like, they're different to our generate, generated generation. So they're all like Gen Xers where there's a, there's more. Okay just kind of break it down into, into stats. 42% of Gen Z will value purpose over donors so they'll put purpose first. 20% are indifference. That gets you to 62% that are at least indifference. And then it's the remaining 38% are people who will put dollars first. Those are the guys who go to Goldman Sachs and that's fine. Goldman Sachs can pay them and that's the deal. The deal is you make another word. But if you're not paying Goldman Sachs salaries and you want people to turn up, turn up as their best selves then you need to be aligning a purpose mission. So to do that you need to get the values of the business aligned with the employees and have a personal connection. I'll give a kind of quick example for my own business. We have just recently recruited a guy from just bizarre situation. He was cleaning the building I was in and we just got it okay, just started having a conversation, had it done like a Hadley wind turbine model wind turbine on the desk and we started talking about. It became pretty clear that he was massively passionate and knowledgeable about the whole whole renewable energy sector. It was just like he was just, he was cleaning to, to pay the bills but he was really really like massively, massively into it. After a couple of brilliant conversations offered him a job he came. He's now been absolutely key in launching the new product line a buyer jar which is kind of the nature based carbon capture storage technology. Been playing with all of the research on distribution supply chains and all the stuff. And even better he brought somebody else with him. So he found like another friend of his, young recent graduate friend of his equally passionate about the environment and passionate about trying to make a difference from the organization as well. So we've got just from having an alignment of interest in doing something good and positive and sustainable. We got two fantastic new people in over the last few months and that's just because you happen to have a conversation because you happen to have a little winter but on your desk.

I think that working for things that you care about we definitely see more of that sticking around, working harder definitely. There are people who spend time in their lives working for pursuits that don't light them up but they, they're expedient. They pay the, the rent, the bills at the moment but then you don't get their all. They don't work as long they don't refer other people. They don't tell people about the business. So you're minimizing the effort, the passion, the contribution of. And if it's all about the money and awesome, you know, like everybody loves to get paid well everybody loves to go out and have a little extra money in their pocket, a little extra money in the bank. But, but the passion, the extra effort is really come, comes from purpose and values alignment. Right. And I think that's true for every generation. I'm a boomer, but you know, where my generation and before were maybe a little bit more willing to compromise something to suck it up, do like, well, whatever. Just like you need to pay the bills and you put in your 20 years or that I think that that whole illusion of a company that would take care of you if you just showed up is shattered and gone dead buried. Nobody believes that. It's not even true really in places like Japan anymore where you're not really guaranteed lifetime employment, you know, so the notion that company will take care of you, it's gone. So you, you're not going to get loyalty, you're going to get some period of engagement as long as you're aligned, as long as you have opportunity and which also kind of reinforces the need for profit. Right. Like if you're not making a profit, you don't have a going concern, it's not a business and you're not going to stay in business. You're not fundable, financeable, you can't manage growth and then you're, you're a cause based business, you're an NGO or a, a charity. Right. And, and that, and just not going to create the same value and isn't going to grow and be sustainable in the same way. They just aren't. Right. There's just no examples of them doing that with any consistency.

Yeah, yeah. One hundred and yes, the best way of keeping your, your of growing. Okay. How do you, how do you obtain value? I guess it's kind of part of the question you're kind of, you're kind of teasing out there. Well, your business is valued by essentially what someone else prepared to pay for it. If what someone else is prepared to.

Pay or expectation future value.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Based on what I think.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is what stock markets are all about. So if you're trying to have a look at and also trying to keep your current shareholders happy, like they will be happy if the value of that share, that share that they have is higher. So to do that you need to have investors. And I also think that sustainability is a really great way to be attracting new investments. It is one of the few very bright sparks in global financial systems today. This and recently artificial intelligence are the two places that seem to be trying to where there's real investment capital in. That's kind of driven by sustainability policy in Europe and major Asia. In the USA it's a bit more mixed but at least the Inflation Reduction act is focusing in on climate change as an area. The whole sustainability other part of the state is saying building controversial for some reason which you don't really understand. It's very much a US thing like the rest of the world think sustainability.

Yeah, well not. Yeah, I think a lot of the. The world is. Is pretty clear that sustainability has business value and is critically important for our security. And the US is more uneven. We're not the only place. I mean look, Brazil was burning through its Amazon at a power.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This, this. The amount of rainforest we lost over those. Those few years was just staggering.

Right? Yeah. And, and I talked to a lot of Brazilians who are like, yeah, it's all BS like because they're dealing with profound social economic challenges and so they'll make compromises. They'll diminish things to a narrative that says that, that, that isn't really important. Right.

I know, I know what we're. We're at risk of kind of tilting into another conversation which is, which is kind of geopolitical. Yeah, we can politics.

So let's share some of the stories that we identified as we prepared the show. And I thought it'd be interesting to start out of the energy sector. Talk to us about Dick's Sporting Goods.

Yeah, well that is one of the, one of the, the good stories about customer alignment, about how you can be. Be gaining loyalty from your customer through sustainability. Now, in the face of particularly awful incidents, the CEO of Dick's Sporting Goods took the decision to restrict gun sales. Like only particular types of gun sales, but gun sales that were used in high school shooting. There was no economic upside they could see and the cost was immediately visible to them. It's about $250 million. A lot of money. A lot of money. But aided by the fact the CEO controlled 2/3 of the shares. He pushed it through and all of these guns were taken off. But the upside in stock price was up by 14%. Even though you had $250 million taken off your, your sales itself, stock price went up by 14. Now why was that? Does that make any sense? The reason was even though you lost a particular Segment, you lost that, you lost that particular market. You obtained so much loyalty and so much kudos from another segment that it was that the stock market saw that and went, no, this is very, this is on balance, it's most of money here, but on balance you get a very strong core of loyal customers on the other side. And that's what anymore. So it's about being sincere and being aligned with, with, with your values. And they, they took a print, a principal stance. And, and you know, the CEO, he's a gunner. Like this was not something that he wasn't saying, saying all gun, all guns should, should go. I'm not going to comment the rights and wrongs that he's talking about their particular rifles. There was a lot, there was a lot of pushback, but an awful lot of support as well. And on balance, the support was what was worth more. Now on the other side you have something like that.

Yeah, Wait before you move on from that because I think it's interesting and it points to something that's more nuanced. In the political realm, we tend to be no guns or all guns, no limits. Right. Like, and, and that's the political realm. Right. And as a CEO, we recognize one. I have a personal belief of whatever it is. Right. And then I have different customer segments and communities that I serve with a range of things and I look at the relative value of that in the path in the world and I say, okay, I'm going to choose this path that's going to tick off some people over here who I'm going to lose. I'm a lose business and not just their gun purchases, but I'm probably lose some other things there because they're going to be upset about what I did. But what will it get me and the others? And we're going to take like a broader thing. And I think very often, you know, I, I grew up learning to shoot guns. I have used guns. But I also have a thought that, that it's gone too far sometimes. The guns without limits and obsession with things. Right. So what's that balance of where, what's appropriate and what type and where. And you know, does everybody need a, a full arsenal in their house? Any given.

Yeah.

Right. So, yeah. And, and so think about that. Like who, who is it? You know, if you are serving a particular corner of Texas, maybe it's going to be all guns all the time for you. I, you're speaking speculatively, but getting aligned with the values, thinking about that thoughtfully and not just taking a blanket approach to Something or saying I'm. We're not going to think about anything at all. You know, because it's business. As long as there's money involved, we're good with it. Right? That's the, the thing. I think that's a good story. And taking a financial hit in one realm, but to get more in another is another. That's like an investment really for sure.

And you can't be all things, all people. You can and you shouldn't even try in any competitive markets. You need, you need to pick your customer base. You need to understand the need, the wants and needs of the guys. Guys are going to try to serve. You can't, you can't serve everybody. Like Budweiser made it made mistake recently. 20. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Be amazing. The Budweiser made the big mistake recently by trying to, to be, to be all things to all people, but trying to serve everybody. And they just ended up annoying everybody. So it's, that's a very good example of how not to do things.

So why don't you share the story of a energy misfire, right? Somebody who wanted to go down that road and then it didn't go well. BP talk about.

Yeah, yeah, British. Yeah, bp, your British Petroleum, you know, major oil and gas, major Very, very, very huge, huge business this part of the world. In 2001 they decided that, that they, they saw the thing, think the world was changing, right? And they wanted to move for BP was no longer petroleum. It's going to be. So they said right, so what we'll do to be, will be on petroleum is we will invest in lots of solar and lots of windows and that was fine. Investments, great. But they were kind of vague in what they were trying to achieve and they weren't that ambitious in trying to make reductions to drilling. In fact, everybody increased drilling. Then they had a big disaster up in Alaska. They had another disaster, pricey horizons, big oil spill. And from day one no one gave them any credits and they all kind of, they had to drop. It was not sincere. It wasn't well done, it wasn't well run. It was all the disaster. But recently they then came back and they said that two years ago they said they're going to reduce oil and gas production by 40% by 2030. Hard and fast. Big number for an oil and gas company. And they're going to compensate that by investing heavily in renewables and natural resources. Renewables, renewable resources, energy efficiencies, technologies. Well the up until year 2000 and no, sorry 2021, their share price fell 40%. They made this announcement, it went up 8% and all of their peers were falling 40%. And so the market was telling them and the market was saying, well, long term we need to be leaving the majority of reserves on the ground because otherwise we won't green. But we want to pilot about radar. What are you going to do about it? So they've sold 40% of the value, dropped off on the base of that question. When they turn around and said, well this is what we're going to do about it. Stock price went back up again and they have been turning around the. One of the oil major, European oil major seems to be pretty good in making that transition. U.S. oil majors are much more focused in on but we'll just keep on doing what we're doing. But smaller and cheaper Europeans are undergoing an actual transition from technology transition themselves. You have different strategies, whatever, but you can be pretty sure that, that the, the European businesses will be there will be around for longer than the US Businesses. If the US business are entirely focused around on oil and gas, well, even.

In the Persian Gulf, right, there's a considerable interest in renewable energy and investment in other technologies and things like that because they realize if we are entirely based on a petroleum economy and then one day it dries up or the world loses interest in it, we're kind of screwed. And, and so they have spent a lot of time and energy. You know, I don't know how you put it on balance, but I think it's interesting that just saying, oh, we're going to go, we're going to do some investing and we're going to send some messaging and we care about the environment too and we're people who live here also. And, and so we're going to start to move that. But not doing anything about the rest of the business and the larger picture, no real hard commitment there and then having a couple of, you know, common kind. I mean, extraordinary. But there's disasters and leaks in, in the oil business that's a pretty regular occurrence. Some are, are massive and some are fairly minor. But before too long, if you're doing enough of it, you're going to have a problem. Right. And you could see that spanking them and, and then seeing the, the suffering, the stock price and then actually making a bigger, deeper commitment to something and you could see it starting to recover. I do note that the differences in percentages are profound though, right. If we lose 50 in value, we've got to have 100 increase to get back to where we Were.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It did really focus the minds. Like if your stock price keeps up, what are we going to do about this? Like we're, we're being told somebody wants something else from us, so what do we do? And they said, well, sustainability is the way forward. Well done. Thank you.

Finally, look at the value over time of Tesla. Right? Tesla I don't like. One of the things I love about Tesla is they took things that felt more like the concept cars that Detroit used to show us and they actually made things that felt futuristic and, and they were, they were boldly working on something. Now you could argue about their profitability and their fit and finish, their production capacity and there's a whole lot of things nits you could pick there with them. But you look at the valuation increase and how it related to all other car makers and it's that future value, right. People look and they're like, those are dinosaurs who are dying. Traditional car makers. And here's a company that's like the future and say what you want about it, but those, that's two different worldviews and generating different stock values.

Absolutely, yeah. Tesla have genuinely transformed the auto markets, like almost single handedly. They've shaken up an incumbent, like all of the incumbents. I just told them there's a new way forward, there's a better way forward for me. I have an electric car, would never turn back. I think they're better in every possible way and their valuation is based on the making things that are fundamental. Pretty cool.

They're definitely cool. Yeah. I remember the first time I got in a friend's Tesla Model S and the, the door handles came out. Then we got in and the dash was cool and he's like, here, watch this. And he put his foot into it and you know, my head snapped back and I'm like, holy crap, that's no Prius.

Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, yeah, they are, they're under steel, like remarkably good.

Yeah.

But they transform the whole industry, like the entire industry.

And the secret thing is that charger network, right. Volt and Bolt are interesting cars. The Leaf is an interesting thing, you know, for a renewable thing, but, but totally different when you build that supercharger network.

Yeah, yeah. And it's, I'm not sure how it is working across the, across the US but it is so much easier now than it was like it was last year, the year before, year before chargers. Every like, I mean literally everywhere you pull up into, into every hotel, every, every supermarket, every mall, every, every parking lot, there's there's charges for your car with, with three different, different hoses you can plug in. It's.

It's increasing a lot more now. It's still not where it needs to be. And while the Tesla supercharger network is good, the amount of press and experiences that people have with the other chargers not working half the time so they plan a trip that go somewhere and it doesn't work. That's been a significant issue with the, with the infrastructure here. But.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well yeah it's, it's. It's not without Steven problems but it. What's. What transformation is you know, that's we do need to keep things. We do need journeys to be. To be smooth but give it another.

18 months as, as a surfer sailor and a kid who grew up for a time living in a van in Europe, a VW van. I I'm very excited about this new electric van. I kind of think that getting one of those could be like a car for me maybe later next year or something. But.

Yeah, brilliant. Yeah brilliant. Should be super fun.

Yeah. The box the new ID buzz. So so let's talk about some others. I don't know a lot about Orsted the energy company, but maybe tell us about what.

Yeah yeah just really briefly like or said was one of the very large Nordic yeah like Scandinavian oil companies. Oil gas companies and they just wasn't quite on the drop of a hat but it's pretty much drop a hat. They said no we're not doing this at all anymore. Divested all of their oil and gas assets and are now the largest offshore wind manufacturer in the world. Yeah Absolute hard cut and they're and. And from and they're enormously successful and they're pioneers in the technology. They're. They're pioneers in the engineering. They are everywhere you look at any. Anywhere that you see governments putting up land offshore or state or there and they're, they're. They're going to be a business that is like every turbine they put up will be generating for 30 years if not more and they're. And they will continue and they're building and building building. It's a super, super super business and that like utterly trans transformed forward from where it was. I don't know what, what else to say about it but it's, it is one of the, it is a great example of a company that went from that just that took the view that what we're doing now will not be a business that will serve us well for the. For the next Kind of, you know, it'll serve us for the next five years, maybe 10 years, but after that it works, It'll be, it'll, it'll be gone. All the values going to be, going to be ended. We need to make a big change. So they made the most dramatic change you can imagine. Going from all taking the skills that they had form like from offshore drilling and like being out there and understanding the seas and understanding how to, how to have large structures built instead of oil lakes to put in winter. So it's taking their skill set and moving and moving it into a different kind of related steel field. Still energy, still, they're still an energy company, but the technology they're using is entirely different. And it's, and it's one with a long future.

You know, I think the interesting thing here is so we're talking a lot about energy companies in particular, but not only that, also retailers. And when I think about my old company and we were selling fashion jewelry, right? And, and I was working on like how do we make this a huge company? And my wife's like, yeah, I don't know. Like it seems so wasteful. And we're producing new things, new, new, new, new all the time. And, and it seems disposable and should we really be doing that? And I'm like, well why don't we figure out a way that do it that makes a difference. And as I started to look at the problem then I realized we weren't going to do it as one company, but it needed to be an industry thing. So we started to create and, and contribute to industry conversations about sustainability. And that meant materials, the mining, sourcing of what went into it also meant labor practices and then all the surrounding things, packaging and stuff like that. And so we focused on this concept. We, we branded clear conscience jewelry. Like you wanted to wear something and not feel like it was trashing the world and hurting people in the process. Right? And this is around the time shortly after the blood diamonds movie came out as well, which was, which is a, another factor of not, I mean the most extreme thing of, of like war and killing around the trading of, of diamonds in particular funding wars. But we were just thinking about like pollution and we were thinking about bad labor practice. We were thinking about factories that we'd visited considering to do business with where they felt so toxic just walking around them. I didn't need a bunch of testing data to tell me that probably wasn't a good place to work, right? Like you could feel it, smell it. And so we started looking for where could people afford, where were people paid well enough that they could afford to send their kids to school so their kids weren't forced to work in the same industry generation. They weren't trapped in something. They had agency, they had choice. Right. We started to look at community thing. We started to look at quality of living. And so they might be paid less in certain places that still meant they could afford transportation, schooling, food, housing, you know, and so was that sustainable? Yes. And then we looked at recycling and we looked at wasteful practices. Right. But that made a huge difference in for some of our customers. But not everyone, you know, not everyone cared. Not everyone wanted to hear that story.

Absolutely. Yeah. And it reminds me of a story that professor of mine at Yale, Zoe Chance, says Zoe's actually remarkable herself. She, she was brand ambassadors, a brand manager for Barbie from Mattel. And she kind of asked herself the question of, well, what does success look like? Everyone in America has a Barbie. It is successful in America having two Barbies.

Really.

You know, just again, it's like petroleum, plastic product. Yes. Yeah. Zoe Chance, really? Professor. Yeah. Then she, she went into, then she went back into academics world went to, went to TL and she's actually now she, she teaches a class on, on influence. She, she's great. Look up her book. Influence is my superpower. She was really, really good. But she tells the story about meeting with Patagonia and they were, they were talking about, you know, they're, they're making a decision on their own sustainability practices. And like there was one particular factory that, that there was, there was a financial decision needs to be made, like, do we stop using this particular chemical, this particular process which people are complaining about and go to something which is much more expensive.

Right.

And there's some kind of serious debate, debate going on there. So what's, what they decided to do was get in the bus, drive the whole board down. Whole board went down, pulled it, pulled that outside the factory. They didn't even even need to get out of the bus. The smell, just what you're saying, the smell. Just turn around. Back edge here. Decision made, all done. Right. We, we change it. We're not doing that anymore. That gets, yeah. Sometimes it's, it's as simple as that. You just need to go. You took to understand the firsthand.

Yes. Yeah, you could, you could feel it, you could tell. Yeah. This is not something we should be doing. Yeah. And then, and then start think about, well, if we're, if we're going to incur some extra Cost or some hassle, what are we going to do to make up for that? How do we still stay a business? Right? How do we still make a profit at something? How do we still have some growth room?

Yeah, but Patagonia is a brilliant example of that. Like their, their entire marketing is. We're making stuff that's really good so you don't have to throw it away. We don't want you buying any more. You buy one bag, we don't want you buying a second bag. Like, that's an Alphabet to most business. Most business, once you want to repeat customers. No, but it's their marketing, their branding all around that gave them massive credibility. And like, they do, they do have wonderful products. But there's also the sincerity built that through us because when the CEO then, then, then step, then stepped down and stepped down and resigned, he gave way. His entire fortune is charity. Like, like that is a, that is a seriously aligned, aligned human being. Like, it's built a remarkable business on the basis of his own, his own beliefs. And it's, and it's a worldwide, enormously successful business.

Yeah, it really is. And, and the combination of their commitment and their product design, the integrity of the way that it all works together, the way they run the company, I think is when we think about sustainability more broadly outside of something like an energy sector, where it's really obvious, but in any other sector, from fashion, jewelry to apparel to, and equipment, retail, that kind of thing, what are we actually thinking about here? How are we operating the business in a way that is lasting, is without risk or future, you know, some balloon payment when somebody figures out what you polluted or what you did that was damaging. Right? When, when there's a huge lawsuit against your company because of something. Right. That's what we're avoiding when we think sustainability. Right. It's not simply, it's not simply the environment and energy, although that's certainly not a big.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're also looking at, I kind of go from this issue as well, like how you run your own business. Like, it's no use. It's no, you know that you need to have like, proper systems that controls. Like you need to watch your, watch your finances. You need to make sure that, that people aren't doing things they're not supposed to be doing. It's, it's, it's, it's all about the things that can trip you up in the long run. Look out for them, Sort them out first. Yeah, well, if you get, get them sorted, then go and have a look and think, oh well, what is the. What why am I here? Like, what is this business all about? If, if we disappeared, what would the world miss?

Yeah, right.

That's, yeah, that's. Figure out, figure out what your purpose is, then kind of break it down and look and say, well, what are the really key things that we can be doing to try and, try and drive that purpose forward? Keep it simple. Keep, keep, keep a couple at them. Don't, don't try and be all things one people, but become really, really good at those couple of things. Like it's, it's, it's not, it's not, it's not rocket science, but it's, you know, it's really important. Like, so if you kind of focus on one or two, one or two areas, like it might be, you know, diversity, it might be the efficiency, you know, it might be, it might be though it could be anything. Whatever's really key and key and important to you. Like if you have a look at say like Starbucks, like their, their purpose, their mission purpose is we believe in the pursuit of doing good. Nothing to do with making coffee, is it, you know.

Right.

Most important course believe in, in like their mission is to unite people to celebrate life's moments. Like again, nothing to do with beer. Try and be, feel like you have a big purpose. Something that's, that can never really be finished, that can never really really be completed.

Right.

And then, then underneath that, look at, look at your strategic goals, missions. Those are things you should be, should be trying to, trying to aim, trying to complete what you. If you're trying to figure out how the sustainability part of it, talk to your employees about what's really important and try and try and get them on board and try and make them your great advocates both in the world and to new employees. Employees. We can talk about the disregard how to embed us and all these things, but I recognize we're running a little bit shorter. We should probably come back and do another.

My purpose is helping leaders build a better world. I am deeply moved every time I see that I've helped a leader grow their company in some way for something they care about. Right. The people that I work with for any appreciable amount of time are people that what they want to do is net positive whether they figured out it or not at the time, said it well. But they're, they're all doing something that makes the world better in some way and make a profit of it. So that's my purpose. Right. And I'LL never be done with that if I work to the day I die. But then along the way I said, well, before I retire, I'd like to reach 5 million. I'd like to help 5 million in some way. 5 million business leaders, whatever it is they care about that makes the world better. And so I set out to do that and that was a profoundly different thing. Like, and I started to think about, well, given the small, very small number of people that I worked with at the time, I didn't see a pathway to getting there. But I, but I'm like, that's worth giving the rest of my career to. And so I started to grapple with that. And then this year, 10 years later, I'm about to hit the first million of people impacted right between this show and the workshops and the global accelerator program that I help run and you know a number of things like that, you know that impact is there. So you, you take that purpose that you talked about, then you pick something significant way out there and you let it transform you, right? You let it impact. Now I still work with a small number of people at a very deep private way that, that generates a lot of income for me. But then I touch a whole lot more people with things like and, and, and our bigger workshop programs and so on. So big shout out for me then if you're listening. If you want to know more, we're actually about to launch a new program that'll have more room for people kind of in between the accelerator stage and our typical scaling up coaching, a new range of scaling up coaching. And you'll find all that and more@scalingcoach.com so if you want to go and see anything about those programs or our shows or the tools or any of that stuff that we talked about or you'd like to get some subscribe there to be notified when we launch that program in the next little bit and be one of the first people in that new program that's really designed for people who want to grow. But scaling up has been just a little too much for them. But they'd like some active coaching. We're going to have a coaching there for companies that are stay between 1 and 10 million which has not been the typical place that we've played. So if you want to get on that scan coach.com so let's close it out and say a couple things. I think we've talked about the value of the company, the long term value, ensuring that you don't jeopardize the value and we've talked about the impact on all your constituencies, your employees, their engagement, the retention, the attraction, how much it makes your life, the the stock value potential of thinking broadly about sustainability and getting way out of that. If you want to know about more about Chris and his company, you're going to find it. We'll put the link up here. But It's United Renewables IM that'll take you there. UnitedRenewables IM you can see all about his company and what they do in there. Chris, it's been a pleasure to have you on the show. Been great.

Thank you so much. Thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it.

Well and I should give some shout outs to some other folks in the background behind the scenes here. Wanda Mitchell Getting our show ready scheduled out the door to my friend and mentor Vern Harnish, who I'll see this week or next week actually in Denver and with one of our clients and then to the folks at Podfly Production who edit our audio and and create our show notes and all that kind of stuff and more. Thanks again everyone for watching, for listening. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep Scaling Up. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software powered by Align, it's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Aligned. To try it now, go to aligntoday. Com Bill G One more time. Aligntoday. Com Bill G that's aligntoday. Com BillG Check it out and try it now.