Achieving Sustainability and Business Resilience with Laura Steinbrink

It's a risk mitigation strategy. Sustainability at the end of the day is a risk mitigation strategy.

So on today's podcast we have Laura Steinbrink, who is CEO of Emerald Built Environments, a Crete United company. Laura, I am so excited for you to be here today.

I'm excited, happy to be here with you today. Thank you for inviting me.

Oh, you're welcome. So can you tell me in either 30 seconds or three sentences, whichever one you prefer, what your business does?

Oh, my gosh, is there a clock?

Yes, it's in my mind.

We're sustainability consultants and we work at the intersection of business and buildings. So we are helping focused businesses set and achieve their sustainability goals. And a lot of our work is in a roadmap, a strategy, annual reporting, things like that. And then we also can help help them implement that sustainability through the places where their people work, where they make their product, their buildings. Wow.

So what inspired you to pursue a career in sustainability as an entrepreneur?

I had a 15 year career in the non profit world when I first graduated from college. I've been a mission driven person for my whole life. And it was the early 2000s. Sustainability, corporate social responsibility, business is a force for good, was starting to elevate and gain traction. And at that point in time, I was at a little bit of a career, what do you call it? Road, fork in the road.

Okay.

And I learned about sustainable buildings and lead certification and I took a test and I got letters after my name that said I was a lead accredited professional.

Congratulations.

I said, well, I can do this too. And essentially I quit my job, some fool hired me, and off I went on my journey to be an entrepreneur in a business that was focused on doing good. Wow.

So when did you, when did the bug hit you of I don't want to work for someone else, I want to work for myself.

It was through this crisis fork in the road that I had where I was at a very large institution that was very top down. I had come out of an entrepreneurial career in the nonprofit world. Nonprofits tend to be very entrepreneurial, smaller, and I was even in startup non profits. And so I was meeting with mentors and advisors and my frustrations with this large organization where my voice was squashed and I was told, you can't say that. You cannot, can't do those things right? We have to ask permission. I was like, oh no, no, no. And so, oh no, no, no. Led me to, well, why don't you do something for yourself and go create your own thing Nice.

So sustainability in a company and helping other businesses, how they can be sustainable. Oftentimes for me, I've looked at it as that's a big business thing. A lot of times it's larger organizations that really have a lot of sustainability initiatives. How can small businesses work and focus on their own sustainability?

Well, if we take a look at the definition of sustainability, so many organizations or people might define that differently. But in essence it's doing things today that ensure that future generations have the ability to do for themselves, have enough resources for themselves, provide for themselves, do no harm. And so if you take a small business, it depends really what industry it is, big or small. If they are in manufacturing, they're going to be want to looking at their manufacturing process and what kind of resources they use, waste, they produce, negative impact of the product, like single use plastics for example. But if they're a small business and it's a professional service firm or something, this is in an office. There are a lot of things that they can do to operate sustainably. But ultimately at the end of the day, any business, big or small, is there an opportunity for your product or your service to have benefit? Is really the foray into ultimate sort of the round, the rounded version of sustainability.

Okay, so are there some simple things that small business owners can do, regardless of whether they're in manufacturing or in business services, to kind of more sustainable.

So operating sustainably, especially if there's an office. Right, so let's just define it in that way that the corporation has an office, whether it's owned or leased, what are they doing inside that office? Are they looking at the consumables that they have like their paper towels and their cups? Do they have ceramic mugs? Are they recycling the soda pop seltzer cans that they might have in the fridge? Is there a five gallon water jug that people have water glasses or water bottles at using instead of single use plastics? Simple things like that, they could go to the next level of the equipment that they purchase for their computers, their printers, laptops. Anything that is Energy Star certified is going to use less energy than something else. Are the lights getting shut off? Are there timers and setting, you know, occupancy sensors so that they're not on when rooms aren't in use. They're little things that any organization can take. And also those things you could do at home, right? You can compost at home, you can compost at the office, you recycle at home, you recycle at the office, you use products that aren't disposable, you don't use disposables at the office. Sort of same logic for small business.

So as you're working through some of these projects, helping businesses figure out their practices around sustainability, I would venture to say that sometimes there's someone in the organization that doesn't see the value. How do you turn people around to really understand how important it is to be sustainable?

Less and less do people see it not valuable. So there may still be what we call climate deniers who don't believe that the climate is changing, that it's considerably hotter than it was, that storms are more violent than they were. Okay. It's a risk mitigation strategy. Sustainability at the end of the day is a risk mitigation strategy. So what we are always trying to do is really understand what industry that company is in. What might their customers be saying? Do they have a hiring problem? Because Gen Z millennials, they care. And so it can be depending if it's an internal or an external stakeholder that might be more influenceable, if you will, to that that company. That's how we sort of find what, what matters most and then show them the way.

Do you find it helps sometimes when you're working in an organization to find a champion within that organization to help you kind of spearhead some of those projects, work with the culture, change things around.

So most organizations won't call us to do work with them if someone at the top hasn't already bought in. Right. So somebody at a mid level manager is not getting to hire a sustainability strategy person or influence the design of the build out of the office if they don't have buy in already. So it very much usually is led by, you know, the executive team or the owner.

Okay.

To bring that, to bring it forward.

So to flip a little bit, sometimes the owner, I know for me, sometimes I have really big ideas and there's members of my team that have like will agree with me and like we'll storm up that hill. But sometimes there's those individuals that are like, I don't want to learn something new. How is this going to impact me? How do you get those individuals on board as well? So everyone's kind of moving in the same direction.

So one of the tools that we use when creating strategy for organizations, big or small, is simply called engagement, stakeholder engagement. And everybody likes to be part of a solution. And it's very simple questions. Imagine 10 years from now, what does success look like for X company? What is happening in the world ten years from now that we need to pay attention to. Inevitably, everybody finds their way into the one thing that they could do or they care about that matters. So I remember we did it at a large insurance company locally. It was before COVID and we had one hour workshops and pretty much everyone was invited to come to at least one. And so people self selected in. So obviously they might have already had an interest in it, but you know, they're the people that care about the outdoors and they want to go for a walk. And so wellness was really important to them and having walking trails and access to the outdoors or the garden that they could go play in during their, you know, break time. And those things are all correlated up to sustainability because it's about healthy planet, healthy people, healthy profit. So there's a bucket that anyone can find their way into.

Wow, that's a great way to explain it. So what are some resources that are available for some of those small businesses that are looking to become more sustainable?

So there are national nonprofits and local nonprofits. So many of the national ones, like the U.S. green Building Council, USGBC, which is the organization membership organization behind LEED, which is the premier sustainable building certification, they have chapters, local chapters that people can be members of. And there's education events. There's another organization called Conscious Capitalism, which also has local chapters. It does do educational events in. We do a lot of work in Nashville. I know it's not local here to Ohio, but they have a urban green lab. And that organization is just a local nonprofit that's focused on helping businesses develop their sustainability. So there's it sometimes a little Google search, city plus sustainability is going to reveal something. But there are communities of people. Cities oftentimes will have a sustainability green team or maybe the chamber of commerce talks about it. And there are ways that people can get involved and then, you know, find their path.

What do you think about the certification for B Corp? Can you talk about that?

Oh, I love the B Corp certification. I got to talk to about with a client this morning. We are B Corp certified. So this, you know us, it's. What is it? B lab.org I think would be the website otherwise. I could clarify that for you, but sure. B Corp certification is a third party certification that any business, big or small, can pursue. And what it's looking at is everything that you're doing to operate your business, your products, your services, your HR policies and procedures, your purchasing, your transparency with your numbers and your way you govern your organization, your investment in the community, your philanthropy. And so as A and each organization, depending on what kind of business, has its own distinct pathway. So it doesn't ask, for example, me, a professional service firm, my company questions about manufacturing. Okay, it would not ask the manufacturing factoring company questions about the product that they do. That's for real estate. Right. Which mine does so that it's customized to your business. But B Corp certification, certification is international and it's holistic, which I love. So even if one company doesn't pursue it, you could learn things that are best practices that other companies do by starting the free assessment. You could Google B Corp assessment and find the free assessment and start looking at the questions that they ask to see, hey, is my company doing this? And maybe we could or should.

Do you think it's a good starting off point even if you can't do all of the things in the certification process to even just get ideas?

So I've been a coach at case. They have actually they have a lab where companies can volunteer to go through a process with students who also are volunteering. They're not even earning credit for it, but. And it's both undergraduate and the graduate students who will be assigned to the company and work with them over a semester to help them take the assessment, get the documentation you might need for certification if they're ready and go forward. It's a lot. So I can't say it might be moderately overwhelming on the first look, but it absolutely is a very easy, simple framework that you could spend 15 minutes a week on just to learn one new thing that could be pursued.

So what I think I hear you saying is that sustainability and working towards some of these things, whether it's certification as a B Corp or working on practices to be more sustainable, is all about taking small steps.

Absolutely, small steps. And we're not going to boil the ocean over day. Right? You can take one step at a time, figure out what's most important to us, our organization, where the opportunities are and just get walking.

Nice. So how can we encourage collaboration and knowledge of sharing among small businesses to kind of accelerate the adoption of sustainable practices? If you could go into the future, kind of future trip and tell us, what would you like to see?

I would love to see organizations talking about what they do in their social media. Right? People are learning, seeing, interacting with companies that they purchase from B2B companies, B2C companies through social media, for example, you know, maybe somebody in your organization volunteered and did a cleanup activity. Why not let's post about it? Let's use similar like hashtags and other frameworks that allow the information to pop up into each other's feeds and to celebrate it. Like, isn't this great? Like if you posted something I would share it.

Nice. How do you see the sustainability landscape for small businesses evolving over the next couple of years? You know, we've got changes in regulations coming, we've had changes in the workplace coming. Covid accelerated some things and in a remote work environment. So what do you see as the future, especially with AI coming into the landscape?

Yep. So without being a doomsayer, because I'm definitely a blue sky, everything is positive. At a minimum, regulation will cause all businesses to pay attention. And what I mean by that is that the SEC in the United States, globally, the European Union and other government entities in other parts of the world are requiring companies to report their carbon emission, their greenhouse gas emissions at a minimum. Like there's other frameworks of other sustainability minded things that are happening and each one of those companies that has to report by the year 2026, 2027 is also having to report what the people it buys services and products from. So let's say you're just a small business, but you are a marketing company and you provide services to somebody that produces a product that's going to go into Ford or you're three or four steps away from Ford.

Yes.

The longer we get past 2026, your numbers must be reported to the person you sell to, who reports to the person they sell to up, up the chain. And it's not just the sec, it's the state of California, it's the state of Colorado, it's the state of Massachusetts. So the reason they're doing it is because we do have an issue with emissions and what it's doing to the climate. And so that's one way to grab it. And by making everybody report what their emissions are, then we have a better chance because you can't manage what you don't measure.

So what I hear is that even though a lot of individual small business owners may say this isn't something that really impacts me, yes, I care about sustainability, I care about the things that are going on, but I don't have any reporting requirements. Potentially it could be coming fairly quickly. So this is something that should be on everybody's radar.

Absolutely.

Okay.

And small businesses too, especially if they might carry a certification or woman owned business, small business, veteran, minority. And they're in those purchasing practices where they're getting a chance to jump up. Right. So maybe they wouldn't normally be eligible to pitch to a Intel or a Disney or Ford or even a local, you know, Smuckers. They are requiring anybody in their value chain, they're asking the questions now. Are you reporting? Are you tracking these kind of things? And so it's coming. Wow.

So as we wrap up, one of the things that we like to do on this podcast is work on getting 1% better in our small business. So the goal is to get 1% better every day. So we. What is something that you would like to leave as a takeaway for the listeners to help them be 1% better in the things that you do?

Well, how many minutes do I have.

To answer that question? Two.

Okay. Well, first of all, there is an organization, a global organization called 1% for the planet. And we are a member and we take 1% of our gross revenue. So not our profits, not our net gross revenue. And we donate to nonprofits that are committed to preserving and enhancing planetary health across the United States. There's local organizations, national organizations, and we that gets verified and double checked. So 1% is one way you could do it. But the biggest thing I would say is every organization just look at themselves and where is the impact that they having? If there is an awesome office, it's your trash. Maybe if it's just, you know, are you recycling? What's the. Where can you find the area to make 1% improvement in where your biggest impact is and start there.

So simple. Thank you for your time, Laura. Thank you for teaching us about sustainability, how it is extremely achievable even for small businesses, and how everything is coming into moving in that direction so that we all have to be more paying, paying more close attention.

Thank you for having me on.

Ra.