ve-BINAR: Fractional Sustainability Leadership

Thank you. Welcome, everybody. Welcome to this edition of our webinar on fractional sustainability leadership. And I'm very proud to have two guests today. Danielle Azole and Craig Riley are with me here today, and I'll have them introduce themselves shortly. A few housekeeping notes first. We are recording this session and it will become available on our website. So with that in mind, I'll ask everyone to keep their microphones muted and we will open it up for Q and A towards the end of the session and we'll allow everybody to ask questions. We're taking the first 30 or so minutes for a conversation between the three of us, Daniel, Craig and myself. And then we'll open it up for Q and A, wrapping it up within 45 minutes. So let's get started. Danielle, ladies first. Please let us know who you are and why you're in a webinar on sustainability.

All right. Well, Henning, thank you for having us and I'm excited to be here and meeting all new people and new faces. I have been a sustainability practitioner in house with some of the largest Fortune 500 companies over the past 20 years. And about three years ago, I left the in house job because I thought we needed to scale sustainability faster. And I started my own fractional chief sustainability officer company called the cs. And that's when I was able to connect with Craig and he and I were doing something similar, but in different sectors. My expertise is really in the consumer, packaged goods, fashion, beauty, food. And Craig will tell you his expertise. And we started to realize there was a bunch of us out there that were kind of doing something similar. And then there was a lot of other people who were saying they could do what we were doing, but without that specific expertise. And so we saw a real need within the marketplace to maintain a certain level of expertise and of quality within the sustainability profession. And we started the Fractional Sustainability Leaders Collective, which is who we're here representing today, the FSLC or FSL Collective, to sort of establish what are the best practices, who could qualify themselves as a fractional sustainability leader. And all of those, like, really thorny questions that come up at the beginning of something. Right. And yeah, so anyways, that's who I am. I'm very excited to be here today and talk more about the need and the evolving landscape for sustainability professionals.

Thank you, Danielle. Craig, how about you? Where do you come from and what brought you into the fractional sustainability space?

Yes, similar to Danielle. Yes, a long term practitioner in the sustainability in environmental management or environmental ops space. So way Back in my career, I was doing a lot of environmental compliance, environmental management. But I moved into the sustainability space about 20 years ago and I've been working in the corporate sustainability space for the last 15 years. Prior to striking off on my own and starting my business Alliance Sustainability, I was working as a VP or director in the management consulting industry where I was leading large scale sustainability programs, strategic planning, transformation projects. I was heavily involved in the, I'd say the regulated industries. So more of your manufacturing, diversified manufacturing, industrial transportation, renewables, utilities, climate tech, those kind of spaces. And I served as either an advisor, a principal, or as a stand in for the leadership of the sustainability strategy. So in the consulting space we would call that like a staff log or a staff extension. And so I was basically doing that for large and small businesses. I started up aligned sustainability in 2023 and I really kicked it into high gear in 2024 where I continue to do kind of a mix of fractional and advisory work. And of course, like Danielle, and we'll talk a lot more about this in 2024 is when we started the creation of the Fractional Sustainability Leaders Collective, which I'm the president and a founding member, Danielle is a VP and. And why did I join it? Similarly, we'll talk a lot more about this. For me and I think for most of our members, it wasn't like a work life balance type thing. We see this more as an opportunity to drive impact, to have scale, to provide a new resourcing model that allows us to work for any and all organizations that I think a lot of times if you're in the consulting space, there's just limitations and if you're in house, you're just working within that industry and you're going to have your own limitations. So many of us bring deep sector and industry expertise that we look to continue driving that, those sustainability strategies like at the industry level. So back to you.

Thank you. So before we talk about the collective and the fractional aspect of the work, let's talk about sustainability. A lot of our audience are sales leaders, fractional sales leaders, and they might not be intimately familiar with what you mean when you talk about sustainability because within different companies, within different industries, there are very different definitions, very different approaches to what that means. So let's talk about that. Can you share a little bit of what you cover and what you mean by sustainability?

Yes. Well, thank you for that, Henning. Yeah. And I think both Danielle and I want to carry the spirit of your discussions that we've learned from you that this is very much a dialogue. But given sustainability is quite a complex and nuanced topic and it means a lot of things to a lot of people. This is the one slide that we figured we would maybe share for the group and that we thought would be helpful. So just maybe give me a thumbs up that you can see the slide. Okay, excellent. All right, so this is just kind of a sustainability at a glance. Like what do we mean when we talk about sustainability? So in the upper left is kind of a definition for you all. It blends the original. Anybody who's in sustainability knows the Brundtland Commission's definition of sustainable development goes back to the 80s, which is basically meeting today's needs without impacting or compromising the ability of future generations to beat their needs. What does that look like in practice for companies? So what are we talking about? So businesses need to have a dual view. They have to think about how they impact these sustainability issues, environmental and social issues, but also they need to think about how those issues, how those topics are affecting their business. From a risk perspective, financial perspective, a procurement perspective, what are your customers asking for? Like how are those topics, those issues affecting you? One of the best frameworks that came out of the sustainability movement over the last two decades was the triple bottom line or the three pillar approach to thinking about sustainability. And that's what you see on the right. So for each of these you think about it environmental, social or governance. You'll often hear people, planet, profit. So environmental is kind of what it sounds like. It's thinking about how you're using resources and reducing impacts. It addresses a variety of topics that really have to be considered by each business. So biodiversity, climate adaptation, energy emissions, environmental contamination, indoor air quality. It involves so many issues around the environmental domain. Within the social pillar is often you're thinking about your employees, your communities, you're thinking about fair practices, labor practices, standards, benefit programs, training, workforce development. So it conclude all the topics that you see here and many more. These are just some of the topics in each of these that are most common. And then the last pillar, it's sometimes referred to as an economic pillar or in a governance pillar, it's what are the processes, controls and systems in place that allow you to manage for non financial considerations. And it addresses everything from like how you're structuring your organization, so board diversity, oversight, your policies. But it also involves very specific issues which have really come to fore in our work in the last five to ten years around anti bribery, cybersecurity, data protection. So heavy topics that don't really fall in environmental or social. So like, what is. Why does all this matter? There are many ways to frame the business case for sustainability. And we, especially in our collective, really like to frame it in financial terms, strategic terms, legal terms, risk terms. But at the end of the day also, the reason this all came to be is a lot of it comes down to values. Not financial value, like values, the values of addressing things that make you a more responsible business. So down on the bottom left are kind of like some of the most important obvious business case drivers there. It's about trust. It's about reducing regulatory reputational risk. It's helping innovate, grow responsibly and. But I think maybe for a lot of people on this call, that last one is also a huge deal these days. It's supporting requests and information from legal, from investor relations, public relations and your sales teams on sustainability requests. I've been told by several of my clients, like, sustainability ends up being a sales blocker for a lot of organizations because they have this ESG request or a sales sustainability request. They're like, I don't know how to respond to this. I hope it's enough to check the box and it doesn't limit our ability to respond on this rfp. So hopefully that provides a little overview. But Danielle, did I miss anything?

No, I think that was a great. I would just a great overview. I would layer in a couple of other things, especially in this moment right now. Sustainability can really help businesses understand their supply chain and it forces them to engage on environmental and social factors. Human rights risks, that could be barriers for import or export. That could mean real reputational and financial losses if not done correctly. And so under that is like what, what chemicals are you using to dye your fabrics in your clothing? Right. Basic things. Or have you conducted a social audit or human rights audit in the factories? Even if they're not your direct suppliers, are you aware of what factories are feed into your products? And these things are checked by customs and border patrol. And we know lots of examples where deliveries were lost or late deliveries were made because the proper checks weren't taken in advance. And so it's about, yes, mitigating that kind of risk, making sure we're doing things in the right way. But it's also about, I think, future proofing your business, making sure that you're building a business today that is using resources in the most responsible way possible because it's more efficient as well. It's financially efficient, it's environmentally efficient. Right. And there's so many examples where the, like Craig was saying the business case exists where it is financially expedient for a company to behave with a better environmental or social profile. And so, you know, really that's what we're looking for is we're not, you know, I think that 20, 25 years ago, people thought of this work as philanthropy, right? And we've really evolved within the past quarter of a century to help businesses drive growth, to provide another strategic lens to mitigate risk and drive growth. And that is really, I think, the core value and opportunity here. The ESG framework is fantastic. It's very helpful. And for companies that have to publicly disclose their financials, that's not every company, right? There's only 500 Fortune 500 companies that you can go down and down. So it's. There are many millions of companies in this world that would benefit from this strategic thinking and long term planning. In a world where we are just focused on making quarterly or annual, you know, targets, financial targets. I like to think of us as like, we help companies be sort of like the moral backbone and figure out a framework to help make better decisions. And so, you know, a lot of that maybe helps to make some of this stuff come to life. That's on the slide, but that's sort of how I think about it with my clients.

Great. Thank you, Danielle. Thank you, Craig. Now let's fractionalize this and talk about the use case for a fractional sustainability leader. Everyone. You mentioned the Fortune 500 companies in most of those organizations, those topics that you just outlined occupy more than one large department within the organization. But you mentioned the millions of companies that probably haven't embraced the sustainability topic yet because they think of themselves as being too small. What's the use case for a fractional sustainability leader?

Oh, that's such a good question, Craig. Do you mind if I jump in on this one?

You jump and I'll add if need be.

Okay. So, you know, the way I think about it, Henning, is while Fortune 500 companies are the ones we know, the brands we engage with every single day, the ones we might own stock in or what have you, the companies in their tier 1, tier 2 or tier 3 who support the product and delivery or the services of those companies that are in what we call the value chain of those companies are now being asked by those companies to implement ESG or sustainability strategies. And while we know the what the how is very murky for them internally. So imagine you're a supplier of Unilever and Unilever has these decarbonization goals, these environmental goals. They're very public about it because they publish an ESG report along with their financial disclosures every year. But the success of them being able to achieve their goals depends on their supply chain making that transformation as well. Because so few companies are vertically integrated today, there's a lack of direct control. And so we've, the lingo is scope one, scope two, SCOPE three, emissions. You know, we, we, we're very good in this space at coming up with an acronym for everything. And you know, that doesn't help to grow the tent, I'll admit it. But you know, with a lot of what we call upstream impact on energy water waste that can be calculated in a carbon equivalent, you know, that really is critical for all of the suppliers to start getting on board in order for the Fortune 500 companies to meet these very big, audacious, very public, I might say, goals that if they don't meet, there will be regulatory implications, there will be reputational implications, and we're seeing a lot of that already. And so, you know, it's 2025, 2030 is the first big milestone as it relates to decarbonization. So companies that haven't started yet really do need to start now. And you know, when Craig and I were talking about, you know, the fractional model for sustainability, it's really because, you know, okay, there's you know, 500 Fortune 500 companies, about half of them have chief sustainability officers. So when you think about it, there's about 250 people in the world who have this level of expert expertise on how to drive organizational and transformational change through the lens of environmental and social risk. We all, and that's for us to be thinking about how do we scale our impact? Because we're all mission driven people. We do this job because we know this is the right direction. We feel it, this is the right direction for business to be heading in. And instead of doing one at a time, we each need, it's incumbent upon us to each be doing, you know, helping four or five companies at a time be making this transformation. And so that was a real driver for me to go move from in house to fractional to start helping the Fortune 500 companies of tomorrow make the change now. Because we really have to, we really have to start. And it does take time. It takes time to collect the data, it takes time to understand who's in your supply network. And I think people in house kind of deprioritize this work because I think there's still, oh, we got five years, that's enough time. But me and Craig can tell you it'll take you two years just to know who your suppliers are. And then I'll take you another two years to set up a data platform to start collecting the data. And before you start being able to have enough data to analyze, develop a program and actually do the work, I mean we're talking about a four or five year Runway, depending on the size of the company. So that's my message, is if your companies haven't started yet, please start now.

Yeah.

Craig, anything to add to what Danielle said?

Well, I know Henning, you probably have a slew of questions. I can, I could build on that, but I could also save it because I think your question gets a little bit to like why we even look to create the collective in the first place. Like what led us to what was the business case and the need that we saw that was out there. I can happy to build on that a little more from the founder's perspective, but I can hold that.

Let me piggyback on what Danielle said first because what you're describing is a process where you backing into the supply chain of Fortune 500 companies. Now, of the millions of businesses in the US not everyone is a tier 2 or tier 3 supplier to a Fortune 500 company. From your perspective now, as fractional sustainability executives or leaders, is there also a use case for a 5 or 10 or $50 million business that hasn't been touched so far to say I'm going to invest in a fractional resource because I am seeing benefit in sustainability for my business? What's the use case there if there isn't the push from the, from the top down from the Fortune 500s?

Yeah, that's a great question. I'll take that. And it does allow me to kind of build on where I was thinking to go. You know, there was, there's six founders. If you go on our website, you'll see that those are the six founders and there's three officers, Danielle and I being two of those. And you know, we came together knowing that we see this as a new dynamic, agile and even disruptive model for resourcing sustainability for I don't even want to call it outsourcing anymore because that's a fractional. You're not outsourced, you're embedded, you're integrated. And we see that as a new way of resourcing sustainability as a function, as a need. And so the businesses that aren't necessarily obligated to report from a regulatory perspective, they're maybe not. They're not global businesses. They're not obligated to report into, you know, international jurisdictions. They're not responding to the unilevers or the international papers or the ford and the GMs. They're not tier three. They may not even be a supplier to tier three. But somewhere somebody is investing and bankrolling or financing that business. So there's an investor or an owner or a founder somewhere. And sustainability gives you the ability to address both financial investor requests, but also your broader stakeholders request. That's why a lot of times when we write a sustainability report, the first thing we say is, well, who's your audience? Who are your stakeholders? Who's important? And it comes down to this term and this concept called materiality, which all of our members know how to address for organizations. It's like you don't want to manage and address everything. You want to manage and address within this large sea of topics, the ones that are relevant to your business. So for those smaller businesses, it literally may only be one or two topics or it may be a way of framing sustainability as an additional competitive advantage against their other competitors. For smaller businesses that are all about like, let's say a low, literally a local spot, a brick and mortar in an area and they want to connect to their community and they want to enhance their messaging to that community, there's so many ways that can be framed and used for businesses of all sizes. And the way a fractional sustainability leader kind of disrupts the old model is those businesses would not have gone to the big four, they wouldn't have gone to the consultancies I used to work for. The price point of accessing that consulting capacity is so high that it even for a lot of Fortune 5000, it's just not cost sensitive for them. But they also don't have either. The future is unknown for them. They don't have the budget and the resource to hire a full time in house person to lead it either. Maybe they want to, maybe they don't. What a fractional can do is we're committed to that. And I know now I'm speaking to an audience where this fractional message is the same, whether it's sustainability or if it's in the finance function, the marketing function, the hr, the tech function, the sales function, you're committed to that business. You may have 2, 3, 4, right? But you're still for that time you are fully committed to that business. You operate and act on their behalf. And so for us, that means doing the same thing, but addressing the sustainability function in a way now that those smaller businesses just couldn't do before. They couldn't hire full time and they, they were blown away by these large scale consultancies and the cost models and the approach like way this is way overcooked for me. I need something very simple. I just want to maybe phase it a little bit. I want to go down the road a little bit and hey, if it turns into something great and the fractional leader is going to be like, if it turns into something great, I'll help you along or I'll help you for a few months. That's why a big part and Danielle touched on this in our eligibility criteria for our members. We're very clear and being a former consultant, we don't want people who are just consultants. We are specifically trying to target out consultants. They still exist, they still need them. There's still large scale projects and program transformations that are needed with an environmental sustainability. But the target audience that we're going for, they're not going to go for that type of resource anyways.

Anything just to build on that real quick. You know, it goes back to what I was talking about, the how. Right. Because consultants are so good at like the landscape and the strategy and all those kinds of things. But what we really need is action and we need people who have experience operationalizing and embedding sustainability deep within organizations. And that to us is the differentiating factor. As in the fsl collective membership is every one of us have had that level of expertise and a lot of us have also worked as consultants at some point. So we kind of can do both and think with both sides of our brain.

Yeah, it's great to hear how you also, from a sustainability perspective, differentiate between fractional and consultant, because that is the clear differentiation in most functional areas. Areas. And as we discussed a while back, also for the fractional leadership alliance, that is the clear distinction there. Let's talk about the collective. So you all decided individually to go out and become a fractional sustainability executive. What prompted you to say, hey, we need to align forces with others in the space. We want to form a collective.

Craig, you want to go first? I went first.

I'll jump into that. Yeah, yeah. I think it's one of those maybe if you go by yourself you can go, what is it? Faster, but if you go as a group you can go longer. For us, we, we realized there was power in our collective membership and I think that kind of gets to the ideation for why we created it in the first place. There's, it kind of gets to our vision or our mission for the collective, which is really, there's a three part, there's a three part vision and mission to the group. And I think we all kind of felt that when we started meeting last summer because it literally, it was a, it was an acceleration race. Like we started in the summer and we launched in April. And for the Latter Half of 2024, it was ideation planning, programming considerations. And then, I mean, as you know, as soon as you create a formal organization, we wanted to be legit, so we incorporated. We had to get banking, we had to get legal support, all those kinds of things in order to become a legitimate organization. But what came out of those ideation meetings and those workshops really was three parts. We want to be a platform for thought leadership on fractional sustainability. Which is why when we engaged with the fla, there was just like this obvious connection. We were working on it and then FLA published its definition for fractional. Like, wow, this is spot on with how we're thinking. So we want to now take that and message that to the sustainability crowd, which is not thinking about fractional. Some of our members were doing fractional sustainability work. They never called it fractional. And then when we defined it for them, they're like, that's what I've been doing for five years. Like, that's fractional sustainability leadership. So like, oh, I thought I was just a consultant. It's like, no, no. So it's a platform. Probably the biggest one especially now is we want to be a resource for companies seeking fractional sustainability leaders. So if an organization doesn't even know where to begin, but they know they want to do something and they can just start Google checking, they can go to our website and they can find members that are targeted to their sector that hopefully have the time and the availability to do so. And that's the point. It's a resource for companies. And then third and foremost, well, maybe not foremost, they're all important, is just being a community. Being freelance can get a little lonely. And so the membership has become for me, my colleagues. I used to manage a global network of sustainability professionals. That was over a thousand at one of my companies. And now there's this much smaller curated, US based business across different sectors. We think a little bit similarly, but yet divergent in a lot of ways. And so we, we find, I think some of that collaboration and cohesiveness there and some of them have even become business partners as we work on engagements together, so I think that kind of is a driver for how, you know, how it came to be. Danielle, anything to add there?

No, I think that's spot on. And I think also I'll just add that, you know, when you're independent, sometimes you don't have the resources or like the access to information maybe that you do as like a large corporation with like a government affairs department or whatever. And we've curated our membership so that we have kind of sort of substituted that. So to Craig's point, it's like we end up being even a resource for each other. Hey, hey, do you guys know the latest regulation on this? Like what, what do we need to know? What's germane or how are you implementing this? Does someone have a tool that they're using? And so we are kind of a rising tide lifts all boats, kind of an organization where we're not. Even though we're, you would think that we're competing, you know, even though we're doing the same thing, we're not really competing with each other. And it ends up being much more of a collaborative spirit and atmosphere. And so it's been a very cool, I would say, initial six months of launch to see how this has been organically evolving to meet the needs of our membership and also to start spreading the word externally that this way of working exists. And you can, any CEO, cfo, CMO can start sustainability work today, even while we're making the long term case to get internal, dedicated department. So we really wanted to remove all those barriers and hurdles that, that go along with building an organization internally so that we can start the work.

We've raced through the first 30 minutes already. I'll ask one more question and then we'll open it up for Q and A by the other folks on the call here. What's your vision for the FSL collective? Where do you see that the organization in five years?

Good question. Craig, you're the president, what's your vision?

So I think both of us have something to add on this one. I'll try and make it quick though. You know, when we launched Henning, it was so exciting. There was so much, so much exposure. We grew from 20 followers on LinkedIn to over a thousand within just a couple months. You know, the sustainability crowd is very active on LinkedIn, right. So our international friends and network and all that have chimed in as well. There's been discussion of having like international nodes of the collective that can do something similar in other geographies, but kind of Where I see maybe this is more of my, a little more of the dry presidential view. And this is where I looked at Danielle to always add some spice into my perspective. You know, I come back to that three part vision for us. You know, our membership right now is not, it's not very large and that's deliberate. We, we were very clear heading when we started. We did not want to become an agency. We wanted clients to have direct access to a fractional, not go through a middleman, not go through a layer or two or three of additional cost that does not directly bear that value to the business. So we've deliberately kept our organization very, very lean, extremely lean, so that companies can have direct access to members. So I come back to that three part mission. We want to get the word out, we just started. We're gonna, we've got some new investment going into our comms over the next few months, which Danielle can definitely speak to because she's leading that. We want to continue to be a platform for thought leadership and we want to also help our, our members where they are. We've got members who've been working in this space for 20, 30 years. Some of them, their network is so established that they, as soon as they, they're aware that they're open, they immediately have clients saying, I need you, I need you, I need you. And we have others who are building new networks who are, frankly, especially in this current environment, like they're a little stretched and they're like, I need more leads, I want to get more opportunities. So we're trying to also meet our members where they are. So it's very important that we keep that member focus for me. But yeah, maybe I'll throw it over to Danielle to just add that last point so we have time for Q and A.

You know, I really just, in five years would love everyone, to anyone who's starting a business or growing a business, to have awareness that this is an option for them to start their sustainability and impact journey and also to lean on us as advisors or consultants so that we can help in their strategy development and implementation plans. From the beginning. One of the hardest things is to retrofit sustainability into 100-year-old corporations. We've done that. I've done that before. Craig, I'm sure has done that before. And it's much easier where you're, you know, for younger companies to start from the beginning. And so, you know, we're only a phone call away and hopefully people actually reach out to us and want to start that Conversation, the earlier the better and we can help them figure out how to make sustainability work for them in terms of a strategic driver of growth.

Okay, if you have a question, just unmute yourself and Andrew, you're waving your hand. Dan, you unmuted. Dan. I'll let you start and then.

Okay, this is fascinating.

I had never thought there was such a thing.

That's why we're here, Dan.

I always learn something here. So it's. So I'm looking at, I'm thinking it through and I'm thinking, man, there is a big, wide gap in the whole world to create a business like yours, which, that's where the, you know, where. That's where the gaps. That's where the opportunity is.

And I.

So it's, it's fascinating to see that. One of the things I was thinking about was, well, there was two things. One is who is your competition? Like who comes in and screws up?

Oh, you know, that's a good question. I haven't really encountered that yet. I think that my competition is internal budgets, internal desire to actually move this work forward versus an agency or something like that coming in from the external. Because to Craig's point, we're so much more price competitive than the big four and a lot of us have, have, have experience with them. Right. So it really is the, the competition is in action, I would say.

Yeah, I'll do a quick build on that too. Dan.

The.

I agree totally with what Danielle was just saying, especially when I think about it from my own business perspective. But thinking about it from the perspective of the collective, we are pretty unique. There are agencies out there that I think are trying to do what we're doing. There's new consulting organizations that put out fractional. But like, we've read the FLA book, right. And we're aligned. It's like you're just a consultant that's using fractional to get new exposure. And I get it, you're going to do what you need to do to bring and build business. But there's no way a consultant purely in consulting capacity can act in the same way as a fractional. It's just the embedded nature is just too difficult to reach. So in that way, I don't feel we, we have any specific competition yet for the collective in the US Anyway.

It seems like as you're talking, there's so much need out there.

How are you gonna, I mean, there's.

Two of you.

We'Ve got 18 members and we are gonna probably steadily grow over the next few years. You know, to probably cap out around 40, 35, 40. Well, like Craig said, we're intentional about who we let into our group because we wanna maintain that high level level of quality. You know, I think the good thing about this industry function expertise is there's a lot of great master's programs who are graduating people. There's a lot of people who are continuing to get the experience at a more junior level. And so maybe the pipeline for fractional sustainability csos will eventually meet the meet the need and the demand. Right now, you know, that'll be a good problem to have.

Honestly, Andrew, you unmuted yourself.

Yeah. Thank you. Thanks, Danielle and Craig for your comments and insights. It's great stuff. Mind expanding for sure. Three questions. You can answer all of them or none of them. So in our business, which is a similar model to yours, we're in the business of fractional sales leadership at Vendux, and for us, it's relatively easy to quantify and qualify problem statements within client environments. In the world of sales, in the world of sustainability, you're in a discovery call with a potential client, how do you quantify and qualify their problems? How do you know? How do they know? So that's question one. And related to that is how do you quantify your impact and your work over time?

Great question.

And the third one to. To what extent is sustainability in general the flavor of the day? Based on the directions that the political winds are blowing, I'm guessing a couple of years ago, sustainability was higher on the agenda for many companies and today it's relatively low on the agenda. So. But that, that's perception.

Yeah. I'd love to start with your last one first.

You know, I'll take the first, Tim.

Great. You know, we think about sustainability. You're right. I mean, when I started my career, it was definitely in different political headwinds and we weren't allowed to say the words climate change internally. And so, you know, for people who have been there, done that, I would say this current climate is nothing new and we're leaning back on sort of the way we used to do things. What it does is forces us to make a bigger and better and stronger business case for the work that we're doing. Right. So going back to, like, we're not a charity, we need to make sure that we have an ROI on the initiatives that we are putting forward and that actually they're making the business stronger and more resilient. And at its core, that's really what I think we can do. So you're Right. It is not easy time from external perspective, from a communications perspective, however.

You.

Know, I'll say I haven't heard of many companies that are really rolling back their programs. Some of them aren't really talking about it or really like waving a flag like they were. And honestly, I'm not sure that's a bad thing because, you know, maybe we don't need to like chest thumb so much on things that aren't fully baked. Right. Or things that aren't quite there yet. And so I think this moment is going to force us to all be a little bit more thoughtful about how do we externalize the work. Craig's going to address your first two questions, but I appreciate that thought.

Absolutely. I'll just quickly address the first two, I think. And every member may address this a little differently as part of an intake or discovery process. Andrew, like you're mentioning, I usually go through a series of questions to kind of get a sense of their maturity around sustainability factors and considerations. Often the way it starts is with something called a materiality engagement, like that slide I showed with all those topics. No organization, not even a massive international conglomerate is going to address all of those. That's the landscape of topics. So normally I would advise some kind of materiality planning exercise that can scale greatly. Go to a consultant and they're going to tell you to check the box and it's six digits and. And then kind of figure out what their material issues are. And then from there do a readiness assessment, usually develop some kind of implementation plan, establish a data and system of record which often can involve like some kind of software technology if needed, but it doesn't have to. And then over time, like, how do you quantify and track it? It's different obviously than financial, but it's a mix of quantitative and qualitative information that you put out reports that you can communicate internally and externally kind of track progress. Some of those things like carbon and energy, are very directly quantitative. Others are more qualitative.

And just to layer on that, I think, Andrew, you know, within our organization, if you look at the member base, you'll notice that people have very specific industry or sectoral expertise. My background is in consumables. So beauty, fashion, food, because the supply chains, the issues, the regulatory environment is very simple, similar. But we have a person that's an aerospace expert, right. Whose main client is like NASA. And like, I wouldn't take that client. I don't know. I wouldn't know even where to start going into a sales call or business development call with them. Right. So it's kind of like. But if I go into a beauty startup, I know right off the bat the kind of issues that they're facing. And so to that question about problem statements is really sector specific and that's why you want to find the right match. And that's also why we try and have many different sectors represented within our cohort so that no matter the industry, we'll have someone who could help you or is adjacent to that industry that they could get close enough to make a meaningful impact within your organization. So hopefully that that helps.

Thank you very much.

Great. Any other questions from the audience here?

Yes, heading. Hi, Bill Larkin, I had a couple questions for you. We work primarily in the SMB space. SMB is defined differently by everybody. But let's just say small to medium businesses, upwards of a thousand employer, I mean, sorry, below a thousand employees. When you sell to those types of companies, who's the Persona you're selling to? And, and who is that person that you talk to in those businesses? And, and what is their. So I can start, by the way, I'm a huge believer in fractional. I've known Henning for many, many years. I'm a huge believer in fractional. I think it's going to get bigger before it gets smaller just because of the staffing issues companies are having. But who is that Persona yourself to? That's my question. Thank you, Henny.

For me it's as high up as I can get. So ideally the CEO in a small to medium sized enterprise because if we're embedded within the senior leadership team, that's where we're going to be the most successful. So the CEO, the coo, cfo, sometimes I would say those would be my top three. Craig, how about you?

I definitely agree. It's usually cxo and often sustainability will sit somewhere within the function that finds it most important. At that scale of business there's potentially starting to be some new strategic functions at the corporate level. And often those strategic functions, especially if they are market facing or customer or community facing, then sustainability will start to become more and more of an importance. And then that's where again where a fractional could like jump in and kind of shape that in some kind of way. I mean that's definitely the point of an intake and a discovery process is just to kind of get a sense of what's your business, what are your needs, what are the drivers for doing sustainability so you can right, size it, you know, and make it make sense for the business.

So one of the groups we work with are fractional coos. And you know, because you get up to a certain point and these companies generally don't have chief operating officer, so they fractionalize it out, which is really important when, when we talk to coos. What should I be listening for? For your services?

Good question. I think for, from my perspective, you know, it's about product development and design, it's about manufacturing footprint, it's about procurement and sourcing. You know, those are the, the main things. And then, you know, just to build off of what Craig was saying, I like to really understand what are the biggest either issues and goals that they have on their plate and how can we look at those issues and goals through the lens of, of sustainability and human rights so that we're kind of embedding but also solving a problem at the same time.

It's a great question. This is why I love having these discussions with Danielle, because we have such a different complementary but different view on how to approach it. Just a quick build, definitely, if there's a sense of sales blockers. So I've definitely heard from some of the small and medium SMEs that I engage and work with of the term sales blockers, meaning the sustainability thing has started coming into our sales channels and it's blocking our ability to have open access to that, to that client. So requests for anything around environmental and social considerations may be something that the COO is hearing, perhaps they may be hearing any requests around something that doesn't sit in your typical financial and cyber and data security perspective around nebulous environmental and social considerations. So coming from the investor or the founders. So we often think of private equity as one potential target for collectives because again, they don't have the resources to hire full time. But either the private equity firm, the owner or within the market, they're getting some kind of request, just little pings for this kind of information. And if you could check that box at a low cost and just say you're addressing it, it goes a long way. And the last, and maybe the one that is often perhaps most powerful for those size businesses is just responsiveness to stakeholders, employees, communities, the places where you operate. To add this new lens into your business, thinking about sustainability factors can go a long way to showing your responsive business. You're not just thinking about the long term financial benefit of the business, you're also thinking about the employees and its overall impact within the community. And being a more responsible citizen and addressing that allows you to addressing what we do allows you to check that.

Craig Danielle, thank you for your time today. I learned a lot.

Thanks, Bill.

Thank you. Thank you, Bill. Craig, final question for you. How can people get in touch with the collective if they want to find out more?

Absolutely. I'm glad you asked. Quick yes, we have a website, so it's fslcollective.com we have an email address, infoslcollective.com we have another one for our officers that just comes to Danielle and myself as well as Brian Schoning who is our treasurer. So the best place is to get access there if it's appropriate. Henning, I would gladly provide Danielle and I's contact information for ourselves as individuals and our individual businesses, if that makes sense. I know we don't have a contact slide or anything like that, but FSLCollective.com is we put everything there. We've really built out that page, including some new stuff that this audience may really appreciate around just Fractional leadership that I think they may really like.

Great. Wonderful. I think the website looks fantastic. As you know, I had a chance to look at it this morning to check out how you're incorporating the Fractional Leadership alliance content there. So thank you for doing that. And more importantly, thank you for joining us for this webinar. Really enjoyed the conversation. There's a whole lot more to cover and I think the website addresses a lot of questions. So thank you for joining us. Have a wonderful rest of your Wednesday and a wonderful rest of your week. Take care. Bye Bye.

Thank you so much, everyone.