E071 - Virginia Cinquemani from Green Gorilla

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Welcome back to the Green Element Podcast, where we feature business leaders and innovators transforming their operations to be more environmentally and socially sustainable. I'm your host, Will Richardson, and I can't wait to meet our guest today and help you on your journey of sustainability. Hi, Virginia Chinkwumani from Green Gorilla. Thank you so much for joining us today on the Green Element Podcast. I'm really looking forward to finding out what Green Gorilla does and how you help organizations become more environmental. What a great name. I'm going to ask you about your name at some point as well because it's got to.

Are you talking about the company name or my own name?

Well, the company name. I'm now thinking I should be asking about your own name.

Oh, well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on this show. That's amazing. And yeah, well, Green Gorilla, Maybe we can start from there.

Okay.

So Green Gorilla, it was created last year as a way of helping sustainability professionals to find their voice. And the reason why that happened was because I worked in the built environment industry for a long time. And my clients at that point, when I used to work at the Building Research Establishment, were sustainability professionals. So very clever, smart people with a strong technical background, but they often struggle to speak to clients and to find their voice literally and to sell their services effectively. So that's how the idea came about. And the reason why I called it The Green Gorilla is because the gorilla is usually, you know, a symbol of strength and assertiveness. And so that's how I see my clients becoming.

If you could give me an example of what you've done for a client, so I've got more of a better idea in my head about how it all fits together.

Yeah, absolutely. So the main services we offer at Green Gorilla are training courses and coaching, one-to-one coaching, to support sustainability professionals to learn skills like communication and assertiveness and finding confidence and overcome difficult conversations and conflicts. And the one that is very popular how to sell sustainability. Because often, as I was saying before, people with technical skills might be very, very well prepared, you know, with their arguments, but they don't know how to actually negotiate with a client. And, you know, at the moment we're living in a world that is made of— it's sort of split into people that really believe that we need to do something about climate action and everything, and other people that don't. And unfortunately, up until this point, and from personal experience, lots of clients have been quite detached from it all. And the usual argument is, we haven't got enough money, or we haven't got enough resources, and it's all about the bottom line. So what we teach clients, our own clients of Green Gorilla, is to find the right arguments to win their clients over. And so if the client wants to speak marketing, let's speak marketing. If they want to talk about bottom line, absolutely, sustainability can help you with that. So it's really demystifying the whole selling, negotiating. It's not a dirty activity. It's actually something that is vital and is providing a service to your clients. It's really helping them finding a solution. And it's a win-win. For us sustainability professionals, it's furthering sustainability in the world. And for our clients, it's obtaining whatever goal they want to obtain.

So what sort of clients have you had in the past? From what industries?

So I come from the built environment industry. Originally, I was an architect. I say I was because I haven't designed for a long time now, but I've been a sustainability consultant and sustainability professional for a long time now, nearly 15 years. So naturally, lots of people that we speak to and we work with come from the built environment industry, especially BREEAM which you might have heard of, BREEAM consultants, and APs, so creative professionals. And also because this construction industry is probably the one that is most advanced in terms of sustainability in the UK at least. So we got quite a lot of clients coming from that area. But then you get people in finance, you know, sustainable finance. You got people from the services industry, but yeah, generally mostly from the built environment.

Okay, I get it. So what would you say your business superpower was?

My business superpower? I think the key, and the thing I really like about Green Gorilla, is the fact that once you teach people how to be assertive, how to find their feet and become more charismatic, that affects not only their professional lives but also their personal lives. So I've seen clients who were quite shy at work, they came through the program, and at the end they started organizing get-togethers and, you know, their husbands' birthdays and stuff that they would never have done before. So really it trickles from becoming a stronger professional into becoming a stronger person. So I think that's quite a cool superpower, is really affecting lives directly.

Brilliant. That sounds great, that's really good. How do you engage with people around you with what it is that you're doing? Because you focus in on sustainability and you're basically sustainability coaches, aren't you? And so how do you engage with people about what it is that you do?

First of all, I need to clarify that I am the director of the company, but I have a number of associates that come from the leadership and management industry and from business psychology background and voice coaches that help Green Gorilla do what it does, because my personal background is also technical. So I have learned these things by being a business development manager in my previous job, but also having done some technical stuff. But I work with a lot of very qualified people to do this. And the way we do it, the way we engage with clients is mainly via social networks and especially LinkedIn, which seems to be quite a very, I would say, very rich platform where debate stays a very decent and professional level, and I like you for that reason. So the way we do it is mainly by providing content. We try and provide as much free and useful content as we can via articles and downloads. And I've done my own version of a podcast called the Green Gorilla Conversations, where I interviewed a number of people from the industry that made it, let's say. So the masters of sustainability that managed to become stronger in their profession and, you know, now they're heading teams and big teams as well. So the main thing is really trying to engage people on social media, getting the debate going about soft skills, about sustainability, about really the core mission of Green Gorilla is to advance sustainability, to make it accessible. That's why we're concentrating on coaching people and training people, because we want sustainability to become a complete no-brainer. So that's the key message and the key mission.

What have you seen over the last 15 years with what it is that you're doing? Have you seen an uptake in this?

For 15 years I've been in the industry of sustainability. Green Gorilla was only launched last year, but this comes with the experience of having worked with a lot of sustainability professionals for, you know, quite as long as, and I've seen a lot of resistance in people in really overcoming the barriers between being a technical person and being a person, full stop. You know, having professional relationships that make sense. And I've seen colleagues going into meetings, in BREEAM meetings, and just opening the manual, which if you haven't seen it, it's like a 400-page monster, and start reading from it. It's like terrible, terrible personal skills, honestly. And you could see the blank faces on clients and you would think, how do you think these people will buy, you know, your solution? How do they— and I use the term buy in a bit of a loose way— it's actually really convince them and really try and make them understand the value of what we're doing. And if you come purely from a technical point of view, you haven't got a hope in hell to do that.

Mm-hmm.

It's really hard. So you need to really start establishing rapport with people first, listening to them, Very important second, and then understand what they want and what actually, mainly what they need so that you can offer your solution. While people usually go the other way around, they start with a solution and then they try and adapt it basically to whatever situation they have.

It'd be quite funny to be in a meeting actually, possibly wouldn't. I'm just picturing it, that's all. So going back to the coaching and helping people, what's the one piece of advice that you could give to our listeners about, and about what to do?

So if you want to really find your purpose, let's say, as a sustainability person, first of all, I think you need to check whether you have any limiting beliefs about yourself, what we call in the course the rulebook. So each one of us have a rulebook, and in the rulebook you put all the stuff that you believe about yourself. yourself, and they're not the real stuff, but for example, I am a technical person, I can't sell, or I'm only one person, I can't make an impact. All of these are very limiting beliefs about who you are and what you can achieve, and we all have it, you know, and often they come up in difficult situations or what we perceive as difficult situations. For example, networking for some is very difficult, presenting for some is very difficult, or finding themselves in a first client meeting is difficult. And what are the limiting beliefs? Why can't you really fulfill your purpose at that point? Why can't you convince people of your fantastic solutions? You know, sustainability makes perfect sense. It's common sense. How come it's not— every business is doing it? So the key is really from people that know their stuff, try and understand what is limiting you. What are you saying about yourself that doesn't help you progressing that objective? And then you go from there.

Interesting. That's really brilliant talking to you about this.

I could talk about it for a whole day, Will, you know.

I guess it's opened up my eyes because I didn't know that— it's not that I didn't know you existed, I didn't know your world existed because, well, I just didn't. You can't know everything, can you? And so it's just interesting to learn about it. If I was a business and coming into you, Do you find that the actual businesses are trying to help these people, or is it people on more of a personal journey?

Well, unfortunately, until this point I've only seen either individuals realizing, for example, that they can't progress in their career because they find themselves powerless in a meeting room, for example, or small companies wanting to compete with the biggie, the bigger ones. And so it's really more at the individual level, and when you start realizing actually every time you come into a meeting it's frustrating because you can't get your ideas across properly, or you've been overlooked all the time and you can't get promoted. So these are mainly my clients, people that actually realize in themselves that there is something that it doesn't quite make them happy really. And you know, sustainability professionals are a kind of vocational professional, I would say. So people that have deep ingrained values. So it's very frustrating for them to go into a meeting and come out with, oh, sorry, we can't do it, we haven't got money, because money is the last of our priorities as sustainability people. You know, we live by higher values. So these people really realize that something must change in order for them to get somewhere. Big companies, I haven't seen them actually approaching us. I've seen small companies companies that really see that firsthand and individuals mainly for that reason.

Okay, and can you tell us a bit about how you approach your own environmental management and carbon footprinting from a professional point of view?

Because I am a sustainability professional myself, and again, as I said, these are values that I live by, I try and live my value in my life as well as in my business as much as I can. And at the moment, this is a small business, so in a way it's easy to control. you know, what everyone is doing. And, you know, we don't fly, for example, we haven't flown so far because the majority of the training is done online exactly to reduce the footprint. And also because that way you can reach more people, of course, and it is more flexible. So I use the same platform that you use to do your podcast. So that helps a lot reducing footprint and carbon footprint. And then we are preparing like a formal environmental management system for the company, but generally speaking, it's really just starting from the common sense things from, yeah, trying to reduce your traveling pattern. Why having to go to the other side of the country to have a meeting when you can actually have a perfectly fine face-to-face video conference? You know, all the paper that we use, try not to print, or when you print, use FC or recycled. You know, the very basic things that sometimes make the biggest difference. And so that's the way we are doing it at the moment.

And what's the best way that we can learn about you and what you're doing? And where can we learn more about you?

So Green Gorilla has a lovely website that you can visit, which is thegreengorilla.co.uk. And we are very present on LinkedIn, publishing, as I said, a lot of content all the time, try and be, you know, as engaging as we can. But also we are on Twitter, for example, but mainly I think the website and LinkedIn at the you know, the 2 places. And so yeah, I would love to have your listeners to come and say hello, maybe on LinkedIn, and you can find Green Gorilla Consultants Ltd or my own name, Virginia Cinquemani.

Brilliant, thank you very much. Thank you very much for today, it's been really, really cool talking to you and finding out more about what it is that you're up to and what it is you're doing.

Fantastic, thank you very much, Will. Oh, just a little mention before we close, I am about to publish a book or that encloses all the theory around Green Gorilla and, you know, the key skills that a sustainability professional should have in order to be successful in this very rapidly changing world. And that hopefully will be within the next 3 months. So maybe, you know, people want to know more, they can get in touch.

That's great. We will put a link to it on the show notes.

Thank you so much.

That's brilliant.

Thank you for having me, Will.

Thanks.

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Thank you.