E087 - Russ Avery, Dr Birgit Memminger-Rieve and Ingemar Hunold from Elodie

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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. Welcome to the Green Element Podcast. Thank you so much for joining today. We have on the show Russ Ingemar and and you guys run Eledy, and your catchphrase is, a new consultancy today for a better world tomorrow. I would love to know more about it. Who wants to just give me a bit of background to it? Would that be you, Russ?

Sure, I'm happy to take that. So briefly, back in November 2018, Birgit and Ingemar came to me, we grabbed a coffee together. I was over in Berlin with them as EnviroSustain, which we'll come on to a bit later. And they just said, Russ, we've got a new idea for a new consultancy, a new business, which will really help to tackle the climate crisis head-on. In a nutshell, it's about blending sustainability consultancy, research, and education with— marketing and communications. In principle, would you be up for exploring that with us? I said yes straight away, and over the course of the next 12 months, we further developed the idea every time we met up and saw each other, kept ticking things along because we've both got obviously our day jobs. And then a year later, you know, we were founded and L&D was a real thing. And as I said earlier, it really is about doing something different to what we're both— what we're all currently doing in our sustainability fields at the moment by blending knowledge and expertise together to create a consultancy which does all of those things. So sustainability research, education, consultancy, and then crucially combined with marketing and communications because— and I'm sure I'll talk about this a bit more later— but without good marketing and communications, sustainability can never really truly come to life and it will never really become adopted by the masses. And, you know, it's thanks to good marketing and communications that the climate crisis has become real for a lot of people because it needs to be communicated in a good way that becomes adopted by the masses through good storytelling and stuff. So in a very brief nutshell, that's how Elodie came, came to be. Okay.

And I think maybe what would help is understanding a bit of background of how this all came together. Maybe Ingemar, you could lead, or Birgit, I'm not sure, from an EnviroSustain point of view and from a background, or maybe both of you actually, because it is a personal journey for both of you. So maybe Ingemar, if you could start and just explain where you fit in and how this has important to you.

Yeah, absolutely. And I would probably also cover a bit of Birgit's background because we've come a long journey together. So we've been both in the real estate industry for quite a while and dealing with sustainability there. Birgit mainly as a consultant, I'm sometimes on the contractor side but also on consulting. And what we've discovered over the probably past 15 years was that the real estate industry is moving kind of slowly when it comes to sustainability, and that we always had to go back, talk about the basics of the climate crisis, of sustainability, and that never really changed over the years. And therefore, we had the desperate need of coming up with something like LOD, which has the goal of, as Russ has said, blending consultancy and marketing. But we really thought we need to educate better on a very low level in the first instance, just to get everyone up to speed in order to understand the urgency and the actions necessary. So, we've come a long way, and we think that there is a lot of experience which we would also like to carry outside of the real estate industry. So, there is a lot of knowledge to share. And a lot more journeys we could start together.

And Birgit, your journey on this, because you're Managing Director of EnviroSustain, aren't you? And so you, you run quite a large consultancy in Germany. And what is it that's driven you towards where you've got to and then helped you pivot into Elodie?

Well, maybe I can start from, yeah, from my studies, mainly an environmental engineer. And what I've learned, that there are solutions to every problem we have in the environment. And the problem is with humans, they don't apply those solutions. So, I thought maybe I found my own consultancy. This was back in 2001. We started with environmental services, contaminated sites mainly, and then environmental and technical due diligence services. So, we inspected buildings. And energy efficiency and, yeah, the climate crisis only came up like 10 years ago. And as Ingemar said, our clients move very slowly. They don't really understand the urgency. And also, we provided them with a lot of help and solutions. So, we gave them ideas how they could improve their buildings, how they could use renewable energy. And the frustration came really from they never apply those solutions. So, and it was Ingemar's idea to say, well, why don't we set up LOD to really educate them and market sustainability? And we hope that this consultancy, we can motivate them to finally apply the solutions that are at hand. So, in a nutshell. So, it's a really long journey for me because I'm a little bit older than my 2 partners. So, I started in the '90s and it's a long way to go. And with all the knowledge we have acquired, we think we have the right skills to provide our clients with solutions and help them to apply them.

And I think that's really important because having the experience and the breadth of experience that you have within the industry does help enormously on that communications because we are— I just think the experience is massively important with that. You can see that across the board, and I can only particularly speak in the UK, but yeah. What I'd like to explore is, I kind of, I understand the research, education, consultancy, and marketing side of things for Eledy, but if I was a potential client, what is it What's the journey that I would go on with you? Would I be choosing one of your parts of the business, or would I be having all 4 parts of the business work on my client?

Ingemar, do you want to take this one?

Yeah, sure, I can. Well, ideally, You would want to take all 4 parts of the business for sure, but not necessarily. But our initial intention was that whichever of the 4 pieces also a client would choose, that together we would develop a positive story about his environmental actions. So whatever we would do in any of these of these 4 business areas Russ has mentioned in the beginning. The aim was really, while doing, for example, a consultancy job or a research project for any kind of client, that we would still, as LOD, come up with a storytelling concept around this and help the client either to tell the story internally to all his staff as kind of a change management activity, as well as to the public world and to show them that whatever action we have taken here, whether it's just a very, very small research project or just a bit of workshop or education for the staff, that you actually take this, shout it out to the world in a very positive way because What we see when you read the news, that typically you become very frustrated when you read about climate change and all the actions necessary. People think they have to limit themselves, they have to restrict themselves, their quality of life might be restricted. No, that's actually not the case. So whatever action we take in any of these 4 business areas, we want to give it a positive drive and show people that, yeah, you might change certain things of how you act in your daily business, in your projects, whatever it may be, but that ultimately it will lead you to something better than before. So we kind of— so, and that's really the concept. So if you say, yeah, to make it holistic, it would be good, you know, to go— through all 4 business areas, but it's not necessarily required. So, for us, we have the take on this that we say, whatever we do together with the client, we will certainly provide the storytelling bits in order to make the communications work properly. So, and maybe that's part of what sets us apart from other consultancies out there. We believe that we also have to talk around it and have to be positive about what we're doing.

I can understand that, and I think I'm relating it to, say— and you end up relating stuff to your own experience, don't you, because that's all you can relate it to— but in our consultancy, we help organizations become more sustainable, and within that you've got experts in waste communications, the numbers, understanding, you know, that half-hourly data, etc., etc. And so there's a huge broad set of stuff. And when people come to us, they don't ask for just one thing. Sometimes they do, but on the whole, they'll actually get the whole gamut. And it's really important to have such a broad sweep of all. And what you've done is you've brought 4 very important parts to that environmental journey together. What would you— who would you say your target market is, or are you looking at any industry? Or I mean, what is it that's— and who are you expecting to talk to, really?

So we're— to start with, we're completely sector agnostic, so we're not going after one particular niche. However, we are aware that our early wins are coming from European commercial real estate firms because the EnviroSustain client base is already very interested in the additional services that LOD can provide. So Ingemar and Birgit have been having some fantastic conversations with, uh, with some of their existing clients who are large European commercial real estate firms. But going forward, we are— we're not going after a particular niche or a particular sector because this is about— this is about us wanting to have the greatest impact possible. So, uh, there'll be, you know, we're hoping that we'll have a huge roster of clients from all different sectors and of all different sizes within, you know, within the next couple of years.

Okay.

And in addition to that, maybe what we've seen in our work in the past few years is no one is really out there who has studied climate change or anything like that. So, and that's why I think it's important to be sector agnostic We have to get as many people on the table as possible with ideally as many backgrounds as possible in order to come up with new solutions to face what's ahead of us. So, and this is why, you know, we won't just stay in that niche. We all can bring experience to the table. So us and any kind of client. And it's gonna be exciting to see what comes out of these different backgrounds and what are the solutions we could develop together. Because it's not like us going out to a client and explaining him the world. We have to find the best suitable solution together. So it's about collaboration with different backgrounds to a challenge which no one really has studied or experience with.

And also, um, to just to develop on what Ingemar's just said, um, you know, our view on collaboration is such that we were also able to draw on our, our massive network that we've got between 3 of us of other sustainability professionals. So, you know, we, we share a very similar outlook to, to you at Green Element, Will, where you don't consider other consultancies to be competitors because actually we're all in this together. You know, which I love about Green Element, and we share the same view. So if someone comes to us, we've got a massive network of other sustainability professionals, each with their own different areas of expertise that we, that we'll be able to direct clients towards if we think that they're better suited to them, or we'll end up collaborating with them on a project to deliver, to deliver a better outcome for the client.

And I guess, Birgit, with your EnviroSustain hat on, you— that's exactly what it is that you're doing. You're looking at, you know, new clients, or by the sounds of it, some current clients, and understanding that actually they can be helped in a different way as well.

Yeah, and what I found with, with our existing clients, they're increasingly interested In education, for example. So, they now really want to know why we are doing ESG consultancy. So, I really talk to them about the basics. So, what does it mean? What does climate change mean? And how everyone is responsible for more sustainable behavior. So, we are in the real estate industry. So, I always tell them, well, The buildings are the shell, but the people, they are important. It's important how they behave, what they eat, how they travel, and everything, because everyone has his or her personal carbon footprint. So, and I really explain how the carbon footprint is made up. So, not only for their daily life, but the buildings and what they can do about it. So, it's not only about driving efficiency. It's about changing. So, use more sustainable energy. Or we also talk a lot about compensating. We talk about the Paris Agreement. So, really some basic— and that really the industry needs to change and that sustainability needs to be easy. So, and also needs to be fun. When I go shopping and see there are more sustainable solutions, we should be happy to apply them. So, it's really about positive thinking. So, everybody should understand the problem but should be positive about the change. This is what we try to communicate. And also, from our existing contracts with EnviroSustain, we see an increasing interest in LOD. So, we tell them, yeah, we could help you also to market your journey to a more sustainable real estate world. And this is when LOD comes in. So I see at the moment there's some close ties between our existing clients and LOD clients in the future.

I can see that. I can understand that because some of the things that you help on in the Offerings. I mean, for example, education. You can help with employee engagement workshops and help with presentations, etc. And I think that's actually really important because it's almost what you're doing is you're drawing out the skills of, you know, that particular client and helping them understand how that can help. From an environmental point of view. Would that be right to say?

Yes, I think so. Yeah.

Okay. And I think it's fascinating. I think as we explore more, understanding the thought behind this and how it works, because it's almost like communications is almost across all of Elodie in one way or another. Or form, but what you're doing is you've brought in different skills into that communication channel.

Yeah, so if you imagine our 4 service areas: research, education, consultancy, marketing. From, you know, although marketing sits there on the far right, actually from left to right there's an arrow where marketing and storytelling and communications runs throughout. And we investigated that a lot when we were coming up with the business model and stuff. And yeah, you're right, good communication, whether it's in the research stage or the education stage, employee engagement workshops, consultancy, obviously it runs throughout. And then marketing at the end is to, as Ingemar said earlier, it's to help people communicate the progress they're making, what they're doing, making sure that successes are communicated effectively. making sure that challenges and setbacks are communicated effectively as well, because that's all part of being authentic, which is absolutely vital in business marketing today. Because with the rise of the conscious consumer, people are much, much more in tune with being able to spot corporate BS, and you will get called out for it as well in the age of social media. As we all know, it can take years for years for a reputation to be built and it can be destroyed in a matter of seconds. So business leaders and marketing departments are needing to be much more authentic in the way they communicate with their products and services. And it's great that people are waking up to this fact. And I just think it's, yeah, there's never been a better time for Eledy to be around as this increases year on year.

So yeah.

Where do you see Eledy going in the future? I mean, your German-British collaboration currently, do you see working across Europe? Where do you see it going?

Well, I'll hand over to Birgit Iringhaber in a second as well, but, you know, we're 4 months old really since we launched properly, so it's really early days yet. And like geographically, our clients to begin with will certainly be in Germany and the UK, simply from where we're based, as you said. So Birgit and Ingemar are in Berlin and Kassel respectively, and I'm over here in Farnham in London. But, you know, broader than that, you know, sky's the limit really.

Farnham, that international hub of sustainability.

It is. 3 sustainability consultancies that I know of have now been founded in Farnham.

Actually, that's very true, that's very true. I was taking the mickey, but yeah, you're actually right.

That's true, it is true. And we're, you know, we've got Extinction Rebellion Farnham chapter, there's a Farnham carbon neutral campaign, so it is actually a really good hub of sustainability around here.

I wonder if there's something in your water. Maybe we should all be drinking Farnham water. Birgit, what are your thoughts on this?

Well, I mean, in Berlin there's an international community, there are a lot of startups, so it's a great place to be. And our clients, they operate internationally, so when we look at real estate funds, we operate Europe-wide. What has really driven our sustainability or ESG market is this has come from the UK originally. So, the motivation to have a more holistic look at things, this was driven by our UK clients. So, I think the combination of our consultancy and the location Berlin-London, I mean, this is just ideal, I think. And then we go from there. So I don't know what the future will bring, but at the moment there's a lot to do both in Germany and the UK, and I think we will be a Europe-wide consultancy as we've ever been, also with EnviroSustain.

Okay, and Ingemar, With your— I'd like to explore with your contractor's hat on and your consultancy hat, because you've actually been both purchaser and consultant in some— for want of a better way of explaining it. How do you— I'd love to know, because you're now working you work in a consultancy and work with Russ, who works in the UK. We in the UK look at Germany as one of the leading environmental countries, I think, in the world, really. And I'm just curious with where you feel that LED can go and, you know, using that experience and Well, it's a hard one, but I would give it a try.

So, I mean, what has come across in both roles actually is, again, so we come back to this bit, is the continuous storytelling in a positive way. So wherever I've been, it's always very important to get the people on board and to get a momentum started. So it doesn't really matter on which side of the table you're sitting. You just have to manage the momentum properly. So, and that's probably the core. And that's why the storytelling bit has such a high importance for LOD. And when we take this, And now I would maybe move it over to maybe a geographical question you had for us and Birgit. I think it's very important, whoever the client is or the collaborator, if you will, I think we are more than willing to go wherever he takes us. And that has been my experience, especially in the US, to be honest. There I've worked for companies who mainly started setting up offices or business areas wherever their clients went. And that was quite a smart move, to be honest. And it managed to keep this momentum up because it created this feeling of achieving something together, really. So this is why I'm not like really restrictive when it comes to geography. But And that's maybe the third part of your question, seeing Germany as one of the leaders in sustainable development worldwide, maybe. Going through Europe, working together with a lot of people in the US, especially in the last 2 years again, yeah, people outside Germany might think that, but there are developments in other countries which which go way beyond what we are doing in Germany. And sometimes the Germans don't realize that, which is kind of interesting. So for example, just you in the UK, you started very early with having a CO2 tax in the built environment. In Germany, we are very far away from that. So this is just a tiny example. So I wouldn't consider the German market being a leader when it comes to sustainability. Yes, we've done a lot, but it seems that we have taken kind of a break and others are picking up, which is good because others have new ideas. And then it would be very fruitful to combine these ideas with the experience we've been having in Germany. So it's going to be an exciting journey, I guess.

Good at marketing and communications by the sounds of it.

Well...

Is there anything more that you'd like to add, Russ, on what we've been discussing?

Lots, but you probably haven't got time for it. I just really want to say that the, you know, what's, what's so exciting for me is that with everything going on in the world and the climate strikes, you know, the galvanization that people like Greta have managed to achieve around the world. It's a really exciting time for us doing what we're doing because every month, every year, there are more and more businesses waking up to the fact that actually to operate sustainably and to be as sustainable as possible is about far much more than, say, you know, their energy usage or, you know, their waste management. And it's so much bigger than that. And people are beginning to realize that, which means that they're going to need the support of consultancies like Elodie. And more and more people are realizing that communications is massively important as well, which is where the blend really happens. And in us, you know, the reason I think we've got such a great formula is simply because of the 3 of us and our backgrounds. So in Birgit, we've got a massively experienced environmental engineer. In Ingemar, we've got an architect and climate designer with extensive experience. And, you know, I'm just some guy that does marketing, but, you know, I'm pretty handy at that as well.

So.

Brilliant. Brilliant. Is there anything more that you can, um, you'd like to add, Birgit?

Going to me?

Yes, yes, yes. Just wondering if there's anything you'd like to add.

Yeah, not really. Maybe Ingeborg can take this. She's more familiar with your English than I am. I'm always a bit nervous.

Well, your English is coming across incredibly well, so I really wouldn't worry about that.

I'm sitting at my kitchen table and I'm sweating.

If we were conducting this in German, then I'm pretty much— it would be a very boring podcast because I wouldn't be able to speak, for a start.

I guess before Ingemar jumps in, I Something else I guess I'd like to say is that we're really excited about our plans for all the different things that we're now involved in. So we want to do more events. So, you know, that might be something that Green Element and Elodie can look at together, Will, for example, is running an event in collaboration. Ingemar just ran our first event a few weeks ago in Munich, which was about smart cities. And for our first event as Elodie, it was a huge success. We had about people in the room, a great panel which Ingemar was moderating. And we'd like to do more free events like that for building the community and getting like-minded people in the same room together and having really important conversations. Or not just like-minded people, people that maybe see the name of the event, whether it's smart cities or something different, and simply just want to learn more about it, hence the education piece. So they're able to come to a free event, have a really good, interesting discussion with a panel of experts. And yeah, we're really excited about doing more of that, more of our own marketing, which will take many different forms over the course of the year, and just getting our names out there, really.

And touching on that, what Russ has said, since this educational piece is quite important for us, yeah, sure, we have to, you know, run a profitable business, if you will, but In the end, it remains about collaboration. So whatever we as LOD and as the 3 founders can invest in order to make that work, like starting off with here free events as an example, we really also want to donate our time to have these discussions and to bring people on board and to create the momentum we were talking about already. So it's a bit of both. But we, I think all 3 of us think the topic is very urgent and we need to find solutions. So we all have to move together and quickly. So, and I think that's what makes it so interesting carrying this LOD idea forward. Yeah, sure, on the one hand, we all have to buy our bread, but on the other hand, you know, we need to act and we need to act together. So yeah, gonna be exciting. Brilliant.

Brilliant. Well, thank you all so much for being on today. It's been really interesting, and I think actually really useful to understand more about Elodie and who you are. One thing that we didn't touch upon actually, which is— and Russ, you'll be able to explain more— is where Elodie came from, because it's actually, it's a rather unique story that you guys have come up with, and it's quite a sweet story. And I think that finishing on that would be quite a lovely little finisher.

Tell the truth, Ross.

Tell the truth.

Yeah, I will, because people can find the truth on our website, so I better not lie. It's kind of a sweet story with a darker side to it, but in— say, how did we come up with Elodie? In our discussions We knew that in wanting to create a radically different consultancy, everything about us had to be radically different as well in terms of our name, our visual branding and stuff. So please do check out immelody.com so that you can see our logo and our branding. But the name came about through the sense of urgency of what we need to do to tackle the climate crisis and how it essentially boils down to the fact that it is a life or death situation. So we were playing with lots of different names. I won't go through some of the ones we came up with now, but basically when we started exploring the idea of urgency and life or death broke down into the letters L-A-D, and then the name Elodie, which is a very common French girl's name, sprung to life. And we suddenly loved this incredible contrast of the name of a young French girl representing innocence and youth contrasted with the life or death situation that we're facing with the climate crisis. And before we knew it, Elodie was born, and then it snowballed from there in terms of our branding. So Elodie, the little girl herself, is our brand. So she is our brand. That's why we are iamelodie.com, and that's why our social handles are Elodie's Story. Because it's all about a young girl growing up, exploring the world around her, realizing the dire state that we're in environmentally. So plastic oceans, toxic air, burning forests, etc. And we fell in love with it very quickly. And then when we were working with our partner agency, when we were exploring our branding, you know, we came up with this graffiti style that you see on the website. And before we knew it, we had— We had our brand. So that is, in a nutshell, that's the background of how Elodie, the name, came to be.

Awesome. Yeah, no, it's really, really interesting listening to you guys and talking to you all. Thank you so much for being on the show, and I wish you all the best in the future. And I hope that Elodie goes from strength to strength, and hopefully we can work together in the future. And I I will certainly be talking about what it is that you're doing because I think it is unique, and I think it is also not necessarily only unique, it's actually really important to be doing what you're doing. So thank you for that.

Thanks for having us, Will.

Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the end of this episode of the Green Element Podcast. Do take a moment and share this with your friends and colleagues and rate and review the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. I'd love to know what has been your biggest takeaway from this conversation. What are you going to do differently? Please share your thoughts across social media and tag us so we can see them too, @GE_podcast. For links and show notes for this episode, visit our website greenelement.co.uk/podcast. Thank you again. I hope you will join me on the next episode, and together we can help create a better world.