E125 - Kevin Wilhelm from the Sustainable Business Consulting

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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. Kevin, thank you so much for joining the Green Element Podcast today. You are Kevin Wilhelm from Sustainable Business, and you are the CEO of that said business. Thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks so much for having me.

And I tell you what, why don't we start off by helping our listeners understand who you are and what Sustainable Business does?

Sure. So my firm, Sustainable Business Consulting, We've worked with about 195 companies across about 37 different industries, and mostly with global brands, but also with smaller regional and medium-sized companies to help them realize the business value of better social and environmental practices and to find ways to not only find cost savings through those actions, but really ways to enhance their brand, to communicate to their employees and their stakeholders about their actions, and to really kind of help push the needle towards the bigger kind of environmental and social challenges we have, but through the lens of business as opposed to the government or the NGO sector. And one of the things that, one of the reasons why I wrote the book that we're going to be talking about, Will, you know, we're in such a divisive time, it seems like, especially in the United States. But, you know, around the globe, you've got people kind of going into their own tribes and their own silos, not only through who they follow on social media, but even who they associate with as friends and want to hang out with and the type of conversations they had. And I really felt like if we're going to solve the huge environmental, social, public health challenges, we needed a kind of a guidebook. And so that's what really got me into writing the book, How to Talk to the Other Side. It's about finding common ground in a time of coronavirus, economic recession, and climate change. And I really felt like when the coronavirus hit here in February of 2020, that I just, I knew that all of the underlying divisiveness that was out there, that this issue, solving the public health crisis and the economic recession that was going to come, was going to get politicized and people were going to just fall into their camps and start shouting at one another. And I wanted to find a way to give people a guidebook, a playbook for how to talk to people again. And, but not just, you know, talk politely, but actually solve issues. And throughout the book, you know, we have 8 chapters where we really get into using sustainability and, you know, many of the things that you know, you talk about on the Green Element podcast, to find those win-win scenarios for, say, Republicans and Democrats to cross the rural-urban divide, to break down the barrier between business environmentalists, to find ways that you can get people who are climate deniers and climate advocates in the same room to find solutions. And so that's really what the book is about, was giving people not only the language and the tools, but showing them the hope and aspiration for kind of a better way through for either side of those arguments.

Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. It's funny you mentioned climate deniers. I immediately thought the world is flat when you said that because it's actually really hard to find scientists that would agree that the climate isn't changing, but the world could be flat. I think it is on my MacBook anyway.

It's kind of like assuming that England's going to do okay in the World Cup. It could happen.

Brilliant. I love it.

Yes.

I'm not a big football fan, but I know that, yeah, that'll probably annoy quite a lot of people. But it's true. It's so true. I watch and go, really? I don't know why you're so excited about this. I'm going to keep quiet because I'm actually going to piss off an awful lot of our listeners. Anyway, so what's your background? How come you ended up in this area?

Well, it's interesting. I don't have what you would call a traditional kind of sustainable business background because I think people your age and my age, I mean, this business didn't exist, this field. And so, I was very much a traditional business person that You know, we do a lot of consulting work with organizations on ways to find, you know, cost savings and financial improvement, competitive advantage or strategic advantage against some of their competitors. And a lot of the times as I walk around an organization, kind of the stuff I was, you know, taught as a young kid by my parents or school or, you know, would pop out at me and I'd be like, well, there are lights that are left on. There's waste that could be, you know, that could be avoided. Hey, that's somebody's wasted time and energy. And once I started combining it with the dollar signs, I found that by just consulting people about money, that there was, people would listen if you said, hey, I could save you money or make you money. There was no ideology to it because you could help somebody within the organization. And then when I moved out to Seattle, I really was in a spot where You know, I was, I wanted to, you know, to do this sustainability consulting, but didn't really feel like, you know, I kind of thought like I was a pretender because I hadn't really done it. And I went around town and talked to about 62 different other organizations and said, somebody needs to be the, you know, the advisor to businesses on how they can address climate change and how they can actually make money by doing it. And everyone to a T was like, that's a great idea. Somebody needs to do that. And then I was like, darn it, I guess I got to start a firm and do it myself. And so we did. And we've been at it for close to 15 years now and have been really successful working with organizations across the spectrum from people who think climate change is a hoax and even that the coronavirus is a hoax. We still can make progress.

Yeah, that's unbelievable, isn't it?

Yeah, it is.

I mean, it's really hard to sit in that conversation. And just, you know, devoid of reality. And one of the things that, again, one of the reasons for writing this book was, you know, I was curious to understand how people really thought, you know, on those sides. I mean, everybody on the kind of left and kind of in the green movement knows how we think, but hardly anybody knows how the other side thought. And so we ran a number of interviews and focus groups and surveys. And really what it came down to was that The people on the other side, when you stripped out the noise and the ideology, they're good people. Everyone's pretty much good people that have the shared same aspirations. You want a healthy family, you want a solid job, you want to be able to retire, you want your kids to get a good education, and you want your sports teams to win. And so when you start at that level, you have common ground and you have that that reasoning. And what I was trying to understand was how do people on either side of an issue get to these extremes? And what I found is that, you know, just like, you know, I'll just use a case here in the United States, that the way that, say, Republican voters who voted for President Trump in 2020 are feeling devastated right now and hurt is exactly how Democrats felt 4 years ago. They felt like their world had been absolutely destroyed when he was elected. And, you know, so realizing that the feelings and the anxiety and the fear is the same. Now, why the fear is there is different. And so the book really, you know, on how to talk to the other side really gives you the techniques for kind of peeling back the onion. And what I found was like a climate denier or someone who is really against, you know, the coronavirus restrictions or says it's a hoax. When you pull them out of the screaming talking points and you just start talking to them, and lower your voice. It's really about listening. And everyone's got a personal story as to why they fear it. And when it comes down to it, I found that most people were saying that COVID-19 is a hoax or that they were never going to wear a mask. What it really meant was they were worried about their business failing or they were worried about something that happened to a friend or a family member because of a government restriction. And that's really what it was about. And you needed to solve that issue. And same thing with climate change. You know, my most ardent climate denier clients, and I would say there's any client, and I'll just use a company, you know, you've got people across the spectrum, but say the organization wants to move forward, but maybe a CEO or CFO or somebody like that is a denier. When I start asking them things about, well, you know, do you think there's a risk to your business from extreme weather? Do you think that, you know, you need to be embracing, Millennials and what they care about, not only as customers, but as employees, they'll say, oh yeah, I know I've got to do this. But, and then they tell you, they say, well, if we admit to this, Al Gore is going to make a ton of money and I just hate the guy. Or, you know, if I open this, it's just going to open another can of worms and then I'm going to have to do 10 other things. And where's it going to stop? And so you realize that once you kind of peel back a few layers, and I think one of the issues is that people aren't willing to listen. They want to tell. Everyone wants to kind of convince the other side. And you can't convince the other side. You can't convince a Buddhist to become a Hindu or a Muslim to become Jewish. You know, they're just on their side. But what you can do is you can find common ground by listening. And usually what I tell people is it's like, it's painful for the first 2 or 3 minutes while they scream and yell and tell you all the reasons that, you know, your side is destroying the world. But then once they get that out, it's kind of like a child with a temper tantrum. You've got to let the temper tantrum burn out and then you can have reason. And what we're all trying to do is we're all trying to reason with the person who's having the temper tantrum and that doesn't work. We've learned that when kids are at age 4 or 5 and it's no different. It's just that both sides are having the temper tantrum right now.

Yeah. I was having a conversation with one of my best mates who is from and lives in Missouri and quite Trump central. And I would say he reckons most of his friends probably voted Trump and he didn't. But he was saying to me what was annoying was he wasn't able to say anything because before he even opened his mouth, he was being told everything he said was rubbish. So it goes exactly what you're saying. There's no listening. And I think that's a really important point that you're making and you've made through that.

And to your point, Will, on that example, and I find this even sometimes, I find myself very much kind of a center middle person. Obviously with a company like Sustainable Business Consulting, align more, way more on the progressive side, but my personality is very much more in that middle ground of, you know, finding, you know, solutions and being practical and trying not to be too extreme. And I've been in conversations on the left and on the right where I feel incredibly uncomfortable because I know I'm being attacked. And I feel like, well, that's exactly where I need to be. And I need to sit with that uncomfortableness. But you're right. It's that People, if you were to say, if your friend were to say, well, I voted for Biden, he knows he's going to be like either ostracized or yelled at or trying to convince. And what he really needs is to not to just put politics to the side and the ideology to the side and say, okay, well, you're still my friend and we like to drink beer. Let's talk about whether it's race issues, income inequality, healthcare, whatever it is, engage on the issues and engage on something that's not controversial to start. And that opens the conversation to bigger things. Like I always say, you know, I may show up at my kid's soccer game or at an event with people I don't know. I don't dive into really divisive issues. You don't start talking about abortion or immigration or gun rights or something like that. You're like, Where are you from? You know, what do you like to do? What are your hobbies? You know, what, you know, and so the first part of the book, How to Talk to the Other Side, is really about what we call the 4 commonalities. And it's, you know, just like anything, when you have a conversation, you know, you start with, you know, where are you from? And everybody's from somewhere. So that's level setting because whether where you're from or where I'm from, it's not better or worse. It's just different.

Mm-hmm.

And everyone can reminisce about, Growing up, and everybody has something they didn't like when they grew up. You know, and you can talk about that. You can talk about shared experiences and travel and hobbies and sports. You know, and by doing that, you build kind of the camaraderie to then have the conversation. But I think right now everyone's so hyper, you know, anxious and fearful and angry on both sides that they want to get to those issues right away. And I say, you can't do that. It's like anything. I tell people, it's like when you're trying to think back to your 20s and you're trying to date somebody, you don't go up to them at a party and be like, here's everything about me and every reason why you should like me and I'm the right person. First you got to listen, find out what they're interested in, see if you have a match, and then you can get into the deeper things. You don't start that way. But we're all so busy and stressed out that we just kind of allowed that to happen.

And have you found that with the research that you did for your book, has it helped Has it helped you? So, has it helped you full stop? And has it helped your business as well?

Yeah, it definitely has with both. And it's funny because I didn't write it for my business. I wrote it more— and my co-author Natalie Hoffman, we wrote it kind of to help save society. It was kind of like we started writing this in February and we put it out in May. We would've never thought you would have the the racial issues that popped up in June. You never would have thought that government forces would be invading some of our cities, things that seemed crazy. We certainly thought that coronavirus was going to be over in 4 or 5 months and we'd figure it out. But we wrote it because we were like, there is such divisiveness, there needs to be a path forward. And I think it's helped me understand where other people's anxieties are and to be more empathetic. And from our business, I think what we've been able to do is teach other people, you know, how to be more empathetic and in ways that for their businesses. So for our business, it enables us to go to our clients and say, well, you know how to get to your current customers, but there's this whole other base of customers that aren't going to you. So let's use some of those same listening strategies and find out how your products or your services can help those people meet their needs and find the value in what you're doing. And so it has helped our business. It certainly wasn't written with that purpose, but those same skill sets. And so what I've been trying to do is get it out there and teach it and tell people as much as possible rather than just saying, buy this book. It's, hey, this book is a great resource, but here are a lot of strategies and techniques that can really help you.

Okay. And talking, if we could start to explore your business and what your business does and what kind of work do you do?

Sure.

Because sustainability is a broad, broad, broad church.

Right. Yeah. We basically have to be able to talk about anything about everything in the interview industry. No, we kind of have 5 key service areas. We help organizations do what we call kind of a sustainability assessment. So kind of think about it from the triple bottom line or look at their environmental, their social, and their kind of financial governance issues. And we can— that includes doing a greenhouse gas inventory or a carbon footprint, but also kind of doing that social assessment. You know, what are you doing on diversity, equity, inclusion? What are you doing to take care of your employees and engage in your communities? And, you know, are your government governance practices aligned You know, only for financial? Are they also supporting these environmental and social initiatives that you say that you're trying to do? So we help organizations kind of first assess where they are. And then the really fun part is then developing the strategy and the vision for where they want to go, developing their implementation plans for how they actually put it together with concrete steps, practical steps, and accountability. We help them then communicate it. So whether it's their own kind of sustainability or CSR reports or pages, or even to their external frameworks. A lot of people are getting, a lot of organizations are getting pressure from investors and customers to fill out, you know, CDP, ISS, GRI, Ecovadis, you know, MSCI, all these different, you know, alphabet soup names of reporting frameworks that are coming to them. So if we start with, okay, you're eventually going to have to go and report to these, let's go back and assess where you are so that we can get you on the scale, help you find ways to improve, but that align with your business value as well. Not just go green because it's the right thing to do, but if you're going to embrace kind of that green element, in what ways would you do it first that are going to save you money or move the needle quickly so that then you can build upon that?

And what Because we are trying to explore and understand ways that we can help businesses, it's great to be able to talk to an expert in what it is that you do. And what sort of things do you advise? I'm trying to word it in a way because if I'm thinking, because we do something similar, I'm thinking of a way that what I wouldn't get annoyed with if someone asked me a question. Because if someone said to me, what sort of things do you do to advise? It's like, well, where do I start?

Yeah.

But I guess if we look at, I don't know, that company that you were talking about, that these are these customers that you wouldn't necessarily have, what sort of, not arguments, but what sort of things would you advise them to do in order to change and move into that strategy?

Well, a lot of it, you know, and I'm sure you know this, Will, like a lot of organizations just want to like start doing stuff right now. And, you know, it's like, hey, we've got a directive from our board, or we're really excited about this. Let's do a footprint. Let's start doing some stuff to, you know, improve diversity, equity, inclusion, and, you know, start working on ways that we can address climate change. And you need to do that. We tell them kind of first off, it's like anything. We all need to get on the scale on January 1st and go, oh God, I ate too much over the holidays. Let's dial this back. So the first thing you need to do is you need to do that assessment, you know, and kind of get your greenhouse gas inventory. You got to have a baseline so you know where you're coming from. So you know, okay, these are the areas that I really need to work on. But we also then want organizations to do that stakeholder engagement and materiality exercise that Vita will do where they, you know, so often organizations just like they're in such a rush to get something done that they skip the step of asking their customers, their employees, their suppliers, their vendors, their investors, what do you care about? You know, so it's just like we talk about in the book. It's like everyone's like, well, let me tell you what we think is great as opposed to going, what do you want and what's most important to you? And by finding out what your stakeholders care about and what's most material to your organization, then you can align the activities, you know, better and smarter and more efficiently with, you know, that can deliver that business value to an organization. You know, I'll give an example. For 5 years, we worked with a pretty large financial institution that we did their greenhouse gas inventory and then helped set their sustainability strategy and their CSR report. And we just kept saying, you need to do this materiality assessment and stakeholder engagement. You got to find out Do your customer what what issues in the environment or on social justice do they really care about? Because you're doing a bunch of stuff, but do they care about what you're currently doing, or they expect it, or do they even know about it? And what we found was, you know, they they didn't jump to that until five years down the line, and they probably spent, you know, half a million dollars on this kind of thing. And the reality was, when we did the survey, only one employee had ever read their CSR report, and it was on. year 5. None of their customers had read it. A lot of the things that they weren't doing on the environment, customers assumed they were doing on the environment because they had seen some pretty graphics on the page. And then a lot of the social stuff, they just expected it as a norm. And so, things that they were hyping as norms, they were like, well, to us, that's just kind of table stakes. So, don't talk about that. What we really want to see is XYZ. And so, we use this as a cautionary example with our clients of saying, let's first find out what you need to do. And again, it gets to that point of everyone's so much of a rush. And I would say government organizations are the worst at this because a politician, they want to do something now and they don't want to spend a year listening to the poor neighborhoods that they never talked to because they just want to deliver something to them. But to enable it to have that long-term success, you have to do those listening sessions first. And because what I found, what we in our organizations have found, by doing those listening sessions first, what you find out is these are going to be your barriers and these will be your opportunities to overcome those barriers to success. And by understanding those and building them in your strategy at the front end, then when you roll something out, you have a greater chance of success. Plus, you've engaged your stakeholders and you've created a whole bunch of allies who want to see you succeed and do that work. So by skipping that step, yes, you can go faster to something, but you're probably going to run into a wall in year 2 or 3 on something and then have to restart as opposed to taking that kind of longer-term view right at the front. So we advise organizations, like when we do the assessment, here are a bunch of low-hanging fruit cost-saving things you can do right away. And let's be thinking about the long term at the same time because When an organization embarks on this type of thing, they're not doing it for 6 months or a year. They know they need to commit to it for 3, 5, 10, 15 years. And so, if you throw that to them and say, well, if you're going to do this for 15 years, how many starts and stops do you want to do? 4, 3, 2, or just want to like nip it in the bud on the beginning? And they'll answer it, no, let's nip it in the bud. And that changes the discussion.

That's such good advice. Brilliant. That's such good advice. And looking at your organization, what sort of environmental management do you do? How do you, you know, do you carbon footprint your organization, for example? Oh, yeah.

Oh, you mean our own company? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. We do a greenhouse gas inventory every year. We do kind of our own environmental assessment using B Corp. which is kind of the most difficult kind of environmental, social, and governance rating organization. It's a really difficult thing. And, you know, Will, I'm sure you've been in the same boat where even though we're in the field, you know, I knew I needed to do it, but it just was so time-consuming that, you know, we eventually hired an individual to help us do it internally. It took us, you know, like 6 months to do it. But once we've done it and committed to it, You know, now it's always been in our values, but now it's not only in our values, it's in our policies. And so we've been carbon neutral since 2006. We've actually been carbon negative since 2018, meaning that we make sure that we're, you know, planting, you know, more, taking care of more offsets than what we're putting out into the environment. But more importantly, one of the things we started tracking was, you know, we're like, what can our firm do in Seattle, Washington on such a giant issue like climate change? And we thought we can lead and we can move the needle with companies that are thousands of times larger than us. And so what we've been able to do is that in an average year, we're helping organizations remove about a million times or more of our own emissions that we're putting into the environment. And so yes, we track our stuff. Yes, we're carbon neutral. Yes, we now have all renewable energy. Of course, COVID, now everyone's working from home and our business travel has stopped, which were 2 of our bigger emissions areas. But from a social side, we had to really look at ourselves and say, even though we're 80% women in our office and 2 of the 3 owners are women and we're probably diversity-wise, we're You know, split 50/50. We just kind of felt, what else can we be doing? Where, you know, from a social justice perspective, from an equity and inclusion perspective, what can we do with our purchasing policies, our hiring policies, our partners, our subcontractors? And those type of just taking that hard assessment of ourselves has forced us to be better on it. But it's also been a great experience because we know that when we're advising clients, we know they're going to have to go through that exact same really difficult process. And so by feeling the pain of what it is and how hard it is, then we don't just go in and loosey-goosey make recommendations. We go in and we tell them what it's really going to be like. And if they really want to commit to it, this is going to be the benefit, but there's going to be some pain to kind of work your way through to get there.

Brilliant. That's really brilliant. Great to hear what you're doing and how you're doing it. So if we were to ask you for one piece of advice for our listeners to take away today, what would you like them to do?

I think it would be, what do you care about as an individual or a business? What do you care about most? And to think about what is the thing you care about most in the world, whether it's your kids, saving the planet, taking care of animals, whatever it might be. And then say, where is the greatest point of leverage that I can come into? So, if you're within an organization and you want to tackle climate change, you say, okay, where would be the biggest point of leverage within the organization? Is that the CFO? Is that the marketing director? Is that the CEO? Who do I need to talk to to make that change? And I think that for so many people, it actually, you know, these issues seem like such big and solvable and tractable problems. But, you know, within an organization, everyone's made of people. And the people that are making decisions are very much like you and I. And, you know, so if you want to make efforts towards diversity, equity, inclusion, you not only need to talk to that, you know, diversity officer, But you need to talk to maybe somebody, you know, where, how can you get to somebody at the board or the executive level to, you know, the point of leverage where they can really commit to it and put the resources behind it and bring the whole organization around and figure out what is my, you know, what is my inroad? What does that person care about? And how can I help them with what they care about most aligned with the issue I care about most and find that common ground? And if you can learn to do that with, say, within an organization, you can do it on any Brilliant, brilliant.

Thank you. And I mean, where can we find more information about you and your organization?

Great.

Well, about our organization, you can find it at www.sustainablebizconsulting.com. So sustainablebizconsulting.com. I have a personal website because I'm contractually obligated for my publisher. So you can reach me at kevin-wilhelm.com. And you can find the book, How to Talk to the Other Side, on Amazon. And you can either put in my name, Kevin Wilhelm, or just How to Talk to the Other Side. And I will say that do scroll down because there are some books in there that it's like How to Talk to the Other Side, which is about how to talk to people in the afterlife and craziness and all that kind of stuff. And you'll see mine, you know, probably 3 or 4 down from the top.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you for today. And thank you for being on.

Thanks so much for having me, Will. And to all your listeners on Green Element, keep signing up and review, review and give positive reviews to Green Element. This is a great podcast. Brilliant.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Kevin.

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