Will Richardson, founder of Green Element, navigates a £500,000 deal while scaling his sustainability consultancy. His business has a 65% sales win rate and 90% client retention since 2004, but he's wrestling with self-doubt and looking to hire a COO who can challenge him as an equal.
Chapters
Hey, thanks so much for listening. I would love to be able to help you more on what it is that you are listening to and why you're listening to, to me. If you could click on the link in the show notes, that would be awesome because it will help me define what it is that we should be talking about on this podcast. It's funny, I've been thinking about doing this podcast thing for a while now, on the side of our normal Sustainability Solved podcast. And I think one of the reasons why I haven't is because I've just worried about what it is that you do or you say. But I've realized that what I'm going to do is— the idea is it's inside Green Element, inside Sustainability Solved, Inside, Compare Your Footprint. And that means warts and all. That means you actually need to get who, who I am and what I'm trying to achieve and not achieving as well. And I'm feeling pretty kind of overwhelmed at the moment. I've got an awful lot going on. I have Literally over a £500,000 deal that I'm trying to work out at the moment. It's the biggest deal that I've ever dealt with in my life, ever. Then, you know, the business is doing really well, but yet it also has cash flow because, you know, parts of the business are not doing well, but the other parts are doing much better. Therefore, the whole business is doing fine and well. I guess trying to scale a business is hard. You always hear about the fact that, oh, it's lonely at the top. That's kind of bullshit, really. Go and talk to your friends. I think what it is is that you just don't know if you're making the right decision. And I can understand why most businesses and founders are co-founders and not founders alone. I fell into this. I didn't do this. Um, I didn't set out to do what I'm doing, actually. I don't think I even thought about it. That sounds really vague, doesn't it? But I basically knew that I was interested in sustainability, knew that I wanted to help organizations become more green. I understood the business side of it. My mum and dad worked in a small business running a kitchen and bathroom showroom shop in Wimbledon Village. Um, they set it up back in the early, early '70s, and that's what I grew up around, was very much a business small business mentality, listening to my mum and dad talk. They, although they did very rarely talk about work at home, they never brought it home. And they had lunch with each other every day and they didn't talk about work. They, and they told me later on in life that that was one of the agreements they had was they would talk about work at work and talk about home at home. Obviously there were some times I heard them arguing. I mean, very, very, very rarely. About stuff. And it's interesting what's going on at the moment with the, you know, global recession and stuff, because it's that— it was the '80s. I was 10 years old at the time, in the mid-'80s. And I remember those— one of those very few arguments was then. And I would hazard a guess it was around the 18% interest rates. And I was chatting to a— to the guy who runs the British Kitesports, actually, Andy Gratwick, yesterday, and we were talking about how horrendous this winter is going to be and the fact that we— I don't know what we can do about it. I try my best on a daily basis to better the worlds of the people within the business, our clients, and give as much as I possibly can from the business to others. I'd be interested to know if I can do more. Do contact me. My email address is william@greenelement.co.uk. Very, very happy for you to contact me on that. And yeah, So anyway, I completely digress, don't I? I've got this big deal. We are looking for a COO at the moment. Um, I think in my mind that will massively help us forge a future and help me have someone to bounce off. I need a peer. I need a person that is my equal and is someone that doesn't think highly of me. That sounds really ridiculous, but I need someone that is willing to step up and go, that's a bloody stupid idea, and however well I articulate the idea, They go, no, that's ridiculous, it's stupid. I've never had that. Does that mean every single idea I've had is brilliant? It's highly unlikely, and I think that's where I am at the moment. I have nervous anticipation that I am not making the absolute correct decisions. And I know that's really hard to make every decision correct, but yeah. I tell you what, that's, that's interesting at the moment is I was saying to someone the other day, I think I've got imposter syndrome. Like, loads of people have talked about that in my life, and I've listened to friends and go— and loads of people, oh yeah, I've got imposter syndrome. I'm a bit like, I don't know what that is, and that sounds really arrogant. But I genuinely don't. I have always felt comfortable where I am. I've always felt comfortable doing what I'm doing. I feel like I fit. I feel like— and I still do, to be honest with you. I still feel like I'm in the right place. But for the first time, I'm like, oh, is everything, you know, am I making the right decisions? Is that imposter syndrome? I don't know, having never been through it before. Maybe I'm healthily questioning what I'm doing. But this is a really big junction for us at the Green Element Group business because we are just about to scale big. And that's not me just saying that. just saying, oh yeah, we're just about to scale big. It's in the numbers. You can see it. You can see the growth that's happened in the last, since 2018. You can see the amount of clients we've brought on board. You can see the retention. You can see the amount of work that we win. 65% of all of our sales inquiries are won. I've been told that's unheard of. I think that is quite high. We've put up the— and those are going up as we put up our prices. We've put up 40% our prices in the last year. We were at 40% or 50%, um, and now we're at 65%. So we're actually going up, not down. And It's our retention. We've worked it out. Over the last— since 2004, when I properly got my first client, we have increased by— no, sorry, not increased, retained something like 90% of our clients. clients that want another year, as in they've come in not on a one-off job, but they've gone, yeah, this is a job. And so we literally have retained 90% of our clients, which is pretty good. And interestingly, we, we did wobble in 2013. When I, was it 2013? It doesn't really matter when it was. I was thinking it couldn't be 2013, 'cause that was when Emma came on, and Emma would've done the reverse to what I was just about to say. Anyway, at some point, and I know it was when I started thinking about growing the business, we wobbled, and we did lose some clients then, which brings that, that's the 10%. Interestingly, and so it just shows how important client retention is. I should probably write down the podcast titles that people maybe maybe you want to listen to, but retention. I don't know how to podcast on retention. Anyway, let's, um, you can tell me if that's what you want. Anyway, that's it for me. I'm going to, um, go. I'm actually going to use this as— you can, you can listen to an audio diary of a very small business CEO. There you go.
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