In this episode of Sustainability Solved, Will Richardson opens with a personal story from when he was 19 and turned down an offer to become the youngest pub manager in the UK. He describes the difficult decisions, staff challenges, and the advice he received to avoid a rough pub job, framing the experience as a formative lesson about who gets to speak and be heard. Richardson then pivots to the central thesis: climate and sustainability messages often fail because they are delivered by a single messenger—typically the sustainability lead or CEO—limiting reach within an organization. He argues that the solution is to distribute the message through multiple trusted internal figures (e.g., operations manager, long‑serving driver, finance analyst) who already have credibility with different employee groups. He urges listeners to audit their latest internal climate communication, identify who signed it, and then deliberately assign the message to three other trusted individuals. The episode concludes with a brief promotion of his Substack, where a written version of the ideas is available, and a promotional voice‑over encouraging free access to the newsletter.
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At 19, I was offered the chance to be the youngest pub manager in the UK. I turned it down, and the reason has shaped everything I have done since. This is Sustainability Solved by Will Richardson, and this is the 4 parts— part 4 of 7 on why I'm changing the Sustainability Main Podcast. Sorry, Sustainability Solved Main Podcast. Bear with me on this one. This is all about the environment and the podcast. I'm building up to how and why we are doing what we are going to be doing in the future. So they have made me barman, head barman in fact, and I had 2 Danish girls who I was working with to start off with, and one of them really wanted to be head barwoman. When I got made head barman, they ended up just leaving. I think they're a bit upset. What they probably did not realize was that Paul and Lorraine knew I was going to stick around and that they were just traveling through because they had been talking and about traveling and going to visit lots of places. Then I had to manage the staff at the Magpie and Stump, and I remember a very awkward character whose name I cannot remember who turned out to be a heroin user. There would be heroin needles all over the floor of his room. And so, I had to sack him and ask him to leave. It was a very, very hard thing to do. I was 19 years old, and it was not a job that anyone would want to do, particularly if you're young and naive and inexperienced. Then, over time, Paul and Lorraine decided they wanted to leave the Magpie and Stump and manage a pub called the Foresters Arms in Loughton, Essex. They had a little boy, and they wanted him to grow up more in the countryside, near a family. They were both from Essex and wanted to move back to where they were from. So I had a choice: move with them and be assistant manager, Or take the other offer. The people who owned Magpie and Stump was a company called Taylor Walker, and Taylor Walker offered me a management position in a pub in East London. They did say to me that I would be the youngest pub manager in the UK if I took the job. Bull and Rain told me categorically that I should not take that job. They said it was a really bad decision because Because it was quite a rough pub and it would have been a really hard, hard job. Now, I did go to private school, and as much as I did not enjoy it— and I left quite a lot, another story, I was asked to leave early— but I did have a rather sheltered background. I think they were right, that I would have been, in inverted commas, eaten alive. So I took the position as assistant manager in the Forester's Arms. Here's the thing: the company with the title, the money, and the flattery lost. The couple who had sacked me 4 times without telling me, because—
Won.
Because they had earned The right to be heard. Same information, roughly, completely different messenger. Some people listen to some people, and sometimes those some people never get to hear the other people at all because they never get exposure to them. That single sentence is the entire reason Sustainability Solved podcast is changing, and I'll come back to that part in part 7. It is also the single biggest weakness in how most organizations communicate about climate. The message has one messenger, usually the sustainability lead, occasionally the chief executive. That messenger has an audience, and it is smaller than the organization. Everybody outside it is not resistant. They are simply out of earshot. So what are your organizations going to do today? Look at your last piece of internal climate communication and ask who signed it. If the answer is the sustainability team, the CEO, or the comms function every single time, your message Has one messenger, and therefore one audience. Find the 3 people in your organization who are already trusted for something else entirely. The ops manager everyone goes to. The longest-serving driver. The finance analyst people believe. Give them the message instead. It costs nothing. And it reaches the people Your official channel has already lost. Next time, I walked past a travel agency with £3,000 in the bank and came out with a ticket around the world. The written version is on Substack, link in the show notes. I'm Will Richardson, and this is Sustainability Solved by Will Richardson.
Grab free access to Will's Substack while it lasts. Every week we pull together the top sustainability stories from dozens of trusted sources. Then he breaks down the big issues facing business right now in plain, practical terms. Link in the description.
