Welcome to my Podcast

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. So this is an experiment and I am just trying something new because I feel that we aren't transparent enough in our society. And we do come across problems running businesses and we come across things that we could learn off each other. It's why I set the original podcast up. Um, 5 years ago. And now I'm going to go into the guts of Green Element, Compare Footprint, Sustainability Solve Media, i.e., Green Element Group. Welcome to the new podcast. It's going to be a pretty scrappy podcast. It's not going to be amazingly, um, you know, there's gonna be no music interludes and stuff. It's literally just me Talking about the business, what it is that we're doing and what we're up to, the problems that we face and how we overcome them. I'm hoping that you will enjoy this journey. I'm hoping that you will enjoy where we go and how we get there. And hopefully, you'll get in contact with me and let me know your journey, because I think Together we can learn, together we can make a difference, and together we can be a part of the solution instead of the problem. So, welcome, and I hope you enjoy. So, to tell you a bit about myself, my name is Will Richardson. I set up Green Element as a sole trader back in 2003. It wasn't the first business I set up. I set up a number of other businesses along the way. It's not that any of them failed, it's just that I recognized that they weren't going to work. I didn't put huge amounts of money into any of them. I just realized, for example, I set up an importing— Yeah, but yeah, herbamate. And I was getting confused with the actual name of the company, herbamate. And I was importing this wonderful green tea from Argentina and went around, looked at all the shops, nothing in there. Brilliant. This is a— it's like a cousin of caffeine. It's called metine and it's brilliant and it keeps you on this very constant high. It doesn't do the highs and lows that caffeine does. So I, uh, wrote a business plan, worked out what to do, contacted suppliers, worked out how I was going to get into the country, was just about to hit go, buy my first lot of Yerba Mate, and I then did a final sweep of supermarkets and there was someone there already. What does that teach me? Well, it taught me that I could go ahead and do it, but actually, for a fairly new tea coming into the UK, they would do all the hard work and they would probably reap the benefits of me running around telling everyone. So I didn't do it. And I need to fix my squeaky chair because I get told off on the other podcast about it. So that gives you an idea. I set up a wine import company when I was living out in South America, where I set up a restaurant in the Andes in a ski resort. I have done a variety of jobs around the world, traveled a huge amount in my 20s and late teens, working as a truck driver in Thailand, Picking fruit and packing boxes in Australia and working as a teacher in Thailand as well and doing a variety of other jobs in Australia, which I'm very happy to talk about, but probably don't want to bore you senseless. Climate change has always been an issue for me. I look back at my school reports the other day and my mum sent them up to me and I realized that I've actually been looking at climate change and talking about climate change since I was about 14 years old and maybe earlier. But at 14, I did a talk on climate change at school, trying to impress upon people to think about climate change and the impact it's going to have on us. Bearing in mind I'm 40, Mid-40s, and I was born in '75. I just didn't want to work out. So in 1989, I did that talk. So a long time ago. And remember that scientists have been talking about climate change for a good 20 years prior to that. So it wasn't as if I was new and kind of understood things that no one else understood. The science was there. So the science has been there for a very long, long time. Fast forward to my degree, I did hospitality management with tourism, and my undergraduate thesis was how people perceive the effect on the environment whilst partaking in sports within the Cairngorm region. Weirdly, I work in sustainability and the environment and live in Scotland. So maybe I could see into the future. I genuinely didn't know that I would be living in Scotland at that point. But I met a wonderful, amazing woman who is the mother of my children, our children, and she's Scottish. So I moved up here. Interestingly, I moved up here because at that moment in time, which is about 7 years ago, I'd recognized that Green Element wasn't Green Element. Green Element was the Will Richardson Show. I worked with some amazing individuals, Emma Littlewood, who is my right-hand person, and Jo Ellis, and a guy called Matt Percy, and Niddy as well. It was interesting because Clients would always come to me. I lived in London. I was always going to meetings. I was always having to be the face of Green Element, which I realized was actually meaning that the company wasn't called Green Element. The company was called Will Richardson, and Will Richardson had a number of people working with him. So it didn't really work out very well as a business because— I was constantly working in the business and not on the business. When Laura asked me if I wanted to move up to Scotland and potentially have kids with her up in Scotland, I chose yes. We talked about it as a team, and they agreed that if it didn't work, I would come back down again. I still live in Scotland. It did work, and actually was probably the making of of Green Element Group as it is now, which is really exciting. And so, I implore anyone who is working and trying to set up their business and wants to take it to the next level, take yourself out. Whatever you can do, take it out. So, move away from the epicenter of your business and have other people run it for you and run the day-to-day. It really makes a difference. I think it's massively helpful that I'm not a micromanager, and that I genuinely think that it's a really good thing when people make mistakes, and they do things wrong, because as long as they learn from them, then it doesn't matter. And people don't mind mistakes. So clients, Yes, I knew what I was doing, but it didn't matter. And actually, quite honestly, no, I can't really name a mistake that was actually that big anyway. But I was just aware that it could happen. But it didn't happen, so therefore, even better. And so moving up to Scotland was the start of building the business that we know today. With Green Element, which is an environmental management consultancy. We help organizations become more sustainable. We have clients like the Guardian Group. We do all of their carbon reporting around the world and setting strategies for them. We work for Linklaters, working on their environmental management program around the world. We work for We used to work for Fever Tree, Jamie Oliver Group, loads and loads of companies that you will have heard of. I'm very fortunate to be working for all of these businesses now. And I say fortunate because I'm lucky enough to work with the people that I work with. And quite honestly, the reason why we work for all these amazing organizations that have such high quality standards is because of the people that I work with. And it's because of the work they do that we are where we are. And that is a real lesson to anyone. It doesn't matter how good you are, it matters how good everyone is. You're a team. Your business is their business and their business is your business. is when you all work together to achieve the same common goal. What is it that you're trying to achieve? And that ties into lots of people that expect you to put together a mission statement. And I'm not very good at the corporate speakers, you'll probably learn over the next number of years. I'm anticipating this to be going on. Articulating your message. What's your mission and vision? What's your— quite honestly, ours has always been, we want to help as many organizations as possible to be as green as possible and have the least amount of impact on the environment. It's not rocket science. And we're all working towards the common goal. It's not until recently that we have all actually— we've got messages that are articulated very well. And that's down to the fact that we've taken on funding and we are growing the business and becoming, I guess, more corporate. But the underlying value system that we hold at Green Element in the Green Element Group is the same. It's just that we can articulate it now. And I think that comes from— and I will give myself some credit here. I'm not amazingly good at that, but what I wanted to do personally was work with people I trust, work with people that have that same value system as me. And I believe that we have. We had our first big away day, 2 days, a couple of weeks ago, beginning of June. Fascinating to see everyone interact with each other. And I was immensely proud just to see that we are, I don't know, that we are a team and that we work together and that we respect each other and we hold each other accountable for what it is that we do. It's a It's an amazing experience, to be honest with you, to see that happen because we can grow and we can build and we can really be a part of the solution going forwards. I'm actually going to leave it there for now for this first one. I'm probably going to keep it to probably 10 minutes for each episode. And I will try and do them as regularly as possible. I will try and do them weekly. And please do get in contact with me, william@greenelement.co.uk, and let me know if there's anything you want to know about the business. And over time, I'll be exploring how we share financials, how we work on our marketing and sales together as a team. How we look at the ethics and morality of the business and which companies and clients we work on and what are we trying to achieve and how are we trying to achieve it. And I will also give learnings from some of the groups that I'm in and hopefully be a source of information for anyone starting out and wanting to grow and build a purpose-driven business.

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