Inspiring Business by Sharing Success

5 key business areas to focus on making your business more sustainable

5 key business areas to focus on making your business more sustainable

Business sustainability refers to business models and managerial decisions grounded in financial, environmental and social concerns. Sustainable companies think long-term. They forge strong relationships with employees and members of the community. They find ways to reduce the amount of natural resources they consume and the amount of waste and pollution they produce.

 

 

Sustainable companies:

• Create long-term financial value.

• Know how their actions affect the environment and actively work to reduce their impacts.

• Care about their employees, customers and communities and work to make positive social change.

• Understand these three elements are intimately connected to each other

1: Embed Sustainability in the Business Culture

Whatever your company’s values actually are—good or bad—will guide people’s actions. To succeed long-term, leaders must ensure they’re nurturing the right corporate values. What happens in the workplace translates into marketplace performance. Shared values cultivate a a culture that should serve as the ultimate platform to drive growth, innovation and opportunity. Without the right shared values everyone can embrace, corporate cultures harbor contradictions and conflicts, fueled by silos where leadership agendas abound and disengaged employees lack the right mindset to perform at their best.

2: Value your people

Without the right people, a business can’t grow and it certainly makes it difficult to sustain momentum over time. Business is about people and without the right people a business can’t grow and mature. Oftentimes, this requires an organissation to refresh its talent pool in support of the organisation’s business model and the unique needs of its clients. Reassess your talent and ask yourself this question: Is your current talent pool servicing your clients and identifying the right opportunities to create and sustain business growth?

3: Operational Efficiencies

Efficiencies drive costs down and embed a mindset within the workplace culture that makes people sensitive to costs and ways to streamline how the organisation communicates, operates and connects the dots of opportunities. This helps to assure that activities within the organisation are in alignment with the needs of the business to create and sustain growth.

The best way to create operational efficiencies is to assure that the workplace culture supports the tools to drive efficiencies within the organisation – by design – not by accident. Success comes most to those who are surrounded by people who want their success to continue.

4: Targeting the Right Clients

Generating sales is all relative. If you are selling to clients whose business needs are not sustainable – this represents a zero sum game. If you don’t have the right mechanisms in place to prospect the right clients, you will find it difficult to sustain growth – let alone grow at all.

Embracing an entrepreneurial attitude allows you to see beyond the obvious and spot the best clients in support of your business model. This keeps acquisition costs low and assures client relationships are mutually beneficial and goals are in alignment.

5: Future Proofing

To consistently grow the bottom-line, sustainability innovation needs to drive the top-line. Innovation that successfully builds new products, services, businesses and customers drives advantage and value.  When an organisation has the protocols, the standard operating procedures in place to solve problems and make sound decisions, they have enabled the ability to anticipate the unexpected to assure that circumstances don’t force their hand.


< Back