The first sure step toward profitable sustainability

It doesn't matter if you're a struggling nonprofit, a corporate behemoth, or an independent business: if you're considering incorporating sustainable practices into your systems, you may feel like there's an insurmountable mountain ahead of you. "Sustainability is unsustainable for our business" is a common mantra for those who can't stand the idea of climbing that mountain; it gives us an easy way to explain our inaction. And for many, it might be right on the money.

I realize this sounds counterintuitive coming from the likes of me, but let's be realistic. A lot of folks start taking steps they feel will lead to greener...something...and quickly find themselves spending more money than they can justify just to do right by Mother Nature. The cause for this ineffectiveness is usually pretty simple, though: in the excitement of change-making, organizations often forget to factor profitability issues into the new system.

The first step for any business is not to implement actual changes, whether to the physical plant, to the product lines, or to processes. Rather, the first step needs to be measurement. A business needs to first measure its processes, as well as the impact of those processes across all areas:

• Product or service footprint: raw materials, manufacturing, distribution at every stage, usage and disposal
• Operational footprint: facilities, employees, supply chain, etc.
• Human footprint: internal policies, and how those policies impact human behavior
• Strategy footprint: how do you incorporate/apply sustainability thinking to every decision made?

A business has to know how their current processes work and what the impacts of those processes are, or any moves toward what they think is sustainability may fall short. This is why there are no universal, easy answers, or a simple checklist.

Unfortunately, measurement can seem challenging, as there also aren't many affordable resources for small-medium sized businesses other than good old-fashioned man hours. Life cycle assessment software (for example) can be expensive. But there are perfectly functional options for the willing: at the very least you can use a simple spreadsheet like Excel or OpenOffice. However your organization chooses to track this information, it starts with details such as:

• Utility use: water, gas, electric, garbage
• Purchasing: products, transport, frequency, quantity, vendor selection
• Materials use (which overlaps with purchasing): quantities, disposal, health impacts, conversion to profitable products, etc.
• Human resources: employee benefits, commute impacts, behaviors, attitudes, wants, productivity, job descriptions
• Structural organization: hierarchy, decision-making, policy implementation, etc.
• Strategy (which overlaps with structural organization): decision-making, short- and long-term goals, employee/er involvement, communication, etc.

Each of these can further be broken down by department or function (so maybe marketing has its own sets of measures, while HR has another, and so forth). This is important, because it allows you to scale your measurement according to the size of your operation. You can stay at the larger level until your group is comfortable that the system works and reaps valuable information, at which point you can drill down to the detail level.

Don't misunderstand: this process is completely unsexy and often tedious. But this is where you discover where the company can both save money and make money by applying sustainable thinking and innovative processes. Not only that, but the measuring has to be conducted before the change process starts, throughout the process, and after the process. And then, assuming there is enough commitment, it should influence how the company adjusts and adapts over time.

This is how you get to a workable, profitable, sustainable system—by simply tracking what you're doing before any changes are made at all. Without this baseline, you're essentially shooting fishes in a barrel. And I'm pretty sure that's completely unsustainable.