A new partnership between the Federation of Small Businesses and Business in the Community aims to make sustainability mentoring available to thousands of small businesses up and down the country. Louise Bateman reports.
Business mentoring is nothing new. But in the world of
sustainability,
mentoring is a niche occupation and is certainly not something that is readily available to the millions of
small to medium-sized businesses that make up the vast majority of the UK economy.
That could all be about to change though, thanks to a new partnership between the
Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) and
Business in the Community (BITC). Last month, the two organisations announced they were teaming up to help FSB members become greener, including offering them exclusive access to a new carbon mentoring programme.
The FSB represents 215,000 small businesses across the UK and BITC is a charity that is helping businesses become more sustainable through its Mayday Network, a campaign to encourage UK business to act on climate change.
Under the new partnership, FSB members will gain access to the Mayday Network’s interactive 'Mayday Journey’, an online tool enabling businesses to move to a low carbon operation. But in a more ambitious programme, they will also be able to team up with sustainability experts from large companies and gain advice and first-hand experience on business sustainability issues.
Launched three years ago by HRH the Prince of Wales, the Mayday Network now has around 2400 members, including large organisations such as Lloyds TSB, United Utilities and Alliance Boots. However, a growing number of its members are
small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and it is this business sector the Network is increasingly trying to reach out to.
It first launched its SME carbon mentoring scheme last year as a pilot project in London and, despite some teething problems, it now wants to take it nationwide.
Business case for sustainability
Paul Turner, head of sustainable development at Lloyds Banking Group’s wholesale division, is in the BITC sustainability Leadership team and took part in the London pilot project. He describes the mentoring programme as "an opportunity to reinforce the business opportunities and business case for sustainability.
"It is designed for SMEs and is an opportunity to share thoughts and chew over some of the problems that businesses face," he says.
But has the pilot project proved that business sustainability mentoring works and can a programme that rests on businesses engaging with one another on an individual level be successfully rolled out to thousands of businesses across the UK?
For one company that took part in the London pilot scheme, it has worked, but mainly because it ditched any assumption that 'big knows best’.
"Don’t assume because we are small that we don’t know anything about sustainability because we do," says Julie Fitzsimmins, director of Lodestar, a central London marketing firm that employs 10 staff. "We agreed to take part in the pilot, but only on condition that it wasn’t going to be one of those programmes where a big company comes along and tells a small company what to do."
In fact Lodestar has been advising clients in the public and private sector, including large utility firms, on sustainability issues for the past decade.
Carbon measuring
Despite being called a carbon mentoring programme, another plus point of the scheme, according to Fitzsimmins, is that it avoids focusing on carbon and
carbon measuring – something she says doesn’t apply to many small businesses.
"Small companies that work in serviced offices aren't necessarily going to be able to work out what their energy usage is. They need to think more creatively," she says. "Guidance is going to be better than measuring because they can’t afford the time to do it."
Clear objectivesMentoring may give the impression of informal chats over a cup of coffee or tea, but Fitzsimmins was also grateful that before embarking on the scheme, companies were asked to set out clear objectives.
"It was very helpful to have format and set of objectives to work to," she says.
But for Fitzsimmins, the real key to the success of the programme has been the quality of the mentor. In the case of Lodestar that mentor was Lloyds’s Paul Turner.
Experience
"Paul is someone of vast experience and with a vast network and a great person to talk to about ideas we have," says Fitzsimmins. "He brought all his experience of working in the area of sustainability to help us look at working with our clients in different ways and broaden our influence in other ways."
For Turner, whose first experience of mentoring has been the pilot programme, it has been a fascinating journey. "We started looking at very traditional routes that a small business might be able to save money through, while having a positive impact on the environment, but we rapidly moved on to examine where the market is going and where the opportunities might be to grow the business," he says.
Shortage of demand
Around 10 companies took part in the pilot scheme, including mentors Segro and EDF Energy. Yet, despite access to such big companies and the Mayday network’s growing SME members (which now accounts for 40 per cent of the campaign’s membership), the pilot struggled to find companies to mentor.
The Mayday Network is clearly hoping that its partnership with the FSB will solve that problem, but it could turn a lack of demand into a supply problem.
"The first thing we need to do is see what level of demand we are going to get through the partnership with the FSB," says Turner, who adds there are a range of companies within the BITC Leadership team that are able to support the initiative.
However, he admits the mentoring programme may need to adapt as it is rolled out and becomes bigger. "We may see clusters of businesses in particular areas being mentored together," he suggests.
Fitzsimmins is not so sure mentoring in groups is the right way forward for small companies, but she is an advocate of any sized business becoming a mentor if it has valuable knowledge to impart.
"One to one mentoring is preferable for a small company in my view, even if it's just a three meetings in six months," she says. "What I wouldn’t do is get too hung up on large and small companies. You could have one small company mentoring another small company."
For its part, the FSB says it is going to be promoting the mentoring scheme and other Mayday Network sustainability support to all of its members.
"We are going to encourage our members to join the Network so they can access support they need to progress along their journey towards a sustainable journey," says David Caro, chair of the FSB Environment & Energy Committee.
There are clearly some real opportunities to be gained for small businesses that take part in a sustainability mentoring programme, such as the one being launched by the BITC/FSB partnership, and these go well beyond cutting costs and reducing a company's impact on the environment. However, rolling out a scheme that has so far been piloted to less than half a dozen businesses to thousands of new ones across the country is going to produce its own set of challenges and it remains to be seen if what has made it a success so far will be able to be replicated on a bigger scale.
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