How can you build sustainability into your mission?

Deeply research the problem

When you’re tackling sustainability challenges, it’s important to deeply understand the scale of the problem that you’re trying to address. 

Tessa Clarke, co-founder of food sharing app OLIO, says that while she had an awareness of food waste being a problem, research immediately verified the scale of what she was taking on. These uncovered alarming statistics—a third of all food produced globally goes to waste—that affirmed the need for a product like OLIO . You can read more about Tessa’s story as a founder here.

Research can also guide the direction of your business, especially given the ambiguity around climate solutions. When Isabella West founded clothing rental platform Hirestreet (forerunner to her latest business Zoa Rental), she found it difficult to decide between approaches, as well as which sources to trust. “There’s a large grey area around what ‘good’ looks like,” she says. 

This led to her putting together a Carbon Savings Library, a library of over 50 sources and insights into different types of carbon models and high level takeaway points from each source. This has proved invaluable in keeping abreast of the science, and being able to quickly refer back to data.    

Clearly identify and outline your mission and values

From the outset, it helps to have a clearly defined mission and set of values. 

Cat Jones, founder of flight-free sustainable travel company Byway, says outlining the vision, mission and values of the business was the very first thing she did. Purpose, Cat confirms, has always sat alongside profit during the decision making process. “This process helped us really think about the values that were going to drive our decision making,” she says, “Our values inform how we hire, which partners we chose to work with, and what to prioritise.” 

It also underlined their commitment to environmental and social objectives, as well as commercial goals. This helped tremendously when joining the Founders Factory venture studio, demonstrating that Byway wouldn’t make particular commercial decisions that other companies might choose. 

“Many travel businesses have their eye on profit margin at all costs, prioritising partnerships with big establishments and chains. We don’t do this,” Cat says. Instead, she opts to work with local, independent businesses who Byway believes make longer term, more sustainable partners, and who further Byway’s social goals of combating over-tourism and spreading economic opportunities from tourism over a wider area. 

Know what your expertise is, and be aware of your limitations

There’s no point getting paralysed through ensuring that each and every decision is as sustainable and impactful as possible: you’re far better off acknowledging that there’s a limit to what you’re able to achieve, and focusing on that area of expertise. 

When building a rental model, Isabella struggled to find the most sustainable transport solution. Ultimately, she realised that she couldn’t completely reinvent the logistics infrastructure in the UK, and instead spent time figuring out how to make the biggest impact within the existing framework. 

“Done is better than perfect,” Isabella says. “Think about what is the best solution you can do which makes your inherently strong and sustainable business model work.”

Make sure it’s accessible

One thing that’s often lost in the noise of creating sustainable businesses is accessibility. Ask yourself—is your product or service affordable to people at all price points? If not, you’re missing out on driving change in a large segment of the market. 

Hirestreet follows a similar model to well known rental platforms like Rent the Runway. While the latter rents out clothing from designer brands such as Gucci and Ralph Lauren, Hirestreet stocks clothing at a much lower price point, from brands like Asos. 

This has forced them to navigate an awkward space, where you’re engaging with exactly the unsustainable fast fashion brands that you’re looking to challenge. But given that this is the direct alternative for their customers, they needed to offer a rental solution for these products in order to drive change for that market. There’s no point in them stocking a Gucci dress which would be out of the price range for their target audience.

Build with a critical mindset

As with building any business, it’s important to approach every decision with a critical mindset, and to constantly ask what you can be doing better. At Byway, Cat is adamant to ensure that every member of the team feels encouraged to challenge decisions that are being made. This means the business is constantly driving to maximise the impact it’s having.

How can you measure impact?

Understanding the impact you are having, and how effective you are at delivering on your mission, is part of the process of building an authentically sustainable business. But measuring impact is complex, and will look different for every startup.

Tie KPIs back to your mission and goals

Your KPIs should closely reflect the mission that you’re building towards. Researching the problem and understanding where you can make an impact will help you to define these KPIs. 

Byway measures impact by referring back to the three mission objectives of the business. For each goal, they’ve identified a number of metrics that demonstrate the progress they’ve made in that area—some are quantitative, others are qualitative (given that certain aspects of driving behaviour change around travelling aren’t measurable). This template provides a useful way of ensuring success remains mission-focused. 

You can read the full Byway Impact Report 2021 here

Manuel Antunes, from early-stage impact fund Mustard Seed MAZE, says it isn’t necessarily an issue if an impact business hasn’t yet identified their KPIs by the time they’re speaking to investors. At Mustard Seed MAZE, one condition of their investment involves joining a impact workshop through which startups can hone in on their mission and identify the right metrics by which to measure success. 

Constantly capture, monitor, and review data

Capturing and drawing upon large amounts of data is a huge asset to building an authentically sustainable business, and will help you to stay driven by your mission and values. Collecting data from day one will help you clearly identify the impact you are having, or will have, which should then drive your decision making. 

Isabella reveals the useful process she went through at Hirestreet of mapping out the consumer journey and measuring emissions at each stage of the journey, and then comparing it to the impact their model would have:

For a normal piece of clothing:

• 70% of emissions take place at the production stage

• Between 12-to-20% takes place in the delivery (depending on whether it’s bought online or in store, and whether it’s returned or not). 

  
  
  
  

For rental clothing:

• That 70% is split between up to 20 wears, as opposed to just one

• Delivery increases (for each rental)

Ultimately, this will prove useful for measuring the long term progress of your startup—to see whether you’re taking steps forwards, and to identify if you’ve taken steps backwards.

Gathering data and publishing it will make it easier to shout about the impact you’re having, which will only positively impact your business and other climate-led startups. “There’s such a lack of transparency, uncertainty, and intimidation around climate change solutions. People are often scared of shouting about good things because they’re scared of being accused of greenwashing,” Isabella says.