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Embracing ESG Principles in Cleantech: Podcast With Gerald Leonard
62 Plays4 months ago
We tackle the critical issue of sustainability in business with Gerald J Leonard, CEO of Turnberry Premiere. Gerald explains the importance of embedding eco-friendly strategies into corporate frameworks. We’re sharing practical tips on measuring the impact of sustainability efforts with science-based targets and certified metrics, and advice on integrating sustainability strategies without losing profits, focusing on smart budget allocation, thorough cost-benefit analysis, and getting senior leadership on board.
Join us to discover how these strategies can lead to long-term environmental success while maintaining financial viability.
📚 RESOURCES & LINKS
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- Website: https://turnberrypremiere.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geraldjleonard/
👉 Interview with Gerald J Leonard: https://www.npws.net/podcast/esg-cleantech-business
🌍 SUSTAINABILITY PODCAST CREATED BY NEW PERSPECTIVE
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This podcast is proudly sponsored by New Perspective Marketing, a dynamic growth marketing agency in Boston, MA, celebrating 20 years in business. We help sustainably focused B2B organizations grow their brands and scale up revenue. If you or your organization is looking to grow, visit npws.com for more info.
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Host: Dunja Jovanovic
Executive Producer: Marko Bodiroza
Creator: Nathan Harris
#cleantech #sustainability #podcast
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello friends, you are watching a brand new episode of The Green New Perspective podcast, a place where you learn about innovative climate tech and meet people who are developing them.
Sustainability in Business: An Overview
00:00:09
Speaker
In this episode, we are tackling sustainability in business with Gerald J. Leonard, the CEO of Turnberry Premier. If you stay with me until the end of the conversation, you are going to learn about the importance of incorporating eco-friendly strategies into corporate framework.
Introducing Gerald J. Leonard
00:00:25
Speaker
My guest is sharing his personal insights and tips on how to measure environmental impact of your business by using science-based targets and certified metrics. So if you're interested to learn more, stay tuned and enjoy!
Gerald's Path to Sustainability
00:00:38
Speaker
um
00:00:45
Speaker
Hello Gerald, welcome to the Green New Perspective podcast. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Can you introduce yourself for our audience and give us a little bit about your background? Sure, so my name is Gerald J. Leonard and I am a CEO of two companies and the one we're talking about today is my company Turnberry Premier and I have a number of Fortune 500 clients and one of them wanted to have us become a preferred supplier and they also wanted us to take a look at our sustainability efforts.
00:01:19
Speaker
And that really drove me into really learning and getting a lot of details around sustainability. But my background, what really drove it was I have 25 plus years as a certified project program portfolio management consultant. And in working in that space, you know, you work with companies on selecting their projects and identifying their portfolio. on executing very large projects and large complex environments.
Music and Business: A Unique Connection
00:01:45
Speaker
And I took that background when I started learning about sustainability and realized that sustainability, when it comes to capturing your carbon-based footprint and reporting and carbon reduction, that it's really a sustainability office, which is the same thing as a project management office. And so it's using the project management skills and tools and capabilities around that for sustainability and for carbon accounting.
00:02:11
Speaker
Now what's interesting is my background is also in music. You probably look at my background and see my instruments. And so how does that play in? There are so many things I learned as a musician about teamwork, about practice, about deliberate practice, about finding the right mentors and coaches, and also finding the right players. to be a part of your team or a part of your band. And so I've always used those same concepts when it comes to growing in business. I always look at what do I need to work on and develop myself in, who do I need to work with, who can help me grow.
00:02:47
Speaker
as a coach or a mentor, because all great musicians, even when they become really professional musicians, they always have a important teacher. And then they always have a
Building a Sustainable Company Culture
00:02:56
Speaker
band. So I always look for who can I partner with and who can I learn from and also who can I contribute to. So when I started my sustainability journey, I did the same thing. I went to a lot of workshops and programs and then figured out there were certain books that I needed to read and I mind mapped them. And when I did the mind map of these four key books, it really stood out to me that sustainability was a framework and a process. It's really not just about sustainability itself, but it's really about the business strategy of a company and identifying what they're going to work on and what they're not going to work on.
00:03:32
Speaker
and how they can be better partners with our climate, with our with our Earth, and and basically do things to really you know recycle, reuse, and make the most of the resources that we have, but also do it in a way that is sustainable and that people will engage with and that they can do good. And so by learning all this and in finding the right band members, and I discovered a company called Greenly. And Greenly has a platform, it's a software as a service platform for carbon accounting. But one of the things about them is that they're also climate experts. And they've taken a lot of what I learned and they've codified it and made it really simple and they built it all into a tool. And again, from my background, I've done a lot of work in the project space. And so I've been an expert also in Microsoft Project, which is a SaaS product.
00:04:24
Speaker
that that is used for managing multiple projects. So when I looked at that tool, and I remember all of the work I had done in the past in project management, the light bulb went off for me. It was like, oh, wow, here's a tool that does exactly what the other tool did around just projects. This one does it around capturing your carbon-based footprint, your baseline, and then identifying the things that need to happen in regards to carbon reduction. And so it allowed me to take my background in music and my experiences and my background in project management and as I learned more and applied them to sustainability allowed me to be able to not only do this for my own company but now off making a service that we can help other medium-sized small businesses figure out how to create a sustainability offering or how to create a sustainability
00:05:14
Speaker
framework and practice in their company so that they can continually work with some of the larger Fortune 500s who are requiring this now. So that's got a little bit of my background how this all came together.
Engaging Employees in Sustainability
00:05:24
Speaker
So what are the key elements for creating a culture that supports sustainability in a company? You know, the what the key elements for creating a sustainable company, it really starts with having a clear vision of who the company is. So once you have a clear vision of how you're planning on leveraging sustainability and using these processes, it really accumulates to getting everyone on the same page and having that vision and seeing where the company is going and how it wants to contribute to creating a more sustainable earth and a ah sustainable service that they're offering. The next thing, it's really being clear about your values, about the company's values. Like what are the criteria in which they're going to make decisions?
00:06:07
Speaker
you know, with sustainability being part of the core processes, um recycling and reuse and using smart grids and using tools that are going to help them with their their processes, that begins to kind of become the standard or framework in which they make decisions the way they they do things. And so it ah allows them to establish those processes. But it also by having those core values allows everyone else to get on board. And then once you have a great vision and a great set of values, you also need to have great stories. And those stories align everyone with where the company is going. And once everyone knows, here's where we're going. Here's the criteria that we're using. Why are we doing that? And that's what the stories do. they The stories get to why are we doing this in the beginning?
00:06:55
Speaker
Like for me, my story of working with my client and them saying, hey, we would love for you to be a preferred supplier with us, but it's going to require you to really have a handle on your sustainability process. And quite honestly, sustainability and a lot of the workshops, especially in America, they're all around recycle, reuse. And I didn't understand the rigor of capturing a carbon-based footprint. and looking at your financials and looking at all your activities and putting it into a database that you could actually see what your carbon-based footprint ah metric ton usage of carbon is at this point and then what the carbon reduction process looked like. Once I went through that process and saw it,
00:07:40
Speaker
That became the story for all of my employees. So as we all looked at that and said, hey, you know, this was before somewhat complex. Now it's really clear what we need to do. That became one of the leading stories that we use within the company to share with everyone to get
Overcoming Sustainability Challenges
00:07:56
Speaker
everyone on board. So when they were taking their surveys and. And when I'm were reaching out to other clients around this, they now get the story. They they can feel it. They can sense it. they They can pull their head, heart, and their hands into it. And then once you have that, you want to also make sure you have supporting best practices.
00:08:14
Speaker
as well as create the environment that supports that and that can be your technical as well as your physical environment and that they are seeing that you're living this process and then you circle it all with a culture of execution just getting things done that you develop processes systems and so on but that you're seeing things happen that are beginning to move the needle within your organization. How do employees react when they um here that I have to you know take some of my supposed sustainability related trainings or education to be able to work in that kind of ESG more sustainable environment. You know, what I found was, and I think it was because of the company I selected with Greenly, on their platform, which is all built into their SaaS product, when an employee takes the survey, which basically is a way for us to capture their input, because when you're creating your carbon-based footprint for your organization, you're not only getting it for the overall company overall, you're also getting it for each of the employees because how they are living and what they're doing attributes to your carbon-based footprint as well as your suppliers. And then the Greenlee tool, when you send out an email link, to an employee to get access to the to the information to complete their assessment, right? It's probably around five or six questions that they ask you. But as they're asking you the questions, you click a link and it shows you a video, a very short 30-second video about sustainability, about carbon, about greenhouse gases and so on, and what their part of it is. So as they're providing you the information that they need, they're getting educated
00:09:57
Speaker
and they're becoming aware of their impact of carbon on the within the overall environment, within their own home, as well as how it's contributing to the company. So it's not like the employees had to go to a separate training, right? Because sometimes people are gonna push back, they're like, hey, I'm too busy, I got this going, I got that going, I have time for this. But when they you when they get an email link and it says, this will take you six minutes, I got six minutes, I can do that, right? I'll go get a cup of coffee. like And now now, not only am I clicking the link and getting and and going through this process, but I'm getting educated. And as I'm filling out the little form and answering the questions of my about my commuting, about my lunch, about you know how how many hours am I working and the things that I'm doing, it also begins to educate them. So when they're done,
00:10:51
Speaker
They're now thinking differently about the plane rides and the things that they're doing that are contributing to the carbon-based footprint of their company, as well as them and their individual cells. So you're getting them on board.
The Truth About ESG Tools
00:11:04
Speaker
Yes, it really helps it really helps to get them on board of that overall process. And what challenges did you did you found while trying to implement the sustainability-related strategies into business models? Well, you know, the thing I found was a part of it was educating everyone to the process. And even with employees, and even with the fact that it was pretty simple, we still had a few employees that kind of drug their feet on getting the, getting us the data. It allowed us to kind of have, you know, some conversations or to create some additional emails that we had to send out. So a part of it is just creating that motivation.
00:11:41
Speaker
and seeing getting people to see the importance of it. And I think the other part of it is that's really important is, and this is why I was really happy I selected Greenlee, is that even though I had learned a lot and even though I had 25 years of experience doing this, as I was implementing this in my own company, there are parts of it that were somewhat complex. And it was, once I do this part, you know how does that relate to this? Or how do I get my data in from my accounting system? Do I need to look at the electrical information from my utility company and so on? And then as I'm developing my targets and my science-based targets, there's a lot of data out there. So it can actually get confusing
00:12:25
Speaker
if you don't have the right guide. And remember, when I first started sharing, I said, you know, as a musician, I always had, you know, I practice, and but I always would go after a coach. And that's what I loved about the Greenlee platform that I have discovered through my research and have become a partner with them, is that they provide the science-based experts. who understand the platform system, but they understand the greenhouse gas emissions requirements, the science-based targets requirements, and the process. They've done this now for over 2,000 of their clients, and so I'm one of the partners that's a part of that process. You have other companies that have become partners with them, but it really made it easy
00:13:10
Speaker
to work through the process because I had an expert as a tour guide and not just a travel
Financial Aspects of Sustainability
00:13:18
Speaker
agent. And the reason I use that language, a travel agent versus a tour guide, a tour guide is someone who's been there and done that and they can take you on the journey and take you to the top of the mountain and show you all the things that you wouldn't see on the brochure. A travel agent says, here's the brochure. Let me give you the software. Let me give you the tool. Go for it. And you call back and says, hey, ah i'm I'm at this junction. Do I make a right or a left? They're going to go, I don't know. I've never been there myself. I'm just providing you this tool and this service. I'm just you know setting up the vacation for you, if you will.
00:13:54
Speaker
And so that's why I like the concept of a tour guide because not only are they going to give me the brochure and help me get started on the journey, they're going to know all of the little things I need to watch out for and catch and be aware of. And it's amazing just how easier it can become when you have someone who has that level of expertise working with you compared to just trying to figure it out by yourself. And what are some of the most common misconceptions You know, some of the most common misconceptions is I know there's tools like Ecovetas and others that are out there where you're just getting, it's it's focused on the ESG process and and you're getting really high level information, but it doesn't give you that carbon-based footprint to say, here's the metric ton amount of carbon your company is admitting.
00:14:45
Speaker
It just says that, hey, we're recycling, we're doing these things, we're doing those things. And this is really important, and I'm not downplaying echovetus or any other tool that does that, but it doesn't give you the rigor of capturing your carbon-based footprint. When you capture your carbon-based footprint alongside of those other governance things that you need to do, now you have data. right You have real solid data from your systems, from your accounting processes, which maps to over 2,000 emission factors where you're able to look and see based on how much usage or how much mileage or how many plane flights you took or what airlines you took.
00:15:25
Speaker
What is your carbon-based footprint? And you can look at that data and see, once you have your report, where in your processes are you spending or it's creating the most carbon-based footprint within inside of all the different areas that you're looking at. So now it becomes really clear where to focus your attention when it comes to reduction. Because when you look at everything that you would have to do to do carbon-based reduction, it could turn into millions of dollars, right? And a medium-sized company, that's a lot of money. So you know it's gonna cost you to configure, re-modify your system and focus on the carbon-based footprint and reduction process, but you also have a limited budget.
Balancing Business and Sustainability
00:16:11
Speaker
So you wanna be able to take that limited budget and apply it to where it's gonna have the biggest impact of reducing your carbon-based footprint.
00:16:19
Speaker
And that's one of the things that having all that data allows you to do. And it's something also called greenwashing. And it's really the idea of greenwashing is where, again, you're just focused on recycling, reuse, and so on and so forth. But you're not getting to the empirical data that's allowing you to know here's where I need to focus my attention and here's where I need to take my limited resources and like a laser being focused on those to and have the greatest impact of reduction of my greenhouse gases and to meeting my targets of where I'm trying to go.
00:16:55
Speaker
But how do you measure the impacts? Well, impacts are measured through, again, through using science-based targets. And those science-based targets are metrics and and data points that are certified by a third-party organization where they look at, these are the things that you where you have on your carbon-based footprint. These are the areas that are the greatest impact of your carbon-based footprint. These science-based targets, are by applying them, are going to allow you to have that greater impact on reducing. And then you end up with metrics. You end up with data points that allows you to see over time. And this is not a you know a two-month journey, right? This is not a three-month, even a one-year journey. This is a two- or three-year journey because to reduce your carbon-based footprint to the numbers
00:17:47
Speaker
by 50% by 2030 or by 70% or 80% by 2050, that's it's going to take a concerted effort to make that happen. But having those science-based targets in that data is where you're able to measure specifically um the the information, the numbers, the charts, and seeing that you're making a difference. I mean, carbon is just one thing that you measure, right? There's a lot of more things that you need to do as a company to reduce your environmental footprint, not just carbon footprint.
00:18:20
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. And so there's there's a number of other areas that you have to look in, again, not just the carbon based footprint, but your overall water usage, um recycling, you know, just um and here. The other thing is you can also there's areas where you can't have as much of a reduction process. You can then bring on some projects like, you know, planting ah trees in a forest or different things that you can do that are projects that will ah increase but or help reduce the carbon-based footprint and and and really leverage that, as well as there's a lot of, now, um you know, the LEED-type buildings. there's There are different ways to clean your offices that are a lot more um sustainable, friendly, and things along that line. Air compressors, recycling, ah water, and so on that can be leveraged to to do that as well.
00:19:13
Speaker
And you've mentioned that integrating sustainability ideas, ESG principles in business can be financially heavy. So how can they do that effectively without actually losing their profits? Can they? Yes, they can. Because it's you know when you think about, and again, this is where my background in project portfolio management comes in, because companies are always investing in the future of their company, right? They may be at point a and they want to get to point b so they can deliver this new product and service. Well they can't ah spend all of their money on this new innovative process where they still have to run the business they still have to grow their business and they still have to focus on how are they going to continually transform their business.
00:20:02
Speaker
So by using portfolio management principles, you know one principle is what I call a portfolio mix process. And that's, again, where Gartner created this framework where you you take 10% of your budget and you focus on projects that will transform the business. In other words, you know what's the new iPhone or the new iPad or the new ah chat GPT service or something that is going to radically change and transform that that part of the business. you know The other 35%, 30% or 35% can go into projects that focus on growing the business, either by increasing revenue or decreasing costs, which again hits the bottom line as far as growing your profits. And then you still have to keep the lights on with the services and products and things that you currently have. So a good 60% of your budget should go towards
00:20:56
Speaker
maintaining and running the business, keeping the business proficient and moving forward. And when you're looking at your portfolio of activities that way, you can now step back and go, OK, here's how much we're going to set aside for our project portfolio budget. But of that budget, these are the ways we're going to break it down between transforming our business, growing our business and running our business. But doing it in a way that at the end of the day, when you're looking at all the different projects and you're looking at cost benefit analysis and your return on investments and those kinds of things, you are then making sure
00:21:32
Speaker
that the projects that you're executing are going to have a positive impact on your bottom line and provide those returns that you're looking for.
Market Differentiation Through Sustainability
00:21:41
Speaker
And one of the best ways to also I've seen in doing that is to have like a gate review of projects before you allow them to be funded. I remember being a part of a ah major law firm where I ran their planning and programs office and any projects that we released as a project that's now being executed, it had to go before a board and they had to look at, okay, how viable is this project?
00:22:06
Speaker
How does this project align to our vision and strategy? Because again, when you look at what I talked about earlier, vision and values, those the the vision can be the overall structure of where the company's going. Those values could also be called your business drivers. you know improve improve profits, and increase sales, improve optimization of our services, and so on. So you can look at specific business drivers. Now you want to look and see, are the projects that are being selected in our portfolio aligned to the vision and to our drivers or our values?
00:22:42
Speaker
and are those projects being vetted and have documented cost benefit analysis where we know that there is a promised return and we're going to track that and we have the processes to track that. All of that comes into play and it comes into play even an even stronger within side of the sustainability area because you're investing a lot of money to make changes in you know whether you're using gas vehicles right now in your company and you're going to switch over to EV vehicles. That's not a small cost, right? If you if you're in one data center and you realize after doing your analysis that that data center creates a ah larger footprint and you want to switch it to another data center,
00:23:23
Speaker
It may be simple if it's within the same company and you're just moving the data from one data center it to another data center that has a better carbon footprint. But if it's moving to a whole other company, that's a major project. Or if you have to switch yeah ERP systems or sales systems or your CRM systems because the current company you're using does comply with sustainability activities that you want and you found one that does. just that move along and the training and the governance and re-jiggering all your processes and people can cost significant. So by having that gate up front and having that board that looks at all these processes, that looks at the portfolio, you're able to now look at all of that and go, okay,
00:24:10
Speaker
we've taken it through the rigors of the of our process, and now we're confident that this project, whether it's a half a million, two million, whatever that cost is, is going to return X amount to our bottom line, and it's gonna save us this, it's gonna make us more efficient, and so on. And when you do that, everyone at the top level, they're paying attention now. They're gonna be engaged in that process. If projects are just being released in the wild, then you're not going to get the senior leadership's team ah focus. But if they know that it's affecting the bottom line and that bottom line is affecting their bonuses and affecting their pay and affecting how much money their departments are getting, now you got their attention because not only is it focused on the company, they're they're going to experience the benefit of that project being executed properly personally. And that's when you really capture buy in when people know that, hey, this is what's in it for me.
00:25:06
Speaker
And do you feel that companies by adopting the strategies can differentiate themselves in the market and maybe get some investors there exactly definitely because you know nowadays i'm many of the investors are looking for sustainable companies. I mean, there are many books written about building a sustainable company, and and it's not just the whole idea of of building a sustainable company. It's not just around carbon emissions, right? It's, am I building a company that can grow its revenue, create processes, and become sustainable over the long haul?
00:25:44
Speaker
And that means that as you're going through the cycle of business where you know things take off and you're in the infant stage and you're trying to grow and now you're making money, but if you're still not reinventing yourself, your products your projects and your processes and your systems and your products become obsolete. So you constantly are having to do that, but you can build your company in such a way that Again, if you're following that governance process or that portfolio mix where 10% of your portfolio is always focused on the next thing that you're going to focus on or the next product you're bringing to the business, you're modifying and optimizing 35% of your portfolio and then you're maintaining the 60%, you're keeping the engine going, but you're also looking at what's next.
00:26:33
Speaker
And you're constantly revamping and improving what you're doing. And you're looking at what's next in the market that we need to take advantage of. You know, obviously, chat, GPT and and things along that line and AI have radically transformed. And it's sped up the cycle time of when things become obsolete. And
Future Trends in Sustainability
00:26:55
Speaker
by learning how to leverage and embrace AI and adopt it and modify your systems with it, it allows you to stay ahead or even ah you know align with that curve or even ahead of that curve.
00:27:09
Speaker
But it takes that rigor of creating that balance, where you have a company that is innovative and entrepreneurial, yet it's sustainable, not just from a carbon standpoint or governance standpoint, but also as a business, that you have a business that is going to be around 100 years from now. And my last question for you is, what emerging trends in sustainability do you believe will impact businesses in, let's say, next five years? I would definitely say AI, right? I mean, AI is is on the cusp of transforming so many things because as we get better data into the systems around what carbon-based footprints look like, where we normally see the
00:27:53
Speaker
the the greatest challenges of controlling that, um all the data that's being brought into the system by applying AI to it. Now we're we're going to be able to preemptively know you know where to focus our attention. We're going to know how to have systems that can provide that data right up front and build it into our processes. So I definitely see that artificial intelligence is going to transform even more the the overall sustainability practice. And I believe that um also governments that are not requiring it as a law
00:28:30
Speaker
will begin to require it as a law, ah even more so because you know as the summers get hotter and different things happen, you know obviously you have climate deniers and so on and so forth, but there are situations and and circumstances that are happening where you can't turn a blind eye to that anymore. You have to look at it. And there will be legislators and government governmental bodies that will put in laws and frameworks and statues to say this is how we need to manage these processes, do business and so on. and And so I think those two are going to have a really big impact, AI and then ah future governmental laws and regulations.
00:29:11
Speaker
And
Further Resources on Sustainability
00:29:12
Speaker
um for people who are interested to learn more about sustainability, can you recommend some of the books or communities, maybe Discord channels, Slack channels, website, whatever you want to, what you know what it's inspired you to actually hop on this journey and well, start a business around it. um I would definitely, I would definitely say um if you go to my website turnberry premier forward slash sustainability um a lot of the books and resources that I have there and there's a number of videos and some white papers that are available. um I think there's there's a number of books like from green to gold is ah is a great book. um
00:29:52
Speaker
um there. There's one on the Chief Sustainability Officer that that is out that's a really good one because that one has probably over 25 to 30 case studies where a consultant at Fannie Mae interviewed other chief sustainability officers and had a like a slew of questions that they went through. And so you're learning about addressing sustainability from the chief sustainability officer and how they're implementing their processes and what they had to do to really roll out sustainability in these Fortune 500 companies. um And so that's a really, really good book. So I would say those are the resources I would recommend.
Podcast Conclusion
00:30:31
Speaker
Great job. Thank you for for being my guest here on the podcast. Well, thank you so much for having me.
00:30:43
Speaker
Hey lovely people, thank you for listening or watching our podcast and tuning in every week to learn more about innovative tech. Guess now is the perfect time for me to mention the sponsor of the podcast, their new perspective, a Boston-based marketing agency working with clean tech clients. They have 20 years plus of experience and if you want to learn more about what they're doing to help clean tech businesses to grow please check out the links in the description of this episode. And if you want to help us with our mission to give clean tech businesses and people who stand behind them a voice, you can support us by subscribing to our channel on the platform where you stream your podcast. We would really appreciate that. Thank you once again, and hopefully I'll see you in the next Clean Your Perspective podcast episode. Bye.