Here’s a list of 10 low-cost things that you could do immediately to reduce your carbon footprint in a business of any size: -
- Switch off your monitors at night (saves around £35 per year, per monitor).
- Put timers on your photo-copiers and printers that switches them off when you’re office is closed (a copier left on over-night used as much energy as it needs to copy 2,000 pages).
- Put a motion sensor switch on your lights (No activity, no lights = save costs).
- Print on both sides of the paper (there is around 17w of embedded carbon in a piece of A4 paper), print on both sides, save energy.
- Take the train.
- Introduce a Cycle2work Scheme. Employees will save CO2 by cycling not driving.
- Upgrade your office technology. Newer IT is more energy efficient and can offer quick ROI through reduced energy consumption. Look for the Energy Star mark.
- Re-cycle your paper. Incredibly many business still don’t do this most simple thing.
- Switch to renewable energy.
- Hold more web meetings. It’s so easy and cheap now. I use Webex. Saves on travel, you can show Powerpoint presentations and share applications in real time.
I sat on a panel at Business North West today in Manchester to represent the view of a local business on the issue of climate change. Joining me on panel were a number of public sector people, directly involved in the area. Here are some of the bullet point factoids that I threw out today: -
- The global market for low carbon = £3 trillion.
- UK market is around £106.5bn.
- 1000 tonnes of CO2 are being released into the atmosphere every second.
- It’s taken 250 years to undo the last 650,000 years of civilisation (in terms of carbon emmitted).
- Around 488bn tonnes of CO2 have been emmitted since the industrial revolution.
- Failure to act could cost around 5% of GDP. Acting could reduce this to 1% of GDP.
- Business is expected to contribute around 9% of CO2 reductions under the Governments Low Carbon Transition plan, which you can read here.
- Envirowise estimate that UK businesses could benefit by around £6.4bn worth of available savings if they got smarter around carbon.
- We have around 86 months before we reach a point of no-return in terms of carbon emmissions before the damage is irrecoverable. Check out the clock here.
- The government is driving for cuts of 50% of CO2 by 2020 (compared to 1990 levels).
More trouble brewing at BA. Cabin crew have threatened to deal a big blow to the airline over Christmas by striking over pay. It’s a bit of a Post Office re-run this one. The business model is in desperate need of re-invention, without new innovation they risk big risk of further problems down the tracks. There’s a real risk here. Striking over the Christmas period, when travellers are highly dependent on an airline is high risk indeed. At a time when the airline needs passengers and income, the prospect of a strike means thousands of passengers will definitely NOT book a BA flight and those affected by the strike may well desert the airline in the future.
CEO – Willie Walsh must be scenario planning big time, he realises that he’s got to reduce his costs and this will mean some difficult decisions, a poor Christmas will throw more wood on the raging fire. Reading some comments on one of the websites this evening, it’s clear that BA have a reputation problem. Their customers are not as loyal as they used to be, BA is living on yesteryears reputation for service and continues to charge through the roof on some monopoly flights, particularly domestics. They need some radical re-positioning and re-invention of their business model. There has to be space for BA, but not in its current form. A strike – in my view – doesn’t solve anything, in fact it simply makes things worse, I hope all concerned see sense and get round the table asap.
I’m going to use this section to update and share details on small business who I think deserve further publicity. Why? Because they are really good, I’ve personally used them and rate them and think others should now about them.
New Life Services UK – Two of the friendliest guys you can meet (both called Ian). They do garden tidy ups, flagging, turfing, tree maintenance, conservatory cleaning, lawn maintenance, patio cleaning, in fact they can pretty much turn their hands to anything. Both devout Christians, they give a fair price for the work and are courteous, friendly and tidied every last single piece of rubbish. I used them for tree pruning and a conservatory clean. You can contact them on 07960 181096 or 07841 284955. They work mainly around Lancashire and Cheshire.
Bit of a play on words todays title (what’s new). I’ve been laid out with a heavy cold for around five days so haven’t got round to the blog with the same aplomb as usual, I’m sure you’ll all forgive me for that. Still, interesting day today in the UK due to the major strike by the postal workers. It’s generated a lot of debate and I think it’s fair to say that opinion is split. I listened to
Jeremy Vine on Radio Two today and enterpreneur
Oli Barrett gave the post service a good slating on behalf of business.
Many of the points he raised were valid. Courier services have upped their game and win much more of the single package business, they are freely available at High St. stores like
Ryman and
Staples, new alternatives like
Viapost are cropping up and challenging conventions. We are using electronic methods of commmunicating more and more. So, where does the postal service fit in? For now, there are still around 10m people that don’t have PC’s or access to the internet, they need the post. If you’re a prisoner in jail or a member of the Armed Forces, the post has a different meaning to the digitally connected consumer, hand written words are irreplacable and have special meaning.
However, the business model is dated and in need of reinvention. Thinking back to the general lack of time in peoples lives, new methodologies need to be developed which put more emphasis on the postal service to keep it alive. For example, not just posting, but collecting your mail at your doorstep. Automatically debiting postage to your house on collection or sorting using barcodes. Handing over unpackaged goods for them to then be wrapped and shipped automatically. There are tonnes of ideas. One thing is for sure, today’s strike may be making headlines, however they’ll be nothing like the headlines generated when the service may have to be massively downsized through lack of innnovation. A great use of time would be for all the striking posties to spend half of their time on the picket line generating ideas as to how to re-invent the business model, how powerful would that be? Or is that asking too much?
Recession. Credit crunch. Who cares? Not the folk at Apple HQ. Revenues are up. Profits are up 47%. Unit shipments are up. Apples domination of the communications world continues. Why? Because they make fantastically easy to use products, which look good and are fashionable. They’ve sold 7.4M i-Phones in the last quarter alone, that’s before you look at sales of the i-Pod, royalties from i-Tunes and their computing products. The great lesson to learn here is that they’ve stuck to their principles of design and functionality and consumers continue to dig deep into their pockets for their products. These principles have “recession proofed” their results and shown the way in terms of robust business strategy.
Interestingly however, Apple still haven’t broken the B2B market (aside from the creative sector). The i-Phone still isn’t considered a major competitor to the Blackberry, with the Blackberrys “push” e-mail being the winner in the corporate warriors kitbag. However, they are definitely winning the applications war, with far more development being done for the i-Phone than for any other product. For results like this to continue, they have to break the business sector. I see cloud computing as the route to do this. No doubt some seed has been planted already back at Apple HQ and they will once again rock their competitors to the core with a great re-invention of a product. They have their faults, in particular, their environmental credentials aren’t brilliant, however if you look back in twenty years time and talk about the most influential companies of the 21st century, then Apple will be in the Top 5 of that list.
It’s been a busy week, so busy I’ve not been able to get fingers to keyboard in the evening. A week of planes, trains and automobiles. Middle of the week I travelled to Brussels meeting with MEP’s and hearing their view around how the EU can stimulate business. In particular, we focussed on the
Small Business Act (2008)as a framework for creating the necessary conditions for small businesses to thrive. During a breakfast meeting we met with
Eurochambres Secretary-General Arnaldo Abruzzini and Mechthild Wordorfer, who is acting director for SME’s competitiveness to discuss the act and our feedback. Abruzzini is a passionate character and I’m pretty glad he’s batting for team business as he talked a lot of sense.
Wordorfer was clearly expert in her area and someone who was completely focussed on trying to get the conditions right for start-ups. Following which I attended a panel debate with the four main European parties. MEP’s who sat on the panel were
Giles Chichester (Con),
Nigel Farage (UKIP),
Peter Skinner (Lab) and
Caroline Lucas (Greens). There wasn’t really much other than political point scoring between these four and – beyond soundbites – little substance for business to feel confident about.
What did stand out is – despite all the headline grabbing rhetoric – the UKIP isn’t actually doing very much for business by abstaining in all European votes – it effectively makes other countries stronger, so that was interesting to learn. MEP’s clearly have a job to do as the European Parliament is such a hugh institution, however I came away wondering about the detail and questioning what is actually achieved when Chambers of 400 MEP’s meet to debate , jurys out. End of the week I travelled to London where we picked up the
BOSS awards Manufacturing Excellence award (+£10M) category, so that was a great end.
Previous night we’d picked up Printer Vendor of the Year award at one of our key customers, so it was a real high to a very busy week.
Big annoucements from the Government today. A sell off of assets to contribute towards the big budget defecit that we find ourselves in. Reaction has been lukewarm to this proposal, which promises to yield around £16bn in contribution over the next two to four years (providing they can find buyers). The problem I have is that it does nothing to tackle the bureaucracy and inefficiency of the government. All it does is pump more money at a problem, without fixing the root cause. Like it or not, there needs to be cuts in the public sector. Efficiency needs to improve. Tough decisions need to be taken.
Quantitative easing and other fiscal stimulus are absolutely fine by me, inefficiency, red-tape and bureaucracy aren’t. The private sector has been taking one tough decision after another for over eighteen months now and they expect all areas of government to have to make the same choices. Selling the crown jewels now, to put a plaster on the debt situation could be described as short-termist. What were the options? What other things have been considered? Why wasn’t it announced at the recent party conference? What is the income impact in years 5-10 and in the longer 10-20 year window? Lot’s of questions. I wonder if we will get the answers?
The party conference season is nearly over. In Manchester today, it was Conservative Party leader David Cameron’s turn on the stage to reach out to the party faithful and the British public with his”compassionate Conservatism” speech. Things are hotting up. What is most interesting is the debate around which ground the electorate will vote upon. Is it just a vote for change? Is it a personality vote? Is it a vote against the war? Is it a vote against the banking crisis? No doubt, the media battle will become frenzied in the time ahead.
My view is that the electorate aren’t silly. Whilst I’m personally not very politically driven, I think it naive to think that we can just keep spending money and ignoring the incredible debts that the country has, not just piling more and more on the UK credit card each month. I would rather understand the scale of the problem, the timescales involved to solve it and the steps that need to be taken to resolve it, regardless of party. Whether or not the electorate agree, we’ll see. The Conservatives have put themselves out there and taken a risk, I’d rather they do that, so that we can begin to see clearer differences between the parties and make clearer judgements on the future, rather than anecdotal references to the past.
Oliver Letwin is in town as part of the Conservative Party Conference 2009. Today, I met him with around ten other major business leaders in Greater Manchester as part of the Greater Manchester Chamber Large Business Forum. Business leaders were keen to understand the latest thinking behind the Tories who have been accused of being a bit “light on detail.” The key points he raised are below: -
First major priority = Getting the macro scene into order. Suggesting that the shape of the financial crisis is difficult to see and that the economy may get a rude awakening when quantitative easing comes to an end. He remarked that the a fair, realistic and achieveable plan is needed for recovery.
He suggested three key areas for focus to help contribute towards the above: -
- Getting young people back to work, to ensure that they are not casualties of the recession.
- Creating a step-change in the regulator scene. Changing attitudes in Whitehall to ensure that it is easier to do business.
- Re-balancing national priorities. That is, stimulating sectors other than financial services.
He spoke at length about the competitiveness of UK Plc in the global marketplace, citing specific states in the USA who totally pull all of the stops out to win re-locations into their regions. He also remarked about the fact that India produced 40,000 engineers last year compared to 4,000 in the UK, suggesting that this contributes to a de-skilling in our economy.
The most interesting part of the discussion was around the idea of “ministerial will.” This issue came up as a result of a question around reducing legislation and red tape. He claimed that the Conservatives would legislate less and rely more on existing legislation to run the economy. This of course requies an “iron will” from ministers not to collapse in the noise of media pressure.
There probably wasn’t enough substance today. It’s hard when you’ve only got an hour or so, everyone wants to ask a question, you’ve a party conference on (so nothing can be pre-announced) and you’re deliberately keeping things top level due to the sensitivity of some of the big announcements which came out later in the day. What is evident is that politicians do need to listen to business. Business creates the wealth, the GDP, the GVA or whatever else measurement you need to show success. To be taken really seriously by business, The Conservatives need to beef up the detail for business leaders. Championing red tape isn’t enough. The election clock is ticking.
