How to Maintain Accountability for Sustainable Business Practices
Guest Post by Chelsea Lamb
Too many companies pay lip service to sustainability but do very little to actually reduce environmental harm. If you’re passionate about preventing pollution and concerned with curbing carbon, you want to avoid disingenuous commitments. One of the best ways to do this is to implement a culture of accountability in your sustainable business practices. Read on for more ideas from Solomon Bruce Consulting L.L.C.
Clearly Define Sustainable Business Practices
When you’re setting sustainability goals for your business, ambiguity is the enemy of achievement. Vague phrasing may sound good on paper, but it won’t allow you to enact any meaningful change. It’s important to identify specific action steps that will inform your sustainable business practices and guide your business.
Marketing these commitments can be an attractive selling point for your business, and it’s also another way to ensure accountability. If you publicize the sustainable business practices that you’ve committed to, you’re more likely to uphold the commitment since customers will be watching. According to research cited by Food Business News, sustainability is very important to 72% of customers.
If you’re worried that sustainable business practices will negatively impact your bottom line, don’t be — Business Standard notes that there’s evidence to suggest that sustainability increases profits. You should plan for higher startup costs, though, as eco-friendly products are often marginally more expensive than their unsustainable counterparts. This extra expense is often due to the costs of fair labor and higher quality materials.
The minor increase in cost is well worth the major reduction in environmental impact that your decisions may have. Businesses that maintain sustainable business practices often reduce waste, benefit local communities, and minimize their carbon footprint. Sustainable business practices can also improve air quality and prevent climate change.
Establish Guidelines for Maintaining Sustainability
Once you’ve established clear criteria for your company’s sustainable business practices, you’ll need to create guidelines to govern how compliance is measured. If one of your practices is to eliminate paper waste, for example, you need to identify what paper usage qualifies as waste, and how waste will be detected. This will help you execute your business’s principles with accountability.
You need to stick to your goals for starting and growing your business, too. If you’ve been waiting for the perfect moment to launch, it’s likely that the perfect moment will never come — you need to get started now. Establish an LLC to minimize your tax liability and avoid tons of paperwork. Partnering with a formation service is an affordable way to do this. Check your state laws to familiarize yourself with any applicable regulations, then compare various formation service sites like Legalzoom reviews for LLC by BestLLCServices.com to gauge which one is the best fit for you.
Create an Eco-Friendly Invoicing System
Implementing an eco-friendly invoice system should be on your business’s sustainability to-do list. If you rely on paper documents to send invoices to your clients, you’re wasting two precious resources — time and paper. Creating a professional invoice online is simple when you use pre-made templates. Customize a template with your company’s logo, text, and colors. This will help you adhere to your sustainable business practices and minimize waste.
Implement Sustainability by Maintaining Accountability
Accountability is key to acting responsibly as a business. This is especially true when your company’s actions could have a major impact on the environment. You need to minimize this impact with sustainable business practices, and you need to maintain accountability, too. With electronic invoicing, you can achieve these goals and use your business to make a difference.
Solomon Bruce Consulting L.L.C. is a professional management advisory services practice with a dedication to excellence in consulting services for business, government, industry and academia. Call us today to learn more! 817.386.3032
