Building sustainability into your small business's DNA

You run a small business. The list on your desk is full of things that keep the lights on – finish the proposal, send the invoices, sort the insurance, fix that glitch on the website.

Somewhere near the bottom sits a fuzzy line that says "do something about sustainability". It stays there for months.

Most founders Sarah Blake meets are in that position. Sarah runs Earthology, a sustainability consultancy that helps companies inch forward one step at a time, often through B Corp work and carbon literacy training.

One side of her business focuses on SMEs, which can include one-person start-ups to teams of 50. Among her clients are including therapists, design studios, beauty brands and small consultancies.

They usually tell the same story. They care, they recycle at home, they try not to waste energy. They feel uneasy when they see headlines about wildfires or floods on their phones between meetings.

But inside the business, sustainability feels like a separate assignment. A job to do when things calm down. And things never calm down.

What Sarah notices is that the turning point rarely comes from a glossy strategy. It comes when a business quietly moves sustainability from the "side project" column into everyday life.

It shows up in the mission statement, in the kind of work they say yes to and in the questions they start asking suppliers. It appears on meeting agendas alongside cash flow and sales.

For small businesses, the good news is that those habits are usually in place already. The challenge, as Sarah sees it, is deciding to point them in a slightly different direction.

How small businesses really "do sustainability" right now

When I ask Sarah how small businesses usually handle sustainability, she doesn't reach for theory. She goes straight to what she sees.

"A lot of the time someone has downloaded a template, put their logo on it, stuck it on the website and ticked a box. Then it just sits there doing nothing."

She's sympathetic about why that happens. She knows most of the businesses reading this won't have a boardroom. Some will barely have a spare chair.

"Small businesses don't tend to have sustainability teams. You're going to be outsourcing it, hopefully using grants or supports. So you have to bake it into the DNA of the business if you want it to make a difference."

What Sarah pushes instead is almost boringly practical.

"Embedding it into everything means it has to be in the mission. It has to be in the strategy.

"You say, 'I'm looking at this as a two- or three-year plan where I'm actively seeking clients that care about the planet. Then you put it into job descriptions and into meeting agendas.

"When you're reporting on sales or KPIs, you're also asking, 'Where are we at with sustainability?'."

That might sound lofty, but Sarah has a very grounded way of describing the shift in mindset.

"One of my clients said, 'How we do something is how we do everything'. I really believe that. How you do business is more important than what you do in your own life.

"The suppliers you pick, who you work with – that has a much bigger impact than whether you recycle your yoghurt pots."

Starting with mission and values, not a checklist

When Sarah talks about "embedding" sustainability, she doesn't start with recycling bins or energy suppliers. She starts with a blunt question – what is your business for?

"With B Corp, one of the first things they look at is the company's mission and whether what it's doing is having a positive impact on society."

That work to encapsulate the mission is the anchor that stops sustainability drifting off into a separate folder. It may sound like a small shift, but it changes the tone of decisions.

• A therapist who sees their mission as "making work less damaging for people" will think differently about taking on a client with a reputation for burning through staff.

• A design studio that states, in plain English, that it wants to "help brands that are trying to do less harm" has something to point to when a fossil fuel project lands in the inbox.

Sarah has watched this play out in hiring too. She tells the story of a firm with only a handful of staff that went through B Corp certification.

"They managed to secure a marketing director part time who was way above what they thought they could get.

"And the reason she gave was, 'I want to work for a B Corp-certified company'. So that mission and that certification suddenly mattered a lot more than the business expected."

Giving sustainability a seat at the table

Sarah keeps coming back to one simple move – writing sustainability into the work people are already meant to do.

In practice, that can look very ordinary.

A founder adds one line about sustainability into every staff role, even if "staff" is just a couple of part-timers. Someone in the business is named as the person who keeps an eye on it and reports back.

"For a lot of my clients, the questions are, 'Where are we at with B Corp?' 'Where are we at with ISO?' 'Where are we at with our science-based targets?'

"Those updates sit alongside the usual sales and operations updates. That's what helps to bake it in."

She's wary of grand gestures that fizzle out. A recurring item on an agenda impresses her more than a big one-off initiative.

"If you say, for the next three months I'm going to look at sustainability, then the first thing is education.

"Second thing is a certification that's relevant to your business. Then you start looking at a plan. You can't really do that at the beginning. You need those touchpoints built into how you run things."

Over time, that steady attention changes how the outside world sees the company. It shows up in the way the business talks about itself. It shows up in tenders and job ads.

"Ultimately, sustainability needs to be in your business's DNA if you want to use it as a point of sale.

"That's when it actually becomes a competitive advantage, not just a nice document on a shelf."

A three-month sustainability experiment

Sarah keeps coming back to a simple idea – treat sustainability like a short project, not a lifelong burden.

Say you decide that for the next three months, you're going to look at sustainability. What would you do?

Here's how that three-month experiment could look, using Sarah's advice.

Month 1: Learn and apply the basics

1. Get some basic education

Set aside one hour a week. Use it to:

• watch one free webinar or short course that's specific to your sector

• read one guide on small business sustainability from a trusted source

• learn the simple stuff – what "carbon footprint", "scope 1, 2 and 3" and "supply chain impact" actually mean for you

2. Write a simple sustainability policy

Keep it to one page and make it honest:

• What your business does

• What you care about when it comes to people and planet

• Three to five things you're doing already

• Three things you want to improve in the next year

Put it on your website. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to reflect reality.

Month 2: Use the frameworks

3. Start a framework that suits you

Sarah's go-to tools are B Corp certification and carbon literacy training. Pick one:

• B Corp certification

  • Create a free account.

  • Spend an hour a week answering questions in the five sections: governance, workers, community, environment and customers.

  • Notice which questions you can answer easily and which make you stop.

• Carbon literacy training

  • Book on to a certified course that fits your schedule.

  • Use it to understand your personal and business footprint, and how to talk about climate with clients and staff.

Month 3: Turn it outward

4. Look at your website and digital footprint

• Run your website through a basic website carbon checker.

• Take down pages and files you no longer need.

• If the results from the checker are poor, ask your developer or host what you can improve.

5. Talk to suppliers and customers

Sarah is clear that small nudges matter.

• Ask one key supplier what they're doing on sustainability.

• Ask if they have any certifications, policies or targets they can share.

• Ask two or three good customers a blunt question:

  • "If you had to pick between a business with B Corp or carbon literacy and one without, which would you pick?"

Those answers will tell you whether visible action, such as certification or a stronger policy, would help you win and keep work.

At the end of three months

Take one hour to look back:

• What did you learn that surprised you?

• Which parts felt useful and which felt like noise?

• Which single change made the biggest difference to how you think about your business?

As Sarah says, once you've done that bit of training and reflection, your awareness of what you need to do next will be a lot clearer.

You don't have to map out the next 10 years. Just decide the next few practical moves that fit the business you already run.

Letting the frameworks do the heavy lifting

When small businesses ask Sarah where to even begin, she doesn't point them to a 200-page report.

She directs them to two things that already exist – B Corp certification and carbon literacy training.

B Corp certification

Sarah says:

"If you're a small business, B Corp is a great way to establish policies and procedures that you've maybe left on the long finger. Putting things into your employee handbook, having 360 appraisals.

"It isn't just about the environment. It's about social sustainability, diversity and inclusion, your customers, all your stakeholders."

What appeals to Sarah is that the assessment itself becomes a kind of guided tour.

"You go through an assessment, which is free. Anyone can start it and work through it, there's no charge.

"The assessment covers seven sections, on topics such as "Fair Work", "Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion", "Human Rights" and "Climate Action".

"Even the questions make you think, 'Why are they asking me that?' 'Why is that relevant?' The whole thing is like an education in itself."

There's a long list of B Corps on Earthology's books, and they don't look alike.

"We've got one client doing disposable towels, we've got a coffee company, we've got a beauty brand, we've got a law firm.

"They all have different impacts, but the B Corp assessment works for all of them. The way you answer the questions gives you a track that's tailored to your business."

Carbon literacy training

Carbon literacy plays a different role.

Sarah runs accredited courses through the Carbon Literacy Project in the UK and sees them as a good entry point for microbusinesses.

"You go through six hours of training. A lot of it looks at what the climate crisis is all about, but it's more than that.

"We do an individual carbon footprint calculator, we talk about things people can do at home and at work – especially working from home – and how to talk about the climate crisis with other people."

The certificate at the end matters more than some founders expect.

"For small businesses, it's an accreditation you can put on your website and show your customers. A lot of people do the course for that reason.

"They want something to put on LinkedIn or to show they're doing something, and they want ideas for their green teams that are easy enough to achieve."

By the time someone has done that, she finds their thinking has usually shifted.

"When you've done that little bit of training, your awareness of what you need to do next and which fires you want to put out next is a lot clearer.

"Education first, always. Otherwise, you can end up down a path that isn't right for your business."

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