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Join for freePosted: Thu 24th Sep 2026
Have you ever lost a tender because you couldn't answer a sustainability question?
Or watched a sales proposal stall because a larger customer wanted ESG data you didn't have ready?
In this Lunch and Learn, Donal Quinn, founder of ENSO, walks SME owners through what sustainability actually means for their business commercially, what data they need to have ready, and how to turn their sustainability position into something that wins tenders, strengthens proposals and builds trust with larger customers.
A clear picture of the sustainability regulations and frameworks that are already affecting SMEs and their larger customers
What sustainability data you need and how to start collecting it
Practical first steps to build a sustainability position that wins tenders, strengthens sales proposals and protects key contracts
Donal is the founder of ENSO, a B Corp-certified sustainability platform built for SMEs. He started ENSO with a clear purpose: to help SMEs have a positive environmental impact and make a real difference in their communities.
Having seen the same problem repeatedly – SMEs losing tenders, struggling to respond to supply chain data requests and managing sustainability questions with no structured support in place – he created a purpose-built solution for them.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Caitriona: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Caitriona, and I'll be your host today. For those of you attending the Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for startups and small businesses.
I'm pleased to introduce Donal Quinn, who's the founder of ENSO. In this session, Donal will explain what sustainability actually means for your business commercially.
If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. Today's webinar will be recorded, and we will send a follow-up email to you with the recording and further resources later today. Over to you, Donal.
Donal: Brilliant, thanks, and good morning, everybody. Firstly, I'd like to thank Caitriona, the team and Enterprise Nation for having us here. For us, sustainability is such an important area.
At ENSO, our mission is to simplify sustainability for SMEs and help make it one of their key competitive advantages, while also having a positive impact on the environment and their local communities. We've got a lot to get through this afternoon. I will be sharing these slides, but feel free to take notes, and we'll have questions at the very end.
To kick us off, right now SMEs are losing business because they cannot share the sustainability data that their customers need, and this is really where I want to start. Businesses are missing out on tenders because they cannot provide sustainability information. They're also failing supply chain requests because they do not have the data ready to share.
They're losing key contracts because they cannot prove to their bigger customers that they are an ethical and responsible supplier and give them the information that they need. Throughout this presentation, I want to bring you through the frameworks and where sustainability is right now. Then we'll look at how you, as a business, can start getting your information together and putting it in a shareable format, so you can start winning more business through sustainability.
We're going to look at the landscape to begin. On the left-hand side, you'll see different certifications that affect businesses around sustainability. We have EcoVadis, which is a scored report that you'll get on your environmental and some of your social performance.
We're seeing a lot of bigger businesses – the likes of Lidl, I know, are doing it – and a lot of larger corporates using EcoVadis to do due diligence on their suppliers. It's a snapshot in time: a one-year report. You get rated, and then you can share this with your larger customers if they ask for it.
Next is certified B Corp. Just to say as well, we do have businesses from the EU, Ireland and the UK here, so we will be looking at both markets. What we're seeing, especially with Irish businesses selling into the UK and vice versa, is that this information is equally valid.
We are a certified B Corp – we have gone through the process and gotten our certification. I would say that this is more for B2C brands. We're seeing it with food producers or skincare providers that face the customer and want to show that they are ethical, responsible and a good brand to buy from.
EcoVadis, we're seeing, is more B2B. ISOs, which some of our customers are using, are definitely more industry-specific, looking at very niche areas. Broadly, we're seeing these with slightly larger companies – 50 or 100 employees and more – where they're a requirement within their industry.
Then we're seeing Sedex as well. It's probably not as popular as EcoVadis, but it's a supplier due diligence framework where larger companies use the Sedex platform to ask their suppliers different questions to shore up their supply chain. So these are some certificates you might have come across – as I said, EcoVadis is more B2B and B Corp is more B2C.
Then there are the regulatory frameworks. In the EU and Ireland, there's the CSRD – the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive – which now applies to businesses with 1,000 employees or more. So don't worry, I don't think anyone on this call will have to report through that framework.
But the EU has released what's called the EU voluntary standard, previously known as the VSME – the voluntary SME reporting framework. The V is for voluntary, so you're not required to do this by law, but it gives you a framework to start gathering your information and sharing it with suppliers, stakeholders and customers. It's a really nice framework, and we'll go into it in a little more detail.
If you're in the manufacturing space, which a lot of our customers are, the EU has now released its packaging and packaging waste regulations. These mean you have to be really specific about what's on your packaging and how your packaging is made, so this is definitely something to be aware of in that space.
Looking at the UK, probably the most prominent area that we're working on now with UK businesses is UK social value. We'll go into more detail on that, but it's more around public procurement, although it does have an impact on the private sector.
Similarly to the packaging and packaging waste regulations, in the UK we have the EPR as well. To be honest, we haven't worked with too many businesses on this, but we're aware of the regulations. If you are in the UK and in the manufacturing space, this is definitely something to look up and be aware of.
I'm going to do a mini deep dive on the two main regulatory areas in the EU and the UK. First is the EU voluntary standard, which is derived from the CSRD. It's broken down into two modules.
One is the basic module, and for a lot of people on this webinar, this is probably going to be more relevant. The basic module is generally for micro businesses with one to 10 employees. It's a set of 50 data points spread across 11 different areas, so it's a really simple framework that you can use, and a nice way to manage and collate your information.
The goal of the voluntary standard is to standardise sustainability reporting for SMEs. Currently, as a business, you're being asked to supply information for different reasons, to different people, in different formats. This takes up a lot of time, and I've talked to businesses where it really can be overwhelming, creating friction and barriers and putting people off sustainability.
So the EU wants to standardise it: you create one report, and then you're able to share that easily. It's a really great idea, and it was only properly ratified at the end of July. If you're a UK-based business, this is a great thing to have in your back pocket if you're looking at the EU as a market, but also as a way to start measuring and collating your information.
If you're a slightly bigger business with 10 employees plus, there's the comprehensive module. That's up to, I think, 92 data points – the 50 from the basic module plus 42 additional ones. I'm not going to go into these in a lot of detail, as you will have these slides.
In environmental metrics, you have energy and greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity, resource use, circular economy and waste management – these are just samples of what they cover. You can use this as a way to start building your own framework and identifying areas to focus on and gather information about.
Then we're looking at social metrics. A lot of the ones we've listed here look internally at your workforce – how you're treating them in terms of health and safety, training and professional development. It also covers some of your external social metrics, such as community engagement and working with local charities, and we'll list a lot more of these later in the presentation.
Then it looks at governance as well, such as corruption and bribery. The way this is formatted is really simple: a lot of it is yes or no, and if it's a yes, you input the figure or a little bit of text. It's a really simple framework to follow and fill out, and it's split into environmental, social and governance.
Now looking at the UK, there's social value, which I think is a really great initiative. For all public-facing tenders above, I think, £123,000 – so medium-sized tenders and above – the UK wants to introduce what it calls social value. Social value asks people responding to tenders to demonstrate their environmental or social impact, or their social activities.
It's broken up into eight different areas, and the people writing the tenders are able to choose and pull in elements from each of these areas. They range from economic growth, skills, resilient supply chains, clean energy and safer streets to breaking down barriers to opportunity, future pipeline, and the NHS and wellbeing.
The NHS, I know, has got really rigorous social value criteria in its tenders, which is brilliant, and it's a minimum of 10%. We were speaking with someone in Manchester recently, and they were saying that in some of their tenders, up to 30% of that individual tender will involve answering something around your social or environmental performance, which is brilliant.
The difference between this and what's happening in the EU is that they're asking for quantifiable data, which is really interesting. What did you do, and what impact did that have? What did you donate to a charity, and can you quantify that impact?
So it's slightly different, with a little more detail on quantifying the data, but it's great. Again, it helps you differentiate yourself: what have you done differently from your competitors? Everyone's got similar products and similar pricing, but what have you done in terms of social value and social impact?
One other thing to note: we were chatting with the same person, and they said that previously, social value was more outwardly focused – what did you do within your community, and did you work with charities? This is now going to look a bit more inwardly at what you're doing in terms of social value and your employees. That means employee welfare, health and safety, and again, training and professional development.
We're seeing some overlaps with the voluntary standard here, and what we're trying to show is that a lot of this information is really, really similar. But if you're based in the UK, I think this inward look at your employees and how you're treating them is going to be a very big area of focus. Equally, if you're an EU- or Ireland-based company looking at the UK, the social value model is something that you're going to have to look at.
So how does this impact the private sector? At ENSO, we work mainly with private sector businesses, and B2B businesses a lot of the time. Just to clarify, when we say SME, we're typically working with businesses from one employee right up to 250 employees, so we're right in the middle of this.
In the EU, there's also something similar to social value that I wanted to mention, called green public procurement policies. Here, the EU has given guidance around public tendering, and each country then adapts that itself. In Ireland, they've adapted it so that it's up to 10% of a tender.
What we're seeing now in public tenders is that they're asking for environmental and social criteria, averaging out at a 5–10% weighting for each tender, so it's still very substantial. If you do not have this information, you risk losing out on a tender because of it, which is crazy. What we'll see is that a lot of the information is very easy to gather and then easy to share when you know what you're doing and have a framework to do it.
That's the public side, and it's also having a ripple effect within the private sector. In terms of procurement, a lot of larger businesses are implementing green procurement policies. They're saying to their suppliers, or in their new contracts, that they want to see your product and your price, but ESG or some sort of environmental or social criteria is now being weighted really strongly.
These criteria are really aligning with the green public procurement policies. We're seeing the likes of the big pharma companies stipulating that unless their current or future suppliers can show that they have environmental, social or sustainability plans in place, they're not going to be considered for these contracts. And this is actually growing.
What we're seeing is that some of the heavy regulatory reporting is decreasing a bit, but it's actually being driven a lot more by the businesses themselves, which is great to see. We're also seeing a big shift in stakeholder and investor sustainability expectations.
We work with a lot of startups and some investors as well. What we're seeing is that investors, even if they're not investing directly in the environmental, sustainability or ESG space, want the businesses they're investing in to have some sort of focus on environmental or social issues. They want them to at least not be doing any harm to the environment, to work well within their community and to have some plan to improve.
So sustainability information is becoming part of the due diligence for a lot of investors. Then there are boards, or even acquisitions – we're working with one business that's in acquisition conversations at the minute, and the sustainability point is actually huge for the people who are acquiring them. It's amazing how these things run throughout the business.
For us, when we're talking about sustainability, we really want to show that it's going to have an impact on your sales, your marketing and your business growth. We want businesses to then prioritise it and invest in sustainability.
The final part here is providing evidence for tenders and in supply chains, especially in the crazy, turbulent business market that we see at the minute. A lot of larger businesses want to shore up their supply chains and make sure they're resilient – we've got so many things going on globally at the minute. So large businesses want to make sure that they're working with ethical and responsible businesses they can rely on, and that won't have a negative impact on their brand.
We've seen cases where suppliers have acted irresponsibly, and that's had a negative impact up the chain on bigger businesses. So for you as a business, if you can have even a basic sustainability strategy in place, and show that you're doing the right things and that you plan to improve, even incrementally over time, that's fantastic. It will help you position yourself really well as a trusted, valued and good prospective supplier for these larger businesses.
So how does this look for SMEs? This is a snapshot of all the different areas where you can be asked for sustainability data. Looking at regulations, pretty much everyone on this call will not need to report legally on their sustainability activities.
So this is really about commercial value: how can you get your data together and use it commercially, whether for bigger customers or to build your brand? On a regulatory basis, you will not need to report currently. But the frameworks are there in terms of the voluntary standard, and the PPWR is more something that you will actually need to have in place or be aligned with.
On the UK side, there's social value and the UK EPR. Again, social value is not a stipulation, but on a commercial level you need it for tenders. Then there are certificates – depending on what sector you're in, is there a need for one?
A lot of certificates are for either branding or aligning with bigger customers, and you'll need your information for that. Our big goal with this diagram is to show that your sustainability data is going to sit in the middle, but it's going to be used for many different things and functions to help your business grow in different areas.
Our biggest message to the customers we work with is to do this once: front-load a lot of the hard work and get your information together in an easily shareable format. Then you can really get benefit from it across many different areas of your business.
Supply chain is actually where we're doing a lot more of our work. Probably two years ago, we were looking really heavily at the regulation side, especially the EU's CSRD, which was going to be a very robust reporting framework, and a lot of SMEs would have had to have a lot of information ready for bigger businesses. But now we're actually doing a lot more work in the supply chain.
Customer data requests are huge for us right now. Businesses of any size working with larger businesses are literally getting emails or customer questionnaires with 20 or 30 questions all around ESG – your environmental impact, your policies, your social impact. They need to have this information to keep these contracts and their supplier and customer relationships strong.
Supplier engagement is interesting as well. We're also working with customers who are sharing their information back down the stream with some of their smaller suppliers. They want to say, "Look, this is what we're doing on sustainability, this is what we're probably going to ask you for in the future, and we're going to bring you on the journey with us."
Then there's governance, like I touched on – board updates, investor updates and investor due diligence at the very beginning. Your sustainability data sits in the middle of all of this. And we haven't even mentioned marketing and brand building, which is also a huge area where your data can be used.
So what does this mean for SMEs? For the businesses that we work with, it means, firstly, a really increased importance of sustainability data. When we go into a business, information is usually scattered and saved in different places and different drives.
It's now really important to identify what you need for your sustainability reporting and information sharing, where it is and where you store it, and just have that ready. The importance of that has really drastically increased in terms of working with bigger customers.
Then we're looking at sustainability strategy and data management. It's about getting a structure in place so you know where your data is, with a strategy to share it and to continue having an impact.
With some of the certificates – look, they're great, and they probably give businesses a framework, but a lot of the time it's, "OK, we'll do this in January or February, and then that's it. We've done our sustainability for the year." For us, that's not our approach.
We get your information together, but we really feel it's important for businesses to keep continuously improving. Even if it's incremental, keep doing small actions to improve your business around sustainability. It's not something you just do once a year to tick a box – it's something we want to continue improving upon.
The big message from today's presentation is really around potential new business opportunities. That's either maintaining current relationships or getting new tenders and new business contracts, including by putting sustainability in business proposals.
With some of our customers, even if it's not directly asked for, we're including it as a tag-on to a business or sales proposal. Even if it's a basic strategy or just a short list of what you're doing, it's really good to have that in a shareable format. You can pop it at the end of a proposal and say, "By the way, check out our sustainability strategy – you might be interested in what we're doing in this space."
So those are some of the reasons, and what it all means for SMEs. That covers the whys – why sustainability is important and what the key drivers are – and now we'll look at how we're going to do it.
Where we start here is the who. In the majority of SMEs – and I could safely say it for everyone on this call – you will not have a full-time sustainability manager whose job is to look after all of this information gathering, strategy creation and data sharing. Generally, it's either driven by the business owner or, hopefully, the business owner is involved in terms of support.
Then there are going to be different people in the business, and it's completely different for literally every business that we work with. There are people from sales, HR, finance, marketing and operations who are all doing their own full-time jobs. They need to somehow figure out what sustainability is, what's relevant to them and their business, and how to actually do it.
It can be really, really challenging, but it's definitely manageable. For us, it's about identifying the people within your business who have access to the information.
There are two types of people we would say to get on your green team. The first is people connected to the data: who has it – a lot of the time, that could be someone in operations or HR – who's going to share it, such as people in marketing or sales, and who needs it, which is often people in sales managing proposals.
Then there are going to be people on your team who are just genuinely and naturally passionate about sustainability. If you bring them on board, that passion and enthusiasm will really drive it, and it's a great way to get things moving and build some momentum.
We do full workshops on this, and this is a really quick snapshot of the key points. If you're starting out and you're the business owner, it's about asking what you need to do, how you can start and whether there's anyone on your team to pull in.
Can you create a small green team, sustainability team or whatever you want to call it, that's going to meet monthly and just put sustainability on the agenda? I think that's really, really important. There's lots more to this, and we're happy to talk to businesses about it, but that gives you a snapshot.
Then, where to start? We never start by building a big strategy that lists all the things you're not doing, because that can be really scary and overwhelming. We always start with businesses by looking at what data they already have in place and what they're already doing.
And I guarantee you're doing more than you think you're doing. Broadly, if we split it up into environmental, social and governance, there are things you might already have that you can put your hand on. For environmental, that's electricity use, like your bills, and for social, have you worked with local charities or community groups?
For governance, what policies and procedures do you already have? You probably already have an employee handbook, a diversity and inclusion policy or different bits and pieces. We're going to give you a framework to start gathering this information, so start there.
This is where you can say, "OK, this isn't so scary, and I actually have a lot to talk about." This is our platform at ENSO, and we've broken sustainability up into these four categories. Feel free to take this as a framework to start gathering information.
I think the first step is to have that framework, so you're literally just dragging and dropping things, and you know where they are. Business impact is your policies and procedures – your vision statement, employee handbook and so on. Trading impact looks at your whole value chain, so depending on what sector you're in, that could be your raw materials or sustainable sourcing.
It could also be looking at your end customer and making sure you have open lines of communication. That one's quite broad and sector-specific. Environmental impact looks at your energy, water and waste – digital emissions are now huge – as well as biodiversity and circular economy, and these are simple things you can start looking at.
Then social impact, for us, is really around working with your community. Can you work with local charities, or offer volunteering or staff days? And like I said, in the UK social value area, employee health and wellbeing is now such a strong focus.
It's coming up a lot more, and again, for a lot of businesses, you are doing the right things. You probably just haven't written them down or put them into a list yet.
The final part is around communication. We've built this out on our platform, but for you, this is just a simple framework: be transparent and be credible. We do not want you to greenwash, but we want to make sure that you're confident communicating your sustainability, either online or directly to customers or stakeholders.
The simple framework to remember starts with what you are doing. Be detailed and specific, and make a commitment in one or two lines.
Then, how are you doing it? Add in some additional details on how you're actually addressing this impact or how you're going to address that commitment. Then the biggest thing of all: can you prove it and back it up with at least some sort of supporting documentation?
When you're talking about this or including it in a report, you're then able to be confident about what you're communicating, and you're not going to be greenwashing. It's all about proof points and evidence-based communications now. If I can leave you with anything, that's really the strongest point when you're talking about your sustainability.
A quick word on ENSO. We've built a sustainability platform specifically for SMEs, where you can create your strategy, invite your team members and take meaningful action to continually progress. We have a public web page, which I'll show you in a second, and reporting as well, so you can use all of your information to share with your stakeholders.
For public-facing communications, we have a really nifty public sustainability web page, which you can link to or embed in your website. We've also got a suite of reports, some of which are now AI-powered, which is really exciting.
A final point from us, to pull it all together: where does sustainability really pay you back? First, it wins you more business, and I really want to reinforce this. It can win new tenders and sales proposals, it protects existing key contracts that you do not want to lose, and it helps you prepare for customer data requests.
It also strengthens your brand. Can you differentiate yourself from your competition and build your brand by including sustainability as a piece of your brand story?
It also leads to growth and scaling. It improves staff retention, opens access to green finance such as loans, and supports investor due diligence. And it saves you costs on your bills by helping you be more energy efficient.
Thank you, and sorry – there was a lot in that, in a very short space of time. Are there any questions?
Caitriona: Thank you, Donal. We can start with this question: are customer expectations changing faster than the regulatory requirements?
Donal: Yes, I believe so. On a B2C level, we're obviously in a cost-of-living crisis, and people are really looking at what they're paying. But if you're able to have a great product and a great price, and also include sustainability, I think people are willing to pay a little bit more for a sustainable product.
So customer expectations in the B2C world definitely are changing faster. B Corp, I know, is a really strong certificate to have in the UK, and I think when people see that B Corp logo on the shelf, they're more inclined to pick it up.
But in the B2B space, it is huge. You need to have your sustainability information if you want to be in that bigger supply chain. If you're a small B2B operator, maybe you'll be fine, but if you want to work with bigger customers, you definitely need it.
Caitriona: Thank you. We're coming towards the end of the session, but we do have time for a final question. How can SMEs avoid making sustainability claims that they can't substantiate?
Donal: I think the answer is nearly in the question: you need to be able to substantiate them. For us, it's about breaking everything down area by area and then impact by impact, so getting granular.
You're not just talking about your environmental impact – you're talking specifically about your strategy on energy, and then backing that up with either your policy document or your bills. Then what is your policy on social impact? Break that down into the individual charities you're working with.
So it's about being more granular and then being able to back up those granular details with actual evidence, instead of making broad, sweeping statements. That's how we do it.
Caitriona: Perfect, thank you so much. Thanks to everyone for joining us on today's webinar, and thank you, Donal, for your presentation. We'll be sharing the recording and further resources in a follow-up email this afternoon.
Donal: Brilliant. Thanks, everybody.
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