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Posted: Tue 8th Sep 2026
11 min read
Donal Quinn is the founder and CEO of ENSO, a sustainability platform helping small and medium-sized businesses understand, manage and communicate their environmental and social impact.
With a background in marketing, Donal became interested in sustainability after seeing how businesses were often doing positive things in their communities but struggling to bring those activities together into a clear strategy.
Today, ENSO helps SMEs organise their sustainability activity, identify gaps and produce evidence-based reports they can use with customers, suppliers and procurement teams.
Donal’s interest in sustainability began while working as a marketing manager for a property developer, where part of his role involved community engagement.
He worked with local communities, charities and groups, and found the social impact side of the role particularly rewarding.
But he also noticed a gap in how businesses communicated this work.
He notes:
“Firstly, I found that part of the job very rewarding.
"Secondly, as a marketing manager, I was posting that stuff on our social media, but it wasn’t structured. For example, we did an event, we posted about it and that was it.
"It was never grouped and talked about in terms of this is what we’re doing as a business, and this is our impact.”
That experience made Donal think about the many people who, like him, weren’t sustainability specialists but were increasingly expected to understand and communicate sustainability within their roles.
He continues:
“I felt that there were probably a lot of people like me who weren’t sustainability managers, but still had to do elements of sustainability and learn about it, know what to do, and then had to communicate it properly.
"So that’s where the idea for the business started.”
The opportunity to turn the idea into a business came during lockdown. Like many people working from home, Donal found himself with time to think about what he wanted to do next.
Sustainability was something he was already passionate about, but he also saw a genuine business opportunity.
In Ireland, the New Frontiers Phase Two programme gave him the opportunity to leave his job and work on his business idea full-time.
He explains:
“To be honest, lockdown was the sort of driver for working from home. It gave me a little bit of time to think and see exactly where I wanted to go next.
"This was always something I had a passion for.”
He describes leaving employment to work on the business as “a big leap of faith”, but the programme gave him six months of support to develop the idea full-time.
“Lockdown gave me the time to think. I was lucky to be in Ireland and get that support. The programme is great for any young or new entrepreneurs.”
ENSO launched its platform in September 2022. Since then, it has continued to evolve alongside changes in sustainability regulation, procurement requirements and the needs of its customers.
One of the biggest misconceptions Donal encounters is that sustainability is simply about energy use and electricity bills.
For SMEs, he believes sustainability needs to be considered much more broadly.
He explains:
“Sustainability is more than energy and electricity bills.
"On our platform, we’ve built a framework that looks at your business, social, trading and environmental impact, including how a company treats its employees, works with local communities and chooses its suppliers."
There is another barrier Donal sees regularly: businesses feeling they need to have everything figured out before they can start talking about sustainability.
His advice is to resist the temptation to wait for perfection.
For Donal, being transparent about where the business is now – as well as where it wants to get to – is more useful than making claims that can’t be backed up.
He advises:
“If you can show that you’ve audited your business, you know what your impact is, you’re taking action against the impact, and for the ones that you’re not, show that you have a plan.”
For many small businesses, sustainability can easily slip down the priority list.
Owners are already dealing with rising costs, new technology, customers, staffing and countless other challenges. Donal believes the key is to demonstrate that sustainability isn’t simply another task to add to the list.
It can have a direct commercial impact.
For consumer-facing businesses, sustainability can help build trust and strengthen a brand.
For businesses selling to larger organisations, it can become even more important when responding to tenders, sales proposals and customer data requests.
He says:
“It’s linked to your marketing and helps you build a better brand and build trust with your customers.
"If you’re B2C, showing that you’re sustainable can sometimes help you position yourself as a really important brand to your customers.”
This is particularly relevant for SMEs that sit within larger supply chains. A small contractor, for example, may be asked to demonstrate its sustainability credentials by a much larger customer with its own ESG requirements.
ENSO was built around a simple problem: most SMEs don’t have a full-time sustainability manager.
Instead, sustainability might be handled by the business owner, marketing manager, HR manager or a combination of people who are already busy running the company.
ENSO gives those a central place to manage their sustainability activity.
Donal notes:
“They’re trying to do it on top of their full-time role. So the platform is a place where sustainability lives within the business.
"It allows teams to upload documents and data, create action plans and work collaboratively."
Donal encourages businesses to make sustainability part of their regular management rhythm, rather than something they only think about when a customer asks for information.
Teams can use the platform to review what they’ve already achieved, identify outstanding actions and decide what they want to focus on over the coming months.
The final piece is communication.
ENSO produces a public-facing sustainability webpage that businesses can share with customers or through their own website, alongside reports that can be tailored for tenders, sales proposals and customer data requests.
The aim is to make sustainability information accessible without sacrificing credibility.
He says:
“It’s a user-friendly way for businesses to communicate what they’re doing around sustainability.
"It's not a 40-page detailed sustainability document that nobody’s going to read. It’s robust and evidence-based, so businesses are backing up their claims and not greenwashing.”
For SMEs wondering where to begin with sustainability, Donal recommends starting with an honest assessment of the business as it currently stands:
Before creating a strategy, identify what you’re already doing and where the gaps are.
Then consider the sector you’re operating in, where your customers are based and which regulations apply to you.
It’s also important to think about the organisations you work with. A small supplier working with a large corporation may need to prioritise different areas of sustainability depending on the requirements of that customer.
Donal says:
“There’s actually the planning, even before you make the strategies. Thinking about who do we need to align with, who are our customers and what regulations.”
Once those priorities are clear, Donal recommends keeping commitments short and specific, adding detail about how they will be delivered and providing evidence to support them.
He also suggests breaking the plan into manageable timeframes. His approach is to look at what can be achieved over different timeframes.
For a small business, Donal believes this is already a significant amount of progress.
Building a business has taught Donal that even the best plans need to be adaptable. This is particularly true when you’re operating in a market influenced by changing regulations and frameworks.
He notes:
“Things change all the time, so your plans need to be flexible.”
Rather than becoming too attached to a long-term plan, Donal believes founders need to be prepared to change direction when circumstances shift.
It’s a lesson that applies beyond sustainability: markets change, customer expectations change, and the business itself changes as it grows.
ENSO has been primarily focused on Ireland, but Donal is now expanding into the UK, with a new office in Manchester.
The next stage is to grow across the UK and eventually the wider EU, while continuing to align the platform with emerging sustainability frameworks for SMEs.
The ambition is to make ENSO a go-to platform for small businesses that need a practical way to manage and report their sustainability activity.
For Donal, the message to small businesses is straightforward: don’t wait until sustainability feels completely manageable before you begin.
He advises:
“Don’t be afraid, just get started even though it can seem overwhelming.”
His advice is to find a framework that works for the business and start building from what you’re already doing.
The goal isn’t to have everything perfect from day one. It’s to understand where you are, identify where you need to improve and keep moving forward.
