Why Service Industries Need Sustainability Too

While service industries don't have smokestacks and may have less environmental impacts than a manufacturing facility, they too can benefit from sustainable business strategies to mitigate risks and capture new business opportunities.

It is not uncommon for small business owners to falsely believe that their business it too small or too service based to benefit from the rewards of "greening" their business. However, small businesses are just as susceptible to the risks larger organizations face: regulatory and legal risk, operational hiccups, and reputational risk.

Our business sustainability consulting practice encourages our clients to look at risks through the lens of business sustainability. Business sustainability, defined as evaluating the environmental and social impacts of your business to long term profitability. Business sustainability is a vehicle to enable your business to meet your goals of profit, growth, and revenue while positively impacting the environment and social realms of your business.

Consider how asking the following questions from a business sustainability perspective differs from the traditional approach:

What business are we in?
What are the industry risks?
What's our unique positioning within the industry, and what gives us competitive advantage?
What are the strategic imperatives that are tied to our overall strategy?
What are the processes that are tied to the strategic imperatives, and then the risks that are tied to those?

Early adopters of a pro-environment policy are answering these questions differently. Business sustainability reshapes the business conversation. By evaluating business risks through the lens of sustainability, small businesses are benefiting from the tangible and intangible rewards of going green: