Greening your business?

greener&leaner

Background:
I'm a civil engineer by training, with a masters in sustainable development. For the past three years I have been working as a sustainability consultant providing advice on how to make buildings more sustainable. My intention has always been to set up my own consultancy, unfortunately redundancy caught up with me before I had time to build the network of contacts I would like to.
However, no time like the present . . .


The idea:
I think that most businesses have a massive scope to improve their sustainability, and to save themselves money in the process. With the background I have in sustainability I'm absolutely certain I can help businesses to do this.


The problem:
To date the projects I have worked on have been within a defined and specific brief. As a first step to setting up my own business, I need to work out exactly what I'm selling and how the process will work.


What I'm looking for:
I'm looking for small businesses owners and managers who are interested in being pilot projects. The business can be anything, a pub, a cafe, a shop, an office. It doesn't even have to be a business it could be a charity or other organisation.


What I'd need from you:
Initially an afternoon of your time to sit down and ask about your business and look over your premises and generally see how things are done and decisions are made.


What I expect to do for you:
From that I expect to go off and use my knowledge of what best practice standards are and a bit of business specific research to develop a plan of action to make your business more sustainable. I will provide simple, cheap, specific suggestions that have the scope to make you a greener business.

Confidentially is of course assured, and if you need any more details of my qualifications/experience I'm happy to provide them.

If you're interested or know someone who might be, I'd be delighted if you PM me.

Any questions or clarification, post away!

greener&leaner

Hmmm, well no responses on the thread, though I did get one pm,
probably shouldn't have posted it on a weekend!

I do sort of intend to use this thread as a mini-diary of my progress and for general comments etc. Nothing like a bit of self-motivation.

I had heard about a group of small businesses working with the help of the EPA to do roughly what I want to do. I met up with one of the guys who was involved today. The results they got were gob smacking. In an industry where the owners had thought they were cut to the bone, some basic training on good energy/water/waste housekeeping cut their expenses by several thousand euro on average.

My current to do list is
1) Contact local county enterprise board
2) Register business name
3) Register .ie website
4) Contact local businesses in my area
5) Contact the EPA guy behind the above scheme

Apologies to hear about the redundancy but don't let that put you off. I wish you the best of luck with this and fair play for doing something. Your post is one of the most defined and structured ones I've seen on here so you definitely seem motivated and determined. Keep up the good work.