This report includes an interview with the George Danellis, the Principal from The Vector Group, which is a small business consulting company for businesses that want to go green and work towards sustainability.

Full Transcription:

Rasika Ranganathan: One fifth of the total site energy is consumed by lighting in commercial buildings such as this one. A simple change as small as conserving the amount of lighting when the building is not in use can go a long way. What many businesses may not realize is that the steps to going green are not as complicated as one can assume. There are several resources and organizations that can help a business maintain cost efficiency while working towards a sustainable goal. It can be as simple as turning off your lights when you don’t use them.

The Vector Group is a sustainability, green consulting service for small businesses. George Danellis, the Principal at The Vector Group, will tell us more about the process small businesses go through when they decide to go green.

What is the Vector Group?

George Danellis: Sure, Rasika, thank you. The Vector Group is a business performance consultancy. And this means we consultant to businesses, primarily smaller companies, smaller businesses on their overall performance.

Is going green cost effective and energy efficient?

George Danellis: Well, it’s quite easy to, whether it’s sustainability initiative or any initiative,  our company to undertake one that doesn’t give a return or not immediately. Generally, our approach at our clients is to isolate, first of all, what’s important to them. And then to see where the proverbial low-hanging fruit is and to develop the structure for sustainability within the business. Then to have success and the success needs to be measured. So we find that working with them on something they’re interested in and gives a quick return and a quick taste of what it’s like to undertake an initiative successfully, then opens the door and spurs innovation within the client’s business as to what’s possible.

Give us an example of a particular client who worked towards sustainability.

George Danellis: Well, we had a client, and they had a workspace. They were running with basically one control system. And they had about thirty employees. Just by implementing measures around IT, basically allowing their computers to go into a proper sleep mode, there are some climate control systems. We encouraged them to move away from bottled water and implemented a filtration system as well as a program was incentivized. Employees used their own containers. And within a short period of time, the company was saving money on materials related to water program, conserving water and the cups and the light.

Are businesses becoming smarter with their energy consumption?

George Danellis: I think it’s clear particularly for larger corporations. We’ve seen a sign up, in the United States, for instance, I mean, definitely in Europe and the industrialized West if you will. The larger corporations now see that having sound sustainability programs leads to improve performance and that includes financial performance and better returns for investors. So these privately-held companies are undertaking sustainability initiatives, sustainable programs in a manner that’s never been seen before.

What is better for a small business: contact you before starting up or ensure a proper business structure before contacting you?

George Danellis: It depends what their business model is. There are certainly tons of wonderful resources for free, for a business that’s starting out as far as setting up their, let’s say, their office space, looking at their operations, and the sustainability thereof. If their potential impacts, environmental and social, let’s say, are greater in their business model, I would say, yeah, there’s a lot more benefit to hiring or working with a professional entity that is suited to what they’re doing. I’ll just give one example. We have a client in South Pacific. It’s a small specialty surfing resort. We started working with them last year. And they were loving it because they weren’t really running their resort as a business and also weren’t really paying attention to the enormous ways, in a place where energy particularly but not only is really expensive, very expensive. Unfortunately, the resort was destroyed in the South Pacific tsunami on September 29th last year. So now we’re being reengaged as we go forward in the process of designing, building, and reopening the resort.

Any important take home messages for our audience?

George Danellis: You know, there’s benefits for everyone. You shouldn’t consider sustainability off on the side. It should integrated into our entire strategy. That it’ll drive innovation throughout the organization, will have greater workplace interests. Employees generally are happier when there is a bio-sustainability program in place. And businesses that do so also attract better employees. There really aren’t too many downsides to implement sustainability in an enterprise of any size.

Rasika Ranganathan: All it takes is a desire to measure your business’s impacts and add on them. There are many benefits to having sustainability mindset and several resources that surround us to help further our businesses into going green. Simple tasks such as climate control, controlling the amount of lighting, making sure computers are in sleep mode when not in use will not only save energy, but it will also enhance performance, cost efficiency, and value of return for business structure. If every business were to have sustainability mindset, we will be coming closer to our goal in achieving a more energy efficient environment. My name’s Rasika Ranganathan, and this is the Daily Energy Report.

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