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INDUSTRIAL TECH CLIENT WENT ALL IN ON INTEGRATING SUSTAINABILITY INTO THE CORE BUSINESS AND WON BIG!
Over the past two years, Flemming has had the great privilege of advising the owners and executive management of a Nordic industrial tech scale-up. It’s one of the few companies that, from day one, held the fundamental belief that sustainability could become a real game changer for the business. The company’s founders were firmly convinced that a long-term investment in sustainability would be the gateway to global, market-leading industrial customers and the key to attracting external risk capital to secure continued innovation and scaling.
For two years, we worked in a structured manner to integrate sustainability across the client's entire operations. From establishing the baseline and ambition level, ensuring full ownership at leadership level and cultural alignment across the organisation, conducting a double materiality assessment, and defining focus areas, roadmaps, data points, and targets. Guided by the principle of keeping it simple, making it measurable, and making it visible. No guesswork. It’s has been all about data. Governance structures were designed to be as simple and effective as possible. And most importantly, through targeted behavioral design, we developed built the client's organisational culture on co-creation, anchored in the principles: Inspire, Engage, Support, and Reward.
Progress accelerated rapidly; after 18 months, the client had full transparency and documentation of its triple bottom line. And now, just over two years in, the founders’ vision has been realized: the company has entered into a long-term strategic partnership with one of the world’s largest industrial groups in the energy sector, while simultaneously securing a substantial capital injection from a large European venture capital fund. The reason this was possible is that, in addition to offering an outstanding product for an attractive market, the company is the only player among its competitors able to provide full documentation of its sustainability performance along with a credible, data-driven plan for future initiatives.
Equally important, outcomes of the sustainability journey include deeper management insight into the client's business, effective identification and mitigation of commercial risks, a more streamlined core operation, significantly reduced operating costs, higher employee retention and satisfaction, and improved access to qualified talent. On top of that, we carried out a fully tailored leadership development programme aimed at strengthening the leadership team and creating the optimal leadership foundation for the company’s upcoming scaling.
Win, win, win across the board.