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Quick Wins: Growing The Triple Bottom Line

The Triple Bottom Line (TBL) refers to the real cost of doing business which includes its impact on people (staff, customers, stakeholders, communities) and the environment. Planning for the Triple Bottom Line is good business practice as more and more businesses see the value of doing good. It seems increasingly unacceptable in the eyes of many consumers that businesses should only care about the economic outcome. Instead, the usual “bottom line = profit” should be replaced with the Triple Bottom Line (TBL): people, planet and profit. If a company does not account for its social and environmental impact, then it does not account for the full cost of doing business, according to John Elkington, who first introduced the TBL in 1994 (!). Research indicates that contributing towards the TBL is a win/win situation: In New Zealand two thirds of the workforce prefer to work for a company with strong values even if paid less. And further research suggests that there can be significant cost savings (up to 45 %) when switching to social procurement in order to grow social impact.

So where do you start if you want to grow your TBL? If you’d like some help in talking this through obligation-free I’d love to hear from you.

Here are five simple suggestions to get you started:

  1. Review your mission and values to reflect caring about your social and environmental impact as well as your economic impact.
  2. Consider substituting business (and personal) gifts with gift cards from The Good Registry which channels the whole gifting industry towards charitable trusts for a better tomorrow for all of us.
  3. Contact Akina to find out more about social impact. One way of growing your social impact is by reviewing your supply chain to include suppliers with social impact or in other words: social procurement. Fwd.org.nz is growing the social procurement movement in New Zealand. You’ll find a list of suppliers for social procurement on their website.
  4. Replace all your lighting with LEDs (if you haven’t already done so). For further suggestions, use the free assessment provided by the official NZ Climate Action Toolbox.
  5. Contact us to find out more about your environmental impact and get help in measuring your carbon emissions. We take pleasure in giving free initial advise to create a better tomorrow for all of us.

Let’s do some good today!