What's Your Elevator Speech on Sustainability?

What’s Your Elevator Speech?

By Jeanne von Zastrow

Senior Director, Sustainability and Industry Relations

FMI

It’s always a good idea to have a few key “elevator speeches” in your mind just in case you run into that perfect person with whom you’ve been hoping to share your latest idea, strategy or cause. 

FMI’s Sustainability Executive Committee, consisting of sustainability experts from 22 companies, are creating a new toolkit for the industry on “Making the Business Case for the C-Suite” – and one element of that toolkit will be concise, customizable strategic language to help executives effectively articulate the business case in less than 60 seconds.   

Why are we doing this?  Because sustainability is complex and complicated, our industry – including C-Suite - often struggle to understand the scope of sustainability impacts and the bottom-line results for their activities in this area.  Sustainability is interwoven into every job and decision we make.  Yet, in many companies, executives are not precisely aware of how sustainability initiatives are effectively transforming the business, creating competitive advantages, spurring innovation, attracting new talent and opening up new revenue streams.

Many leaders are already seeing returns on investment related to store enhancements, from greener buildings to energy efficiency and waste. Innovative retailers are now moving to transform every activity – from the farm to the landfill – including sourcing, transportation, packaging, recycling, fair labor and empowering a new shopper generation.  An integrated sustainability strategy is a competitive advantage, critical to a brand’s image, and ultimately reduces risk within the supply chain.  

If you search the Internet, you will find a myriad of studies and resources that document the business case for sustainability.  There is no lack of hard evidence proving the value of a good sustainability program, but much of that great information goes untapped because it is either too generic or too lengthy and difficult to decode.  FMI’s members see a great value in translating existing information into our own language, and combining new, industry specific guidelines and case studies into one strategic tool that is customized to the retail food industry. As an association, we want to present information in a practical, hard-hitting format that is easy to navigate and customize.  

As a prelude to the development of the new toolkit, we will be featuring Bob Willard as a keynote speaker at the Sustainability Summit in October in Washington, DC, to speak about “Competitive Advantage and a Triple Bottom Line – Marking the Business Case to the C-Suite.”  Bob is a leading authority on quantifying and selling the business value of corporate sustainability strategies to the C-Suite, and he has created this presentation specifically for our industry.  He’ll present us with new ideas, customizable tools and personal examples to help attendees increase effectiveness as change agents in their companies.  His book, The New Sustainability Advantage, was released this year and his website is full of free tools and resources to get people started. 

The FMI Sustainability Executive Committee will present its new toolkit as a free gift to our industry – with the goal of helping the food industry move forward faster, together toward success.   The toolkit will be a concise and relevant way for you to develop and customize your menu of “elevator speeches” for that strategic moment when you can make a major difference in the direction of your company’s path to sustainability.