The Triple Bottom Line: Sustainable Growth for businesses

SustainableBizDesign has been started just recently, and it’s a new service to deliver and host websites, for sole business owners and small businesses. In the same way that they need at the beginning business cards to kickstart their business, we’re offering an all-included service, which guarantees a beautiful online presence.  

It’s a for-profit project, and at the same time, the service is rooted in sustainability, meaning it wants to be socially responsable and green. What? Why? How? Did we fall on our head? Why technology, entrepreneurship, and mix it with “New Age” stuff? Those are supposed to be two different worlds.

The aha! moment started with the book “The Triple Bottom Line”. Andrew Savitz writes that in a hyper-connected world, over-stressed and over-charged, we have no other choice than worry about all stakeholders, and think all projects to be forward-looking. More importantly, all preoccupations to make a profit should and must be aligned with sustainability.

In this mindset, one should then forget all perspectives of “Getting Rich quick” or “Built a startup to flip” but rather start projects that needs to last 10, 30 years or more. That means you have to worry about the community you interact with, from employees, suppliers, neighbours, and the environment. The growth will be much slower (so it’s not a startup, per say), but the consequences is that foundations are solid and built to last.

In the SustainableBizDesign project, the ambitions are huge: reduce by 10% every year the ecological and social footprint, give back to the community 20% of revenues and time available, customers must be 100% satisfied, and even more: they must be “happy” with us than any other services. Consequences: the requirements for technology and automatin are enormous. We have to do our best to satisfy customers. We even have to go beyond our “normal duties” to make sure that their websites works, get them customers, even if we have to invest and look out for visitors ourselves. The bet is that that this community sees the efforts, and that we can continue the adventure together for years.  

Will it work? Difficult to say. Around the project, lots of competitors, be it startups like weebly or yola, or web agencies, who don’t give a damn about those practices. They maximize profits, even at the cost of their customers, and they are pressed to sell. For me, I don’t have anything to offer back that it will go well in the long term…. We’ll see… in a year!