Return on Sustainability

Fundamentally, all companies are in business to provide goods and services and to make money in the process. Sustainable companies seek to mesh financial drivers with mission or values-oriented goals as a way of ensuring long-term viability.

In well-performing companies, all projects contribute to either a reduction in operating cost or an increase in free cash flows. Sustainability projects are no different. While they may yield positive benefits for society or the environment, the primary justification for a sustainability project is the financial return it will generate for the company.

For this reason, many sustainability initiatives focus on gaining operational cost reductions through energy efficiency and other green efforts. But operational efficiency projects have limited impact on metrics that have a much greater impact on long-term financial performance, such as employee turnover or customer loyalty.

The fact is, most sustainability programs produce ‘intangible’ benefits, of which the financial returns traditionally have been very difficult to calculate with any degree of certainty. As these programs have matured, more comprehensive and insightful ROI evaluations are desirable. For firms with substantial sustainability budgets, having the ability to report complete returns to investors has become essential.

Our Return on Sustainability (ROS^®) service brings innovative methods for calculating intangible value returns to corporate sustainability investments. ROS^® reveals the value - in real dollars- of
both tangible and intangible returns of sustainability initiatives.

And it is scalable. ROS^® can be applied at the project level or rolled up across the entire sustainability portfolio. At the portfolio level, executives have the information needed to optimize the corporate sustainability program to generate maximum financial returns.

Project	Types of Return	ROS^®
Community Project	Sales	20-50%
Ethics	Fixed Costs	50-3,000%
Training	EBITDA/employee hour	28-840%
Innovation	Revenues, Fixed and Variable Costs	30-1000%
Environmental	Fixed Costs	7-40%
Governance	Stock Price, Corporate Valuation	1,000%+

* ROS values generated from actual client programs and represent Year 1 project ROI.

While ROS® is innovative, the method is proven and mature. Developed by our European partner, Madrid-based Management & Excellence, S.A., ROS® has been utilized for years by top-performing firms in Europe and Latin America and has been highlighted in leading publications such as LatinFinance and Harvard Business Review Brasil.

Don’t let your company’s sustainability investment – or the company’s long-term performance – rely on faith in being rewarded for ‘doing good’. Get the facts. Get ROS®.

Return on Sustainability (ROS®)

Return on Sustainability (ROS^®)