Continuing to look our PNL, we already treated the reduction of energy consumption, of sending and moving and we also studied in-depth “the paper” subject. There is also other ways to go green and reduce you costs in parallel, and the best way to have a good overview of the actual situation and where you want to go is by listing the last few months’ operations. Listings and numerical representations are largely used in re-organizing project since they allow having an overall overview of the situation. A green transition can take time since it requires not only to change products you use, but also habits and there is where you will have to show as entrepreneur you capacity to innovate and manage your team in a way that the change will become nearly natural.

Tomorrow, how do I imagine my store?

Last week, we defined in a simple way how to create a powerful tool in order to have a global view of the today processes and costs. Once the actual situation, the most difficult is to come. We know where we are and can easily, realistically plan the “TO BE” state to achieve. For each type of costs ask the following questions:

• Are these equipments all useful or can I reduce the type of products? for example if you used to buy different type of pen according to the need, reduce them by the exact number of requisite products).
• Do I need all these suppliers? Sometimes, we forget that doing business with many different suppliers can really make you management complicated (it does not allow you to make savings, since you reduce your negotiating power, the more you buy the more power you have on negotiations with your supplier). So choose, the most environmentally friendly and the one with the better rate quality / cost.
• What products have the worse impact on the environment: think recycled paper, no more plastic, choose suppliers that send with the less packaging.

Before starting the research for alternatives, you must define where you want to step. This means that you have to define accurately the target state of the business: I want to decrease by 2% the printing category costs, I want to have at least 2-3 categories of eco-products this year, I want a global decrease of the “Office equipments” cost line by 10%. These are some targets, as you can observe they must have what, how much and when, always define in your target what you want to achieve, in what dimension and for when you want this goal to be achieve, otherwise your project will be endless. 

Next week, step 3 Office equipment green transition

Whatever the size of your business, if you ever need to evaluate a cost line of your business, do not hesitate to contact me cam.delcour@gmail. With your knowledge of your market and a precise analysis with pertinent tools, we can easily and cheaply find a way for you to get productivity, effectiveness and more profit by just making small changes that you never thought about. I can provide you excel database tools aligned to your type of business, or any other help you can possibly need to make your green transition a reality.

You can read the first part here