While driving efficiencies to create a leaner enterprise, the CEO found himself steering a greener agenda. Where being green was a lucky accident, now it’s something to shout about.

Many businesses are in the same boat. Whether there’s a financial crisis or not, businesses are always streamlining. Sometimes those decisions are conscious ones, sometimes they’re sub-conscious ones part of a wider goal – and the subsequent knock on effects can be staggering.

When I came to write this article, and I started asking myself “What are we doing to be green”, I found myself getting slightly agitated. Are we green? What initiatives are we implementing? Then I began to realise that as we were streamlining processes developed over a decade ago, we were going green anyway. That’s because, simply put, greener can be cheaper and more importantly faster.

When our first company went out into business, postal invoices were all the rage. Cheques were the anticipated response. The “cheque is in the post” will conjure up mixed feelings amongst business people. It’s part and parcel of the cash-flow problem, even during the tiger days.

So, during a routine online banking training session in our offices in Dublin, a retired veteran of the banking world who’d been brought back to the trenches to roll out the internet solution, shared his experiences and ideas about the postal cash flow cycle. “It used to be that a company would send out the invoice, then the client would post a cheque, then the client would acknowledge it. Just lodge the check and move on, they know they’ve paid son” is how I best remember it.

I can’t explain the joys a young business person experiences when lodging the first cheques his business receives. Try to imagine the sheer delight that electronic banking brings: we could receive funds from the UK within 4 hours – faster than we could (and still can) get cross banking cheque fund transfers 10 years later. It didn’t take a genius to work out that you could save £1 by e-mailing a PDF invoice instead of posting it, but that if you also included your EFT details, you could remove the billing cycle and cheque clearance system. By e-mailing an invoice and by getting an electronic payment, you saved at least two weeks on the whole cycle. And it turns out its’ better for the environment. Win.

We’ve also begun switching our sales teams from European petrol cars to Japanese cars. The lower cost of repairs and maintenance being the main reason. The phenomenal saving in fuel consumption was a fantastic discovery. I bore my friends to death with the €600 a month I save – a 2 litre diesel Avensis  can achieve 4.2km/l. That’s 6.2 in a Golf 2ltr and 6.8 in a Lexus Hybrid. You’d need a Prius to beat it and then not by much either. That’s an enormous cost saving. And oh – hello – turns out its greener too.

We were going to buy embossed leather notepads but then we realised we’d just end up typing the notes into Word later, so why add in the extra step.

We saved a fortune on rent by moving out of the state subsidised incubation place into a private commercial centre that’s 100 times more professional with real internet facilities and, it also has its own bio power plant. We invested in state of the art live online meetings to further reduce travel. Actually, it was to save on the time between starting a relationship that travelling necessitated but seeing as I’m on a green run, I’ll stick with it. ;-)

So, the governments initiatives to reduce carbon usage, by applying taxes to things like cheques, petrol, cash withdrawals, car tax – they’re not only incentivising but driving change to green. The process of going green saves more money in efficiency, like improved cash flow. I hope cheques will become a thing of the past soon – less fraud, less wastage, less time. And being green gives companies something to shout about – blog about, advertise, and demonstrate: Differentiate! Everyone wants to be a greener person.

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