Sustainability at SBC

Our Company | Our Workplace | Our Environmental Impact |Our Social Impact

SBC's 2010 Corporate Social Responsibility Report is comprised of the pages listed directly above. We invite you to take a look at our company's social, economic and environmental performance and policies. If you have any questions or feedback, please contact Emily. To learn more about the structure and framework of this report, see the links under GRI-Related Documents.

• CEO Letter
• GRI-Related Documents

We launched Sustainable Business  Consulting seven years ago for one reason – to help transform the market into understanding that there is a pure business motive towards improving social and environmental performance. As we look back at 2010 and compare our goals with our efforts, we are both proud of our accomplishments and realistic about how far we still need to go to realize our dream.

As we embark on our fifth annual Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report, we truly believe that we are at a point around “sustainable business” similar to the mid-1990s when the internet was beginning to take off. Remember when companies were being asked about their “e-business” strategies? There were established leaders in the marketplace, but the majority of companies were just getting started and launching their first websites. It is no different right now, because while there are many companies that have been working at this for some time and are winning “green” awards, the majority of US companies are just getting started on this issue. The term “e-business” is no longer used because it is just how business is done. Similarly, we believe that the term “sustainable business” will follow the same path over the next five to seven years.

So while there have been many major public policy initiatives that have stopped and started over the past few years around climate change, toxics, energy, water, and waste, the markets have not been waiting for Congress and the public sector to act. They’ve gone ahead and are now putting pressure on companies to improve their sustainability performance through their value chain. And it’s not just suppliers that are putting pressure on corporations; it’s also their investors, customers, insurance providers, lenders, and their own employees.

As disappointing as it is to see little change on Wall Street after financial regulation passed this year, and that no new laws were enacted after the BP oil spill, SBC has stood pat. We realize that our greatest opportunity in saving the planet cannot be accomplished by solely focusing on our internal efforts.

Therefore, we doubled our efforts in 2010 and had our most successful year yet as a company, increasing the number of companies we helped and boosting our own sustainability and financial performance.

As we continue to grow, more difficult challenges await SBC. We expect the number of competitors will continue to rapidly increase in the next one to three years. We will need to protect our position and our margins as the market leader for corporate consulting services in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. So we are frequently looking at how we can push the envelope and become a better provider to our clients, which led to the development of several new services.

As we work with more global clients and add employees, we expect to see our own environmental impact and carbon footprint grow due to increased travel and commuting. Therefore, in 2010 we began to meet biannually as an entire company to discuss these issues, and changed a number of our internal processes and incentives to work with all employees on reducing both their personal and professional carbon footprints. 

We invite you to read through our CSR report to learn about the actions we’ve taken, the metrics we’ve created, and our progress over time. And if any of you have any suggestions or areas in which we are not living up to our mission or commitments, we encourage you to contact us directly and we’ll be happy to talk with you.

Yours in Sustainability,

Kevin Wilhelm

GRI-Related Documents

• About this Report
• Disclosure Index
• 2010 Indicators
• GRI Content Index
• 2010 CSR report (pdf)
  
• 2009 CSR Report (pdf)