An exchange of household eco tips by two execs over WhatsApp in 2021 paved the way for the entire ESG strategy of one of the UK’s largest IT providers.
Daisy Corporate Services is three years into an ESG quest that could see it submit decarbonisation targets to the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) in the next 12 months.
But its journey only began after its COO, Lyndsey Charlton, began swapping everyday sustainability pointers with then CEO Stefni Oliver.
“We’d share tips on ‘I got my toilet roll from here’, or ‘I’ve changed to this deodorant because it’s better for the planet’,” Charlton told IT Channel Oxygen.
“Then, through one of those conversations over WhatsApp, Stef said ‘you know, we run this business and it’s over £200m. Why can’t we use the business to do more good in the world?’
“That’s literally how our ESG strategy started.”
“I needed to hire someone who lives and breathes ESG”
Targeting the public sector and upper midmarket, Daisy Corporate Services generated £208m of Daisy’s £417m revenues in its year to 31 March 2023, putting it among the UK’s largest IT providers. Daisy itself ranked 11th in the recent Oxygen 250.
Having crowdsourced ideas from across the business, Charlton concluded that she needed to hire a dedicated ESG head to “pull all the millions of ideas together”.
“We had so many ideas and I got to a point where I just said ‘I need to hire someone who lives and breathes this’,” she explained.
“He helped form a strategy, and keep us on track.”
Daisy Corporate Services then opted to align to the UN sustainable development goals where it felt it could make an impact, Charlton explained.
“Most people knew I was a natural fit for the role”
After the dedicated head left the business last July, Charlton moved to appoint Head of Bid Management and Frameworks, Lynne Magennis, as Head of ESG in a dual role.
“I’m conscious that lots of organisations have a dual role in this space, but don’t necessarily always invest. So what we did was give [Lynne] extra funding so she could beef up her team,” Charlton said.
Magennis has “looked at what we were already doing and just done more of it”.
“I’m a lifelong vegetarian and a tree hugger, in the same way Lyndsey is. We tried to keep that under wraps for fear of getting a bad reputation. Most people knew I was a fairly natural fit for the role,” she told IT Channel Oxygen.
“There’s a gentleman on my team who is hugely interested in anything that can be translated into numbers, so he’s taken us on a journey within the carbon reporting space.”
Although there is “only so much” money her team can tap into, the secret is to achieve a “certain degree of commercialisation so that you can start to pay it forward from your customers, suppliers and the business”, Magennis said.
“The amount of money that’s being put into our charities, into our social side and into the environmental side has been rising, and will probably rise significantly over the next few years,” she explained.
“That’s because we’ve identified areas where we can commercialise our ESG for the good of our customers and for the good of our business.”
“We hit a challenge with the vendors”
At a board level, Daisy Corporate Services has resolved to put forward sustainable solutions as a priority for customers, even in the event they cost more, Charlton said.
But repeating concerns she voiced at the recent Oxygen 250 dinner (pictured below), Charlton said efforts here have been hampered by a lack of reliable carbon reporting information from vendors.
“When Lynne and the team started to look at pulling this together, and making sure it’s in our catalogue, that’s when we hit the challenge with the vendors,” she said.
“It’s almost impossible to get proper statistics for environmental impact for most of the technology market,” Magennis added, before emphasising that it is about more than just the energy efficiency of a product.
“It’s much more to do with how people use their technology, how they refresh it, how it’s configured and the whole service aspect of it,” she said.
“This is where we do see an opportunity as well to a) do some good and b) raise the profile of the organisation, as there are very few people looking at it this way.”
Daisy Corporate Services is on course to be net zero on scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2026, with plans to submit its targets with the SBTi in its current financial year, Magennis said (this being dependent on how the current controversy around the SBTi potentially U-turning on carbon offsets plays out).
“We’re probably a third of the way in”
It is about more than just the ‘E’ of ESG, however, Charlton said, emphasising that plans are afoot to deepen ties with several local, national and international charities in 2024.
This includes GroundBreaker, a charity aiming to improve access to education (particularly in the global south) that Charlton has become personally involved in.
“We’re probably a third of the way in [to the ESG strategy],” Magennis said.
Boosting the number of employees who utilise Daisy Corporate Services’ annual three-day volunteering allowance is a particular priority, Magennis indicated.
“They aren’t being taken up nearly as much as we would all like to see. It’s going up, but we want to see everybody using them,” she said.
“That’s got to improve, and our sustainability by design [strategy] has got to start. When that starts going in earnest that will be a juggernaut.”
Charlton admitted she was initially reluctant to publicise Daisy Corporate Services’ ESG strategy due to fears it would attract accusations of greenwashing.
“We probably should have shouted about the things we were doing,” she concluded.
“Just being on the journey and doing some good things is worth shouting about.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
