Climate Confident

Climate Emission (Carbon) Accounting For SMBs - A Chat With Greenly CEO Alexis Normand

November 02, 2022 Tom Raftery / Alexis Normand Season 1 Episode 94
Climate Confident
Climate Emission (Carbon) Accounting For SMBs - A Chat With Greenly CEO Alexis Normand
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Show Notes Transcript

Carbon accounting (measuring and reporting climate emissions) has not traditionally been something SMBs have needed to do. That is starting to change as larger organisations are requiring reporting from their supply chains.

One company looking to help SMBs with this is Greenly. They have developed a carbon accounting platform specifically for SMBs which they liken to a Freshbooks or Quickbooks for carbon accounting.

I invited their CEO Alexis Normand to come on the podcast to tell us all about it.

We had an excellent discussion talking about how Greenly helps organisations especially SMBs measure and report their carbon footprint, how they also work with larger enterprises to account for the carbon footprint of their supply chain and what their plans are for the future.

This was a truly fascinating episode of the podcast and I learned loads as always, and I hope you do too.

If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message on my SpeakPipe page, head on over to the Climate 21 Podcast Forum, or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

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Music credit - Intro and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played, and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper

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Credits
Music credits - Intro by Joseph McDade, and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played, and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper

Alexis Normand:

I'm of course optimistic for our business, but also optimistic that people can come to the realization that embracing the, the energy transition right now is in, not just in their long term interest, but in their short term business interest. It's a huge opportunity. Net zero will happen. So, hopefully we can help accelerate that

Tom Raftery:

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the climate 21 podcast. The number one podcast, showcasing best practices in climate emission reductions. And I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Don't forget to click follow on this podcast in your podcast app of choice, to be sure you don't miss any episodes. Hi everyone. Welcome to the Climate 21 Podcast. My name is Tom Raftery and with me on the podcast today, I have my special guest, Alexis. Alexis, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Alexis Normand:

Yes, Tom. so happy to be with you here today. I'm Alexis Normand. I'm the ceo, co-founder of, Greenly. A tech company that helps, SMBs, tackle climate change.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. And how are you helping SMBs tackle climate change?

Alexis Normand:

Sure. So, Essentially, we are helping these companies to start their climate journey by first providing a baseline of their greenhouse gas emissions. And I think everyone is going to do it. So big, small companies alike. And if it hasn't happened until now, is because measuring your emissions disclosing your carbon footprint, reducing them was mostly a consultancy based process, which required a ton of expertise and was costly, time consuming, and so on and so forth. So we look at this as we need essentially a quick books or fresh books for carbon accounting so that anyone can start his climate journey. And what that means is essentially offering a platform whereby the work that is involved in doing this is, is made as easy as possible by streamlining the steps, by automating the data collection, automating the analytics, training the person doing this in the organization with uh, equipping him, I would say with the basic concepts of where are emissions and so on and so forth. So essentially focusing, you know, on a clear, simple, design, transparent process that helps you streamline the GHG emissions measurement.

Tom Raftery:

Okay, fantastic. This is something that, as you rightly point out, has often been done through consultants and done, you tend to think mostly by the larger companies. So did you tackle the SMB space because it was A, unaddressed, or B, because you think it's more important, or C, all of the above?

Alexis Normand:

Yeah, it's well I think we, we were a young tech company, you know, we're, we're we're going to celebrate our third birthday at the end of this month. So it's happened very quickly. And when you, when you launch a company, you, what's super important is to have very short feedback loops. So, you need to test, you need to learn, and your growth is essentially a function of how fast you launch this you know, test and learn process. So, to, and essentially our work building, the, the product has been how do we take a consultancy based process and, and streamline it. And so how do we iterate and, and create something that works for as many people as possible? And you know, I don't, I I actually, you know, was a consultant myself. I have a lot of respect for these guys, and they, they have, know, standardized the carbon accounting process, they invented the notion of scope one, two, and three. So I think we, we have to give the pioneers of carbon accounting credit, you know, to, for having built the analytical tools. But of course, as is the case with experts, they, they tend to keep their knowledge to themselves and it's not the same job democratizing this to, to more people. So, to do that we thought that it would be easier to begin socializing our, our work, our platform to SMBs There. They're, the sales cycle are much shorter,

Tom Raftery:

Right.

Alexis Normand:

But also you know, we, we were from the start super transparent with our first customers that we were going to co-build the product with them and that whatever the platform didn't have, you know, our, our customer success guys would complement. And we were working with a lot of tech companies who had themselves been through that process. And it's also why we, we have so many tech customers. Sometimes they are unicorns in Europe. It's because they, they, they understood the vision. They liked it. They thought it was the way to go. And so they helped us get there. So that's the, the first part of the answer. Now, the product three years down the road is becoming very mature. So we, we now have something that is probably actually better than a lot of manual processes that you have with consultancies. So we, we are able to, to work with enterprise but we've built a high velocity growth machine that is more um, adapted to, to midsize accounts, then large enterprises. So we're in that phase now of closing our first 10 15 enterprise. But what we've discovered is our real added value for these guys because they all have uh, If you take the, you know, the, the loreals of this world and all the big enterprise, they, they all have a lot of experts in house who are very good already, and you're, you're kind of displacing them if you're, you're bringing in a, a new tool or a new process. And that's hard. but what is easy on the other hand is what we are helping them is helping them fill a gap, which is how do these people engage their supply chain? So we've gained expertise basically making carbon accounting for mid-size companies, super productive. And that is to save much cheaper as well. So, five to tenfold decrease and acceleration. And so that won't help the enterprise where there's a lot of project management, but enterprises that start committing to reducing their emissions very quickly realise that it involves engaging their supply chain because a Loreal or or who, whoever, you know, whatever the, the big company, well, most of their emissions are actually from the products that they purchase, the transportations companies that they hire and so on and so forth. And so they are actually like overseeing a, a very large network of much smaller companies and, and it kind of trickles down and with all their expertise. These guys are not able to do the work for their suppliers. So we we are slowly moving up the, the food chain, so to speak, going from SMB mid-size to enterprise, but working with the purchasing departments and the CSR guy to engage the supply chain. And that's a great business because then they become your distributors basically.

Tom Raftery:

Very nice. Cause that was gonna be my next question was, you know, Is there an appetite in SMBs for doing this? Because if you're in an smb, you've got a lot of stuff on your plate already and this whole carbon accounting thing, unless there's some kind of burning platform, there's other things that are probably higher priority, right?

Alexis Normand:

Well, of course, you know, I'm, I'm myself now the CEO of a hundred people, something smb. So, you know, we, we are on a mission to decarbonize, but, you know, for, but we also have to get the business running and get more orders and so on. So I think an important thing about what we do is to, to make it super clear that carbon disclosure, getting on a net zero trajectory is not an additional constraint. It's something that aligns with your business trajectory. So, if it's only seen as a you know, a regulatory thing that essentially it costs money and is like your IT security stuff and so on. Well, that doesn't really work. The, the customers that are the, the fastest to sign on are those that see that it benefits their business. And, you know, I, I am not a, a moral judge. I am not here to, you know, distribute good and bad points to my customer. I'm I'm here. I mean, Greenly is here to serve their interests. And we try to essentially make the case that's, you know, working for the climate is working for your business. And for some guys it's like totally obvious if you've set up a business that is a, you know, a more environmentally friendly shirt company or whatever, you wanna prove it. So that's a no-brainer. But then for all the other businesses, you know, the, the normal economy, so to speak. You have different cases. We see that B2B suppliers are increasingly judged by the larger enterprises on this criteria. And I, and I really think there's been this trickle down effect of large companies committing to some net zero objective and then pushing it down the supply chain. So, and the way that it's the, the good word spread, so to speak, is you have an industry leader, a a big supplier that starts to do this, communicates about it, it, it wins the deal, and then all its competitors realize they need to do it as well. And that now, you know, like, getting ready for uh, you know, the energy transition is just as important as digitizing your business 10. And I would like this to be true everywhere. It's not it's something we definitely observe in continental Europe, in the uk. It hasn't really started in the US So us you're still more at the enterprise level saying, Okay, what do we do? It hasn't trickled down completely or, or not as much as we would like it to, but, but we, we see the effect happening.

Tom Raftery:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you deal with different reporting requirements in different geographies, or is that something that has come up at all?

Alexis Normand:

No. Great question. So yes, you know, the UK has C ecr, if I'm not mistaken. France has something else called the Adam reporting. And Germany has something. The US doesn't really have much of a reporting requirement, but there are, there are standards. So, well first of all there is already a, a global international standard called the the G HG protocol. And so we are very insistent on the fact that we have not invented any sort of methodology. We are essentially applying those global standards. But then you need to, to translate your results into a reporting format that eases your, your customer's life. So we, create basically these uh, reporting apps. So I'll give you a few examples. Large companies will, will want to disclose their emissions on the cdp, the Carbon Disclosure Project, because it's a, it's a global database where you can compare, you know, people along their, how, how far they've been disclosing you. You have stuff in the finance area, you might uh, if you're doing the carbon footprint report of a private equity firm or an asset manager they might have signed on the data convergence project or they may be applying the T C F D task force for carbon disclosure standard. And so it's, it's basically your accounting report plus a few other stuff. But which is much easier to, to report. So short answer is we have reporting apps, which is like a, a translation of the data that's in the platform into the format that you needed to, to be in for whoever is asking.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. And how do you get the information from your customers and translate that into carbon emissions.

Alexis Normand:

Sure. So that's the core of what we do. And I, and so that core layer, you know, is, is made up of different stacks. So there's a data collection stack. There's a standards and you know, normalization stack. There's a user experience stack, there's a auditability and compliance stack, and then there's a reporting analytics and reporting stack. And so that very first step is about streamlining the data collection and. Maybe just a step back. So what data do we need to collect? So carbon footprinting right, is about quantifying all the activities of a company. And then those quantities of activity, it might be how many miles you've driven, it might be how many gallons or liters of fuel you've purchased, how many kilowatt hours of electricity you've consumed, how many tons of steel you've bought, and so on and so forth. So you, you, you quantify all that's relevant to the emissions. And then you translate these quantities into carbon through this very important concept of emission factors, which are really ratio conversion ratios. So, you know, uh, on average a kilometer of a car driven is like 200 grams of co2. And of course it depends on the type of car and so on. But a liter of fuel is 2.6 kilograms and and $80 of fuel is something else. So, so you collect the information and you translate it. And there are two types of information that you can collect. There's what we call expenses. So, you can collect all of a company's expenses and translate it into co2 with monetary emissions factors. And that's great because you can integrate directly with a company's e r p or accounting software, and you can scan all the expenses and translate it. So the, the advantages of this is really fast and it's totally automatic, but the drawback is, you know, prices fluctuate. They don't necessarily reflect the quantities of goods that you've purchased beyond you know, the, the amount so, Ba it allows you to baseline the big buckets, but it doesn't give you enough grain to, to really use this information beyond reporting to, to reduce your emission. So it's much better to go after what we call activity based data and emission factors. So, To give you an example, let's say you're, you're doing the carbon footprint of a tech company, so it's mostly services but their profile is very similar from one company to another. We, we've done more than a hundred. So, we've seen, you know, this happen over and over. It's usually 50% of their emissions are linked to all their IT services. So it's their purchase of computers, it's their consumption of cloud from AWS or Google or whatever. It's all their web services, it's their ads and so on. So if you take just a monetary approach on this, it gives you the big bucket, but it doesn't help you reduce the emissions of your cloud which is usually the biggest bucket. So here you, you know that this is the important part and to, to do a good job at it, you have to take this activity based approach on your cloud, which is really about looking at your consumption and understanding how much electricity has been consumed. And translating this electricity into carbon, which is usually different if it's in Ireland, in the uk, in France, in Norway, in the US and so on. So, so to your original question, how do we collect this data? So we collect automatically expense data, but there are a number of other things that we can collect automatically. So it could be cloud consumption. When it comes to tech company. It could be inventory data through Shopify or pimps type integrations with softwares for inventory. It could be. You know, travel data to integrations, to Concur or Expensify type softwares et cetera, et cetera. So we have over a hundred integrations, but unfortunately the world is a complex thing. So we don't have everything um, automated. So there is still there are still some parts that uh, need to be collected manually. But that's essentially our roadmap and our day to day job to reduce that part as much as possible. And just to conclude on the question, at the end of the day, it's not totally automated yet, but we, we measure ourselves against the consultancy based process. Where for a mid-size company, you, you'd be working four to six weeks. Whereas our climate experts who support company will be doing anywhere between five and 15 companies in that same time span. So there's already a five to 10 productivity increase just through this streamlining of data collection.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. Very good. Very good. And having baselined a company, can the company then, can you then work with the company, for example, to set science based targets and to measure and report against those?

Alexis Normand:

Sure. So, as you point out the, the first step is this baseline. It's the G HG reporting, But reporting without actionability is a bit pointless. Right. So, and, and plus the data is pretty abstract to most people. You know, it's, it's hard to represent what a ton of CO2 is. So, people will, will want to baseline themselves, but also benchmark themselves. So, and that's where having a, a platform is interesting because you're measuring everybody along the same standards, the same emission factors and so on. So we have. We have about 700 customers now. So there's a high level of comparability across these customers, and it tells you against, you know, similar type companies where you're where you stand out, what are the outliers. Maybe you're like over traveling, using your plane or maybe your cloud is over the roof or whatever. So, but to your question, once you've done this and you've identified the priority, it's a, about setting action plans, which of course is the hardest part but it, it's also where we, we begin to have impact. So there are a number of things that you can do to reduce your emissions. It depends obviously, on the type of emission that you have you can break it down in, into like two, I would say, directions. One is reducing your consumption of what emits the most. So you can, you know, if I stay on my cloud example once you have a, a very good analysis of which instance of your VCPUs, your, your emit the most you can change the menu. You can go to, you don't need a Rolls Royce to or, you know, an SUV to go buy your bread down the road. You can take a bike. So, so you, you can adapt the, the vehicle or you can adapt the V C P U to the actual task. So you, and, and you can say the same thing about a food menu. You can reduce the amount of meat versus. Vegetables and so on. So you can play on the mix basically. So that's lever number one. Then there is this notion if I stay on my cloud example of workload. Sometimes it emits more because you, you're using the V C P U that everybody is using at the same time, and you could, if you change the mix, you, you are on the lower workload. So AWS doesn't have to open more machines for you. Basical. And so, so this is the first bucket. How do I reduce my consumption of what emits the most? And it doesn't mean stop consuming, it means replace it by something that consumes less. We're not like anti-growth or what we're anti-carbon intensity growth, which is different. Um, So bucket number one is reduce your emissions through your, what you consume. And then bucket number two is reduce the energy intensity of your electricity. So if I stay on my cloud example, I can consume less V C P, basically, or less electricity, but I can uh, the bucket number two is I can make sure my electricity is less carbon intensive. So, so maybe all my data centers are in Poland and, you know, Poland is mostly coal power because they don't want any Russian gas in their country. They, so they, they privilege their security over the climate. Well, it is what it is. But it means that if you move your data from Poland to Norway where it's all hydroelectricity then for the same amount of energy consumed your, your footprint has been divided by 10. And, and so the, the energy mixed thing is a super powerful lever when it comes to consuming electricity. And then of course, you in electricity as in data centers, you have this notion of workload. So if you can, you know, do your laundry at night it'ss more efficient. And if you do it while everybody else is doing it, I just took this example, but you, you could say the same about food, about transportation. You know, you can decarbonize your, your transportation shifting from thermic to electricity. It's, and you can charge on, on low carbon electricity and so on and so forth. So, last word on this. Obviously all this stuff is super industry specific. So I took the, the tech example. But in industry it's something else. In asset management, it's something else. In food, it's something else. And so all this thinking we're, we're basically building action plans per industry with like scenario builders. I, I, I keep talking, so I, I'll just add another thing and then you can change your suppliers. You can engage them that I talked on already. And last but not least, of course, there's this notion of offsetting but maybe I'll, I'll let you react first.

Tom Raftery:

Yeah, I mean, offsetting is the, the is what we want to avoid, if at all possible, or at least minimize. It's for that very, very hard carbon to get outta the system would be my way of looking at that. Do everything possible before that and then for the last bits of carbon that you can't get out. Maybe do some offsetting there to down to zero.

Alexis Normand:

Yeah, so, so indeed I think that's the, the right approach. Um, to say something like this, is a sign that you've already given quite some thought to the topic, but many of the. you know, newcomers that we, we talked to about this topic may tell us, Look I am coming to you because I would like a, you know, carbon neutrality certificate or something like this, so that there's this idea which is out there that, you know, you measure your emissions, you're offset. Okay. Problem solved. So, Some people I, you know, would say that that is akin to greenwashing. I think it's the first step, you know, you're, you're, at least you've begun to take an interest in the topic. But what is uh, slightly misleading about this approach is that no, the problem is not solved when you've offset it because you, you know, the, the world at large is not carbon neutral. So even if you yourself say you've done your, your part and you've offset it, there aren't enough offsetting projects around to solve the problem. So the, the principle of your action is, is, is not something you can generalise. So, the right sequence would be measure, reduce and then offset what you can't measure. And so, it's not just wording. Uh, I think words in this case have a lot of importance. It's more about so what we tell these customers is not to claim that they are carbon neutral, but to start a net zero journey. Which can involve offsetting, and I'm not saying it's not part of the solution, it definitely is because even in 2050, if we, you know, have done everything we, we needed to, we'll still have to eat and move around and so on. So there will still be emissions. But offsetting only makes sense if we reduced our emissions massively first.

Tom Raftery:

Correct. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. What kind of, I mean, you mentioned high tech, but what other industries are you serving? What other kind of customer buckets are you in?

Alexis Normand:

Sure. Well, several. One interesting one is the financial vertical and you know, finance I is interesting in itself to measure and reduce emissions because well basically, you know, people tend to respond to their investors when they ask you to something. And so if getting to net zero becomes a requirement to get investments. It's a super powerful lever. So, so it's a, it's an industry that has been maturing to the topic. I wouldn't say that you know, it's the first priority of asset managers. But they have been under increasing pressure from regulators. In Europe you have this regulation called the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation. Which essentially says that if you're an investment fund and you're thesis is about funding the energy transition or being, impact driven then you can no longer claim it because you've invested in Tesla. You have to actually measure it. And that means that they are required to track their own footprint and their footprint for asset managers, I mean, 98% in general of that footprint is the footprint of their portfolio of investments. And so these guys end up becoming distributors. And there's a specific methodology around measuring this because then it's essentially your emissions as a fund is a pro rata of your investment, you know, emissions. But you, you have some leeway. And so these guys end up becoming distributor. And what's interesting too is that the, the central bank in Europe and and other places is saying, Well, you're gonna get a better interest rate if you're funding decarbonization. So, so that ends up trickling down, you know, if you're borrowing to, if your private equity or LBO company and you're borrowing to purchase companies you're, you're getting a better deal if you borrow for decarbonization. But you have to prove it, and you really have to invest in companies that have an impact. So we see this as a, as a super powerful lever And having been in business for three years. We've really seen an acceleration last year on this. I think it's starting in the US again. Uh, we, We, we've signed on quite a few companies. The SEC, the Security Exchange Commission has announced that there will be an obligation to report your emissions if you're listed. So any private equity firm wishing to list, you know, companies. Company wishing to list itself needs to start thinking about these topics. So, long story short, finance is a acceleration for the energy transition if it's done properly. I'll try to be shorter on the other verticals. The food vertical is interesting. People want to eat healthier stuff. They you know, you're, you're being told that uh, cutting down on meat is the single most impactful action that you can do as a person to reduce your emissions so distributors have noticed and they've also noticed that when they offer more sustainable products, their sales increases. So we got a lot, we get a lot of uh, food distributors that want to, prove that and, and so disclose their emissions and also know which one of their products are more interesting alternatives and then, you know, put it in front of the customer. Last vertical, I can say a word on perhaps is of course industry, which is a huge emitter. And you know, the, they have. Always had more requirements. It's, it's a trickier topic because it, it's very much around the consumption of the machines, the facilities, all that stuff. So the, the investments to decarbonize are much bigger. But I think what's I've seen in this space is the big guys who are doing it already have been doing it for, for a couple of years. And what's really picking up is this pressure down the supply chain to to small industries, you know, 50, 100 employee industrial companies. These guys are starting. And so we, we help them out too when we can.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. Fascinating. I'm just curious because you mentioned the food industry and industry itself. In the food industry, you have a lot of regulations around labeling of nutrition, for example. There isn't as yet regulations around labeling for emissions, but I suspect it's coming. And so, and not just in the, in food, but also in all other industries, is that something that you'd be able to help customers with?

Alexis Normand:

Well, we can certainly help measure the emissions of products, right? Until now, I've mostly been talking about measuring the emissions of organizations. So scope one, two, and three, direct, indirect due to electricity and all the other indirect stuff. But when it comes to products, basically if you're measuring an organizations, the products are part of it. But usually you say, Okay, an apple or a carrot, you know, on average is 10 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of carrots, let's say. But of course if you're, if you want to label a product as less carbon intensive, you have to perform what is called a life cycle analysis, which is a deep dive not on the organization, but on the product itself. And that, and that you can do on pretty much any object fruit or an iPhone. And it breaks down into five or six steps, One is the actual material sourcing. So, you know, how much I don't know, fertilizer or seed or, or or whatnot have I been using. So one is you know, material sourcing. Two is the, the actual manufacturing or you know, assembly, let's say. So in the, you know, in the case of food, it would be like you know, the, the trucks, the seeding all that stuff. Then there's the transportation. And then there is the consumption. And, and consumption uh, can be the most important part. You know, I think half of the footprint of a cup of tea is when you boil the water, right, to make the tea. So the, you spend more energy getting the tea hot than actually producing the leaves. That go in your tea. And then the final step is end of life. So, you know, if you, if you have packaged goods and they're full of plastic and you throw everything away it doesn't have the same impact as if you used unpackaged food that you consume entirely or, and you or not, and you recycle or you compost whatever is left. So, all of this cycle, you. It's not that hard to compute. It has been done on generic products, but it, does require, work. And I think it's not that expensive to do either, because once you have like the, the framework for analyzing a carrot, you know, it's always the same components. You just modify the parameters and stuff. So frankly I think for those listening to us, they might think if we have to do this for every single product in the world, it's crazy. Well, I think it's not crazy at all, and I think it's not that hard and it's not that long. And everybody putting out a product on the market. At one point should, and probably will be asked to do it. It, it could start with food because there's already a high culture of documenting everything, but frankly, it should be done on shirts and, and you know, if I, if I push the reasoning just a little further, I would say you know, Amazon should require it of everybody or, or doing it. Just a thought on that. I read their um, sustainability report and what I found super striking is that they were reporting all their emissions except the other 99% which are the products that they buy and sell. And what a missed opportunity, because if you, if you were required to push a footprint of your product to sell on Amazon, they would have such a huge impact. And frankly, the cost would be minimal. People would say, Oh my God, what a requirement. But no, it's like, a life cycle analysis. You know, for shirt it costs 300 bucks and for a more complex product, it might be 10 K, but if you're selling well on Amazon, it's not hard to do. So it's, it's not just a food concept, it's a, it's a goods and service concept in general, I would say.

Tom Raftery:

No, I agree. I agree. I agree. Where to next for Greenleaf? What, what are your plans For the coming years?

Alexis Normand:

Sure. Well, of course, you know, we, we've gone past this first phase of really scaling the business, going from 50 customers last year to, to 700 right now, and probably a thousand by end of year. So we. Of course very happy about that. But you know, the, the initial vision is that carbon accounting should and probably very, probably will become universal. So how do you go from, you know, 1000 to to 1 million customers? So it may sound pretty ambitious, but I think that's the, the nature of the problem forces us to, to be ambitious. So. Right now we're, we're seeing within those 700 customers a kind of tiering where you have the very small companies that can almost perform this like self-service style. A bit like you have like pre accounting stuff. If you're a 10 people company, you don't necessarily need an accountant. And so on. And the larger ones need of course, more assistance there, there are more moving parts and so on. So I think we we're going to have both more self-service and that could be distributed through, through banks. We're rolling out a first project with banks who would like onboard, you know, five, maybe 10,000 of their own customers on a self service carbon accounting, which would be a little less exhaustive as when we have a climate expert, but would at least, you know, be better than nothing, which is the, the current state of the art. And then there are the midsize companies that we are. Just getting more and more productive on, and then we're moving up slowly, to the large enterprises that are essentially distributing us to their supply chain. And that of course requires more service. So, the plan is really to be able to, to serve you know, a million companies. Right now we're, we're I would say 60, 70% in Europe. We, we've opened the US earlier this year, it's already 30% of new business each month, so that's great. They're clearly like five years behind Europe in terms of maturity and, you know, I don't say this to, to alienate Americans. I think they. They have the ability to catch up and, and do something much better, much faster, very quickly. But it's an opportunity to be there before it's really started. So it's a niche market still. But being a leader on a niche that will become mainstream is a good strategy. I hope

Tom Raftery:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it, it allows people to have a competitive differentiation, so I, I think it's a good thing to your point about, going to suppliers or going out to RFPs and RFQ s and, and being able to say, I can, I can document exactly how much my carbon footprint will be for this particular product or service. Okay, we are Alexis coming towards the end of the podcast now. Is there any question I have not asked that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of?

Alexis Normand:

Yeah. Well, you asked a lot of very good questions, so it, so it's pretty exhaustive. I, I just think, you know, overall throwing a a few figures might be important. You know, why, why will this scale I mean the, I think just perhaps repeating myself, but right now um, 20% of emissions are tracked and managed. We need to get to a hundred percent if we are to half our emissions by 2030. Get to net zero by 2050. So really you know, if you agree with that we will get to net zero at some point hopefully by 2050, you know, and if we're lagging by 50 years, it's gonna be a problem, but we'll have to get there anyway. Then, you know, how do I prepare for this world right now? And I think businesses that fail to do so, will fail. Maybe not next year, but down the line they will. So, I would say you know, that's why I'm of of course optimistic for our business, but also optimistic that people can come to the realization that embracing the, the energy transition right now is in, not just in their long term interest, but in their short term business interest. It's a huge opportunity. Net zero will happen. So, hopefully we can help accelerate that.

Tom Raftery:

Fantastic. Fantastic. Alexis, if people want to know more about yourself or Greenly or any of the things we mentioned in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Alexis Normand:

Well, directly to me. I mean, I'm happy to, to share my email, Alexis greenley.earth or on the contact form of our website. Hopefully it'll be a smash hit and a hundred thousand people, you know, contact me, so I might have to redirect a few of them. But I, I would be super interested in getting direct feedback from this.

Tom Raftery:

Fantastic. Fantastic. Great. Alexis, that's been really, really interesting. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Alexis Normand:

Oh, my pleasure. Thanks Tom, for, for all your questions and very happy to spend that time today with you.

Tom Raftery:

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about Climate 21, feel free to drop me an email to Tom Raftery outlook.com, or connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please, don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show Thanks. Catch you all next time.

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