Rewards Beyond Profit: Why Sustainable Growth Delivers True Outsized Value

There's no question that businesses exist to create profits. Yet we shouldn't measure success just by financial gain. Ethical and sustainable growth should be the ultimate goal. It's the gold standard toward which most businesses should strive.

Getting there requires understanding what sustainable growth means and how to achieve it. Let's start with a quick definition.

Understanding Sustainable Growth 

So what is sustainable growth? In essence it means pursuing a strategy that focuses on environmental, social and economic considerations. It's not purely driven by maximizing short term profits. Instead, it's about forging new business models that balance financial success with positive societal impact, while keeping environmental harm to a minimum.

To put a finer point on it, sustainable growth is sometimes characterized as being the amount of growth a company can generate without creating problems, either for their company or society at large. One way to measure this is the Sustainable Growth Rate, (or SGR), which calculates the maximum rate of growth a company can create assuming it doesn’t take on any financial leverage (or debt).

Now that we've covered the essentials, let's go deeper into the subject.

The Three Keys to Sustainable Growth

Sustainable growth is driven by three factors: Economic wisdom, stewardship of the environment, and social responsibility.

Economic wisdom means creating a socially responsible approach to business: Think paying employees fairly, engaging your communities, and creating long-term value and financial stability.

This often means understanding your firm's SGR, which can provide insight into how the company is being run. For example, if debts are being paid off quickly and cash flow is running predictably and without issue, these are signs economic wisdom is present.

Stewardship of the environment means taking care of it by minimizing your company's ecological footprint. Limit pollutants, increase resource efficiency, and prevent waste as much as you can. Other common steps include recycling, limiting water use, and phasing out of plastics in favor of biodegradable materials.

One of the most impactful steps you can take is going paperless. Reducing reliance on paper, ink, and all those storage cabinets can save trees and help your budget. Automation is also employee-friendly, as it means fewer tedious manual processes.

To promote social responsibility, you also need to promote human rights at every level of your organization. This also extends to vendors and supply chains. Provide fair labor practices, promote diversity and equality, and ensure your company has a positive societal impact.

SAP Concur and Sustainable Growth: A Winning Pair

As we mentioned earlier, automation is a winner for the environment. SAP Concur has changed the trajectory of sustainable business travel by giving companies the ability to quickly implement sustainable business practices related to travel and expense (a category with outsized environmental impact).

Some of these benefits include travel decision support, helping guide travelers' decisions by showing green labels, and offering a variety of transport options, including filtering for sustainable travel.

SAP Concur solutions offer data on sustainability indicators and dashboards that help businesses track and meet their sustainability and regulatory targets. The ability to set and manage carbon budgets is another benefit for organizations using automated tools.

These benefits don't just help the planet; they align with the preferences of business travelers, who increasingly want sustainable options.

How to Achieve Sustainable Growth?

We've talked about the value of sustainability, but how do you actually achieve it?

First, establish your core values. Clearly articulate your defining principles and let this serve as the foundation for everything you do. Specify where and how your company can realistically make a difference and work toward these goals. Employees want to work for companies that have principles, and sustainability remains a core shared goal.

Next, consider customer satisfaction and retention. Long-term relationships provide stability and lower the costs (financial and environmental) of constantly churning clients and searching for replacements. This is a great example of how you can serve both the profit motive (lowering your cost of business acquisition) while also saving resources that can be allocated elsewhere.

Embracing innovation is also important. If you can use solutions such as SAP Concur that automate and improve efficiency, you are creating a powerful enabler of sustainable growth. You can reduce your reliance on paper, become vastly more efficient, reduce waste, and get more transparency through new insights and reporting.

How to Scale Your Sustainability Strategy

Scaling is a challenge for most businesses. Making your sales processes more efficient is a great way to jumpstart this, and tools such as SAP Concur can play a clear role here and help create more sustainable models.

Begin by measuring your progress. After all, it’s virtually impossible to effectively manage something if you cannot measure it. That also goes for sustainability. You should create transparent metrics for tracking your progress across all three (previously mentioned) dimensions of sustainable growth.

Companies can add reporting capabilities that extend beyond crude metrics by adding SAP Concur solutions. You can go deeper into causal factors and discover exactly what steps to take to improve performance. If an organization gains the ability to perform automated calculations for travel emissions and connect directly with booking data, it enables much more accurate reporting.

It's also important not to introduce too much complexity too quickly. Meet with your key leaders, communicate your plan and metrics and use reporting to ensure everyone remains informed and onboard. SAP Concur solutions can help facilitate this and provide visibility into sustainability metrics and progress toward goals.

SAP Concur solutions integrate easily, and can help power up your overall tech stack, getting you ready for the challenges to come.

The Takeaway

Sustainable growth isn't just a competitive mandate for business; its success or failure also have a profound impact on the world around us. If we can balance profit motives with stewardship, we can create a better world for everyone.

Tools such as SAP Concur have a major role to play in making this happen. It can help you optimize processes and lower costs while tracking your overarching sustainability goals. 

If you'd like to hear more about what SAP Concur solutions can do for you, contact us today.