How to use sustainability to build an enterprise

In this episode, EY’s Chris Hagler and Cox Cleantech's Vice President Steve Bradley discuss the importance of sustainability in a business.

Key takeaways:

Determine the business’ vision of growth – consider aligning with Sustainable Development Goals, major world challenges and areas facing critical impacts by climate change. Commit to an in-depth understanding of the areas of focus to determine the opportunities to grow the business.
Leverage the capabilities of the organization. For areas of focus that seem very different from obvious core competencies, creatively look at the current capabilities of the business.
Optimize investments for impact. A diverse business needs both companies that have outsized impact based on capital requirements, as well as companies that have a more linear impact from their capital.
Get experience and momentum by making investments in a risk-adjusted way that fits the business.

For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available.

Podcast

Season 3, Episode 1

Duration

40m 56s

Chris Hagler

Welcome to Sustainability Matters, a podcast series of EY. My name is Chris Hagler. I’m one of the leaders in our Climate Change and Sustainability practice and your host for this series. We designed this podcast series to provide leading trends and practical advice around the environmental, social and governance, or ESG, issues and opportunities facing business today.
Corporate sustainability has evolved over the last 10 years or so. Where companies used to focus on philanthropy and community engagement, they evolved to a focus on reducing energy, water and waste and to better managing risk. And today more and more companies are shifting to a view where sustainability is a strategic advantage. They’re developing new products and services to help others address their sustainability challenges. Some companies have taken sustainability to a whole new level by focusing on the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs. These are 17 goals that were put forth by the United Nations in 2015, encouraging countries and companies to build a sustainable, safer and more prosperous planet for all humanity. The objectives of the SDGs are certainly worthwhile, and they also provide opportunity for enterprising and creative companies. One study estimates that the SDGs provide $12 trillion in market opportunity. One company that is addressing this market challenge and opportunity is Cox Enterprises. I’m joined today by Steve Bradley, vice president of Cox Cleantech, who will share with us how Cox is ramping up its business to create increased positive impact for the world. Welcome, Steve.

Steve Bradley

Thanks, Chris.

Hagler

Steve, can you start by just sharing a bit about your background and sort of how you got into cleantech?

Bradley

Yes, sure. How far back do you want to go?

Hagler

Let’s skip kindergarten.

Bradley

(Laughter) OK, so, let me start by saying I think just something that might resonate with some of our generation of sustainability professionals. You know I always say that a lot of us — and I’ll put myself in this category — didn’t actively start our education or careers to do what we’re doing today, but there was always this maybe pivotal time or moment that you could look back in hindsight and say, well, OK, I was probably on this predestined path and just didn’t know it. I grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, in a very natural environment of the brackish marshes, the river, the Gulf of Mexico, and what I saw there was this beautiful natural environment but that was being impacted, you know, in a negative way. Specifically, things like the levees that were built on the river with the idea of flood control also had an unintended consequence of isolating all of the fertilizer runoff that ends up in the river rather than that getting spread out through marshes and deltas all down along the river. That water now gets funneled out into the Gulf of Mexico, which creates a dead spot.
And so, that thing really influenced me growing up, standing at the mouth of the river, looking up it, wondering, who are these people up there that are sending all of this bad stuff down to me? And so, as a kid, when you’re told you can only eat one fish, it tends to make you not want to eat any; and so, those types of things were really influential in how I thought about nature, the environment, the planet and how humans were altering the state of that planet sometimes with a lot of well-meaning but having these negative consequences.
But I didn’t really catch on to that early on. I worked for a big electric utility doing turbine and boiler performance and designing and maintaining the high-voltage transmission system. That was really the skill set that enabled me to make the transition into first sustainability, which then led to what I’m doing today, and the reason was, you know, I joined Cox about you know 19 years ago with that background and never really thought what I was going to be doing was sustainability. I was thinking I would be building mission-critical facilities for the company, leveraging that mechanical and electrical engineering background, and I did some of that, but it very quickly evolved into a role that then became my passion, which was alternative energy.
At the time our CEO, Jim Kennedy, who’s still the chairman of the board, really had I guess a vantage point for seeing change that was happening on the planet like no other and was thinking about these things going 30 or 40 years ago. Because of that, Jim really wanted us as a company and then, therefore, me to put a focus on that. And so, we started in the early 2000s implementing alternative energy. I fell in love with doing it. That’s ultimately then what led to our broader sustainability program, which then over time evolved as you said.
We went from thinking about something as simple as how to reduce our energy consumption. That was our second largest expense next to people, because Cox is a services business. We said, well, let’s focus on that. That was what I knew as well. So, it seemed like a natural start. Later on, as we learned from what others were doing, we also really took a minute to think about what Jim wanted his legacy to be, which was Jim wanted Cox to leave the world a better place, which is a pretty broad statement without a lot of measurable goals. We went back and thought about that.
I thought, OK, is having an energy reduction goal, does that fit the mission, and really does it honor his legacy that he wanted? The answer I came up with was no. If we really want that to be what the company is doing, we need more aggressive goals, and we need more holistic goals. And so, we expanded our focus to carbon, water and waste and also set date-certain neutral goals, because the other thing I realized was if you just have a very simple goal that you know you can meet, it’s not really changing the culture of the company.
You’re just doing some actions that are beneficial, but it’s not really changing how that company is moving into the future; and so, we wanted to make the goals really aggressive to where we were really forcing the conversation of at least considering the environment in every business decision that we were making. Now that was great, and it worked really well, but it also forced me to really rethink how we were going about sustainability, because date-certain neutral goals don’t work that well if the company is growing and expanding. You should be able to align those two things.
Meanwhile, Alex Taylor, who is now our CEO, was really trying to put the company back into a growth mode. When we started thinking about how that would look from an environmental standpoint, we realized that we needed to do something bigger than just eliminating Cox’s footprint. We would keep focusing on that, but we needed to do something even bigger. What we determined was it made a whole lot of sense for several reasons to drive a certain portion of that growth and diversification by building a new division of the company in the cleantech sector. It helped us by diversifying into a completely new area. There was a huge amount of financial opportunity there.
And then the last thing, which is one of the things that makes me most proud of working for the company and the family, is through building Cleantech we have the opportunity to really enact this positive trajectory change on the planet, which we wouldn’t have been able to do just by eliminating Cox’s environment footprint.

Hagler

Wow. You know, Steve, you just told the story of sustainability for the whole corporate America I think in the last several years. I mean, Cox really personifies that move from we’re trying to do a good thing to we’re just trying to reduce our impact to that stage where you are now, whereas we’re trying to create a positive trajectory for the world. And it’s a fantastic story, and I appreciate you sharing that. And if you really think about it, Cox Cleantech is impact investing. We did another podcast with the leader from Prudential, who was talking about impact investing from just that financial perspective, and you’re really doing that as well. Right? This is sort of a new take on impact investing, and it seems to me that it connects to Cox’s purpose now, which is empowering people today to build a better future for the next generation. How do you see Cox Cleantech helping to bring that purpose to life?

Bradley

I think the term “impact investing,” I think it sort of depends on your perspective. What I think about in terms of building Cleantech is, Cox has been around for over 120 years. What I’m trying to do is build a durable business that hopefully plays a role in the next 120 years of the company’s future. What we are literally trying to do at Cox is build that better future. I think about it in terms of impact investing. I think about it in terms of traditional investing, because, to me, if you have a little company, no matter what impact it has, it’s going to have a little impact.
If I can build a really big business that has an outsized impact on the world, that sort of successful mission for me, that’s really how we think about it in terms of squaring it with the company’s values. This is something that has been just core to our values since day one of the company. I’m really proud that the company continues to have this as a value and demonstrated as a value vs. a program or something that is not going to stand the test of time, but that’s really our goal of what we’re trying to do is to build a better world.

Hagler

Fantastic. Let’s get a little bit more specific. So, within Cleantech, I hear you. You’re trying to build a big business with outsized impact on the world. The term “cleantech” sure is a big, hard-to-define phrase. How do you define cleantech, and how do you decide where to invest to build that big business?

Bradley

That’s a great question, and it was probably my first moment where I realized the joke about the dog catching the car, going through and doing a total addressable market of cleantech, and I came with hundreds of trillions of dollars. So, job one was … first of all I’ll just say “cleantech” to me, I look at cleantech as anything that has to do with resource efficiency, using less or using the things that we’re using in a more responsible way. I also think of it in terms of resiliency and adaptation. I think there’s a point where we have to acknowledge, I think, anyway – I acknowledge it – that the world is changing. The planet is not going to be the same tomorrow as it is today, and part of that’s being caused for sure by humans, in fact, a lot of it. I think there are sort of two pieces. One, we need to stop doing that harm in every way that we can to try to help change that curve, but then there’s that second piece of we just have to acknowledge there’s going to be some change no matter what, and we need to make sure that we’re building more resilient systems and that we’re adapting in a way that lets us be able to help ensure that we’re going to have functioning businesses into the future.
And I think this is also part of the change when you talked about the evolution of sustainability. It went from doing the right thing to risk avoidance to competitive advantage, and then for us it then changed into opportunity. So, that’s sort of broadly how I think about cleantech. Unfortunately, that definition you can pretty much apply it to almost every single sector.

Hagler

Still pretty broad there, Steve.

Bradley

That’s right. So, then what I said is, OK, let’s really focus on a few areas where we think, A, we can have the most impact. For instance, if a particular sector is like the smallest piece of the pie from an environmental standpoint, you probably don’t want to go try to build a business in that. That was sort of the next cut. Let’s look at, I call them sectors, but areas of cleantech that could have a huge impact on the environment. Buildings. The numbers that I’ve seen represent something like 40% of greenhouse gas emissions. All right, that’s a big piece of the pie. Let’s go after that.
So, anyway, we sort of took that cut at it. Then we had to look at it from a financial standpoint for it to really have a true impact in the long run and be durable. It can’t be philanthropy. So, we need to make sure we look at sort of the financial side of it as well to say, OK, is there growth in this area from a financial standpoint? What’s the fragmentation look like? New-entrant dynamics — could we come in and be successful here, or are we going to get crushed by the 800-pound gorilla that was already in that space? And then things just go right back to the way they were.
That was sort of the way we started winnowing down this massive sector to really focus on specific areas like sustainable agriculture, energy services and waste-to-X, which is a term that I’m not sure. I think we might have made it up, but it’s waste to anything other than burying it in the ground; and so, we just call it waste-to-X for short. That was really how we focused in on those segments, and now these are not the only segments. We really had to also choose like, what did we want to impact? Do we want to impact carbon emissions? Do we want to impact water or other types of resources? Water pollution, things like that. That sort of focused us in where we wanted to be, and then we had to go really deep in those areas to understand if there was an opportunity for us to build a big business there.

Hagler

I think you did make up waste-to-X, and I’m pretty sure I’ve stolen it and used it with some of my other clients.

Bradley

Awesome.

Hagler

So, I’ll be sure to give you credit for it. (Laughter)

Bradley

It started as waste to energy, and that was my definition. It was sort of a flawed definition. I started there because as we were doing the work in that space, at the time we looked, that was about the only thing I could find that was a profitable business model in the waste space, and you could handle the logistics. You know if you can turn it into energy, like you do something with it, but then that changed. We saw some opportunities to do better things with waste other than just turn them into energy. Energy is a good thing too, but better things meaning a higher and better use for that waste vs. conversion into energy.

Hagler

As I think about these three segments — sustainable ag, waste-to-X, energy efficiency — two of them tie very directly to those date-certain neutral goals that fit Cox Conserves or the original goals of the enterprise and makes sense to me, especially given your background as an engineer coming from electric utility. It sounds like you’re building off of goals of the company, experience that you have, I’m sure your team as well. Sustainable ag is a little bit harder connect for a cable company. So, maybe you could talk a little bit more about that.

Bradley

You’re dead on about the other two. You know we were able to leverage in energy. We could leverage multiple decades of energy services experience of what we were doing inside Cox, and the same with waste. We had a good idea of all the challenges that people were having because we were having those challenges. Sustainable agriculture was an area that when we started looking at it, it was very far afield from any of Cox’s core competencies, you know, things that the company is good at today or so we thought.
I’ve also learned to have to just to be very creative about how we apply our skills from our businesses to these, because inherently all of these businesses are going to naturally just be far afield from sort of the black and white definition of what a cable and automotive services business’s core competencies are. Anyway, ag was an area that got me really excited personally because of a lot of reasons. One is just the connection to the earth. Our founder came from agricultural roots. We do have that sort of tie in the genetics way, way, way back, even though we can’t necessarily leverage those skill sets today.
And then personally, both of my grandparents were farmers. I had that natural inclination to want to do things that you can touch and feel vs. like energy is a little bit more of a nebulous thing. What really got me excited, though, beyond that was we saw an opportunity that is sort of masked in a challenge that’s looming out there, feeding a growing population and offering access to food — higher quality, healthier, safer, more reliable food — to be better able to keep up with the demand of what the planet’s population needs are going to be.
And then if you look at sort of the environmental challenge of it, ag is maybe responsible for a lot of bad things, and nobody really has spent, I don’t think anyway, a lot of effort thinking about these things because you don’t touch your food supply. Just leave it alone. Do what you got to do to make sure that we’ve got the food that we need to eat. And so, as I was thinking this through and saying, OK, we’ve got this growing demand, so we need to be more efficient at what we’re doing. And then just personally like growing up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, when they built all the levees on the Mississippi River, all of that pollution and runoff, all the stuff from agriculture, was getting forced down into the Gulf of Mexico, creating the dead spot that’s there now. There are a lot of bad impacts from agriculture; and so, I thought there’s a great opportunity there as well.
And then the other thing goes back to when I talked about resiliency and adaptation. We know as climate changes, where we’re farming today may not be the place we’re farming tomorrow; and so, we need to have more resilient systems, but we also just need to potentially move them somewhere else, and that somewhere else may not have the right soil conditions. Or it may not have the right water availability. There are opportunities there to do it in a much better way than we did 100 years ago.

Hagler

First of all, you did align with one of the Sustainable Development Goals. Right? The zero hunger, addressing a major world challenge. You also focused on where is a major impact happening. So, where is this major environmental impact? And then that third piece is agriculture is also going to be impacted substantially by climate change; and so, you almost have that trifecta of three major impacts happening here, which sounded like opportunity to Steve Bradley at Cox, is what I think I just heard.

Bradley

That’s right. It’s hard to look the other direction and like not think about it when you check every single box, and sustainable ag for us does.

Hagler

You also mentioned when you were first talking about there’s more connection than you think. So, the waste and the energy efficiency, you were able to really leverage the capabilities of Cox and some of the experiences that you and your team have, but that you creatively have found capabilities within your organization that matches with sustainable ag. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Bradley

A great example I’ll start with is a company called Growers Edge that we invested in. Growers Edge provides agricultural warranties for products like methodologies, meaning like think about it when you go to a big box electronic store and you buy a TV. You can get a warranty with that TV. Well, imagine a farmer who you’re trying to pitch a new technology to that may come with some additional perceived risk. That farmer is not going to take on that additional risk just for some modest gains or modest increase in helping manage their asset, be it the dirt that they own.
What Growers Edge does is they provide warranties for those outcomes and help accelerate the adoption of new technologies and methodologies on the farm. I love that business model, because they’re not inherently direct cleantech. So, Growers Edge is not directly responsible for lowering carbon emissions or water pollution, but they’re an enabler who’s helping other companies who are get onto the farm.
You would say, well, why in the world would Cox be investing in a space like agricultural warranties when they’ve never done anything like that before? We have a business that we call DealShield that does the same exact thing for cars; and so, we’ve got a lot of experience in basically building that same sort of a business for car dealers. And so, we can apply all of those learnings over to the agricultural space. You just have to sometimes reframe how you're thinking about the business and the skill sets.
And then just more broadly across our portfolio, Cox is an operator. Like that’s one thing we’re really good at. We’re good at operating and scaling businesses; and so, if we can find some of these businesses, especially technology businesses ... BrightFarms is a good example of that. They’re a controlled environment agricultural company. So, they grow leafy greens locally, indoors. We know nothing about that, but it’s a technology business. It’s more technology than it is agronomy; and so, we do have some capabilities on the technology side. They bring the piece of the agronomy that we don’t have.

Hagler

I love those examples. It is something that I would encourage anyone to do is really look at what are the unique capabilities of your organization, and how can you apply them to some of these major world challenges? Because it creates major opportunity for your company as well. That’s a fantastic example. Let’s shift to how you find the right investments. Let’s talk about sort of in general how you do it, and is it different in our world today in the middle of a global pandemic?

Bradley

There’s a huge challenge in the cleantech space, for us anyway, and that is I’m trying to build a multibillion-dollar revenue division of the company; and so, I’ve got to find companies out there who can advance the ball in a significant way to that goal. The problem is there are not a lot of scaled cleantech businesses out there; and so, we don’t have the resources to go acquire a portfolio of hundreds of thousands of these and help them all along the way, although we’re doing it for some. And so, that’s probably the biggest challenge that we face in finding these businesses. Now, I’ll say we’ve also gotten better about understanding what our role needs to be. And I think that would also be my advice for someone going into this space is, what do you want to do?
There are certain areas like waste-to-X where what we’ve determined is that there’s this gap between venture capital and the growth equity, private equity area that these technologies, because they’re more infrastructure-based, the risk is binary. One day it’s there, and then the next day it’s not, but these types of businesses have a huge problem because they get the venture capital, and they get up and running, but they’re not quite ready for commercialization; and so, they have trouble accessing capital. And so, what we said there is our role is to help get them from point A to point B. That’s a place where Cox can solve a problem for these businesses and help them get across that chasm. That’s sort of just making sure that we’re understanding what our objective is in the different spaces.
But, you know, how do we find them? I would say it’s no different than traditional investment. We look for all the things you would look for if you were an investor, like take the cleantech sustainability piece off the table. We’re looking for those kinds of things, because we want good businesses, and we want good businesses in a place where we think they can compete long term. The one thing about cleantech is then you layer in what impact could they have. I think about impact the same way when a typical investor would look at a management case on their financials and their plan.
I also want to layer in the impact that they could have, because what I want in a perfect world is a small investment and a big impact or a rapid growth of impact; and so, I’m always trying to optimize for companies who not only are just good businesses, but ones that have this outsized impact based on the capital requirements that they’re going to have.

Hagler

You’re leading into my next question, which is, really, how do you measure success? I’ve heard you say that outsized impact is part of what you're looking for success. You’ve talked about financial results because of a big business. How do you think about measuring success?

Bradley

We took a pretty methodical approach to how we were going to do this; and so, I think there’s sort of the short-term, long-term view of this. Short-term was a lot easier I think anyway. We knew that these businesses would be pretty far afield from anything Cox was doing. What we wanted to do was look for areas where if we had an impact, it would be in a segment or sector that has a huge opportunity for impact. We started by making equity investments, smaller check sizes into the sectors that were really interesting to us, because we wanted to learn. We wanted to learn what the challenges of those businesses were.
So, we need like to need like to answer key questions before we would feel comfortable making acquisitions of those businesses, but we also needed to learn about their impact, because what I didn’t want to do is lock us into a framework that didn’t tell the story of a company. Like carbon is an area, — like that’s for sure a place where we are and will be measuring impact. I always want to say, well, does carbon impact tell the story of this business? You know BrightFarms, who’s using less land, less water, not letting any fertilizer go into the rivers, all of these kinds of things. Does carbon tell that story?

And so, I think it’s going to be a couple of different metrics long-term; and so, we haven’t settled on any specific metrics for impact, but we do absolutely look at those impacts for each one of our businesses, and the really exciting thing is every one of those businesses, if you believe the management’s case anyway, are magnitudes beyond anything we ever thought about inside of Cox. And that, to me, is sort of the feedback that I need to say, all right, this is going to work, and we’re going to be able to go truly change the trajectory of the planet. There’s nothing there today as far as specific goals around impact. Now we do have specific goals around the size of the business, and we’re working on how to optimize which ones, back to what I was talking about before. It’s like this capital efficiency exercise of where should we support more, and then where should we bring in partners to help us in other places?

Hagler

I’ve been jotting down some notes that I think summarize some of your advice, but I would love to hear from you. If there was another organization looking to start up a cleantech division or focus on creating greater impact with their business, what kind of advice would you give them?

Bradley

I think the first thing is probably what I said before, is just know what you’re trying to accomplish. What are you trying to accomplish, and what role do you want to play? For us, it’s no surprise that we ended up focusing on energy and waste for the reasons you said but also those are things that are important to us. It goes back to this vast cleantech opportunity set. You really need to focus, and I think to focus you need to pick what is it you want to do, and then what role do you want to play to achieve that goal?
And then beyond that you should always, and I may index a little overly towards this, but it’s not really any different here than any other type of investing other than thinking about that impact and what you want to accomplish, because at the end of the day I think everybody’s goal would be impact and value creation. If you’ve got the impact locked down, then you just need to focus on, OK, is this the right investment for me or my company to achieve whatever other goals I want to get to beyond just the impact side of things? And then beyond that, I think — I always use this baseball analogy, probably too much, but it’s get out on the field and get some reps. You know you can only do and learn so much if you’re doing third-party research.
I always sort of joke a little bit that our investments that we were making was us getting into scrimmage games. We don’t want to go get our eyes beat out by some really good team, but we need to go get some reps. And so, I think you got to do that but do it in the right risk-adjusted way for you. Just to carry the analogy out, I always said the worst thing I could do in cleantech was to step up to the plate, take three cuts and walk back to the dugout; and so, you know we think about it in terms of get some singles. Get some singles and like get some momentum going. You’re going to learn some hard lessons when you do that, and do that before you really go big.
And I mean that’s just me. I tend to be a little bit more conservative about how I do things, but I also feel this great responsibility as a steward of the company and the family’s money, and I want to make sure that I’m balancing the growth aspirations and the impact aspirations with how much money we need to be putting at risk at any one time until we get to the level where we’ve educated. I always tend to think in terms of you got to educate your gut.
At the end of the day, anybody can do the research and figure this out. What sets you apart from somebody else is an educated gut. So, you go learn 70, 80 percent, and then you’ve got to trust your gut, and that’s the only thing that’s really going to differentiate you from somebody else who can access the same data, get the same information. And so, you’ve got to have that competitive advantage if you’re going to be successful.

Hagler

Your team, I expect, that works with you is educating their gut, taking a lot of at-bats and a lot of swings and really coming up to speed and learning by doing it sounds like.

Bradley

That’s right. You can’t learn the challenges that these businesses are facing unless you’re sitting in the boardroom over a period of time. That’s when you truly learn what it takes to scale these businesses, and it might completely change your thesis on what you’re doing, but at a minimum it’s definitely going to inform how you think about acquisitions of those companies and others in the space. And I just think that’s just a fundamental that I’m really glad we did it. We could have went faster and took a lot more risk, but I think at the end of the day we will see a much higher success rate because we took the time to do that.

Hagler

I’m sure that’s the case. Steve, let’s just talk about what’s on the horizon for Cox Cleantech.

Bradley

Just in general terms, I don’t want to go into any specific details of what we’re doing, but maybe I’ll just talk about a couple things we’re doing at a high level, and then you’ll get to see these as they happen throughout later this year and next year.
The first thing is we’ve had a pretty broad portfolio now for enough time to get those at-bats and learn all those lessons, and now we’re in the process of further investment into that portfolio. So, we’ve answered the questions we needed to at least first deploy more capital into these businesses when it’s the right time, when they hit that tipping point and they’re ready for scale. Some are; and so, that’s kind of the first thing that we’re doing.

The second thing working on strategic partnerships for some of our businesses to help us accelerate scale. We did this with Anuvia through Mosaic, their large fertilizer manufacturer; and so, that’s a great example of how we can leverage strategics in the space to help accelerate scale. We’re also in the process of doing that with other companies in our portfolio; and so, there will be some announcements around those later in the year.
And then the last thing is back to those key questions that we needed to answer. We’re shifting into acquisition mode, and that to me is really exciting. While we needed to do the work and get the reps and play the scrimmage games, I’m ready to play the real games now; and so, we’re at the point where we’re ready to start making acquisitions in certain sectors. That is where this all becomes real and Cleantech becomes a real business. And so, that gets me really excited to think about.
Now, the current financial situation is obviously going to play a role in that; and so, all of these things are running in the world as we know it today, which is just different than it was four months ago, but despite the tragedy of the situation, I know that it’s going to bring some really good opportunities for us on the acquisition side. And so, the team is peddling harder than I think they ever have throughout this whole time to try to get us ready and in a position in as many sectors as we can to take advantage of those opportunities when they present themselves. So, I would say beyond the normal things that you have to do as a company to ensure that the company in general is positioned in the best way for the future to get out of this economic crisis that we’re in, we’re going to have a lot of fun over the next call it year and a half with going out and finding some really good businesses and building up the Cleantech company.

Hagler

Thank you, Steve, so much for taking the time to share your journey and Cox’s journey towards building Cox Cleantech. It just so closely aligns with the company purpose, the family values and the opportunity to create impact in the world. When I do these podcasts, I always like them to be practical and have advice, and I really appreciate your very practical advice for the listeners as they are thinking about how they could apply some of these concepts. Things like make sure you have your vision; you know where you’re going with this before you start. Right? Have that vision. Leverage the capabilities of your company and be creative in terms of looking at the capabilities that you already have, because you might be able to apply them in a different way.
I particularly appreciate your advice on knowing where you fit in the investment cycle, and what I heard you say too is you’ve shifted a little bit in terms of where you fit, because you’ve gotten some knowledge. You’re ready to shift. And then finally, optimize your investments for impact. Those are all such really practical, straightforward, with sports analogies and everything. So, I don’t know what else I could have asked for, Steve. (Laughter) So, thank you so much for being here.
If you’d like to know more about Cox Enterprises, you can find them on the internet at CoxEnterprises.com. You can follow them on Twitter as well. If you want to know more about the Sustainable Development Goals, UN.org/sustainabledevelopment. That will give you an idea of the 17 challenges that the world is trying to address, and there’s also that article there that talks about the $12 trillion in opportunity. That might be interesting. Finally, please follow me, @chrishagler on Twitter and EY’s Sustainable Impact Hub, which is @EY_Sustainable, and please subscribe to this podcast. You can get it on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcasts.

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EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.

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