Achieving net zero in a remote working world with Matthew Stibbe, CEO of Articulate Marketing

In the second of our podcasts with Matthew Stibbe, Yiuwin Tsang delves into what it means to be a truly remote working team and how this has allowed Articulate Marketing to establish a unique employee culture despite them being spread throughout the UK. 

Their remote working principles have also allowed Articulate Marketing to strive for net zero status, a process that is very rigorous, but which Matthew feels all businesses have a responsibility to at least consider and work towards.  

In the podcast, Matthew shares his top tips for going on the net zero journey as well as the pros and cons of setting up a remote working environment for his agency. 

About Matthew Stibbe:

Matthew is a CEO, entrepreneur, marketer, writer, pilot, wine enthusiast, and a geek. He's currently CEO of Articulate Marketing, which provides marketing for ambitious B2B tech companies. Previously, Matthew was founder and CEO at Intelligent Games, which he sold back in 2000. 

Transcript

Yiuwin Tsang: 

Hello and welcome to the Beautiful Business Podcast. Beautiful Business is a community for leaders who believe there's a better way of doing business. We believe beautiful businesses are led with purpose by people who care, guided by a clear strategy and softly grown. 

Hi, folks, welcome to this week's episode of the Beautiful Business Podcast. My name is Yiuwin Tsang and I was joined this week by Matthew Stibbe. Matthew is a CEO, entrepreneur, marketer, writer, pilot, wine enthusiast and geek. 

He's currently CEO of Articulate Marketing, who provide marketing for ambitious B2B tech companies. And previously, Matthew was founder and CEO of Intelligent Games, which he sold back in 2000. 

I really enjoyed chatting with Matthew and found his advice super helpful. So I hope you do too. We'll start off with net zero in a remote working world. 

Matthew, tell us a bit more in terms of the background to Articulate because you've always been remote. So I'm curious to know, why did you set it up this way?

Matthew Stibbe:  

Well, it goes back to the year 2000, when I sold my previous business, and I came out of that having signed all the papers and sat in my car and thought about things for a bit. And I swore to myself, I would never have another office because my old company had a big old four storey building, and I pay rent for it and things. So you know, it came from a rather selfish commitment, not have to pay any more rent. 

But as the agency took off, and it really Articulate Marketing sort of flourished in the last 8-10 years, it seemed to make sense to continue working from home, I was working from home, I was hiring a few people. The first few people I hired are still with me, why that suddenly became very attractive was I was able to hire somebody who was living in Oxford, I was able to hire somebody who was living in Harrow North London. And we were using like pinup video conferencing, it's amazing, you could do this, and we were chatting on Skype back in those days, and then with various other things. And so it just sort of went from there. I proved the case with those two, and, you know, ended up hiring. And for a little while we were hiring people, you know, all over Europe and the UK, we've slightly backed off that now. Because as we get bigger, it's harder to manage the legalities of employing somebody in another country. So we've got people in the southwest, we've got people in Wales, we've got people in Scotland, we've got people all over the UK. And it matters not a jot. We love working that way. But you do have to work at it. 

Yiuwin Tsang: 

Yeah, it's an interesting debate, certainly since the post COVID kind of world and other debates around hybrid working, which we'll come on to in just a second. But just to kind of go back to your point that it opened up more opportunities for you and for ticket marketing in the sense that the talent pool that you could tap into had no geographical two degree geographical restrictions. So long as they were happy with working remotely, yes, you could take them on.

Matthew Stibbe:   

Correct. And so the talent pool has been a big plus, it's turned out actually in looking back on it, that it's not only being able to, you know, recruit over a large geographical area. But there are some people, and this is less of a benefit now, sort of COVID wise, but there are some people who actively don't want to work in an office. 

For example, we have a couple of we're big advocates for neurodiversity. And there are a couple of people in the company who are diagnosed with autism. They don't want to be in an office, it's too much for them. So, you know, for them working remotely, it's actually a really positive thing. They are amazing employees and being able to hire them and attract them. So it's not just the geography of this, once you start kind of diving into the culture of remote working, it unlocks other possibilities.

Yiuwin Tsang:

It's really interesting, because I've had the fortune to work in a really nice kind of office environment, work remotely myself as well. And it's really interesting, as you said, there's some people who just prefer to be in their own kind of space. And you see that even pre COVID people who, you know, just kept themselves themselves in their office put their headphones on, they didn't really take part in whole kind of office culture, not in a disruptive way, not in a negative kind of way, but it just wasn't for them. 

So the opportunity to work from home I think is really just an interesting point. Do you find them that you attract do attract certain people because I want to move on to this whole debate of office working remote working, the hybrid kind of concept that coming up? Because I think there are lots of perspectives on it. I personally believe there isn't a right or a wrong answer. But I think there are particular nuances. So if your business is, you know, employees, perhaps like lots of, say younger folks, but you know, the people that don't have the trappings of a family to look after and a mortgage to pay down and things like this when I was that age, work was very much part of my social fabric, you know, and it meant a lot to go and see my colleagues and hang out with them and go for a beer after work and things like that. So at the same time for everybody who likes to work at home, there's probably people who almost kind of need The social interaction of workplace. So what's your perspective on that whole debate around Office hybrid remote working? Do you see that being any downsides to the way that you work remotely? And and how do those upsides outweigh them? 

Matthew Stibbe:  

Well, there are downsides and upsides to any of those models. And I think if you take a company that is really accustomed to work in an office together, and they've got their culture and their communication systems and their management styles, and then you get right, everyone worked from home, and we all had that experiment a couple of years ago, right, just getting zoom, and slack doesn't solve those problems. You need different ways of managing people, you need different incentives, you need different culture and different behaviour. So it's not just, you know, choice, and you switch, you have to think about it. I sometimes make the point to people about remote working, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, when we were trying to help people who were making that switch suddenly, and we've had some experience, it doesn't save money to remote work, you know, we have a chief happiness officer we have, we put quite a lot of time into bringing people together for company meetings. And you know, probably probably what we spend on being a remote working company is what we would spend on an office. It's not that it's great, no office, no rent. And I think that's something I've learned in the last 20 years that I didn't know in 2000. 

So that but I think coming to the specific point, you mentioned about some people, young people, particularly needing a social life, or looking to the workforce socially, I agree. And it's been very hard for people who are naturally gregarious and young people who especially, you know, I'm lucky, I have the privilege of having my own office, and I have a big house, and I can, you know, make a cup of tea downstairs, if I was sharing, you know, a small flat with three other people. And you know, that's hard, that's really hard. So we try to help people with paying for remote working spaces, we have a happiness account that we give everyone that they can use, if they need to be in an office for a day a week, just have the noise of it, you know, we can pick for that, that sort of thing. So that's one thing. Another thing is culturally, for employees to make the shift from my social life is going to come from my work colleagues to my social life is going to come from my social life, and I'm going to build a hinterland to my life outside work. That's quite an important transition for people to make. And it's not easy. And it's not easy when you're young to go out and make friends and things. 

You know, we spend quite a lot of time thinking about this and talking about this, you can't substitute a happy half hour on Zoom, although we do those two, for having friends that you go and meet in person. But that's something that people have to do for themselves, you know, we can't provide it's a byproduct of working in an office, it's not the reason why people work in an office. So there's that I do know that this year, we were able to restart our company in person meetings for the first time in three years. And I know that people love those, the chance to actually meet him. So when we did it this year, we had two whole days when we flew everyone or trained everyone into London. And we had one day of like, in an office or in a meeting room doing work stuff. And then the second day we were we went bowling on the first night we went pottery making we had a pub lunch, we're trying to do things just to put some social capital in the bank.

Yiuwin Tsang: 

Nice, nice. Indeed. And I think that's it, isn't it, like so much in life, Matthew, it's a case of balance, isn't it and bringing that time together the some of the podcast interviews I've done, there's some really interesting takes on bringing the team together and how you make the most of that time. And one of the best rules that we've adopted actually, within our organisation has been when we do have team away days, it's like an est. We're not there to talk about client projects and things like that. It's about the team, we might spread into what we're doing for the business and what the plans are for the business. But the emphasis is on the team. And making the most of the social capital is a lovely terminology I really like that came across human capital A while back for social capital, it seems very appropriate. Just to kind of segue rather neatly into the next part of this part. When you fly people in and you train people in love the idea of training people in because of their carbon footprint. When you fly people in, I'll just assume that you plant some trees. But Net Zero, Net Zero has an obligation on all of us, or at least I feel like, again, that kind of checkout privilege type thing. There are certain people who needed to do what they can rather than go the whole hog. However, I think there's an obligation on all of us to at least start that journey, our journey towards net zero. And I know that articulate all on that journey, it will be really good to hear what spurred you to make that start and what has that journey been like so far?

Matthew Stibbe:  

I think fundamentally, yes, some people can't necessarily afford it. But I think it's incumbent on businesses to recognise their moral obligation to pay those external costs, and not that other people pay for carbon emissions and global warming and things. Even though you know you as a business of 20 people, we played quite a small part in that. Even so I think we have that obligation. So when we became a B Corp in 2018, we started buying carbon offsets for all our business travel. So at that point, we knew that we were offsetting the flights and the train journeys and the car journeys to get people in for the company meetings. And at that point, we were doing six or eight a year, so there was quite a lot of travel. And that was the starting point was really it was a byproduct of our B Corp journey. In the last year, we have started off firm commitment to being net zero and authentically, audibly provably by 2025. That deadline feels like it's really close, given the amount of work we actually have to do. It's, as I got into it, it's easy to set these sort of lofty goals, and then you find out right, it's actually quite complicated. So at the moment, we are, this is a marketing term, I think, from ecology, but we're a climate positive employer. So what that means is that we are buying carbon offsets, carbon reduction projects, investing in carbon reduction for our travel for direct business output, which is relatively modest, because we don't have a building, we don't have an office, we don't have a factory, we don't buy physical goods, particularly. And we are buying carbon offsets for all the personal consumption of all our employees, because that's the main carbon output that we have to offset. And we're doing that by using data that says this is what an average UK citizen does. And we're doing the travel and the direct things just on a sort of an estimated basis. I think, therefore, we are actually massively overshooting. We're buying a lot more offsets than we probably need to. But I think I'd rather be on that side of the balance. And so we're doing this with ecology.com, which we like very much. And they make it quite easy to do all of this. So the next step in the journey, the journey that we are on right now is a couple of things. So the first thing is we are beta testing, ecologies, zero product, which plugs into our accounting software, Xero accounting software, and basically looks at your purchases and puts a carbon cost to that. So it's much more specific about where your upstream co2 emissions are coming from. And the second thing we're doing as part of the Sustainable Development Goal project, looking to our B Corp recertification next year, because STG has become part of B Corp is also using another tool that they have, which is effectively a small business auditing tool that tells you what your co2 emissions and we've done a first pass on that. So between ecology zero and this other tool, forgive me, I forget the name of this other thing, we're triangulating very specifically what our co2 emissions are and what we need to reduce really important and then verifiably offset with, you know, scientifically provable things. And besides all that we're planting a lot of trees, which is not for now, it'll pay dividends 510 years down the line. So that's an add on. And my CFO who used to be an auditor for the World Bank, and used to run compliance for big multinationals and things she said, really do the SDG work and the net zero work properly, really properly. She said it's on a par with doing Sarbanes Oxley for a multinational SDG manuals like 700 pages, you know, there's a lot of work in it. So I thought it would be easier than that. But But we've got to do it properly.

Yiuwin Tsang:  

Yeah, no, indeed, it's absolutely incredible the journey that you've gone on so far, and I love the level of intricacy, but not the intricacies sake, you know, it's this accountability part. And another, we'll talk about certification in a bit. But I think that for many businesses out there, and certainly for my business as well, we're kind of like finger in the air, you know, well, let's overshoot it and do it, which is fine. But then I guess almost psychologically, it almost becomes a financial term. It's just like, it's how many trees we need to pay for to feel good about ourselves, almost, you know, and it becomes almost a transactional in that sense. Whereas if you've got that level of accountability, and you can see how much carbon is being pushed out through your activity.

Matthew Stibbe:  

Net zero is not only co2, but it's other greenhouse gases, which is one of the differences between carbon neutral and Net Zero, there's a higher level of rigour and accountability. And with net zero, you have a really strong commitment to reduce as well as offset, you have a much higher standard set for the quality of those offsets. I mean, it's exponentially harder, actually net zero, as it turns out, but nil desperate random. I think anyone listening to this, who wants to take the first step, you know, just start, you can actually go sign up with ecology, and there are other providers out there to start, at least you know, as you say overshooting and at least buying enough offsets that you're, you know, feeling comfortable, you're doing something and then work on the rigour and the accountability.

Yiuwin Tsand

I guess getting to the nub of this part of the podcast really is how do you manage it from a remote worker perspective and having a distributed team in the way that articular marketing does, because if anything, from an accountability perspective, you've got an office and where you're paying rent, you know, what your heating bills are, so on and so forth. That level of measurement and accountability is pretty visible. What are the challenges was trying to get to net zero from a remote working perspective?

Matthew Stibbe:  

So part of it is thinking about our primary hate to abuse this tradies unit of production is people so making sure that we're actually accounting for their emissions, which is why climate positive employer it's important, and even though we probably don't have to do that, For the net zero, we will probably continue doing that. So that's one piece of it. But actually, if you think about the journey to net zero, and I won't get into scopes, and all the technical terminology, but you're responsible for things like we have a building, and we buy gas, and we heat it and light it, and that co2 emissions for that, fine. But there's also a scope that is we buy cloud services from Microsoft, or we buy computers from Apple, or we buy, and there's all of that stuff, that doesn't matter. If you're in an office hybrid or remote working, you still have to grapple with that bit of it to move towards net zero, you can't have evade that. And accounting for that, and auditing that actually accurately going. We know what co2 emissions or greenhouse gas emissions were responsible for. So that we can offset them or reduce them appropriately is really important. In a sense, i Our problem is simplified by not having an office but it is not eliminated. And every company has got the same challenge.

Yiuwin Tsang: 

What would your best piece of advice be Matthew, For businesses that are looking to move towards Net Zero, specifically, if they have got remote workers, if you could go back in time and tell yourself, you know, do this, Matthew, because it'll make your life easier? What would it be?

Matthew Stibbe:  

Hire a genius CFO? One thing, a couple of things that Joking aside, I think the first thing is to, as a leader, as a business leader, set the objective, you might not know what's involved to get there, or how you're going to get there. In some cases, actually, it's quite honest and disarming to say, I want this, we're going here, I have no idea how we're going to do it, I need your help. Because then you can enlist the support and the enthusiastic engagement of your team. So making it a company thing, but setting the target, I think setting the target that is quite ambitious, right? It's everyone else is going net zero by 2030. And they've got much bigger companies and much bigger problems to solve. And we have, so I went right to it. 25, let's do it, you know, quicker. I wish I hadn't. But now we've done it. So we've got to move faster, I think then you can start, as I said, you know, you can go to ecology, and you can sort of make an initial stab at it. But I think the netzero sort of rigorous thing to do is to really get into understanding scopes and emissions of greenhouse gases and scientific targets, you know, educate yourself. And yes, it's quite complicated. And it takes some time, you know, I probably spent a day or two reading about this on with stuff that's been spoon fed to me by somebody who has read much more of it, I think, engaging your staff and educating them about it so that when you say, you know, scope one, scope two, they go, Okay, it's that we're doing that. And so we've made it one of our mandatory training courses about the learning part about sustainable development goals, but including the net zero target. And I think then, you just got to start kind of working out what you are actually emitting and what you need to do. And yeah, it's a bit like going for B Corp, or any other certification and ISO certification, the journey is almost as valuable as arriving at the destination. So if you don't start, you don't get any benefit. But if you start, you can start racking up some wins and some progress and some understanding and demonstrating. I run a small business, I'm busy as hell, I understand that. This is one of many calls on a business owners time, it's very hard to keep up with this and all the other things, especially in economic crisis situation, but starting it, setting targets, enlisting your staff, understanding it, and then making incremental progress towards it. I think it's the way to make this work.

Yiuwin Tsang: 

And just as you were talking to Matthew, and all makes perfect sense that all adage, the longest journey is the one that's slowest to start. What I'm really interested about is this part of your personal development plans to inform and educate your team around SDGs are you come across people, there's a friend of mine who I love hanging around with outside of work, he's a great guy, but whenever we talk about, you know, the environmental crisis is coming, he almost kind of closes his ears to it, you know, and you know, he's a decent bloke. And His thing was, there'll be watching frozen planet with the kids. And his daughter's eight year old daughter turned around to him and just hit that we broken the planet, and his heart broke at that point, you know, because it just thought we are we've absolutely ruined it. And I think that was the thing that got in, it was almost like this intentional ignorance, almost, you know, where it's like, if I don't know how big the problem is, then it's not such a big problem. And it feels like if we can educate our teams if we educate ourselves, without scaring the life out of each other, but it does bring that it brings the urgency to the situation, it brings the perspective, the size, the scale of what's in front of us. And with that, I guess it strengthens our resolve to try and fix it. Is that fair thing to say?

Matthew Stibbe:  

I think so. I think for us, our employee base is relatively young, they're quite, you know, right on politically, and, you know, we have this sort of, but not you know, there's a spectrum there as there is in society. And, you know, I was watching Trevor Noah last night doing his stand up comedy, and he was doing this story about the dinosaurs and there's a dinosaur and there's an asteroid coming and then other diamonds, okay, no fake news. That's just a hoax. There's no such thing as asteroids. You know, just we, you know, we live in a world where some people are in denial. Some people are, I don't want to know about it. It's too complicated. It's stressful. You know, I'm not on a mission here to preset, as I'm not really I don't make a religious issue out of this. But it is part of our business culture. It's part of our business goals. It's part of our OKRs and business plan that we are moving towards. And people need to at least understand what we're doing as a business, they need to understand how we're doing it. So when we rolled out this training course, and when we had our company training day company event, we were doing SDGs workshops around that for the whole day. There's a proportion of the company that's passionate and enthusiastic and engaged and they're the ones that are evangelising for it and championing it and helping, and there's a sort of middle rump who like never volunteer for anything, because you know, they've got enough on their plate, and then as a sort of few sceptics, I can't be bothered. Well, that's okay. You know, what we're trying to do sort of make sure that everyone's involved to the extent that it's part of their work, their business, their engagement, and if people are enthusiastic, they can get involved. So yeah, I think you have to recognise that spectrum, but it doesn't have to stand in the way.

Yiuwin Tsang: 

Thank you so much, Matthew, for sharing your time, your advice, your ideas and your insights from running Articulate Marketing. 

Thank you for joining us for this week's Beautiful Business Podcast.