Does innovation always start with a question?

What if the biggest breakthroughs in business don't begin with answers, but with curiosity?

In this episode of The Great Business Podcast, Jennifer O'Donnell is joined by entrepreneur and Green Space Innovations CEO Nicky Rifat to explore what really drives innovation. From growing up on a North London council estate to building a business that is helping commercial buildings become cleaner, greener and more sustainable through smarter waste and environmental solutions, Nicky shares the mindset that has shaped his journey.

Together, they discuss why curiosity is often the starting point for innovation, how seeing problems differently creates opportunity, and why some businesses embrace change while others resist it.

The conversation also explores the relationship between innovation and governance. Far from holding businesses back, the right structure can give people the confidence to experiment, challenge assumptions and turn ideas into lasting change.

This is a conversation about curiosity, resilience, leadership and the courage to ask better questions.

Because great businesses are not built simply by doing things well. They are built by never losing the curiosity to imagine how things could be even better.

Thanks for listening to The Great Business Podcast.
If you enjoyed it, please follow the show so you don’t miss the next episode. And if you’ve got a minute, a quick rating or review really helps other people find us.

You can find more about The Great Business Company here:
Website: www.thegreatbusinesscompany.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-great-business-company/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:21

What do we have businesses make sustainability through the building foundations in the future when the business into weeks? In this context, we ask one simple question what makes a good business and what makes a great one. Today we're talking about innovation and the role it plays in that shift. For many of us, innovation is a word that is increasingly appearing in strategic conversations and it sits at the heart of sustainability because it requires organisations to understand the internal and external factors shaping their future, challenge their status quo, and continuously adapt, improve and evolve. But what really is it? And who are the innovators? And is this something that all of us can learn? Today we're going to explore that with our guest, Nikki Riffat, co-founder and CEO of Green Space Innovations, who are a company focused on developing and bringing innovative sustainability solutions to the market. Nikki's story is one of practical experience, leadership, and continuous learning. So, Nikki, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Thanks, Jennifer. Thanks for that really interesting intro.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

Before we talk about innovation itself, I'd like our listeners to know a little bit more about you. You grew up on a council estate in North London, left formal education after secondary school, started stacking shelves in Sainsbury's and then moved into the window cleaning industry before eventually becoming CEO of an innovation business. So tell us a little bit more about that journey and whether the younger Nikki would ever have imagined that one day he'd be running a company with innovation in the title.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

Yeah, sure. Um just to answer the last part of that, I would absolutely say no. Um I guess probably if we go right back to the start, I guess I was a young, a young guy who didn't really know what he wanted to do. And I think that's probably something that resonates with a lot of young people still today. I think I'm seeing a little bit of that with my son at the moment. I've got a 13-year-old son called Logan, and um he reminds me a bit of myself actually. Um quite academic, naturally clever, a really good EQ. But when you talk to him, you kind of be like, you're trying to egg out of him. What are you interested in? What would you like to do? And I guess I was a little bit like that. I was curious about a lot of things, but didn't really know what it is I wanted to do. You know, I think again, looking at a lot of young people today and where I grew up, I grew up in a place where, you know, it's probably quite easy to take a wrong path. Um, and there was a probably a lot of social pressures from peers to potentially do stuff that you're not supposed to do. And I thought, I think I found myself dancing on that line a little bit of okay, I'm quite naturally clever or academic, but nothing formal, don't do very well in school, but it's sort of there in the background. And I kind of wanted to do well. There was always that part of me that wanted to do well in school and and be that type of young man. But then there was also this pressure from the other side of, you know, I wanted to be cool, I wanted to be, you know, I want it to fit in with my peers, I wanted to be, you know, when we were on the council state, I wanted to be a little bit naughty, I wanted to throw crab apples at people walking by, I wanted to get involved with that kind of thing, even though I knew it was wrong, you know. Do you get what I mean? And I sort of found myself all the way through to being a very maybe to maybe 19 or 20, balancing that that line. So when I think about would would I would I have guessed that I would be where I am today, I'm not so sure I would. I do know that I always wanted to do something more, and I think probably that's what's driven me in probably every step of my career. I think you mentioned that I went through school. I I did actually go to college for a very small, small I I'd studied a national diploma in sports science, but only for a couple of months, and then I uh I quit. So I dropped out of college, and then I went into Sainsbury's. My cousin was working at Sainsbury's, working there at night stacking shells, but there was always this part was I wanted more. I thought I was capable of more, and I guess that's what to sum it up. I think I was sort of someone who was really capable of doing a lot more, who got stuck in a cycle of probably being where he shouldn't be, and trying to fight out of it each time. So Sainsbury's work in Sainsbury's, I want more, but I was very limited in options, you know. I didn't have much education, you know, had no work experience. So I was sort of just fighting my way through, trying to do better in everywhere I went. And then eventually I went on to my brother was working in window cleaning, so he he offered me a job and I went into that. And again, I really enjoyed that job, but again, I always kind of wanted more, and it was sort of there in when I was a window cleaner where I thought I made this one commitment. I remember making this commitment to myself because I I came to realisation that you are where you are, you can't change what you should have done. Maybe you should have gone on to further education, you can't do anything about that now. What I made a commitment to myself was whatever I do, I'm gonna try and do the best I can at it and go as far as I can in it. So if it's window cleaning, I want to get to the pinnacle of window cleaning, right? I want to move through the ranks, I want to be a supervisor, I want to be a manager, general manager, director. So I made that commitment, making that my goal. No matter what I do, I'm gonna try and one, do the best I can, but two, try and move as far as I can in it. And lucky for me, in window cleaning and in cleaning, I managed to do that, right? I managed to go through those, through those steps. And it wasn't, again, that wasn't a very you know, it weren't a seamless process. There's a lot of rejection in that. And one of the things I learned was vocalizing when you want more was one of the most important things that I learned early was you have to be vocal about what you want in these places and these organizations, and it or it doesn't happen for you. And that I I I learned that by literally going through it. I remember jobs would come up for supervisor, you'd go for them, but you wouldn't get them, and I'd be like, Well, I think I deserve these more than everybody else. But what I learned was actually these people were way more vocal than me, they were way more vocal about what they wanted, so that was something that I learned through that process.

SPEAKER_00 7:06

You make a couple of really valid points there, one of them about the school system, because it's structured in such a way that there isn't any room for people like yourself, and there are probably lots of kids that are very similar, they don't slot into what is required in order to be able to be achieving, but are very, very bright, and obviously, from what you've said, you know, there was that element of wanting to take a little bit of risk when you're young that could be labelled as being naughty and disobedient, and and actually it's people that have prepared to take that bit of risk combined with curiosity that the ones that can go on to be really brilliant entrepreneurs. I mean, you see that listening to lots of different entrepreneurs that they come from backgrounds where they haven't achieved academically. I actually worked in the music industry, and when I joined, almost every senior board director there had not gone through formal education. So I think there is that combination of risk and curiosity, and I think if you combine that with what you were saying about, you know, you had this moment when you thought, I'm gonna do the best that I can possibly do. I think when you've got that in play as well, you've got something really powerful go going on. Where do you think that came from? Did that come from your family background, or did it how do you think that that kind of manifested itself?

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Do you know? I think you mentioned about the school school system and the children who are sort of on that line of being intelligent or being capable of doing more, but caught in that that I spoke about that that balance in line between being good, almost like a good and bad, you could put it as a basic level. I actually think that there's a moment in those with those children in school, and I've certainly felt this myself, is you kind of get forgotten about a little bit. It's like you're not you're not doing so well academically over here that they really want to grab you and drive you, and you're not bad enough for you to be looked at as you know, he can't be successful, or they they plonk you over here. You're easy for the teachers because you're actually quite clever and you do quite well, and you're not bad enough to make an impact in that sense. So you're kind of in this middle space, but actually, what I think it does is make you a little bit resilient, and you're watching and you're wondering, you're thinking, Well, what about me? And wanting to prove to people that you're capable, other people maybe not watching you or maybe not seeing you. Um, and you could maybe link that back to my my family life as well. You know, I had lived with my mum and dad, I've got two brothers, my dad was always working, as many, many dads would be, especially in that time. My mum was busy with with us, and I say this with all respect to my parents, I love them. They're very old school, but you know, for for my parents was you're ever in school or you're working, and we don't care where you're working, it doesn't matter. To them, that was a success, right? Anything outside of that was a bonus. And I just think that I was probably driven a little bit of trying to want to prove to my mum and dad and prove to other people that I'm capable of something. Yeah, and I think a lot of that drive was from that. I was wanting to prove themselves that you know what, and do you know what this probably plays a part as well. My brother, my older brother, which is only 18 months between 16 months between us, he was a very good football player. So he played for many pro clubs, he also played for England. So I had that as well. Was it all the talk would be about my brother, and I played football as quite a good footballer, but it'd be all about how amazing my brother is and how amazing he's doing, and how he's gonna be a footballer, he'd signed pro contracts, plays for England. So I guess there was probably a little bit, not envy, because I loved the fact that I spent a lot of time with him, but I was there, was there probably a little bit of I need to find my own impact.

SPEAKER_00 11:09

Yeah, absolutely. Where you sit in the in the family dynamics is is interesting in itself, isn't it? Because the psychology of that can be what drives you. But you were you always naturally curious? Would you say that that was a characteristic that you had?

SPEAKER_01 11:26

Yeah, yeah, I would. I think if you were to go and speak to my mum, my mum used to call me Daleboy, so she would say, You're always trying something new, or you're always trying to do something, or you're trying to sell something, or you she said you just always had this thing about you where you always wanted to do something different. Something different. Like I remember it's funny because I was speaking, I was actually with my mum yesterday, I was speaking about coming on the podcast, speaking about different things, and she was like, Do you remember when you tried to make an alarm for your bedroom door? So if someone came in, you would know someone come in. She remembered you were trying to make it through like a little motherboard and these wires, and she was like, You would do stuff like that, you would do stuff that was different. She said you'd do stuff that just was very create creative in the sense of trying to do stuff different, you thought differently about things.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

You need that natural curiosity. I mean, I think we all do have it to some extent. I think it is that combining factors of what drives you the curiosity that you have and the risk that you're prepared to take. Because I think everybody at some point in their life, or maybe they don't, but I know that I've often thought, oh, there's a bet there's a better way of doing that. Or you think of innovations, don't you? And I used to think, I wish somebody would create a facial iron to like iron out the creases in your face, but like I guess that's what Botox is.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

Yeah, things you think of when you like I remember maybe being 14, 15 and thinking, do I be really good if they could deliver McDonald's? Right. And this is like we even talked about as friends, like, wouldn't that be really good? And now you look, and how many apps do you have on your phone that literally can deliver you anything you want?

SPEAKER_00 13:16

Yeah, absolutely. So, how how did you get from early Nikki and doing window cleaning and working your way up in a business to then deciding to go out on your own and do something yourself?

SPEAKER_01 13:32

As I said it earlier on, I've always kind of wanted more. And I think as I started going up through the ranks within a business, I think it came apparent to me. I remember wanting to achieve really badly to become a general manager, and I had in my head that I always thought that was like for me, that was almost like if I got there, that'd be it, I'd be happy. Do you get what I mean? I don't know why it wasn't role, but I had this thing in my mind that the general manager's role is like the holy grail, I got there and I'm gonna be like great, I'm gonna sit back and I'm gonna be happy and that's me for life, yeah. And I remember getting there, and it wasn't too long after getting there thinking, well, now what more? What's the next step for me? What do you want to work towards now? And I was like, I've worked through all these steps and all these roles, and I continuously want to work towards something else. And I thought I guess when I went through that process, I sort of looked at and thought, I don't think I'll be happy if I keep going for these roles. So I think it was in that moment where I thought, I think I need to do my own thing. I think that is where it's going to be best for me because I've got this drive, it seems like this drive of wanting to continuously be ambitious to push myself to another point. And I sort of put two or two together and I thought, if I could have that in my own business, then I believe I could have a successful business.

SPEAKER_00 14:51

So tell me about Green Space and how that kind of came about. Because the actual name of the company is Green Space Innovations, and you're looking at sustainable innovations. So, where did the says sustainability come in? What made you go down that route?

SPEAKER_01 15:09

So it was funny because I I just mentioned that I had uh you know, I arrived at a point where I've said I wanted to do my own business, and at that point you probably had something similar. You start looking at many different things, right? You start thinking, I think I've thought of every bloody business under the sun. I thought about doing a coffee shops, um, a hydration um drink business, a mobile uh cryotherapy business. I've I think I thought of so many random things, but I guess really where it started with green space, you could rewind way back before that. Was I was working on a specific account for a business um and it was a cleaning account, and we got asked to quite large 48 properties, and we got asked to um set up a waste program for this for this portfolio. And what would happen is you had 48 buildings, and you would have to go and collect the waste which was put out on the street because there was no room inside those buildings for a waste facility, and then you would take those back to a centralized area, and this uh portfolio, the people who ran the portfolio wanted weights for each building. So we did a really manual process. So we named all the buildings one to 48, really simple. Then we took all of the bags that we supplied to those buildings, opened them, and stuck a sticker referring to the number of the building on every single bag, packed them back up, delivered the bags, so when they put the waste out, we could identify where the that waste had come from. Because if you imagine the person was going to pick them all up, once they throw them in the back of the tug truck, they're completely mixed up, so there'd be no way to identify them. So we would take them back to the centralized area. We had a scale from like Robert Dyer's or somewhere like that, and we would weigh them and manually write down you know the the weight for that building, and with writing up an e-I'd write up an email saying this is the way statistics for this month, and we'd send it off. And I think I'll tell that story because that was probably I did nothing off the back of that straight away, but that was sort of where I think the seed was planted for me was in that where I was like, we've been asked to do this process, we're doing it, but it could be done so much better.

SPEAKER_00 17:17

Like I put my better, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

We put it together and it worked, right? There's there was nothing wrong with what we did. It worked, but I guess what drove me to actually start thinking of how you could do this better or what's out there that does this better was if you fast forwarded from that point two or three years, there was I see a shift into a building now needing its data, but now the occupiers within that building are wanting data. Now that changed you know the landscape completely because okay, it's very it's quite simple to get the building's data, and most of the buildings will get the data from their waste carrier in some form, but whether it's accurate or not, is a different story, but we're gonna go into that. But they get that, they can get hold of that data, right? But how does an occupier get that data? That becomes very tricky. Um, so that was sort of where Green Scope, which is the way this market tracking system we developed, was born, was out of uh a solution to give anybody who wants it their waste performance data. Or another way of looking at it is be giving people the opportunity to monitor and track waste from any space that they would like. And that was where sort of that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be able to be give people what give people in that FM environment in terms of waste something that they've never been typically been able to get before. I sat down one day, I was in my in my dining room, and I don't know what came over me. I think I watched Stephen Butler a c a couple months before, and I remember his one of his podcasts, he's saying, just start. There's no time, wait for the perfect time, you'll never do it. And at that moment, I had no idea how I would do it, I had no idea what it would look like, but I remember just saying to my my my wife, this is what I'm gonna do. So I sat down and it took me about three months, and I I just I just wrote the business on paper. I say on paper on my laptop and notebooks, but I just started building the structure of what it is, how it is, who's gonna be involved, who's it gonna benefit, and it took a long time, and it's funny. So I ended up with a business on paper, but the business was actually called Green Scope, and the whole business was revolving around this waste monitoring tracking. But I had I spent three months writing that and then had a finished it and read it, and then had a uh a point where I was like, I'm gonna pivot here after three months of this writing. And what I've when I read it back, I thought um what I didn't want to do was pigeonhole the business into one thing, and I felt like what I'd wrote and what I'd done was really good, but it had pigeon-holed the business. All the business would have been able to be is a waste monitoring and tracking business. And there was a couple of reasons why I wanted to change. One from a business sense, I don't think that's the smartest thing to do. Didn't seem like business savvy. I wanted to keep my business flexible and I wanted to be able to pivot and offer new innovations or new products, and then that was sort of what led me into what the business became. I said, Well, what do I really want the business to be? Well, I want it to be about sustainability because I'll get on to this a little bit. One, it's important, right? Sustainability is important. Uh however, I did have a bit of a love-hate relationship with sustainability. Um, I really have this strong sense of uh sustainability for me is all about localization, right? We have the big picture, you can't get away from the big picture. I completely respect the big picture, you know, the big global warming, and if we don't act now, the world's gonna blow up and it's gonna end, and I get that. Um, but I felt like there was so much focus on the big picture that we've lost a little bit on how how could you locally in your life play a part in working towards the big picture? I thought that message was lost a little bit, and I still kind of think it is. Um so I wanted to create something where I could bring innovations that could give people the chance to be involved on a local scale, in your building, in your home, or wherever it is, to playing a part towards solving the big problem.

SPEAKER_00 21:52

Yeah, I I do think that um sustainability, if there was another word to use to replace sustainability. And environmental social governance, which is the framework that is used to be sustainable in businesses. If there were words to replace those, then we should replace them because even the professors that first kind of were Professor Rockstrom, who was the professor that created the planetary boundaries, and they taught they are the scientists that feed into all of the information to the UN and what was then led to the sustainable development goals. Even they have now said we can't keep on coming from this big picture disaster position because people are just not listening. It's human behaviour is to react either when they when they feel the pain, so when it's actually happening, or when they're told to through regulation, or if they see the opportunity. Tell me about the um product that you um the the your latest product that you have because there's something really quite genius about it that I really want you to be able to get across.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

Yeah, we're working with um aerobic food digestion. Um and you know, I would funny enough, I worked with it quite a long time ago, and it was uh anaerobic, so it was a slightly different process, and it was on the same place what I just spoke about about us having to put together a waste program, and we would have this big machine, this big food digester in a centralized area, and it was the most awful thing, right? So it was down in the car park. And if we had to go down in the car park, which we had to quite often to weigh the waste and do stuff with the waste, you dreaded it because the noise, the smell, and it was just really awful. And what it would do is it would break down all of that food waste and turn it into like a sludge, like a water liquid, and you would dispose of it down the drain. Um, and that was my first experience with these units. And when I started Green Space Innovations, obviously I just spoke about wanting to bring different types of innovations. That was the one of the things that I looked at exploring against. So I thought the idea of it for me was quite special. What we're gonna do is we're gonna take food, we're gonna put it in this machine, and we're gonna reduce it down, and you're gonna deal with that locally on at source, right? So I thought that's a really that to me, the idea was brilliant, and it and it remained brilliant the whole way. I just didn't like the way it was done. So I started looking into it again, and um I'll tell a little bit of a story about how sometimes your luck can go, luck can go in your favour. So we met a we got introduced to a guy who who was um business was selling these um digesters, and we went through you know a lot of a lot of um meetings with him, go going and seeing certain things. Then we got asked to through him was Tottenham Hotspur want a food digester in their stadium, and we'd like you to do it for us. So under green space, we would put this digester in Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. And what ended up happening, we didn't end up putting it in there, and we felt really, really disappointed at the time as we worked, you know, we have a fairly new business that's a massive opportunity for us to work with someone like Tottenham. And long story short, it went in and it was a big unit, 100 kilos a day, and it didn't work. So there were two lessons for me that came from that. That was one, and I'm quite experienced through all the work I did was I was willing to put that unit into Tottenham, but I had never seen one. And then when I look back, I'm like, what a rookie mistake you nearly made. And I think that was the lesson for me was don't become desperate. And I think there was probably an air, if I'm being totally honest with myself, a little bit of air of desperation, but it's probably a culmination because it was Tottenham and because things were gonna lost myself. Yeah, I lost myself a little bit, and that was and that's where the lesson was don't get desperate, and we got lucky. So that happened, but that that forced me. So obviously we stopped we stopped working with this guy. So I was like, right, I'm not gonna work with him, and actually it put me off of the large units a little bit, and and and I I remember just sitting down and thinking, and this is where it was sort of boy, I was thinking, well, where's the gap here? Because this is really good innovation, right? And I think it it's important and it can be used. What can I do with this where it could be really powerful and impactful? And it sort of dawned on me, they have these sort of home units, these small composter units, and then they have these large units for like big commercial buildings. And I remember just sitting there and thinking, What about offices? How many offices are there in the UK? How many offices are there in London? What is the current process for an office? Or it's a food caddy. So I thought, well, the food goes, you have to legally you have to separate your food waste now under the legislation. And I thought, well, what if I could create something or work with a partner to bring something that could replace the food caddy, but could do everything that the larger unit is supposed to do. So what they do is they reduce food waste by 90%. You're left with a digestate. So what comes out of it is a fertilizer enrich now that can go back into the earth, so it becomes circular. So I was like, this is really powerful, right? You've got two big things, you know, reduction of waste now is becoming probably the most important metric. And I think we spoke about hierarchy of controls, you know, in different things. And I worked with a lot of hierarchy controls. I remember working at the hierarchy control of working at height. But the first thing you do is do you have to do it? Yes or no? Well, we have to create waste, right? We're humans, we know that. Second part, can you reduce, you know, for window cleaning and working at heights? Can you reduce the amount of time they're at working at height? Well, the same for waste, can we reduce the amount of waste we're actually producing? You know, and then you go on to recycling, but there's a big focus now reduction. So this innovation reduces food waste by 90%. Um so I'm like, well, this makes total sense. But then there was a last part sort of for me which really sort of makes this really different to what anyone else is doing. I think now we live in a world where saying what you're doing is not enough anymore. You know, things have to be measurable and you have to do evidence, and uh you know, it does give you the ability to show people what you're doing, and um we with the units that we've brought, these uh food digesters for offices, they're all linked to Green Scope. So everything that we do is going to be measurable. So any innovation that we actually bring to market will be a measurable innovation. We're starting to build that infrastructure into the data platform. So if you take a digester, you get access to Green Scope, and then you get all of your data on how much waste has gone in, how much has come out, how much digestive you've been left with, what your carbon impact is based on your uh reduction. But that is funny because now the way we look at it is we built a platform for a specific solution. That platform has now become its own product. Green Scope now is its own product. We don't link it solely to the waste monitoring and tracking anymore. It's Greenscope is our data platform that links all of our solutions.

SPEAKER_00 29:36

Yeah, and you and you're so right, like data is absolutely key, and it's not just being able to put strategies together in terms of how you're going to reduce waste, it's actually being able to demonstrate that you are doing it. Well, one of the things that I've really noticed is that there's increasing pressure on businesses to be innovative, and I think sometimes, particularly in tender processes or with KPIs, with um property management companies, innovation comes up. What are your new innovations? And I think in some ways that is stifling the way in which companies can be innovative because they're thinking I've got to come up with something new, but actually that isn't what that means. And I think that they should change that question because it's really about new ways of working, constantly finding new ways and better ways and continually improving. Just going back to our original question with this podcast, and we always ask the difference between what makes a good business and what makes a great one, in through the lens of innovation. What's your view on that?

SPEAKER_01 30:43

So it's interesting what you just said, and what you just said is how I would basically sum it up in terms of innovation. A great business doesn't pigeonhole innovation into one area. You know, a lot of businesses will look at innovation by looking at our products, new shiny products that are physical, right? But I think a great business looks at innovation in many different ways. You know, product innovation is one part of innovation, process innovation is another part of innovation, business model innovation, service innovation. Innovation to me is everywhere. I was speaking to my son about it yesterday, actually, and I was like, try and explain to him about innovation and how we do it all of the time, even in your everyday lives. It's just how you label it. So I'm like, if you went to school and you took a certain route and I gave you the route, but then you came back to me and said, Dad, I found another route that would save me 10 minutes. That's an idea. Soon as you implement that and you take the new route and you save yourself 10 minutes, you just innovated. For me, a great business has innovate, understands that innovation has many different pathways and many different forms. Yeah, and they absolutely encourage you to be curious, create an environment and a culture where people allow to say what they feel. You can't have innovation without that.

SPEAKER_00 32:07

Yeah, and look at um innovation in terms of the word sustainability. Perhaps that's the word that needs to replace it because sustainability basically means being here now and also being here in the future. Um, Nikki, thank you so much. You've been a great guest to have on. And yeah, I wish you a little bit of luck with the business. This is the great business podcast with a new episode on the last Tuesday of a few minutes. Thanks, Nikki.