It’s that time of year when we do our annual reports for the last and our plans for the next.
My last year was definitely mixed blessings. After a couple of years of gearing up, I launched Supplejack’s new service design platform, with some great help from green marketing professional Kath Dewar at GoodSense. And financially it was a good year. So, all good overall.
One of Supplejack’s internal projects is looking at ways to integrate sustainability with business models. My philosophy with this stuff is ‘learning by doing’ – you only learn and gain when you start doing something, and most times, you’re learning stuff you couldn't even have imagined.
Some of you will know I’m a keen cyclist. After a health scare in September 2010, I decided to commit to a year without driving a car (Nov 2010 – Nov 2011), which in my world means lots of cycling for work!
The good news is it’s working out fine – I’m cycling a lot, plus using buses, trains, taxis and sharing rides. The bad news is I’m realising how much waste driving results in - time, money, energy, you name it.
To explain, in past years travel has made up over 90% of Supplejack’s average annual carbon footprint, and over a third of this is usually land travel. Over the years it’s become clear that land travel is good direct indicator of my resource use (the office footprint is very stable and air travel is a bit random).
The very strange and surprising thing about not driving is that productivity has improved dramatically. And that’s after only five months!
The diagram gives you an overview of productivity for the 2010 – 2011 year. I use net revenue (after taking out contractors) as an accurate indicator of actual revenues.
Dividing net revenue by carbon emissions for land travel shows you how much value Supplejack creates given the resources it uses (measured in kg CO2-e).
So you're looking at a big productivity jump (in orange) from NOT driving. Not at all what we might expect!
 The diagram at right gives you an idea of how this productivity works.
First, I travel less kM overall, so I encounter less risk of injury on the roads, use less energy travelling and emit fewer kg of CO2-e.
Second, because I use active modes, I’ve actually reducing my social (external) costs by 200%. Most of this is from saving the health care system a whole lot of money (from obesity and car crashes).
And finally, my internal costs are a 26% lower. That’s partly because I travel less, and partly because I can now use more travel time to do useful stuff, such as reading.
I’m left wondering how much driving a car shapes our business models without us realising it. What would a business model look like if we set out to create a business based on not driving?
So there’s the year that was. A launch, a travel experiment, and a whole lot more learning for the year to come. | 
