2 Experiences and challenges when engaging with SMEs

SMEs are often referred to as a ‘hard to reach’ group. They are geographically dispersed, and very diverse in the buildings and spaces they occupy. Some draw their customers from the local area, and may be well-connected with other businesses and networks in the vicinity, while others have a national or international focus, and rarely interact with local business advisors. SME owner-managers are often ‘time poor’, having to divide their time and energy between clients, staff and business development.

In the opening activity we’ll look at the kinds of challenges and obstacles that advisors often face when seeking to engage with businesses.

Activity 2.1: Engaging with SMEs – the key challenges

This video features a number of low carbon advisors speaking about the challenges they face when trying to engage with business owners and managers on energy and environmental issues.

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Engaging with SMEs – business advisors’ perspectives

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[What are the key challenges when you engage with SMEs?]

SUBJECT 1
I think the challenge I face with engaging SMEs about the environment is often that the businesses I'm working with will want to see a clear business case. They'll want to see that the numbers stack up. And that the time that they have is worth expending.
I think often a challenge you have is that businesses are focused on the short term. And sometimes they can see the longer-term benefit, but it's whether they can spare the time to look at the more strategic issues.
SUBJECT 2
There are many challenges involved in doing the work that I do. It could be involved in actually engaging with the businesses in the first place and convincing them that, a, there's a need for our support and that we can help them. Or b, it could be around whether or not they feel that they'd be able to make any changes in their business anyway. So there's a number of different challenges.
SUBJECT 3
The challenge, essentially, that I'm finding with engaging with SMEs is speaking the business language. My background – I'm rapidly learning – but my background is not directly with businesses. But I am from the sustainability field. So it's getting the right hook that speaks to the business. And then they say, OK, right, OK, we found some common ground here.
SUBJECT 4
I think often businesses do come from a different background to low carbon advisors. I would say using the term businesses it's quite a heterogeneous group. I wouldn't want to ascribe a single tag onto that. But perhaps working as a low carbon advisor, for instance, your motivation isn't necessarily to do with money, to have power. It's more to do with wanting to make a positive difference in society. But doesn't preclude businesses from having the same set of values. But it does mean that perhaps there's a bit of differentiation there.
SUBJECT 5
The challenge we have in getting SMEs engaged is that they don't see energy as part of their core business. And that they are too busy trying to improve their bottom line and talk to customers. And so quite often they're time poor. For example, we might have either a social enterprise or a small or medium-sized business coming to us because they know their energy bills are quite high, but they don't actually know how to reduce them, or how to prioritise measures that might help them reduce their energy bills.
SUBJECT 6
There are many challenges an organisation might face, but one in particular that we're working with is a school. And something difficult about that is that the head is very much engaged in environmental work and is really pushing to develop a One Planet action plan with us. But he doesn't have the necessary buy-in from the rest of the staff.
And so having that sort of instituted and filtered down is quite difficult. We do have several things and strategies that we're working on. But it's about trying to get those networks as well. And he's trying to encourage other primary schools to buy-in as well so that they can be stronger together and sort of knowledge share and what have you.
But I think just for a lot people it's time. We're really time scarce as a society, but especially in schools. You know, maybe environmental matters are not their first priority.
And so trying to get staff after a really busy day of working with children to then think, you know, have another meeting and say, OK, how can we change the school for environmental purposes and not purely educational ones? That's quite difficult. And that's something that we're trying to figure out at the moment.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

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Watch the video (around 4 minutes) and make your own notes on the following points:

  1. What are the main kinds of challenges mentioned in the interviews? You may find it helpful to group them into categories.
  2. How do they compare to the challenges that you have experienced in your own work?
  3. Select three of the challenges mentioned by the practitioners and indicate how you would seek to overcome them.
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Comment

The following challenges were mentioned by the low carbon advisors in the video.

  1. Owner-managers are often time poor.
  2. SMEs need to see a clear business case. You need to give them numbers.
  3. SMEs are often focused on the short term.
  4. Engaging SMEs in the first place is an obstacle.
  5. Speaking the language of business.
  6. Advisors often have different backgrounds and experiences from business owners.
  7. Energy is not a core priority for many SMEs.
  8. There is a need to get ‘buy in’ from colleagues – in both directions of a business hierarchy.

Another challenge that was not mentioned in the video but is discussed in Hampton (2018) is that SMEs can be quite defensive. Here are some quotes from this article:

  • ‘You do get people who say “oh yes, it’s fully insulated” because they just want to tell you it is. They are a bit protective, and want to think “I’m doing everything I can”.’
  • ‘People always think it’s a solution for somebody else. It’s for other people. “I’m not part of the problem”.’

Engaging with SMEs on environmental issues is challenging for a variety of reasons. These include the fact that SMEs are often time-poor; they are focused on the day-to-day running of the organisation, and climate change is not high on their list of priorities.

Additionally, advisors find that environmental messages don’t tend to be effective when first reaching out to businesses through marketing channels such as social media. Claiming to save an SME money might help an advisor to get in the front door. However, if advisors want to achieve lasting impact, they face the challenge of steering the conversation away from cost savings, toward environmental issues.

This course aims to help practitioners to have more meaningful and productive conversations. Later in the course, you’ll get a chance to reflect on whether money-saving messaging is compatible with these, or whether it sets up unhelpful expectations that mean it is harder to talk about values.

2.1 Economic arguments