We spend a lot of our time telling businesses that the world has shifted beneath their feet, and that they need to shift with it. That the old economy — linear, extractive, powered by fossil fuels — is on its way out, and the new one is arriving faster than most businesses and their leaders are ready for. They need to lift their heads up, have the hard conversations, do things differently, and ultimately evolve their business for a sustainable future.  

It would be a little rich to say all of that and then carry on exactly as we always have. So, over the past few months we’ve made some significant changes to how Go Well works, and since we ask our clients to be transparent and authentic about why they’re changing, it seems only fair to do the same. Here is what we’ve changed, and why. 

Starting with something we’ve come to understand through our close to nine years in existence: advising on sustainability is not like advising on most other things. Marketing, accounting, HR, legal — these are specialised, certainly, but they tend to sit in their own lane. Sustainability doesn’t have a lane. It runs through everything. To do it well you have to hold strategy, execution, communications, reporting, data, regulation, behaviour change, culture change and leadership in your head at once, while also having a working knowledge of economics, finance, ecology, climate science, physics, waste, politics and marketing, alongside many others. It is, frankly, a lot. And it is fundamentally about change — getting an organisation to do things differently — which is the hardest thing any business ever tries to do. 

That is why a glossy strategy or a polished report, on its own, was never going to be enough. We know, because for a while that is more or less what we sold. A business would come to us, we would help them produce a considered strategy or a credible report, and then we would hand it over and move on to the next one. The document was good — but a document is just words on a page. It doesn’t truly engage your stakeholders, it doesn’t shift your culture, and it doesn’t get a single thing implemented. Implementing and change requires action and impact. What we came to realise is that what businesses actually need is the support to carry it through. Yes, start with the end in mind and develop a well thought out strategy, but then successfully put that strategy into practice, communicate their journey, upskill their people while bringing their other stakeholders with them, and ultimately embed sustainability across the whole organisation rather than parking it in a PDF. 

Businesses need that support because the conditions they are operating in are genuinely difficult. The leaders we work with are facing regulatory pressure, consumer and staff pressure, supply chain uncertainty, price volatility, and a world that feels less stable than it did a few years ago. Trying to survive all of that by reacting to each new thing as it lands is exhausting, and it’s risky. It keeps you permanently on the back foot. 

The alternative is to get your head up. To understand the big forces driving these changes, to be honest about the trajectory the planet and the global economy are on, and then to make a deliberate choice about the role you want to play in the transformation that is already underway — and to set a clear pathway to get there. That is what a good sustainability strategy is really for. Not compliance for its own sake, but a considered position on where you are heading and why. 

However, even with a brilliant strategy, things come up that you could not have planned for. A supplier falls over, a regulation shifts, an initiative that looked straightforward turns out to be anything but. Things that force you to adapt, change tack, reconsider, double down, or occasionally abandon a plan altogether. When you are new to this, any one of those can be enough to derail your progress entirely. Unless, that is, you have an experienced advisor alongside you — someone who has seen it all before, who has the contacts and the know-how to find a way through, and who knows that a wobble, a bruise, a skinned knee are all part of the journey and the required learnings, not failures.  

For all of these reasons, we have changed how we do business. We still advise on sustainability — that has not changed and never will. What has changed is that we no longer do it project by project. No more writing a strategy and leaving a business to implement it alone. No more delivering a report and leaving a client to flounder until the next one falls due. That model suited us well enough, in its way, but it did not serve them. 

Instead, we now offer long-term support through three ways of working, each designed for businesses at a different stage of the journey, with different levels of in-house confidence and capability. 

Year One is our foundational programme, for businesses ready to begin but not sure where to start. Over twelve months we work alongside an organisation that knows sustainability matters but has not yet built the groundwork. The first six to eight months go into engaging your key stakeholders, identifying the impacts that genuinely matter to your business, and shaping a strategy that is credible, robust and gets that balance right between aspirational and achievable. Then, rather than handing it over and wishing you luck, we spend the rest of the year helping you put it into practice, building the confidence and capability of your people so the work keeps going long after we do. 

Year Two and Beyond is where the impact really starts to show. It is for businesses ready to turn strategy into results — a full year of implementation, getting initiatives off the ground, making measurable progress against the targets you have set, and deepening the capability of the people carrying the work. It leans harder into communicating and reporting what you are achieving and what you are learning, so the effort is visible and credible to the people who matter. In practice, it is a little like having your own Virtual Chief Sustainability Officer, without the salary that comes with one. 

And then there is our Part-Time Advisory Service, for businesses well along their journey but need a hand from time to time. Some organisations already have a strategy and someone leading the work internally; who just need a sounding board, an extra pair of hands, or expert input for the moments that call for it — a tricky board paper, a materiality refresh, sense-checking a new piece of legislation or outgoing communications. It comes with a baseline of monthly support hours for the year and then discounted pricing to deliver any projects as they come up, scaling up and down as things change. It is the teammate idea at its most flexible: there when you need us, out of your way when you don’t. 

Each of these comes with a skeleton recipe that a business can add its own ingredients to. You might want to upskill more of your people, so you add a run of Lunch and Learn sessions or some modern slavery training. You might need a modern slavery statement written, your carbon footprint mapped, or a report produced — so you add that to your package, at a better rate than you would pay for it on its own. The shape stays consistent; the detail bends to what you actually need. 

Underneath all of it, though, the principle is simple, and it is the thing we have really learned. Most businesses cannot navigate the sustainability journey and deliver the change it demands on their own — and, honestly, not even with a brilliant consultant (self-proclaimed…) parachuted in to tell them what to do. They need ongoing support and guidance, through the good stretches and the hard ones. They need experienced people who understand their business and have built trust with their team. Some organisations can afford a highly experienced sustainability professional in-house, or a whole team of them. Plenty cannot and should not have to in order to take this seriously. 

That is the gap we exist to fill. Cheaper than a full-time hire, focussed on delivering the things you genuinely need done and coaching and upskilling your people as we go, so that over time you come to depend on us less, rather than more. Sustainability leadership without the full-time hire. 

We did not change how we work because the old way was easy to walk away from — it wasn’t. We changed because the thing we ask of our clients, we know we have to be willing to ask of ourselves. The world is moving and standing still is not an option, for any of us If we are going to help businesses adapt and go well through this period of transition, we need to practise what we preach. 

You can find out more about our three key packages here.

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Written by Nick Morrison, Founding Director at Go Well Consulting.