Sustainable cashflow: How to make your EBITDA Green & Mean

By Cas Weijenberg & Wim Nieuwenhuijse

Sustainable, Circular, Emission free. All buzz words a business owner can’t do without these days. But how impactful is your company already? Because at Morph, we see many companies unwittingly embracing their sustainable future in sales and their in-house operations. Actually, most of the initiatives we came across were started as cost conscious or market development initiatives. We developed a quick scan to assess the impact of those actions on your sustainable cashflow.

Tagging Sustainability

The scan is very straightforward. An important part of our commercial due diligence is to assess the quality of future potential cashflow. All the current and future plans on that are categorized and tagged on sustainability. Either on a smaller carbon footprint or on the effectivity of the business development. Because we believe that by making your sales funnel more effective, less emission is needed. We benchmark those actions to the specifics of the industry or product category you are active in. And give advice on potential improvements.

Good Green Practices

What did we come across? A lot of good green practices that firm up the future cash flow. Four examples that can help you in reaching your sustainable ambitions:

  • X-sell: Those companies who are the best to do a meaningful cross-sell are more sustainable. Period. But it is sometimes not easy to let go of category selling. Succesful cross-sells start small. And give direct sales responsibility to the operational level.
  • Make sales plans simple: How many times, sales have gone havoc because of the complexity put in? A lot. Start listening to customers first before jumping into action. It saves a lot of time, zoom meetings and mileage on cars and planes. We see the most efficient sales operations getting the largest sustainable spin-off.
  • Scale-up smart: Invest only in production or services lines that give you an efficiency gain of 30% plus. Below that, you lose more money in the set-up before you earn it back.
  • Digitize, digitize: Yes, digitization is a great way to minimize your carbon footprint. Go through each process you own, get to each customer interaction and ask yourself: can we do this better and smarter through digitization? For sure, you will find enough potential for it. Do it piecemeal though. No grand schemes or huge transformation plans. But make it short and simple. And also: if it doesn’t work, discard. It is all about being flexible to make future cashflow green & mean.

More information on a sustainable future cashflow? Contact us at Morph.