Consulting Firm Offers a Little Help (Or a Lot) to Green Teams

OAKLAND, CA — Jim Lampert meets lots of people at Fortune 500 corporations who tell him how passionate they are about their company's green team or initiatives. The passion, however, can only go so far.

"But then everyone says, 'I have a day job and that has to come first,'" Lampert said. "These things fall by the wayside."

To overcome the inevitable hurdles, Lampert's company, Global Green Consulting Group, launched a new service today to help companies keep their sustainability initiatives moving in the right direction, regardless of where they are in the journey.

Its Sustainability Managed Services program allows companies to choose from three levels of consulting services to suit their sustainability program requirements, ranging from starting a program or fine tuning data collection to extra help during reporting season.  

"We want to provide clients with the right expertise and resources where they need it," said Lampert, who serves as president and CEO of Marlborough, Mass.-based Global Green.

More and more people within the business community are becoming interested in the benefits of sustainability but aren't sure where to start, Lampert said. Or large firms, mindful of expenses in an economic downturn, are relying on lean, two-man teams to drive sustainability programs across their global operations. Or perhaps they have processes in place, but the reporting data is inconsistent.

All of these scenarios, Lampert said, could benefit from Managed Services. "I think this program can make sure the trains leave the station on time every day."

The program is divided into three basic levels of service: silver, gold and platinum. Final pricing varies, but the service starts at $10,000 per month and up.

For the silver service level, Global Green would act largely as an advisor providing about 10 percent of resources needed to help programs move forward, with the client owning roughly 90 percent of the workload.

The next service level up, gold, would see Global Green take on a more prominent role, sharing the work effort equitably. For the platinum service level, Global Green would take on overall control of the sustainability program, performing roughly 90 percent of the work.

These are rough guidelines and meant to be flexible since no two sustainability programs are alike. Clients may also start with one level of service and either dial down or up to another based on the program's progress.

Consultants must always be mindful of client resources and work to conduct projects in the most cost-effective manner, said Anna Clark, president of consulting firm EarthPeople and a GreenBiz.com contributor. Global Green's new program, she said, is clearly a reaction to market demand.

"It’s a response to a genuine need they’re seeing for companies to have different ways of getting someone in and getting the work started and executed," Clark said.

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