By Anna Abdelnoor, CEO & Founder, isla & TRACE by isla
Imagine an accountant telling you it’s fine to just reconcile the books each month and there’s no need to actually look at the P&L 😳
The numbers balance, so what more do you need?
No analysis of margins, cost, cash… and no view of future exposure.
🙅🏻♀️ You’d fire them 🙅🏻♀️
Now imagine that same accountant saying they can help you, but only by comparing your accounts to other companies they work with.
Not how you performed last quarter, not whether you’re improving or getting worse, not what’s changing over time inside your business.
Just a benchmark that tells you how you stack up against someone else.
🙅🏻♀️ You’d fire them twice 🙅🏻♀️
If you’ve got a sustainability provider telling you that they offer more value than “just” emissions reporting because they offer you benchmarks about how you’re performing against others, or that they can help you demonstrate your sustainability creds – they’re completely missing the point.
It would be like that same accountant telling you how you’re performing without actually reconciling your books 🤭🙃
Consistent, comparable emissions data is as foundational to business continuity planning as your financial accounts.
Without either, you cannot forecast, mitigate, adapt, diversify, invest, reorganise or thrive.
No-one in their right mind would try to run a business without understanding trends in their revenue, costs, liabilities and cashflow, and emissions data feeds the insights around that information.
👉 It exposes where your supply chain is fragile
👉 It reveals where cost, carbon and risk concentrate
👉 It tells you where to put time, energy and money
👉 and just as importantly, WHERE YOU DO NOT NEED TO.
Comparing your performance – emissions or financial – to another business doesn’t help you understand what you’re already doing well, and it doesn’t gives you a baseline to forecast what you need to do differently as the operating environment shifts.
And the operating environment ✨is✨ shifting.
Geoeconomic shocks, geopolitical instability, regulatory change and resource constraints are already shaping margins, operations and impacting business continuity.
And it’s showing up in your accounts already – it’s just misattributed to rising costs, when the root cause of rising costs is ecological debt.
Benchmarks don’t help you plan for and solve the problems coming down the track in your near-term business future, without solid emissions reporting underneath them.
If you can get your head around that and learn how emissions data feeds business continuity, then your CFO and clients will thank you for it when they realise you’re bringing them decision-grade information instead of another sustainability narrative.
If what you want is to say you’re “doing good”, we’re probably not the product for you.
But if you’re an events business that wants to understand how to ensure continuity through sustained volatility, TRACE by isla helps with that.