Introducing Earth Action (EA)
Introducing Earth Action (EA)
A quick write up of my thinking from the first couple of months working at EA.
For almost two months I’ve been working on a 3 month contract for EA, Earth Action. I was introduced to them by my friend and now colleague (again) Irene. Seeing as it’s taking up all of my progressional headspace at the moment, just like I did with South Pole and Canonical before them, I thought I’d do an intro based on what I’ve understood so far.
Context
Earth action is first and foremost consultancy. Getting more specific than that gets tricky. They do LCAs, plastic footprints and carbon footprints, I imagine like most other sustainability consultancies, but they do more than that too.
They do advisory and strategic work with a focus on regulation and governance, they work with strategic partners/clients on the future of plastic pollution legislation with the big brands like Nestle and big orgs like EMF on global UN treaty type stuff. And, enter me, they’re wanting to build a product that will bring a solid baseline of revenue that they can stand on top of that gives access to the data they’ve years and much effort collecting, processing, and offering.
Now, when I say all that it’s easy to imagine this as a fairly large organisation, but no, with me included there are about 12 people on the payroll, and most aren’t full time.
On focus
If I were told all of this before joining I would have said they are doing too much, that they can’t have enough focus to do anything particularly well. Regardless of if they work in sustainability, that level of activity is unsustainable.
I’ve talked a lot before about focus and the necessity of prioritising and saying no to things. Whenever I do I talk about the trade off between time, scope, and skill. With infinite time, regardless of scope and skill, you can do something. With infinite scope, regardless of time or skill, it’s impossible to finish something. And with infinite skill, well you’ll get very very bored.
The scope of what EA does is both broad and niche, they do a lot of different things but everything they do is related. The focus is almost entirely on plastic stuff, on circular economic things. This allows for the various different things they do to, usually, contribute to the others. If I were to look at this through a product manager lens I would say they have a clear direction, a clear vision. Very important.
In terms of skill (of the company, I won’t talk about individuals) a word I’ve heard tossed around several times internally is ‘pirates’. They’re knowingly small and are making conscious decisions to operate quickly and intentionally outside of the norm. They take on many smaller projects to hunt for bigger opportunities. Again, if I were to look at this through a product management lens, I would say they are able to prioritise and iterate well. Also very important.
Nevertheless it seems as though their success up to this point is in no small part due to their network. The founders, and with the recent addition of Irene have a very impressive network of contacts that is serving them very well. They have been able to keep a steady stream of projects going while being able to raise their hourly rate too.
On Consulting
Now, I’ve spoken before about my distaste for consulting. And the principle still stands, it’s definitely not for me. The idea of coming onto a project, for a company I don’t know or understand the motivations of, working on something for a limited time with limited influence, and then letting go and saying good luck and goodbye - no, not for me. I want to feel ownership, responsibility, I want to see how the sausage is made, sold, and eaten, not just come in for part of the journey.
But, they have influenced my thinking somewhat. While the above is still true, they do temporary work and it’s relatively impersonal, unlike other consultancies I know of, the work is at least seemingly always to contribute to EA as a whole, and they’re small enough that I believe it.
Each project, despite the limited nature of a consulting project, is chosen at least in part because of the contribution it has to EAs brand, or to its people’s knowledge, or towards what they’re trying to achieve. They’re chasing the interesting projects, or the impactful projects over the easy money. Although Im sure they’d take some easy money if it was particularly easy, they are still a start-up after all.
This might not sound unusual for consultancies but I think it is, they can take meaningful pride in the projects that they do because it fuels the growth of EA in a way that serves what they want to achieve which is specific and targeted.
Bigger consultancies are not like this, no matter how good the projects you work on, you can’t tell me that their completion contributes to the rest of the organisation doing good. No, there’s too much blah blah, too many initiatives, too much personal gain, and meaningless project work in big consultancies for that.
On the future
And, it's a point in their favour that they were looking for someone like me. Well, I would say that, but let me elaborate; in 2021 they, along with some big companies realised there was a significant gap in the data available for doing plastic oriented analyses (LCAs, footprints, and the like). The official project they were going to get money for was closed down for possibly nefarious reasons, but being the pirates that they were, believing they had found a problem to solve, and seeing that certain organisations didn’t want it to happen, they cracked on by themselves anyway.
In the years since they have built up this database of plastic waste management data that, as far as I’ve been able to see, is unmatched. They have several clients using it, they use it for their own projects, and they add to it every year. The problems though are; no one knows about it, offering it is manual and time consuming, and anythign built by scientists or consultants is not going to be built in a way that is robust or to last (sorry scientists and consultants, I’m sure you’re great, but you don’t think long term).
Now, with a respectable amount of self-awareness EA recognised this and thought that a good way to solve all three of these problems was digitalisation. This is why I say it’s a good sign that they were looking for someone like me. If they were looking to build ‘tech’ for the sake of ‘tech’, a solution looking for a problem, they could have found a consultant or an AI guy or whatever. But the fact that they were looking for a product manager, whether it was luck or intentional, means they were looking to validate that their has legs. Is it actually solving a problem? Would people actually benefit if they turned this thing into a digital product? Very important.
Conclusion
Anyway. That’s the long and short of it I think. I’ll probably talk more about my role specifically and what I’m working on another time, here or somewhere else. I’m enjoying myself at the moment, I see a future where we realise the potential of this thing and it goes crazy well, and a future where we’ve missed the mark and it fails spectacularly. We’ll see. But I realised when I was having dinner with some friends yesterday that I didn't’ have a good way to explain what ‘EA’ is so hopefully I can send them here in the future like a truly bad friend and a shameless self-promoter.