Katherine Keddie: So welcome back to the Scaling Green-Tech podcast. I am here today with Becky Lane and Anne Snelson, who will be exploring sustainability within the built environment. Becky is the CEO of Furbnow, and Anne is a carbon literacy training specialist working with huge multinational companies. So both a perspective from the startup founder and from the person who trains and helps corporate buyers. I think it's going to be a really interesting episode. Thank you so much, guys, for joining me. So to start off with, I would love to hear a little bit about your journey to date. Maybe, Anne, you can start off. Give us an introduction to your work.
Anne Snelson: I have worked in various companies for about 30 years up until about three years ago when I decided that I really wanted to do more about climate change. I've worked in the transport industry, I've worked in telecoms, I've worked in built environment as well. I guess I was at the point of telling my 16-year-old daughter that she and her brother would have to sort climate change. And she just looked at me and said, well, what are you doing about it, mum? You're not exactly past it. And I thought it was a good point. And at the time, I did carbon literacy project training myself. Two people had recommended it to me. And it just blew me away. It changed my whole attitude about the urgency with which we need to deliver change. And ultimately, I gave up full-time working, I retrained as a carbon literacy specialist. And yes, as you say, I now go and train the likes of BMW and international companies in carbon literacy and see them taking similar actions.
Katherine Keddie: And how about you, Becky? Tell us about how you got here.
Becky Lane: Oh, my journey goes way back, probably to when I was a teenager and just, I mean, that was like 15, 16 years ago, just to give me a bit of feeling about this journey for me. I started with an undergraduate in geography at Oxford with a focus on climatology. So how are the CMIP models built? How is it actually modeled? What is the evidence base behind climate change? Way back then it was the IPCC report five. We've had quite a few iterations since then. The evidence is irrefutable. We're in real state as a planet. But back then, what was going to be my impact? And they're kind of similar to Anne in many ways, like what's my contribution going to be? And back when I was 21, if I'm going to be completely honest, looking for roles in sustainability, it didn't really exist, like trying to find a job that was in that area, you could be a sustainability consultant. Write some reports for companies that they can ignore and put into the pile of ‘we've done some things’. Or you can go work for organizations like the Environment Agency and things like that. The job market for sustainability really wasn't there about 10 years ago. So I've kind of built my career over that time, firstly specializing in energy. So at Energy Systems Catapult, which is a focused innovation agency in the UK, basically supporting innovation and kind of policy change in particular to support more innovations to come to market in the energy sector. And that just really built my enthusiasm, massive area of impact. So energy, obviously where we generate it, how we use it across transport, which Anne's worked in, the built environment, how we generate our energy, it's huge. And there's a lot of transformation that is happening in that sector. And what my contribution was, was working as a commercial consultant, I was working with a lot of companies back kind of eight, six years ago when they were at their pre-Seed/Seed stage, thinking about what their business model would be, how their kind of initial go-to-market strategy would be. And what I didn't realize then is kind of setting me up for what I'm doing now, if I'm completely honest, but it gave me that understanding of what's the policy environment, how does this ginormous complex sector actually work, and then how can you actually kind of take businesses to market in what is quite a structured regulatory environment. And then just over time, my focus became more on the consumer journey. I think it's my kind of approach, kind of talking about me being a bit of a ruthless pragmatist. Everyone gets really excited about flexibility and kind of the options. Oh, and you have the EV on your driveway, then you can charge your home and you can use it. That's totally technically feasible, but there's a long way to go from where we are today technically with the solutions we have to what is acceptable from a consumer perspective. And I know heavy industry and there are other areas of emissions, but for me, my passion is that consumer transition and became more of a specialist in that over time. And I wanted to understand how we're actually going to meet consumers, the mass market where they are today. There's a huge push on heat pumps, I think that's not really the mass market proposition where most people are starting. I will go into that a little bit more. So where are we starting? And my role after that was to work and set up what's called the Net Zero Neighbourhood Programme in the West Midlands, the first Net Zero Neighbourhood Programme in Europe. And the whole idea there is how you meet consumers, neighborhoods, residents, citizens, lots of different ways of framing that, but people where they are to support their transition where they're starting. And that was my real entry point into seeing how things were being delivered on the ground in the retrofit sector. I don't personally like that word and we'll talk about that probably a little bit more later as well. But where's people's transition? What's their starting point? And then we have this gap between people who want the change. They want comfortable in the winter and the summer, healthy homes that are at sustainable price to heat and run. And then also this side benefit of climate change kind of being resolved by having lower carbon heating in the longer run. People want that. But then when we look at the supply chain and where it is at the moment, there's just this ginormous cliff in between the two. And I had the opportunity to kind of quit that role and start Furbnow with the support from the Nesta Mission Studio. That was kind of very important in the formative years of Furbnow to basically meet consumers where they are and build a proposition that really helps people through their journey where they are today to achieve that goal without having to become a fully fledged building physics expert to figure out whether you have to have a heat pump now, whether you need to insulate, whatever. It's all too complicated. And from my perspective, for us to really succeed in this transition for home decarbonisation, for the context, globally, home emissions for energy use is about 25%, in the UK it's about 22%. So it's a pretty hefty chunk. And my theory of change is we need to build a proposition to meet the mass market where they are and support them in that transition. And that's exactly what Furbnow is about. That's our core mission is to make it super simple for homes to transition. And that is what we're going to be able to do to pick up the pace. We've been going for just personally me, it's actually three years today pretty much that I've quit my job and started this. The company was registered about two and a half years ago. So it just gives you a bit of a feeling of where we are in our journey today. But zooming out what we've done just under a thousand homes across England and Wales and scaling, growing all the time and basically trying to show how we can really put the foot down in decarbonizing homes at scale, not just in the UK. Our ambitions do go beyond the British Isles.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, I mean, you're really building a leading UK company when it comes to energy efficiency in homes. So for anyone who's not come across her work before, definitely watch this space. That starts with saying a bit of the context behind decarbonisation of the built environment. And I'm going to come to you, Anne, to sort of lay out what is really driving the decarbonisation agenda for the built environment. Why should people care about it? And who are the parties here that are making change?
UK net zero mandate and carbon budgets
Anne Snelson: Yeah, well, I mean, it is basically like anything else. The government has a legal mandate to reach net zero by 2050. So that is driving a lot of the legislation in this area. And they keep being taken to court. So the high court injunctions basically force them to come up with new legislation if interest groups like Greenpeace etc feel that they're not doing enough to achieve those goals. For those that don't know we have the Climate Change Committee obviously that are putting out carbon budgets all the time and we're on track for things like CB3 we've already achieved, CB4 is looking okay, CB5 even but by the time we get to CB6 which is in the 2030s we're a long way off And as Becky says, there are two main sectors there that we really need to do more about now. Energy has done quite well in reducing carbon transports, the biggest at about 30% of UK domestic emissions and buildings is the next one. So that's why the built environment has to do more. The government is very aware of this. I think in the built environment, they're struggling. Transport is pretty simple, you electrify everything, you move to electric vehicles. But in the built environment, they are lacking because it is so complicated. And that's really why I love what Becky is doing, which is making it simpler for consumers. So when people understand where we are with climate change, where they understand that we need to do things. They want to decarbonize their houses, but they don't know where to start. You know, do you start with solar? Do you start with insulation? Do you start with an air source heat pump? Which is the main thing that the government is focusing on. And, you know, people need that advice to know what to do first. So that's the main thing that's really driving it. Yes, of course, the industry is being forced to do some of this. So there's like the warm homes plan. and things around construction and new builds. But quite often those policy changes are being shifted around as well. So things like gas boiler removal is being put back constantly. So it's tricky for the sector to actually know what to do and when. So that's the background to it really.
Katherine Keddie: It sounds like there's a lot of confusion as a whole across the sector. Where do you find there to be common misconceptions? I mean this is both for consumers and then some of the people that you work with who are kind of more larger businesses.
Anne Snelson: Yeah, I mean the difficulty is say for new builds for instance as I say you know they've had targets or they thought that new targets were coming in around things like removal of gas boilers and that legislation has been put back you know previous government was not as focused on net zero and on environmental benefits as the current one is so that's a good move in terms of climate change but you know Changes to things like landlord regulations have been put back as well. So they don't really know when things are going to happen. Also, there's things like minimum standards. So for new builds, for instance, two solar panels. Why would you put up two solar panels as part of a new build? And particularly as customers quite often want more, they're wanting to put as many solar panels as possible. And the obvious time to do that is when you're building. But because there's a limit, the construction industry will quite often put the cheapest thing possible up there. And that's not good for the environment overall. That's not the best practice. So we need to be rethinking whether things are done. minimum cost and minimum requirements or whether the sensible thing is happening. Because then yes we get to the retrofit market, sorry Becky about the term, but we need to retrofit probably 28 million out of 30 million houses in the UK. We've got really poor stock here. So again, how do we do that sensibly? quite often when it's not actually the person that's making that change that's going to benefit. So for instance, landlord regulations don't actually benefit the landlord, they benefit the tenant. So, you know, how do we do that so that it is fair and not just put off landlords from actually renting out properties or trying to get around the legislation.
Policy confusion: DESNZ, building regulations, and inconsistent government signals
Becky Lane: I just want to build on something Anne said there as well, because I think the challenge, particularly in the built environment space, is that when we set the policy, that is essentially what's setting a lot of the context for then regulation and behavior in the market. And incentives are important to really drive change, because if we look what's happened the last 20 years, there's not really been much progress in the built environment. So what are we really going to do? And obviously, part of my theory of change is by having a good proposition. But then to really drive things at scale, you do need to have that signal coming from the top down that change must happen. But then from the policy perspective, there's all the lack of joined up thinking. So there's a few different departments that I'm referred to there. So one, for example, we've got DESNZ, Department of Energy Security and Net Zero. And then we also have the I think it's called DLUHC now, but basically the area that looks after building regulations as well on the ground. And they don't often talk to each other. And the strange thing about building the built environment is that we have kind of policy driving energy efficiency change, when then really what should be happening is it's just should be changes in building regulations that set the standard in the bar. And obviously you referred to a minimum of two solar panels going on new builds, Well, that doesn't really line up with the energy security and net zero policy drivers there as well. And really a bit more pragmatism and kind of joined up thinking across what should be the regulations that are driving the behavior, the building regulations, and that's across domestic and non-domestic buildings. And then how that plugs into these policy incentives, which are the headlines, EPC by 2030. Okay, but how do I actually reach that? And when you refer to building regulations, they're quite behind in the UK. When we look where we are versus Germany, Netherlands, basically a lot of the European countries, we're quite behind. And what I mean by that is we have kind of ventilation regulations. They're behind in terms of the standards. We've only recently just started enforcing trickle vents, and that's quite basic. We don't really have a good strategy around how we deal with overheating. So if we actually look at the building regulation guidance, it pretty much says, do everything you possibly can to passively cool the building before you even think about air conditioning. Well, that's not really appropriate because our buildings in the UK are ovens and also fridges at the same time. They don't really have the right thermal mass to be able to actually work properly for either overheating or cooling. So just a lot of the standards that we have, building regulations, don't actually tie up to the strategy in terms of the policy which leads to this confusion and ultimately the market, the players, the supply chain can only really deliver what the regulations are saying and this lack of joined up thinking is really causing a lot of challenges in the sector and how we can actually integrate and deliver for our customers whether that's landlords, commercial clients which Anne works with or in our sector consumers and then no wonder when I was going back to the start that consumers are confused because the sector is confused to be completely frank not seeing that drive come through from regulation either.
Katherine Keddie: And as a business owner, as someone who's trying to create a solution in the space to make this easier for consumers, how do you navigate that changing policy environment, the lack of joined up thinking, the changes with new governments, how do you actually navigate that?
Becky Lane: Just got to keep an eye, unfortunately. Obviously we have lofty ambitions, but to be frank, we do not have lobbying power to change things. And who does? It's the ginormous construction companies, the house builders, the ginormous asset managers that are not really incentivized to see the change either as well. They've been operating profitably for a long time. Any change means there's a change to operations, which ultimately probably means a change to the base, the bottom line. And they have that lobbying power. So I can inform, and we do have routes to doing that through kind of the Startup Coalition, UK Green Building Council, organizations like that, where it helps kind of share our voice. Other startups and scale-ups kind of go through that route as well. But we're the voice for change and we're kind of fighting against the incumbents as this kind of classic situation when any change is happening, whether it's for climate change and sustainability or other areas as well.
Anne Snelson: Just really as well, another thing that is driving or should be driving the industry is wastage because, for example, within the built environment, building new houses. For every four houses that are built, a fifth one could be built out of the waste material. And you kind of go, you know, if we're talking about expense there and how to drive down costs, surely making it more efficient. But again, they're looking at, you know, cost of salaries over cost to the environment. So again, you know, there should potentially be, you know, a greater increase in legislation around that. And I think there are going to be new legislation around waste and disposal and things like that, which will hopefully help drive more sensible behavior as well.
Katherine Keddie: I mean, it's absolutely bonkers a third of, on average, a third of the budget for a new construction project in the UK goes to rework, because people literally don't know what type of materials are in their building. They have to rip stuff out and do stuff again. I actually have an amazing client, Qualis Flow, who are our building a solution for this in the construction space. It seems like a massive efficiency problem. Often, sustainability and being efficient come hand in hand. I think the wastage problem is a great example of how something that is better for the industry and more sustainable kind of comes together.
Katherine Keddie: Okay, so coming back to, Becky, your story about how to navigate this changing environment, I'd love to know more broadly, as you scale your solution, tell us some of the crunch points and some of the stories on the way. There's lots of people listening who are looking to scale a climate tech solution or are scaling a climate tech solution. Tell us some of the kind of war stories from your time so far.
Furbnow's founding, early traction, and supply chain challenges
Becky Lane: Oh, it's an interesting one. I think, When did we start? Two and a half years ago, October 2022, we officially put the business out there, which bank accounts set up all the basics of setting a company up and the website was out there. And feel free to have a look on Wayback Machine to see how bad that first website was. But we were really shocked that within about two weeks, we had our first customer pay us £450. And that's not bad for a startup. I appreciate obviously everyone's searching for the holy grail of recurring revenue, but we just had a product that was transactional to start with just to test and see what our consumers really wanted. We didn't really know why they bought or what they thought they were buying. We had a product called a home energy plan. We still call it that. And then it was a mass scramble to figure out how to deliver it. So thank you to our early customers. We were very patient while we were figuring out what we were doing. But in the true start of nature, we kind of spent two months validating what customers were looking for. And Anne's kind of referred it to as people need to know what to do before they can proceed with confidence. So we had a product, no code. We just didn't really wait. We put it out to market, did some Google advertising, set up Stripe. paid. Okay, now we need to figure out how to deliver that and how the supply chain is going to work. So we've always been in the true startup way, pushing things out a lot earlier than we were ready to do that. Everyone says like, if you're embarrassed about your first product, you know, that's probably about right. And we very much were. And still now there's things that we would like to be much more happier with how things look or how more polished that we are. But we're all about executing and pushing things out a lot more sooner that is really comfortable just to basically keep getting the pace and basically going to our next hypothesis and crossing that out and on our scaling journey. So yeah, two and a half years ago, first customer, then out to the supply chain. And I think I want to reflect on this because anyone working in the built environment, you have to work within the context of the supply chain that you're in. It's obviously true for many others. I'm more of a specialist in the built environment, the retrofit sector. We kissed quite a few frogs in terms of suppliers and how we built our supply chain strategy. Meaning that we could scale very quickly from just being in the Midlands to the West and East Midlands. all the way down to the south and then kind of building up to the north and then launching in Wales as well was because we set up the supply chain management approach. Our supply chain lead, Neil Statham, he's the MVP behind all of that, but it all came from our early learnings with how to actually engage the supply chain. And we're trying to find this role called a retrofit assessor, which is quite driven by regulation in the retrofit sector. There's a regulation called PAS 2035. It's not strictly a regulation though. It's a standard, but then it's also not written into legislation. It's a very weird standard that's been adopted by the retrofit sector, but it isn't quite adopted by building regulations or legislation either. So it sits in this weird liminal space. And it's driving a lot of new roles in this area as well, so retrofit assessors, retrofit coordinators, retrofit designers. But as a consumer, like normal people, they don't know who these people are. We know who they are because we know they have the right skills, potentially, if they're trained properly, to be able to do this. Um, but then you've got to hunt them down cause there's not that many of them as well. Um, and then obviously when you're kind of scaling, you've got customers know what they want. There's this early supply chain of professionals that can actually deliver it. And then you've got to somehow fill that gap. And that's kind of what our tech strategy is pretty much. It's like filling that gap, standardizing the process, using data and technology to automate and to smooth a lot of the stages out for consumers because this like fledgling sector is. in the early stages of growth and we basically want to make sure they're more efficient in terms of their time, so they're not wasting their time on tasks which are inefficient for them to do that. So yeah, trying to find retrofit assessors, very, very interesting, some stories to tell. Ooh, retrofit assessors swearing at customers. Retrofit assessors pulling wallpaper from a customer's wall. And then we had to go and rectify that. What other stories? Oh, they come out, they always come out in the wash a little bit later on, but it's just a little bit of a challenge to find the right people on the ground. And it's always a little bit of fun, but we always went back and rectified it and basically be that front face to solve that problem for the customer. And we've always been build in practice first, so kiss the frogs, find out what the problems are, and then build the tech solution around that as well. So very basic things in the early days, like the software stack for doing PAS 2035 in the industry is atrocious in terms of the customer facing products. So we built a customer facing product, which meant that they could actually understand how to go through that process. We have a platform with Home Energy Plan. You can access all of your recommendations. It means that you can actually play around with it a little bit as well to find your pathway forward. And then going forward, plan is one thing, advice is one thing, but then we do the design work. So that means we take all the data from the survey into the designs, the drawings for the insulation, ventilation system, the heat pump, all collected in one place. And then you'll install a team, quote against that, and we build your team for you. So it just means it's in one place, but always we've gone from do it manually in practice, you know, do it with Google documents, Zapier integrations, just figure out how it works and how we can build a process which is better for the customer, but also ultimately from the business sense as well. And then, yeah, build the product around it to help with the scaling. Oh, so many stories. if I'm honest, because it's just a practical element. When you're doing real things, when there are real installations, you're integrating with the supply chain as it stands at the moment. You're just going to come across some challenges because that's how it is at the moment, unfortunately. But that's what we want to do is give the customer the confidence that when they do elect to do this, whatever their motivation is, whether it's climate change, if I'm completely honest, who's doing this and why, it's really from a comfort angle. So just now we're kind of in the summer period, the overheating, A lot of people are like, oh, how do I fix that? And obviously air con is an element of that, but there's ventilation as part of that. So is shading and so is insulation. It's, it's kind of a bit of a complex challenge. You don't have to do it all at once, but you do need to connect it all together. So we've had a big influx from that side of thing, comfort from overheating, but there's also obviously the comfort over the winter period as well. Um, I just want to refer to something that's super interesting. Um, anyone listening, take a look at the graphs from Tado, um, cause they have huge data sets around how homes respond to heating. So the UK takes the longest, oh sorry I'm going to have to remember the right way around, please cut this bit. In the UK, we are the quickest to cool down when the heating turns off. So they've got a huge data set from all the thermostats. But also, like I said earlier, homes are ovens. So we actually speed up the heating in the home the quickest as well. And it's just kind of crazy to see that is the environment that we're in. And people are really motivated by solving those comfort issues first, rather than necessarily looking at energy bill savings, which is a little bit of a a focus of the energy efficiency sector. It's important, but when we step back, the best payback time is for solar panels, and if you're lucky, that's six years. Anything else is kind of 15, 20 years. We've got to stop talking about energy efficiency in terms of payback. It does not help, because really what the people are doing is solving their comfort problems, having a comfortable home for their family, for their retirement, for their life, to live in comfortably, but also healthily as well. and integrating that into the renovation process. This is why I said earlier about me not liking the retrofit word because it feels like we've taken a section of refurbishment and renovation and it is slightly different because we're looking at the energy efficiency but it doesn't mean anything to most people and we've carved off the whole industry that does something slightly separate to building regulations and normal construction management and called it PAS 2035 and given it its whole other area and that isn't actually helping because it means that People are even more confused when they start doing the research about what to do. Okay, I've got the heat pump grant. I'm going to go to MCS - Microgeneration Certification Scheme. Sorry, try not to use too many abbreviations. And then I do a little bit more research and I'm thinking, oh, maybe I need to insulate as well. And then I come across this retrofit thing with PAS 2035. Oh God, how does it all connect? And it just does create a lot more confusion, both in the industry with these kind of delineations and then also from the consumer angle about how to find a route forward. So I've kind of meandered slightly there, but I suppose the frogs that we've kissed along the way have been us trying to plug those gaps with how the industry works to give that smooth experience and using tech and data to be able to tie that all together as well.
Katherine Keddie: I mean, I was going to come back and ask you what's your beef with the retrofit sector as a term, but it sounds like generally it's putting a shiny label on something that is related to general improvements in the home. And I think, I guess, what you cut out by focusing on payback time is, like you say, that improvement to your life and the improvement to your home. But also, I mean, on the other hand, the payback time, very useful from, you know, looking at an energy efficiency or a financial perspective. So how do you find the, when you're talking to people about, I mean, Anne as well, you can definitely come on in this, when you're talking to people about why they should potentially consider sustainability improvements to their home, how do you sell that to people if not through payback time?
Anne Snelson: I mean, certainly, as Becky says, people see it. So in the winter, they're cold. In the summer, they're too hot. And that is down to their housing. And they don't even know, understand the basic problem of, you know, if your house isn't insulated, then, I mean, they know that they will have to pay more for heating, for instance, but they don't realize that that will also help cool in the summer. And as you think, you know, temperatures are increasing at 10 times the rate that they ever have done before. We've talked a lot about insulating and all the benefits, you know, in terms of cost for heating, but actually cooling is going to become more of a problem in future as well. And we want to steer clear of air con and things like that because the F gases from air conditioning will just make it even worse. And all right, maybe you can use solar to power your air con and things like that, or power fans, but the whole thing is linked together so much. Excuse me. Um, so when I am training people, I'm not just training them from an industry point of view, I'm training them as consumers. And quite often they're going, okay, my house is a thing that I want to improve. And they go, you know, where, where do I go first? Especially if you've got an older house and I have friends who kind of go, haven't you sorted your house yet? And I'm thinking I've got house from the 1970s. It's like, it needs desperate amounts of insulation, desperate amounts. It's like a. a one-skin wall, sorry about this, there is no cavity to fill. The roof and the ceilings all need to be insulated. If I even started to look at retrofitting in terms of an air source heat pump, I would be spending so much money that it's really not worth it. So I've put solar panels on because that seemed like a really easy, nice thing to do. And I love my solar panels. But it is that, what do you do first as a consumer? How do you decarbonize, how do you improve your home environment? And that is again, what I love about Furbnow, they make it much simpler because otherwise you have to do that process of, shall I do solar panels first? Okay. I go to solar and then, you know, they just spam me with advertising and I'm not ready to do it yet. Where do I get that independent advice? What's the best thing for me to do? So it is a minefield and all I would say really to people starting out in an industry, If you can find a hole like this where people desperately want advice, go and fill it because that is what Furbnow is doing in an environment where there is just a mishmash of things that you can do and no real clear path to doing it. And it's why you're so successful. So, well done.
Consumer motivations for home energy upgrades: comfort over payback
Becky Lane: I just want to say that why are people doing it now? Payback is an important part, but it's not the driver of people who are doing it today or will be doing in the next kind of three to five years. And for us, our perspective is that, and I suppose that was my beef with retrofit. People will do this during a renovation cycle. That's when they actually do it. Even the people who are climate motivated or motivated from a comfort perspective, that's the reason why. But the trigger when they actually act and decide to proceed with something is they've bought a house, it's time to go back to brick. I'm going to do a kitchen extension and at the same time, I'm going to figure out how that new cavity wall is going to tie in with my solid brick home. Oh, I've just had a child. I want to do my loft extension, but I've just seen all my neighbors and they've got basically ovens upstairs in the loft. How do I make sure I don't do that? Or my boiler is going to break down. I've kind of heard about this grant, but also I'm kind of aware of maybe a couple of stages in between. And like the, the reason why might be, um, a mix of comfort, bills, future proofing, all these kinds of different complexes, quite complex. reason why, but it happens during the renovation cycle of people's homes. And I just find it quite, we've been doing a lot of research about this positioning of retrofit, basically. And if you do research around kind of renovation sector, like all of the reports, consumer reports around renovation, you look at kind of what's reported in the magazines, kind of like, you know, how are people talking about this in the traditional renovation sector? The only retrofit measure that ever gets mentioned is windows and doors. And that's actually a real problem because it means that when, you know, the mass market, even people who are motivated, that trigger point when they're actually considering of doing something in their home, that there's no awareness coming through. So there's no awareness coming through from the renovation sector. There's not really anything coming down from the policy perspective, like in that trigger point to help people think about it. And it's just, we need to position retrofit in the renovation cycle for people because otherwise you're just shouting at people, think about doing a heat pump, think about insulating. And I think about my own home, people on my team, we kind of try and cross-check, you know, does the proposition fit for us? And we are very, very motivated, obviously, because we're working on this problem. And if I think about what we were doing to start with, not really, because if somebody tells me, oh, you should do this list of insulation measures, and I'm like, well, I'm also thinking about doing a loft extension. I need to replace the floor. I know that the plaster's blown, how that's going to integrate. And that's what I mean is that it has to integrate with the renovation cycle, because otherwise it's just a separate thing that doesn't actually meet the needs of people and their homes as they go through what's already happening today. So it's not quite beef, but I think it's just like a strategic positioning that we need to think about how do we just try and push this over to the mainstream and then think about it from a sustainability perspective as well because kitchens, bathrooms, redecorating, all of these things add value to people's homes. I mean, it's not the core reason why, but they do think about like, oh, it's going to pay back. I'm going to spend £15,000 on my kitchen, and maybe you might see five coming back on the house value or something similar to that. But people do do it from a kind of, again, a mix of complicated reasons and ultimately reflects it. A kitchen doesn't pay back, a bathroom doesn't pay back, but it does deliver a core functionality benefit to you. You feel happier in your home. You feel proud of your home. And this is where retrofit needs to kind of play in this game. of actually kind of what functional benefits does it give rather than just all my energy bills a little bit lower because that's the play of the people who are really keen at kind of watching their smart meters and looking at their export tariff going back and that's great but it's not the mass market and that's what I mean about what's the strategy for retrofit what's the strategy for decarbonizing homes and just talking about retrofit and having the separate segment is not going to meet the average consumer where they are and we just need to sneakily get it into the consciousness, I say sneakily, but it's basically inserting that into what's already happening. So we can get that scale to happen already, because renovations are happening. It's a huge, huge market, recession proof market as well, because when people stop moving around, they start focusing more on their own homes, ginormous opportunity. retrofit needs to move over into this space rather than having its own world, own kind of way of talking because it's not connecting with people at the moment.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, so the trigger point you're saying for people to think about how do they start to make sustainability improvements to their home is, I'm considering making improvements to my home and this is one category rather than it being some kind of separate decision making kind of pipeline.
Becky Lane: Exactly. And that's, there are people today who are looking at it from the retrofit angle, like, Oh, I want to make sure that it's as sustainable as possible. But that's a tiny, tiny market. It's not very easy. Like if we're going to kind of step back and like, how, how do you do startups and like do the initial kind of targeting? I know this is the kind of work that you do is like, okay, if I go on the Google keyword search and like look at the volumes and what people are searching for, people searching for retrofits, like in the thousands a year. people searching for like energy efficiency renovations, again, low thousands, when you want is like, you know, millions, huge market in terms of search term, and it's just not, it's not there at the moment. So we can either try and push, push, push this separate thing, retrofit took to grow and build awareness that is not a startup or scale of strategy that is the job for government to build awareness or we go and insert into the cycles already that renovation and that's that's our strategy because it makes a lot more sense even with our earlier customers as well they're doing. a renovation, a refurbishment, an extension, something quite big as a project, and they're looking to optimize their project at the same time to make sure it also achieves these other benefits as well. They're not just doing the kind of skin deep improvements, they're going a lot deeper to make sure they're doing it at the same time. And oftentimes, the cost of doing the retrofit is a small fraction of the overall cost, and you don't have to go back to doing kind of fundamental works later. doing fundamental retrofit works at a later time as well.
Katherine Keddie: So if we're thinking about, sorry, one second.
Anne Snelson: Well, I was just going to say, I mean, the additional key point is, which I try and get my trainees to think about is, how old is your gas boiler? Because the last time that you want to be thinking about this is when your boiler has broken. Because what you will do when your gas boiler is broken is get in a gas boiler man who will go, hey, I can't fix it, but I'll give you a new one. So I mean, I try and tell people, think about how old your boiler is. If you think that it's not working terribly well, start planning now because you need that time to think about how you can change your house to put in place some alternative that is better than what you've got at the moment. So that's the other place that I think that we should be targeting far more. And it would be very nice if the gas boiler man actually came along and said, have you thought about a heat pump instead?
Becky Lane: The thing we like to joke about is build your boiler funeral plan. But the thing is that most people don't necessarily plan that far ahead. And again, it's this awareness. And we don't they used to be. And again, this is about 2017, 2018, they were talking about a gas boiler ban in the 2025s. And that was seven, eight years ahead, it's all been completely scrapped. Nobody's talking about that at all anymore. And I would agree with that as well. Because at the moment, there isn't really a plan other than the seven and a half thousand pound heat pump grant, to actually bring the cost down of a heat pump installation to be in line with a gas boiler installation. And you can't, it's completely politically will never fly to try and actually put people in that situation that we've banned the cheap alternative and now you're locked into this expensive alternative. But then if we look at the sector that you had a lot of experience in as well, transport, this target was set ages ago very clearly, the transition to electric vehicles. And we do need that long-term trajectory set so people know what they're working towards. And we've seen, you know, landlords, it feels like a little bit of a scrap at the moment to put something in place before 2030s. and not really thinking about a transition plan to help people and the market respond as well appropriately because at the moment something rushing for landlords, EPCC by 2030 or 2028. It's not in place yet but we're not sure because it hasn't actually come into legislation yet. It's going to be a very kind of knee-jerk reaction from the market What is the same transition for homeowners, owner-occupiers? There's nothing really there at the moment to tell people what the transition is other than this kind of nudge and incentive coming from the heat pump side of things. We do need this longer term. That's the point of the 2050 target. That's the point of the Climate Change Committee. to set some of that longer term perspective and we just don't see it necessarily coming from the policy side. So we can tell people to plan ahead, but if people are not thinking about planning ahead, then they're still coming to us again in that renovation cycle to start thinking about, okay, I'm thinking about my extension, my kitchen, redecoration, always tends to kind of come as part of it. But they're not necessarily thinking about the long-term kind of prospect for their boiler and like it's not on people's minds normally all the time that, oh, my boiler is now 12, 15 years old. Maybe it might conk out in a few years' time. It doesn't tend to happen. So what's the driver to help people starting thinking on these longer-term cycles? And it does need to come a little bit from that kind of nudging perspective and awareness from policy and it's not there at the moment for the homeowner market. and arguably for the landlords it's coming a little bit too soon. It is needed but it's potentially a little bit too soon to help that kind of market transition.
Anne Snelson: Social housing as well are facing the similar things and the difficulty at the moment is that the EPCs don't even include heat pumps in there so we're incentivising something that then when you try and sell your house aren't even recognised so the new EPCs will be coming in next year. which will hopefully address that and refocus things, but this is what you're saying when legislation just doesn't tie up and that strength of communication with consumers is really what we desperately need in order to achieve all of this.
The adoption curve for home energy upgrades
Katherine Keddie: Where do you think, both of you, where do you think we sit currently on the adoption curve? Like we always have in my mind, I mean literally named our company Adopter after the adoption curve, that shift from having like the early Adopter segment that are really excited by new technology. There may be people who are really interested in the payback as you were talking about earlier. They're excited by something new and therefore they're more willing to accept risk, accept going through all of this like headache with trying to retrofit your home. And now we're shifting into more regular people or kind of early majority people. starting to think about these transition areas. Where do you think we currently sit in that adoption curve and how do we move up the curve and get more people involved?
Anne Snelson: I mean, it's so funny. I mean, in transport, we're at about 3% on shift to EV. So that is just starting in the early adopter phase. It's not even into the early majority yet. Housing is way behind. And this is the difficulty. Yes, we have the innovators at the moment who have spent a fortune, who can afford it. And interestingly, it's quite often older age groups who kind of realize that they should be doing something about climate change, who still want to continue flying, dare I say, and say, oh, I'll do lots to my house because it makes them feel better. But they're not necessarily going to go and shout about what they've done to other people. They're not really going to shout about the fact that, you know, they care about climate change. They're worried about how their children are going to cope with it. So it's quite an interesting sort of mix. And then you get the other end of the scale, you know, the youngsters who are renting out, who can't afford to do anything and or may, you know, may not even have that control. So it is quite interesting from a marketing point of view. Now, how do we get to those people? that are able to do this, who will talk about it. Or else you get, you know, the complete fanatics that then, I've done this, that and the other, and they almost put people off because then other people are left going, gosh, do I really have to do all of that? You know, what can I do as a one step towards this? So it's interesting from that, yeah, that product development curve because you have such a range of different people and doing it for different reasons. And as soon as you get into it, you kind of go, but I did the same with my solar panels. I want to put solar panels up there. Am I going to stay there long enough to get the benefit from that? And then, oh my goodness, is my roof strong enough to take that? And it's sort of because things are sold in as separate products, you don't have that thinking about what are the different things that we can do, what are the different things that we have to do. And that is where I feel a bit sorry for government because they're trying to push, you know, here's heat pumps as a solution, here's your grant for that. There's actually a variety of different things that people can do. And it depends on your house. We have such a weird housing stock in the UK that no one size fits all, really. If your house, as a rule of thumb, if your house has been built since 2000, probably putting a heat pump in should be relatively straightforward. Is that a good rule of thumb, Becky? Yeah, if it's prior to that, you need a plan about how you're going to do, what you actually need to change. There is no rule. And again, that's why other sectors are easier. As I say, transport, it is electrified or going to public transport. It's really very simple. Whereas here, it is so much more complicated.
Becky Lane: I think to come back to your doctor curve, I think I would characterize it in a slightly different way in that the people that we The motivators of people are in the early majority kind of motivators. And what I mean by that is the customers that we see are not the climate fanatics. They are doing it for comfort reasons in a renovation. The challenge that we have is like the market awareness and like our people looking at it at this point is in the innovator phase. So I think I characterize it in a slightly different way because the people that are doing it are not the really climate tech kinos that are trying to push along because of climate change. So it means their motivation, we have a kind of mature reasoning for doing it. It's kind of optimizing their project and then focusing on comfort for their family and health. But then that awareness in the market, much, much lower. Which does create a challenge in the kind of startup environment. It means that we have to be super focused on like, how do we find the customers at the right trigger point? How do we nurture and educate those customers that we do find as leads at the right point and kind of find their path forward? And that's what the point of the experimentation is. So we're at seed stage at the moment. I'm not going to profess that we've got product market fit. That's the holy grail, you know, when you really start driving behind growth, and ultimately our focus at the moment is on how do we sustainably find our customers predictably, so we know our drivers, our growth levers that are the most effective. And that's at the front end, both in kind of acquiring our customers as leads, nurturing the leads to become paid customers and then ultimately giving them a fantastic experience all the way throughout that so they go and tell their friends and then we have that word of mouth kind of cycle referral that comes off the back which we're already seeing evidence of. We look at the maps because they don't tell us that they do referrals but we can see on the maps that we see clusters around streets and clusters around kind of within a kilometer of customers coming through so we can see these kind of communities coming through afterwards. But it does take that time and we are in this kind of early adopter curve. But the key and the secret sauce of any startup is kind of finding that route to market to kind of your new innovative product. To some extent, you could call us a new category in the renovation space. We've got to figure out what our communication strategy is and be clear and consistent to meet our customers at the right point. But I think it is there, you know, survey saying was, I think, Between 42 to 60, there's loads of surveys that have kind of asked people, do you want to do energy efficiency upgrades in your home within the next three to five years? 42 to 60% saying yes. So that's huge. but how can we find them? So there is a market there, it is here today, it's just again that communication and why I think the retrofit industry is kind of creating a bit of a problem for itself by moving over here rather than speaking in normal speak that people are thinking about this and we can then find them more effectively as well and grow.
Anne Snelson: Certainly, when I set up my built environment project training course, I thought that estate agents and letting agents might be interested in it. And I was thinking, here's a great way to, you know, convert the market because if you get into them, then they're advising people regularly, but there's no benefit to them really in promoting it. And I was just, so I'm finding that it's people in construction. that are more interested in it because they're seeing the legislation driving it. And it is, you know, as a startup, you have to find out what are the trigger points, what are the best ways in, because you can't focus on everything, you know. And I think, I mean, we're maybe going to go on to it, but that sort of ability to pivot, to try things, see whether it works or not, and really just say, okay, no, that's not working. What else can I try? Um, I think that's the, the foundation of any good company, um, as a startup and the difficulty then is maybe you were going to go into this Becky is how do you, how do you say that in a strategic way that appeals to, you know, uh, people that are going to put money into this. If you kind of go, well, we've sort of pivoted here. We did have a strategic plan, but we realized that that wasn't working quite so well. Um, and I think wording of that marketing communication is, um, is key in terms of just really, um. helping to recognize that, you know, this is not a straightforward path. You have to work out what happens at different stages in the market and you have to change your messaging as well. And I think Word of Mouth is fabulous, obviously. I get a lot of that too.
Katherine Keddie: I think it's such an interesting point that actually the The classic adoption curve is really lacking a lot of nuance, I think, and I think the market is quite fragmented. Different people have different motivations. When it comes to product-market fit, how will you know when you've found it?
Product-market fit: the Sean Ellis methodology and Furbnow's results
Becky Lane: So two things for us. So one thing that we track, you know, what can we control and what can we not control? So there's two ways that we look at it. One is us tracking. There's somebody who are very well known in the startup space called Sean Ellis. And his thing is if you ask your customers if they would be very disappointed, somewhat disappointed or not disappointed if he didn't exist. You ask them that question and you see kind of roughly what the results come out. So we have 60% of our customers would be very disappointed and the other 40 would be somewhat disappointed. And good is if you get 10% and obviously we're not, so a thousand customers, that's very good, but that's not huge. huge at the moment, still got a lot to grow, but that does give us the indicator that we do have something of genuine value of our customers that they really do want. And the somewhat, you know, it's important to focus there because they are our ideal customers, but there's somewhere we've let them down. There's a feature we haven't given them or something that we haven't quite given them. And we should focus on that if we think it's our next target market, those consumer profiles to address that in our proposition. So that's how we kind of look at it from a customer angle. Are we delivering value? Are we doing something that's actually helping them? And then the other side as well is on the growth front. So, you know, product experience, people who come in, are we delivering what they're looking for? So product market fit, the market that we find the product seems to be fitting. So that's a really good indication. We'll keep tracking that. But then really what you're looking for is then how do we sustainably find, so if we say put £100,000 into the acquisition funnel at the top, what do we get at the end? And there's loads of strategies that go behind that. And I know this is kind of your expertise and you've worked in it as well. When we get to that point, and we can sustainably acquire our customers, and we're still delivering this value to the product, so it means that our customers are happy, word of mouth referral, low churn, product market fit, that's when you know that you've achieved it. The growth is sustainable, the customers are sustainably happy with you, you're delivering that value. And then the early stages of seed, so seed stage businesses, so pre-seed, you're probably kind of validating your idea, you're getting the MVPs, does it work, do people want it? Seed, you're starting to build up your growth playbook, because by the end of your seed capital, when you're getting to series A, you need to go to your investors and say, I want money. please write a check and I'm going to spend it in this way to deliver this growth. So it means I'm ready for Series B because at that point you're getting ready for serious growth capital and you need to kind of show how that money is going to be invested and going through. So our focus for Seed is building up that growth playbook more sustainably so we know this money is spent through these channels, we expect this acquisition rate, these leads, this conversion rate coming through. And we're talking a lot about kind of trigger points for retrofit renovation. You can kind of see the hint of what our kind of strategy is and like our messaging, more of that will come out over the next year, probably more proactively as we test and push things out. But that's our kind of go to market strategies. basically pushing retrofit into the renovation space, both direct-to-consumer, but then also through partners as well. So we don't just go direct-to-consumer. It's been very effective for us to work with some energy suppliers, particularly more ethical ones, the smaller ones that are more ethical. I know this is going to sound maybe a little bit naive, but with community groups, because they're already talking on the ground, so that can range between kind of like a WI group, something around the wildlife trust locally, but also obviously those that are really focused on climate change and energy. They are already having these conversations, they're kind of really those early adopters. And then also, strangely enough, we have a lot of partners with councils, local councils as well. need to go a little bit deeper on what the drivers are there, but they see the need to drive local retrofit markets. They're very heavily in this kind of like keep it separate, both from the awareness perspective, but also the supply chain. They're delivering energy efficiency programs delivered by the government, but they also want the benefit of that to be kind of coming across to the self-funded market so that the homeowners are paying for it themselves. to basically support a sustainable growing retrofit and energy efficiency sector, because at the moment the growth in that sector is capped, the grant sector, because government says there's a billion pounds a year, year on year, well that's the market cap. It doesn't matter, you can have some shifts around in terms of players, but that is the cap of the market. So how are you going to be able to grow it? Well, government gives more grants out. Unlikely, there's not a lot of cash in the bank, unfortunately, for UK plc. So to grow it, then we need to grow the sector more sustainably. And that can be for occupiers, and we talked a bit about the landlords. And that's what local authorities are trying to do when they've put these retrofit one-stop shops together. They want to kind of catalyze on some of the grants to see growth and more growth beyond the grants that are there in the self-funded sector. So we've been working with Surrey County Council, a consortium of Gloucestershire councils, and also most recently with West Yorkshire Combined Authority, more to come out on delivering. We are the one-stop-shop provider, so customers come to us, we take them through the process, we also support some of the supply chain development as well. Recruiting the supplies into our supply chain to give them that work and visibility and that confidence that the sector is growing it is happening. But the benefit of working with those partners on go to market strategy is they do a lot for us in terms of kind of priming the market. I'm waiting a half years old to be complete frank like people are spending tens of thousands of pounds with us. that needs a lot of trust and these partnerships have helped kind of hack our trust as well to demonstrate that we have been procured, they've checked our processes, they're confident with how we work, they also do a lot of marketing and kind of priming the market to position as well and that's kind of helped us as well in the kind of hacking our growth in the kind of early years as well and we'll continue to do that until we become a household name. There's some years until that happens like it takes a long time to build a brand but we have to find our roots to kind of hack that trust hack the growth rather than just kind of having an endless pit of direct-to-consumer marketing spending because that is not sustainable for a startup. So yeah, those partnerships have been a really key part of our go-to-market strategy in our early years.
Anne Snelson: Yeah, I mean it's how I got to hear about you because I worked with Zero Carbon Guildford, had them around for, you know, to review my home and with the cameras etc. They gave a report there and then they recommended you. So, I mean, fabulous. And I think thinking about your marketing strategy and coming to those sorts of conclusions, yes, councils are hard work and they have a very long cycle of decision making. But if you can get in there, then it's a fabulous thing, a fabulous way to bring your services to market. I really recommend that. I found that for the training as well, of course, you know, if you get in. And councillors, genuinely, they want what's best for their area. You know, these are different, you know, quite often local government is much more focused on what is actually good for their residents because they get voted in, surprisingly enough. they're much more keen on actually developing the built environment to suit their area. It's not good for them if there's lots of flooding and lots of issues around insulation or cold homes or whatever. They get a lot of residents going to see them and complaining. So from their point of view, if they can shout about something positive that they're doing, then it's good for them and good for the business too.
Becky Lane: Yeah, I just want to talk about another company in this space that's a bit older, I think they've been going since 2015, called iChooser. The UK brand is called Solar Together, so some people might have heard of them before. They do have a really strong tech element, but it's cool what their route to market is through local authorities. They do campaign in collaboration and then they basically facilitate bulk buying of solar panels. So that means that you can come in and get solar panels normally about 20%, 30% cheaper than going direct to the installers because they're bulk buying the equipment. And they're also obviously giving that pipeline without having the cost of sale for the installers as well. So they're just achieving that volume reduction. And it's just been super effective that they've grown so much, they've done so many schemes across all of the UK, they're in several European countries as well. And for us, it's been great to work kind of behind them. So the council does the prep, great deal, bulk buy, like you've done, it's like your entry point, I've got my solar panels. Okay, now I'm thinking about maybe what comes next. And what we found is that that's been really good in terms of pump primary, but then everything else, it's more complicated, because solar panels are quite easy to replicate and kind of simplify because to some extent it's quite simple. So long as your roof is the right type of roof, you put them on the roof, you get the wiring sorted with the inverter and then you put it into the fuse board and it's relatively simple. I know there's a little bit more to it than that. But you can simplify it to be able to buy six, eight solar panels per home. When we're looking at insulation, ventilation, heat pumps, it gets a lot more complex because the scoping, the design does have to be a lot more specific to the house. And we did allude a little bit to what our scaling strategy is. We want to productize that process. So we know for a certain type of wall, a certain type of home, the data that we have, we know which products work best and we can design them basically in an automated way, which means that process is a lot more simplified. But to do that, you need thousands of homes worth of data to be able to have data-driven decisions so that you're actually able to productize that process and ultimately drive down the cost of us doing that work and then also simplify the installation process as well. So we know systems of insulation, systems of ventilation, heat pump systems that work most effectively for different house archetypes. Very contentious, I'll come to that in a second about archetypes. And then basically simplify that supply chain going through to homes as well. So we're driving down the cost of doing it well by productizing the design process, but then also driving down the capital cost of doing it by simplifying the solutions that are available and ultimately bulk buying those solutions for people's homes as well to make it less capital intensive for the actual installation. And that's basically our big picture strategy is Firstly, automate to make it simple and cost-effective to deliver this across the country, using our data and technology to strategy, sorry, to repeat, using our data and technology to drive down the service cost of doing it well. So how we do the designs and then ultimately final step, big step, driving down the capital cost of doing the installation. So it's much more cost-effective and we're more confident about those systems and how they'll work in people's homes. But that's our strategy and how we will. make it more accessible to more consumers over time.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, so you're starting off basically by simply flying and being that one-stop shop, like you say, for a very complex market and by doing that you are fundamentally making things more efficient when it comes to people's time, when it comes to the price that they eventually have to pay. That process is really where you fit into the market.
Becky Lane: Yeah, just tying it all together and using the data to basically drive those bulk efficiencies. Solar Together have done an amazing job with solar panels, but then what do you do with everything else? And that's essentially what our tech and our data strategy is, is to bring that same efficiencies to the rest of the process as well for people's home renovations.
Anne Snelson: And in terms of things like suppliers, that's critical because you get some, dare I say, who cherry pick the really easy solutions. And so I was saying about, you know, houses since 2000 or whatever, there are particular suppliers who are far better at installing heat pumps for the newer ones, whereas older properties, you obviously need to have a little bit more changes to the housing or a more detailed look at them and different solutions there, because it is in terms of balance for the consumer, Do you pay the cost upfront to change your house and then have lower operational costs? Or do you buy a one size fits all, but then have really high running costs going forward? And again, consumers don't understand those differences. I try and give as much as I can in my training to people who may be specialists in one area, not in another, but Sam, it is really difficult. And that's why I think the whole market needs to be simplified.
Becky Lane: Yeah, in the training that you give as well, Anne, do you tend to find, cause ultimately change comes with cost and there's that opportunity cost and capital, like investment cost. Um, and then obviously the, the personal element of like change management that comes with it. So with the kind of training that you've done, how, cause obviously we're talking from it, from a consumer perspective where people are, you know, there's the disruption, the capital costs, the opportunity, all these different elements, but how do you tend to find it happens with the corporate element of people? Does it come out in the training? It was like, this sounds nice, but how are we going to do it?
Anne Snelson: Yeah, I mean, so the good thing about carbon literacy project training is that I give a raft of different solutions. So as I say, in the beginning, the first half of the course is quite miserable. It is about climate change. It's about where we are. It's about what's happening. It's about where we're going in terms of higher costs, higher temperatures, more floods, more storms, and things like that. And even people who really know quite a lot are usually impacted by that. Even if it's something that you know about, particularly if you've been to university and studied it, just the fact that you've got two, three hours of this is where we are and this is where we're going and this is where we are now tends to be quite a driver to people. And then in the afternoon, it is a whole range of different things. So we do look at even within a particular sector. So like the built environment, I'll look at what's going to happen with flooding and mitigation, things like that. What are we going to do in terms of embedded emissions? And I guess what I try and do as well is to focus on, yes, there are costs to doing many of these things, but there are also savings. So in terms of wastage, and we were talking about that. So really just trying to show that although people think that all of these things cost money, actually there are so many benefits out of it as well and companies can save as well if they just focus on the right things. And I do, you know, I use every example of, it covers quite a range of different things, my built environment course, so it includes some things around planning like biodiversity, how are you going to create nice environments around places because I get quite a lot of landscape architects and people coming on the course as well as your standard construction and built environment type of companies. And then I go through and say you know this is where we need to go because I have had Passivhaus specialists on the course as well and what's really nice is that people share their experience as well so you actually go away from a general course having a lot better understanding of all the different parts of what's involved in decarbonizing the built environment and what people can do. And yes, it covers even food and transport and things like that. So generally, people can go away with a whole raft of things that they can do, and they choose what's best for their company and their personal circumstances as well. And the really nice thing about carbon literacy project training is ultimately, it drives change. Because to get certification, you have to say what you're going to do to reduce emissions. in the workplace, it's generally in the workplace, but as an individual, as part of a group, what are you actually going to do to make a difference? And I have to say I love reading those when they come in to me, because some of the changes that people are making in the workplace are amazing, and it is fabulous to see.
Carbon literacy training in large corporates: scope 3 emissions and workforce engagement
Katherine Keddie: So when you're actually running training with large companies, corporates, people who are in big positions of power and responsibility when it comes to potentially being able to shift the needle on some of these new climate technologies, what actually motivates them in this session? Because I think I know your background is also in marketing and obviously a lot of my work is focused on getting new technical solutions into B2B markets. So there's a lot of discussion around value drivers and obviously legislation and efficiency and price reduction and how we tell stories around that. But I think you get a very human side of people and you spend time with them and you talk through all of the reasons why someone would care about this. When we're talking about the individuals that are making some of these decisions, how do people tend to respond to the messages that you put out and what do they particularly respond to?
Anne Snelson: Yeah, I mean, it's such a massive range. So I have everything from procurement directors who say, I flew 80 times last year. I'm just not going to do that anymore. So I suppose transport's a relatively easy one because there are quick wins there around. Do you have face-to-face meetings all the time or can you reduce that? And they tend to focus on so different roles obviously will have different types of solutions. I had a sales team yesterday so a lot of that was about how many face-to-face interactions do I have? Do I drive to the other end of the country or not? and they see that they can make a difference there. At the larger corporate side of things, I mean the driver has to be that they are being targeted every year with what are their scope 1, 2 and hopefully 3 emissions and they need to make reductions and they need to show what their plans are for doing that. And so a lot of the time with the larger organizations I'm going in to help them do that. They already have in place plans to put in solar, to use more renewable energy, to shift to electric, et cetera. But what the benefit for them is actually engaging with their workforce, because a sustainability manager on their own can only do so much in the big corporate environment. Whereas if they engage all of the workforce, they get multiple different ideas. And it's quite difficult for me, actually, to come up with. a best a best pledge because i get so many of them which is lovely and in a so it is as i say you know reduce travel a lot of people when it's international if they have a head office in paris for instance they say well i'll take the eurostar instead of flying um i had one corporate where they actually changed their their travel plans and what they could sign off and they shifted people from flying first class and business class to economy class because actually if you're taking economy class your emissions are a third of what they are in business class and a quarter of what they are in first class and they just said this is a no-brainer you know they just showed what the emissions savings were I do say to people, yeah, OK, if you can cut your flights, then do. But feel virtuous about the fact that you're squished into a little economy seat when you walk past all these people in first class and business class. They tend to laugh at that. But it really is down to each different area. And a lot of what I'm focusing on now is actually for those bigger organizations. they are being targeted with reducing their scope 3 emissions. And in order to do that, think about your consumers, think about the education that you can give to your end users, think about your supply chain, because if you put, dare I say, demands on your supply chain, to think about emissions. You're not only helping your scope through emissions, but you're also helping influence a whole new market because that supplier will then go and say in their bids and their tenders, I do this and this is what I'm doing in order to reduce emissions. So that sort of mushrooming effect of how do you influence a bigger and wider and wider circle happens through that. So it's really nice. I vary the training quite a lot, considering that it's a fairly fixed course, but it depends on who I have in that room at any one time about, you know, who can you influence? Think about your particular role and what you do, whether that's marketing, you know, do I communicate with my end users about how to, you know, insulate their homes, how to, you know, even things like turning down your thermometer by one degree, you know, that can make a saving of five, 10% on your energy bills? How do you make sure that your office isn't sitting there in summer so that people are having to wear cardigans because your air con is on too high and having to strip off in winter because your heating is too high? There are these very simple solutions that we can still do and we can all still do. And I'm sure your audience knows all that already, but actually it's lovely to remind yourselves that there are still people out there for whom this is new and who you can influence fairly easily through that.
Katherine Keddie: And if I'm thinking about some people who are listening who are involved in climate tech, from both of you, what kind of advice do you have for those people? So it could be people within a built environment. We work with a lot of people in that space and I know that we have listeners from that area. But it could also be people who are interested in climate tech and maybe they work in a corporate or they don't have a job that specifically relates to climate. I mean, maybe Anna can come to you first. What broad advice would you give them? Do you have any resources they should look at? Any kind of key pointers?
Anne Snelson: Yeah, what I actually really like about the training is that quite often I will get people who are just coming out of university and they desperately want to work in sustainability and they come on my course because it is an extra certification for them. you know, it motivates them again to do more. And they go, I want a green job. And you kind of go where you are there, you can make it green. You know, if you're not already in a sustainable job and you want to get more into that, do what you can, you know, go and volunteer to do scope one, two, and three emissions. Probably people will love you for doing that. Come up with the ideas. Um, develop where you are and then at least you can show to prospective employers that you're better than that person that you were at the start when you didn't, when you had no experience. So that's one of the things I do. I also tell them to go to People Planet Pint where it's a fabulous environment. Yes, you just go and meet local people. And I think quite often as startups, you know, I can feel quite lonely on my own. You sound like you've got a lovely big company. Um, but you know, when I'm not training or even when I'm training online, I'm working for myself at home. So actually getting out and hearing about different people, it can be a great place to actually get new work as well, because you're talking enthusiastically about what you do. Um, so actually I've had quite a lot of people come on my course from just going to be able to plan it fine. And it's, yeah, it's. Every month, if they're not doing that already, we met through… I know, never going to miss school. I said, I said, sorry. I said, you know… Sorry, do you want to start that point again?
Katherine Keddie: I actually was blanking as well when you said that. I was like, yes, I remember, I remember your face in the event, but I can't remember where. Anyway, sorry, sorry, we're going to start again.
Anne Snelson: I mean, go to events. So we met through Earthset, which is a lovely group of people interested in climate, fascinating talks as well, where you just meet on a monthly basis as well. Get out there and meet people. And I know that can be quite tricky sometimes, especially if you're busy working away at your early startup initiative or whatever. take that time to go and meet with other people, because you'll learn from them as well about how to develop your business. Most people in this space, what I love about the sustainability space is actually that people are very free with their advice, not just on what works, but also what doesn't work, which is just as useful to hear.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, I completely agree. Actually, Juliette from Climate Connection, she did a post that immediately came to mind as soon as you were talking, which is, every job is a climate job in that you can make impact wherever you are. And I think we spend a lot of time, and in my work as well, and on this podcast, talking specifically to climate tech innovators, but there's this whole group of people that are the linchpin for these solutions actually being able to scale. And being able to take action in your role, I think, is really key. And Julia does a monthly event called Climate Tech Time, which is also a really good place to meet like-minded people, hear about new climate tech solutions. And there's lots of people that come who don't have quote-unquote a green job, but they are putting climate goals and they're using that to drive them in their role, which fundamentally is what makes a difference and what we need to be able to scale climate tech solutions.
Anne Snelson: Absolutely. I think that's the thing that I really like about the training is that it is wider than just that one person. It's not just that one department. that is doing things. It is that connection across the whole company. And that's what we need. We need everyone to be buying into it at whatever level.
Katherine Keddie: What about you, Becky? Advice for people listening, maybe climate tech founders who are interested in learning how they either break into the market that you're in, or if they're in a totally different market, how should they start to build their climate tech startup? How do they know when they have the right traction? How do they find that product market fit?
Advice for climate tech founders on team building, hypothesis-led strategy, and using AI tools
Becky Lane: Oh, that's a tricky one. Okay. I'm a first time founder, so I can't really say that I've got the battle scars and so far things are going well. So it's a bit hard to kind of talk beyond the stage that we're at. So this kind of seed stage where we've got customers, revenue, we've had like some net profitable months, like things have been going all in the right direction so far. Not always to plan, but you have to kind of just be flexible. That is the start of way where you're figuring things out. I think while it's gone well for us, um, It does come down quite a lot to the team, like who you have on the team to start with, like alignment around the mission. So we've always had a very clear statement that we We had a stupid number to start. We said a million homes by 2030. That was silly. Now it's more pragmatic. It's 100,000 homes by 2030. It's still big, but it's a little bit more pragmatic on what we think a realistic growth target is and the impact we can have with that. And my co-founder and I, Lawrence Watson is my co-founder, chief product technology officer of FurbNow. When we started together, we both were like, we don't want to build an app that optimizes energy at home. We don't want to do that. No shade to people who've done it, but it wasn't what we wanted to do because both of us were like, we recognize there is an asset deployment problem. I'm not making it sound strategic. We need to get stuff in homes. We need to firstly reduce the energy efficiency from a big picture perspective. If we're transitioning all the gas, the terawatt hours of gas that we have used over to electricity, if we just bung in heat pumps, we're going to have to do five to seven times the amount of renewable energy we have today. And that is mad, considering the fact that we're also going to do electric vehicles and industry. It's the same, really, the transition that we have to do in terms of energy. So energy efficiency has to be part of this strategy. And we want to, we've always been very clear, we actually want to make this happen, not just build a reporting tool or build some sort of optimization. We want to be the people that make it happen. So that alignment upfront was so important because it just means you can't always be talking to each other every day. When you set the target and you set it clearly, you can have a huge multiplier effect because you two at the start, so the two of us at the start, and then as people join your team, have a clear mission and what they need to act upon and what's important and what isn't. So clarity of mission but then having the team around you that are motivated by the mission as well. Not everyone comes at it from the same angle, from the climate change angle. Some people are just kind of fed up from their own personal experience and like have come from maybe a procurement background or kind of from working in the industry and they wanna put their shoulder to the wheel, let's say, to push things along and get it moving. But we have that alignment from everyone in the team that they want to work on this specific problem and they understand kind of what our strategy and approach is and how they can contribute to that. So, I'll come on to like, how you pivot. But I think having a team that gets the overarching goal, when things do change, they get the context of why and it feels comfortable because things can change a lot. And ultimately, you know, three of you working on something when it goes to five to nine, we're currently at 20. you, how you manage that team changes quite a lot over time. And you just need to be able to have that safety, that clarity. So if things do shift, everyone can kind of come in around that as well. So team is really important, because it will set you up for success or not, as you go through the different stages. So yeah, don't skimp on the hiring process. I mean, what do we do? I mean, we don't drag it out, we have a two stage process. So we have like a basically 30 minutes, we just want to get to know you, we've read the CV, we shortlisted you, we want to have a proper chat, like to get to know you a little bit more. And then that's a bit more around kind of cultural fit. And like, do you kind of align with our way of working and like, It's fine to have different worldviews, but they're kind of on the same page as us and what we think is important for making this business go forward. And then the second stage is basic people prepare. So we give them a problem that we're actually working on. And I don't expect people to do war and peace. It's more like, come with your thoughts, like five slides. Talk us through how you're thinking about it. And this is going to be an hour of us working through that problem together. And we just want to understand as like, you know, they haven't got all the information that we have. When we walk through that problem, How do you respond to this new information that we found that's kind of proven or disproven, the hypothesis that you had when you came through? Do you cope with that change and that challenge? Well, if not, then probably this isn't the environment for you because we need to keep experimenting. Like I said, we haven't got product market fit, seed stage business, raising venture capital. We need to constantly evolve to the new information that we have. And if you just get stuck and you don't want to move forward, then startup environment isn't necessarily for everyone. You've got to be able to kind of roll with the punches a little bit as things come through. So, yeah, setting up the team well, and that's kind of how we've done it so far. Had quite low turnover, to say the least. We've had one person leave, but yeah, she came from a legal background. We had a person leave because they weren't quite the right fit for the team as well. But then, yeah, it's been amazing to have the team and I will say that So I've been driving things since three years ago, but we would not got to the place we are now without such an amazing team behind us. And I really love what we've built from the product, the customers that we've served, but also our team as well. And then just like from the built environment lens as well, this market is very tricky. Um, and like feedback I've had from investors and like challenges I've had is like, it's very difficult to make things change in construction, in property. Um, because there is like a very well structured and defined value chain. And you've got to figure out, you know, where you sit within that value chain and what is the, you know, new product or disruption. And then like you've mentioned Qualisphere, obviously they're coming in more at the design phase in the, in the non-domestic construction. Um, that's their disruption. Our hypothesis was that for consumers. We could try and build an app for installers. For us, we didn't think that was going to make the change happen, because for us, that problem, consumers want it, supply chain can't deliver it at the moment. We need to fill that gap, so it meant we had to own it at that point. I think it's having a good understanding of what that value chain is, how it works, for the customer that you have, you know, what's their problem, validating that, spending time, but then also understand the context of the value chain that you're in. And when you do start to disrupt, who's going to be upset with that because they will block the adoption of what you're doing. Um, so that's why we have this position that we do, because if we just built a retrofit platform and gave it to who we're giving it to. There isn't, there isn't a B2B customer for what we're doing at the moment. So we've had to focus on this consumer proposition to build, build that up and focus there to have that impact. So yeah, for built environment founders, it's yeah, really understand that customer persona from a B2B perspective. Obviously it's a little bit more complex because you've got the buyer environment. What's the strategic drivers and obviously you're dealing with that as well, Anne, from your perspective. And then for the consumers, like obviously we're still experimenting around exactly what the real focus is, and I've shared a bit about a hypothesis with the renovation sector, but then we've got to situate ourselves in the supply chain in a way which means we can scale and deliver, which is why we've chosen the approach that we have. But it is tricky, and I think it's how you think about that supply chain transition over kind of initial scrappiness of getting a product out and just making it work and Wizard of Ozzing behind the scenes just to plug it all together versus when you're three, four years in and are you going to have a one strategic supply chain partner if you're in a supply chain position? is trying to figure out how that evolves a little bit over time and you can't have it perfect but it's like building that understanding as your maturity of the market, your knowledge of that comes together so you do have a plan particularly if you're raising investment because you need to have a decent answer or an answer about how what your view is now and how you're going to prove or disprove that as you go through kind of the fundraising stages so you've got a good hypothesis to go through because Yeah, it changes over time as your scale changes and you need to de-risk and manage your position in the market, particularly important for this sector.
Katherine Keddie: I love the idea of a hypothesis that drives an early stage company over it being like a mission, which I think is a typical language used, right? But it's a bit more like, here is our theory and this is what we're guessing is the problem and what the solution needs to be. And as we go, we're going to iterate and learn and get new data and information and use that to scale. And I think that makes the pivoting, going back to our discussion earlier, it makes more sense because you're sort of trying to work out, does this hypothesis actually make sense? How do we adjust and tweak it as we grow? And as we have more information, how do we actually move forward to achieve what broadly we want to achieve, which I guess is more vision? So that makes a lot of sense. And then the other thing that came to mind when you were talking about being at that early stage where you're sort of rattling around in the back trying to kind of make it work is someone once said to me that an early stage startup is like a swan where you're beautiful on the top and you're you're really professional looking and then underneath in the water, your legs are going like this. So I think going, finding, let's start that again. At the end of the day, starting at that point where you are making it work in the backend and testing out your MVP and making sure that you have a problem that people actually need solving and then building after you've kind of validated that fact, it sounds like that is your approach. And from my experience, it's a way more effective way to approach a startup. So I think that's a useful takeaway for people listening.
Anne Snelson: I mean, I would say the other thing is test it wherever you can. You know, people are sometimes a bit protective about it. So I've been part of various startups. I mean, you do want to get it out there. You need to find out that research is really important. So you may think that you've got the best design and the best idea ever, but actually. if no one wants it. You know, I've had this, dare I say, with youngsters coming at people, planet pine. They come up and it's gone. I've got this amazing idea and you kind of go, okay, whoever you thought about this, this and this. LinkedIn is actually a brilliant place to be testing your theory and making yourself an expert as well. So, I mean, I still use LinkedIn. I know it's not, I don't find it quite as good as it used to be, But, I mean, it is where people look at you. You have to have that presence. You have to be, you know, your professional white swan there. But it is also because, you know, your posts will get lost in a few days. It's where you can test different things. You can test different ideas. And almost just the reaction that you get from other people will tell you what is a good idea and what's not. So, you know, I would always suggest using that from a marketing point of view as well.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I could talk about that forever.
Becky Lane: I said a little bit about how to be scrappy and I was saying about how to test ideas and it's an incredible time to be a founder right now, a startup founder in the early stages because Just in the last nine months, I'm going to talk about AI, which is an incredibly controversial topic in sustainability, but you can't ignore the tools that are now at our disposal. What we're doing, the rate of growth experiments that we can do now is insane. We can Build a tool, build an app idea, build a new website in the matter of a day, hours, in fact, once we've scoped the growth experiment properly. And it just means that I'm saying about, you know, take your idea out as quickly as possible. You don't need to figure out how to build like a web flow or, you know, a website or build an app builder. Obviously when you do get to the next stages, you do need to build it properly, but for the initial stages. You can build something that people can play around with, you don't need to be really good at drawing up wireframes. For very low cost now, you can put your idea into something real and take it out and talk to people to see whether it's got any legs. And then, you know, if you think it's any good, then you can start charging and seeing if you've got a revenue and business model that works behind it as well. It's really quite insane at the moment, the pace that you can start to build things and take your idea from a conversation point, you know, it's where you should start talking to people, getting that feedback into a product like an initial MVP, which actually kind of shows the ability of it. Just like say something we did. So like one idea that I had was, In the home buyer process, you get a RIC survey. Wouldn't it be great if we could take the RIC survey and then turn it into a home energy plant for you? And if we'd done that the traditional engineering way, that probably would have taken us three months to build something that actually worked. We built something in about five hours and tested it. It was out the next day. And then we left the experiment to run for about two weeks to see what the results were. But it just means that the the starting point for you to test something is just so much easier now than it used to be. So I'd say to climate tech founders listening today, if you have an idea, don't wait to raise money to build it now. You can actually do something and kind of show the traction much more simpler than was possible even a year ago. It's quite insane. So yeah, give it a crack and then get out and talk to people, Anne said, because nothing beats some hard truth feedback. You have to listen to it because otherwise you're you're not going to go in the right direction in the long run.
Katherine Keddie: Yeah, I think that's a great point. Like you say, we have tools now at our disposal to mock things up and test them out so fast. And I think being able to build off that and make sure that you get that early feedback is so crucial because otherwise You spend a lot of money and time doing something that, in the end, if no one wants it, you know, what was the point? You've just wasted lots of time and money. So I totally agree. We're coming to the end of our episode now. So I would love to get from both of you one takeaway for the people listening and then a bit of information. Where can people find you? Any shout outs you want to do? Tell us where you want people to go. So Anne, can I start with you?
Anne Snelson: First, one takeaway. I mean, for me, Educating people is crucial. Obviously it's why I do what I love. And I suppose that feeds into the other side of it, which is do something that you're passionate about. I spent a lot of my life doing things that were okay. Um, I love what I do now. I see a real difference from it. And if there is anything that's going to drive your business, it is really just pursuing that. And if it doesn't work to begin with, tweak it a bit, you know, find your way to make it work. Um, but ultimately if you get enough feedback that says this isn't going to work, think again and find something different.
Becky Lane: I think my takeaway is be fearless because I got a lot of this is never going to work at the start, not from the customers. So I will say it's like when you get your feedback, you know, you have to kind of wait where the feedback is coming from. So there was a lot of people who were industry veterans. I've done it before. I was like, OK, cool. I don't think you've done it the way that I've done it, but OK, fine, thanks. And you have to kind of respectfully sometimes take the feedback and weight it against where it's come from. So if somebody who's kind of, you know, built the same business or something in the same set tells me like, Oh, you know, you probably want to think about another way. I'm going to listen to their feedback because they have been through the wars. Somebody who tried something and then didn't get anywhere. I probably won't listen to so much. Customers, absolutely, I will listen to their feedback all day long. But you have to be quite strong headed and kind of fearless with like where you take your feedback and decide which ways to go. So I can be a little bit strong headed sometimes. But that's probably a good thing for a startup founder because you have to kind of find the way forward, particularly in this quite complex sector, as we've been talking about over the podcast. But I am so bullish, and I do believe that there is a segment here, but we need to find the right way of positioning it. We are focused as a company on the execution, but I'm confident about, and we have the evidence as well about how we can actually find these customers and grow. So for founders and startup companies, be fearless, find your hypotheses, but strong convictions loosely held is kind of our way of looking at it. So have the hypothesis tested. but ultimately still be brave and keep push forward. And then some like shout outs, as I said, like some call outs. If you are a homeowner thinking about all this and you're like, oh damn, I could do with a little bit of help, furbnow.com, come and start and speak to us. You don't have to start with the get started. Give us a call, send us an email, understand what we're doing and yeah, just reach out because we're so keen to help people at different points in their journey. And then also those that are listening as well, if you're thinking about maybe what's your next step in your career, we will be hiring across product. across growth and then also our delivery team and supply chain teams as well so go on the site under the careers page if there's not a role there at the moment fill in an open application and we'll reach out when those become open as well so yeah come and join us on our mission.
Katherine Keddie: Amazing. We're going to put all of the relevant links in the description of the episode so you can also find Anne if you want some training. But for now, thank you so much both for all of your insights. I think it's been a really interesting conversation. And we look forward to seeing you in the next episode of Scaling Green Tech. Goodbye. Thank you.
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