Customer

Green Sky is a team of sustainability consultants providing services including certification and training. The company has also developed a proprietary strategic program known as CARMS™, or the Climate Action and Resilience Management System, which it has newly launched as a digital product for purchase. The team is fully remote with around 10 employees and a number of contractors.

Situation

In the words of Nelson Lee, Green Sky’s founder, the company was a “successful, established and growing company with mostly manual processes.” The company has grown over the years to a size where standardized processes and robust technology need to be in place for the team to be successful.

Their business operations involved:

• Projects and tasks managed largely in Excel
• Customer relationships managed with Excel but interactions not thoroughly tracked
• A simple WordPress website (managed internally) they have outgrown, lacking key information about their services, value proposition and calls to action
• Starting to explore Constant Contacts for email marketing
• Internal documentation stored in a combination of OneDrive and SharePoint

Our team was then asked to help identify the operations that could be streamlined using technology and develop a digital adoption plan for them.

Project Goals

Green Sky took advantage of the Canada Digital Adoption Program grant to support our work to help analyze their business technology opportunities and to develop a digital adoption plan.

Our project goals were:

• Analyze their business to identify where they can better use technology
• Develop an implementation roadmap for technology initiatives

Impact & Results

We identified a core area of operations were lacking a robust system: project management.

After gaining a thorough understand of their key business areas - from sales and marketing to HR to finance - we identified 17 technology initiatives that help increase the efficiency of their business processes.

10 of these initiatives were considered “quick wins”. These include:

• Upgrading their graphics tool (Canva) to support expanded digital marketing activities
• Performing employee background checks with Certn, an easy-to-use tool to support this
• An inventory of their critical data to ensure they were stored in the right places with appropriate access controls to maintain confidentiality of client/project data

Several important initiatives were identified:

• A project management solution for efficient and effective management of their projects.
• A CRM solution was also determined to be required, and needs to be integrated with the project management solution.
• Improving their website to showcase their work, team and services, with the help of a WordPress developer. Green Sky’s new website was launched in February 2023. They utilized a $2,400 Grow Your Business Online grant to support this work.
• A review of their accounting software, QuickBooks Online, to ensure the set-up is customized for their business needs.

As a result of the recommended technology initiatives, the impact on the business will be:

• A strengthened online presence through their new website and increased digital marketing activities (email and social media)
• Increased efficiency in managing the team’s progress on projects and better task management
• A better understanding of the company’s financial performance.