Q&A: Trio CEO Drew Murphy on Sustainability & Profit

Drew Murphy, CEO of Trio, spoke to Sustainability Magazine at Sustainability LIVE Climate Week NYC.

Tell us about Trio

We are an international advisory firm that helps mostly large commercial, industrial and other organisations manage their sustainability and energy issues with a focus on helping those organisations really navigate the energy transition that we're experiencing across the economy.

We do everything from strategy setting around energy and sustainability to goal setting, project identification, implementation and all of that. So we offer a full suite of offerings across all of those sets of activities. We also help people manage their conventional energy supply to be more cost effective and more efficient. But we also do a lot with helping them think about cleaner energy supply.

Ultimately, we help them track both the cost of that plus the carbon impacts as well.

This must be a growing business because of the area in which you operate. Is that something that you are seeing?

We are seeing a lot of increased interest across the things that I mentioned.

We've been doing some of these things for a number of years, but I would say, in the last five or six years, more and more companies are saying we have to really understand our current energy and greenhouse gas and footprint and we have to have plans in place for how we're going to manage both of those things as longer term plans, not just year to year, but really longer term strategies with longer term goals. And then they have to report on those to their stakeholders.

The public companies now have a lot of requirements, especially in Europe, to start actually reporting and reducing those things. That's happening in the US, although it's not happening as fast as we thought it might. 

What are the key challenges you're seeing in the industry? 

I think some of the biggest challenges our clients have are understanding how to think about what I'll call the carbon and the sustainability pieces of their plans and their strategies and think about them and integrate it with the rest of their strategy and then also put that together with their financial goals.

So a lot of times, companies have those things separated and they think, “okay, I'll do sustainability or greenhouse gas reduction over here, but then I've got my financial goals here”. We talk to them a lot about how to think about those together and come up with goals that satisfy both. So I think that's a starting point, an educational issue.
The other challenge we face is that there's a lot of volatility in the energy market – pricing volatility, cost of capital volatility, but then you have regulatory volatility on top of that and policy. So we help them understand how to think about all of that and come up with a plan that makes sense and manage those different moving pieces. High inflation means that the costs of a lot of the things that people want to do are higher than they would be.

Renewable energy projects cost more to implement. So we help them look at alternatives while those things are hopefully playing out.

Do you think people and businesses are understanding better the connection between sustainability and profitability?

I think they are. There's a couple of drivers for that.

One is obviously regulation or mandates to reduce carbon, which drive people to look at doing things with that lens on it because they know they're going to have the compliance obligation. So that begins to change the conversation.

Beyond that, I think you are seeing people also start to price in more and more explicitly the risk of climate change to them as operating businesses. So when they think about that, they realise they have to de-risk how they operate their businesses.

And that's another thing we're starting to see people actually include as part of the calculus about what kind of return they need from an investment or that set of activities.

Do you have any examples of the work you are doing?

So we just announced a couple of weeks ago that we have a big programme we're unveiling with four large automakers: Ford, General Motors, Honda and Toyota. That's a programme that is designed to help their supply chain companies, all their suppliers actually begin to think about decarbonising and reducing it in their supply chain.

Big companies, especially in auto, pharma, food and bev, they all have basically the same set of suppliers when you dig down into it and they realise they can't work together, they can't set prices or anything together. They do need to have ways to collaborate.

And we have these programmes now to help people in that industry think about how to have a more standardised approach to their supply chain. 

Could you say a little bit about how important these kinds of events are to getting people together and getting things done?

We see it as a way to get people familiar with what we do so that they can work with us. We also view that part of our strategy and part of how we are trying to do things in this space is to be a leader, showing people the way you can make progress. Because a lot of this is education.

And so being in events like this and talking about the successes we've had where clients are actually making investments, what they do and how they work, that really helps other people think about what's possible for them in their business. You can't do that fully effectively online. I mean, a lot of it you can, there's case studies out there, you can list things, but there's no substitute for getting the right stakeholders and actors together in the same place.

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