Dan Leverington On Linking Businesses Seeking To Decarbonise With Environmentally Conscious Social Enterprises

Dan is the Founder of The Ocelli Group, helping business leaders build resilience and commercial opportunity through bespoke Sustainability support networks.

This 'Impact-as-a-Service' ecosystem consists of sustainability consultancies, data reporting platforms, and communications agencies to ensure these organisations can consistently realise collaborative advantages.

Dan has worked in Australia and the US for both publicly-traded firms and early-stage startups, across natural resources, technology advisory, and ESG consulting. He sees collaboration as being the key factor in ensuring all companies, industries, and countries seize the opportunities presented as we decarbonise the global economy.

He often reflects on a quote by George Mack, who said: “Networks are unique, because they don’t divide when you share them - they multiply.”

Dan discusses helping mainstream businesses to choose ESG-committed, ethically conscious suppliers, and why building a global commercial ecosystem led by sustainable social enterprises will generate systemic impacts.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led you to working in the business of sustainability?

[Dan Leverington] - I was predominantly raised by my mum growing up. I also had the opportunity to go on an exchange to South Africa when I was 14 years old, and to live in the UK after high school. I then spent a fair bit of time in Sydney, and I've also lived in the U.S.

These experiences have given me the opportunity to look through several different lenses in terms of the way people see and want the world to be. It’s also perhaps instilled in me the ability to step back and see the commonalities we share than are only sometimes obvious.

I was also fortunate to have a good friend of mine at university who I many nights with over the years debating what the purpose of business is.

He was firmly on the business is there to drive value to the shareholders, and I was on the other side of the argument, arguing not as eloquently as we do now for stakeholder capitalism. Certainly, I wanted within that model for business to be positively contributing to society.

What I realised during my early career while I was working in global recruitment firms for start-ups was I was always doing my job and then also volunteering. When I came back to Australia at the end of 2020 from the U.S, I wanted to figure out how I could do good by doing my job.

This led me to becoming involved in the for purpose and B Corp space. I realised there was a gap I could help bridge between those who are doing good and the enterprises who are specifically looking for suppliers who can help them on their decarbonisation journey. That observation brought me into the sustainability space, and then in terms of putting the finger on what my business was going to be, The Ocelli Group came from attending a Q&A session Cedar from Flow Hive was speaking at.

He was speaking about the ecosystem of bees and why bees are so important to society and the planet. The next day I spent a few hours going through the bee glossary from A to Z, and I found the word ocelli.

Ocelli is the secondary visual system bees use to navigate via the sun, and I felt this was the perfect representation of what we would be trying to do at Ocelli. We want to help business leaders form a clear understanding of what's happening outside of their organisations so that they can make positive changes on the inside.

As the founder of The Ocelli Group, can you share more about this organisation's activities and what services you are offering to mainstream businesses?

Our aim is to help organisations remove the guesswork from their decarbonisation roadmap. We do that by unlocking collaborative advantages to support the transformation of commercial, environmental and social risks into market leading opportunities.

The reason why the decarbonisation space has become so important is if you look at it from a top-down perspective, Australia signed up to the Paris Agreement in 2015, meaning we need to be net zero by 2050 in alignment with international reporting standards.

Mandatory climate reporting is going live in Australia from the 1st of January 2025, something the head of ASIC Joe Longo has said is going to be the biggest change to the Australian economy since the GST.

Businesses in Australia have been split into three groups depending on their size. The largest companies are going to start reporting first, then group two will start a year after that, and then finally group three will start a year after that.

The reason why I bring this up is that group one is already starting to get their house in order. They are looking through their supply chain to identify risks and opportunities to accelerate this transformation.

This feeds into where The Ocelli Group helps by sourcing partners and service providers who are native to this space. Often, these are social enterprises and B Corps who inherently believe the purpose of business to do good, and so often, they have a clear understanding of their company's environmental footprint and social impact policies look like. This is the information larger organisations are looking for as they transform their own supply chains.

Why do businesses require extra support to investigate their supply chains and mitigate negative impacts when they possess more resources than smaller enterprises?

I'll invert my answer by starting with an example and then zooming out. Cybersecurity offers a fascinating case study on the importance of sustainability. Cybersecurity for a long time was seen as an IT only department within organisations. The boss will say, “leave it to the IT Department, they will put up firewalls to keep us safe.”

That was all good until data breaches started happening amongst some of the largest organisations in Australia. Then it became a regulatory, reputational, and finally, a revenue problem, because customers were beginning to leave.

I see sustainability similarly following that pathway, in terms of if companies aren't proactive with their approach to sustainability, they will be hurt commercially. It's also worth noting statistically speaking, most business leaders in Australia more than likely voted for a political party who during the climate wars didn't believe climate change was either a problem or that it even existed.

I have a fair bit of empathy for these business leaders now, because not only are they being tasked with upskilling themselves on the risk their companies face, but they also have a significant number of regulatory demands that need to met as part of their fiduciary responsibility as business directors.

It's almost this whiplash journey they're on, where at first, they didn't believe there was a problem. Now, they're recognising there's a problem, and the next step is asking, “how do we rectify this problem?” That's the spot we sit in, because it is a problem that can only be solved through collaboration. It is not a problem companies have the capacity or capability to solve internally.

Social enterprises are in such a strong position, because they operate with their eyes open to how they impact their communities and the environment. They can help these organisations retool on the run and reduce the impact of their operations, products, and supply chains.

This is a huge opportunity for social enterprises and B Corps, because these are now commercial conversations. If you can start working from a commercial outcome perspective, then programs can be designed around that framework.

What impact can businesses and entrepreneurs create when they start meeting their ESG outcomes and managing their supply chains?

The impact could be enormous to be honest. What's becoming clear is the best partnerships are the ones where both parties come to the table with humbleness, humility, and an understanding of what each party's skills are.

They are then identifying how they can help others find the answers to their pain points. From a corporate perspective, if you've never looked at a social impact program, you literally have no idea where to even start.

If you engage a social enterprise who specialises in social impact, there's an automatic partnership that can be formed. The organisation is benefiting from the social enterprise’s skills, experience, knowledge and network, while the social enterprise can scale up their own impact by partnering with that organisation.

That is a model that has been done well in Australia, and it’s something that is going to continue to grow. The other fascinating area is from a supply chain perspective, particularly for these larger organisations. I mentioned Group Two and Group Three for the mandatory climate reporting.

What's fascinating is initially the climate reporting was being spoken about from a compliance perspective. People were saying, “as long as we have X, Y, and Z and that aligns with A, B and C, then we've done our job and we can move on.”

What's becoming clear is that is not going to be a pathway towards success. What we're also seeing is that rather than waiting until it’s their turn, the Group Two and Three companies are already providing their emissions data to the group one companies, which means commercial pressures are running well ahead of compliance pressures.

That's exactly what you want happening in a functioning economy, because it means that by the time Group Two and Three must report under Chapter 2M of the Corporations Act, they're already going to have a lot of information. That uplift is not going to be nearly as painful as it potentially could be, because having that information proactively is helping companies manage their supply chains.

It is going to put social enterprises and for purpose suppliers at the top of the procurement engagement list, because they're solving not only the problem from a services perspective, but they're also able to provide the data an organisation needs from an ESG perspective.

What progress is required to create a “global commercial ecosystem” where suppliers and businesses collaborate to transform how we provide products and services?

This question is at the heart of the conversation around transforming business. For those who are familiar with the circular economy or similar principles, there has been a positive change in terms of the way companies are producing things.

Previously, they were incentivised to extract resources from the ground, sell something, and let those products go to waste. Now, we're starting to think that if we want to continue living in a world that is fit for humans to exist in, we've got to adhere to this target of a 1.5-degree temperature increase as a maximum under the Paris agreement. So, how can we change the way we do things to achieve that?

It's difficult because it is such an enormous challenge when you take a step back and look at it. You can look at it from a national level, so for example, in Australia we have a population of 26 million people. That generally pales in comparison to the largest emitters in the world.

On an individual level, we're mostly living on the East coast of Australia, so how the hell can we have any impact that is of note to the rest of the world? Well, Australia has always been known as a country of innovation. In 2018, with the work of CSIRO, we came 14th in the world in terms of government research organisations.

Australia has consistently punched above its weight when it comes to innovation, and this spirit feeds into the social enterprise and for purpose spaces as well. No one starts a social enterprise because they think everything's right in the world, people start a social enterprise because they see a problem and challenge they want to fix.

They believe they have the skills to fix it, and this belief in the ability to create change feeds into this idea of a global commercial ecosystem where people are interacting with each other to solve not just financial problems, but to solve a financial problem with a sustainable solution.

Whether you want to do it from a B2B or consumer perspective, everything is trending towards this being the case, so the question is how do we remove the silos so people who otherwise wouldn't know about each other are starting to interact? I speak about collaborative advantages a lot, and collaborative advantages can only occur when two or more parties come together to create something that is greater than anything either of them could have created on their own.

That's what I'm constantly looking for when I'm making introductions between two organisations or companies. If you didn't know this person, what would you do? That mindset is something we must constantly adopt, look out into the world rather than retreat.

What advice would you give to a change maker or entrepreneur who is looking to start a social enterprise or impact led business?

The key is always hold on to the reason you started your business in the first place, because it will give you strength to fight against the inevitable challenges you will experience. As I mentioned, we all start our businesses to solve problems, and those problems exist for a reason, they're hard to solve.

If you're jumping in to solve a hard problem, remember why you started your business in the first place, because there's going to be times where you're going to think, "what the hell am I doing?" The benefits you bring others, those will be the parts of the journey you're going to remember.

Focus and understand what you wanted to achieve when you first started so you have a reference point. You can then look back and see how much how much you have achieved.

I'd also be clear on what benefit you're providing that others can't, because in a fast-changing marketplace that is going to be what helps you stand out. To come back to your question of, why would an organisation with all these resources need an external provider, it's because there's no way they can possibly compete with the amount of experience a social enterprise supplier has.

One more thing I’d recommend that I've been doing for the past 12 months is to have an accountability partner. Particularly when you're building something on your own, find someone else who is going through a similar stage or has been through the stages that you're going through. Have regular calls with them every two-three week or whatever cadence works for you. Having an accountability partner in place has been enormous for me.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating a positive change?

Over the past 18 months, I have helped organise the B Local chapter of B Corp in the Northern Rivers. it was an amazing experience where I was organising panel events with Q&A's, but then also being able to have monthly coffees with local B Corp’s in this region.

One of the things that has stuck with me is because of one of the conversations I was having over coffee about the volunteering programs organisations can engage in. One of our members was talking about how they do a lot of volunteering, but they try as much as possible to do that volunteering based on the skills of their staff so that they’re creating an outsised impact with their volunteering hours.

That's something I liked, because it’s easy when we think about volunteering to just go and plant trees. That’s obviously important, but not everyone who wants to plant trees can or has time to plant trees. If you're in recruitment, for example, how can you spend a few hours a month helping a cohort of people with their interview skills? How can you help by looking at their CV?

If you're in accounting, how can you help a not for profit with their financial strategy? If you're in marketing, how can you help organisations with their collateral, how can you leverage existing skills that will have an outsized impact on the people you're working with.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

I've got a historical fiction and nonfiction book to recommend. From a nonfiction perspective, I’d like to recommend Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein. This may show my bias, because I do count myself as a specialist in being a generalist!

I loved this book because it speaks to the value that can be added by people who work across multiple silos, and their ability to bring those silos down so others can start communicating with each other who otherwise wouldn't interact.

For historical fiction, there's a book called Forever by Pete Hamill, and it's about an Irishman who arrives in New York City in 1741. He's given the power of immortality if he never leaves the island of Manhattan. I read this before I lived and worked in New York on the recommendation of my wife, and I loved it for a whole host of reasons.

The book spans 250 years up until the modern day, and the key message I took out of it (particularly through the eyes of a fictional character) is that the one constant in life is change. It's such a beautiful experience delving into a landmass that has changed from a building and population perspective. The way Hamill weaves the narrative through that story, touching on all the major moments of New York's history is beautiful.