written, not owned
Written by Marketing. Owned by no one.
Ask to see the sustainability report and someone in marketing will have it within the hour. Beautifully laid out. Photography of the factory floor. A letter from the founder about the company’s commitment to a better future.
Ask the plant manager the same question and you’ll get a blank look.
That gap is the whole problem with how most mid-market businesses approach sustainability. The report exists. The operational changes it implies don’t.
The report gets written backwards
Here’s how it usually happens. A customer or a bank asks for ESG disclosure. Someone — often in marketing or a founder’s office — is handed the task of “putting something together.” They pull together whatever data exists, fill the gaps with reasonable-sounding commitments, add a target or two for good measure, and design something that looks credible.
Nobody in procurement, operations, or supply chain is in the room while any of this is written. Why would they be? It’s a reporting exercise, not an operating one.
The document that comes out the other end is internally consistent and externally impressive. It’s also almost entirely disconnected from how the business actually runs. The “30% reduction in emissions by 2028” target on page four has no owner, no budget line, and no plan attached to it beyond the sentence itself.
This works right up until someone checks
For a while, this doesn’t matter. Nobody asks. The report sits on the website, gets attached to the odd tender response, and does its job of looking credible.
Then a large customer’s procurement team sends a supplier questionnaire that asks for actual data — energy consumption per unit, supplier-level emissions estimates, a named sustainability lead who can answer follow-up questions. Suddenly the gap between the report and the business becomes very visible, very quickly, to exactly the person you didn’t want to see it.
We’ve watched this cost businesses real commercial ground. Not because their sustainability performance was bad — often it was perfectly reasonable — but because nobody could produce evidence for what the report claimed, and in a diligence process, an unsupported claim reads worse than no claim at all.
What actually closes the gap
The fix isn’t a better-written report. It’s moving ownership of the content from marketing to operations before a single word gets drafted.
That means the emissions baseline comes from actual utility bills and supplier data, not estimates. It means every target in the document has a named owner inside the business who’s accountable for it, not just a communications team accountable for the sentence. And it means the report gets reviewed by the people who’ll be asked to explain it under questioning — plant managers, procurement leads, finance — not just approved by whoever signs off on brand collateral.
Done this way, the report gets shorter. Fewer commitments, but ones the business can actually stand behind when someone checks. That’s a worse-looking document and a much stronger position.
The reframe worth making
Sustainability reporting isn’t a marketing deliverable that happens to mention operations. Done properly, it’s an operations deliverable that marketing helps package. Get that ownership the wrong way round, and you don’t have a sustainability strategy — you have a PDF waiting to be tested.
If your sustainability report has never been read by the people who’d have to make it true, that’s worth fixing before a customer’s questionnaire finds it first. See how our Sustainability & ESG practice works →
