ESG Advisory

Contact Our Experts

Developing Your ESG Strategy for Long-Term Value

Want to build a business that lasts? Sustainable business practices prioritize long-term stability over short-term financial rewards. Strategically, they help you improve performance and address risk while positively impacting the planet, community, or society.

When your business strategy integrates Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), it can help you better measure your impact on your community and beyond. This in turn can increase stakeholder trust, help your company thrive amidst future change, and better tell the story of your organization.

Why ESG Initiatives Matter

Increasingly, stakeholders are looking for more transparency that your company’s practices are helping the environment it serves. With the EU requirements in the form of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) becoming law to proposed SEC rule changes in the US, companies should prepare themselves to adapt to increasing ESG compliance requirements.

Whether your business has an ESG program in place or is in the process of developing one, it’s attracting increased scrutiny from stakeholders and regulators alike. So your statements and reports published around your ESG goals, targets, and achievements must be defined appropriately to avoid greenwashing and to be executed effectively.

If you’re a board member, head of sustainability, or finance personnel in charge of ESG initiatives at your company, Centri can support you with the guidance needed to confidently move forward in your ESG journey.

Our 5-Step Approach to Helping You Build An Effective ESG Program

1. ESG Strategy Assessment

We’ll start by helping your company’s management integrate ESG into its overall business strategy through education and strategic facilitation. This includes assisting your management team in identifying what areas are important to your organization in terms of stakeholder importance and business impact.

Doing so allows you to develop your ESG goals across the environmental, social, and governance pillars. We will help guide you in the goal-setting process based on the 17 United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s), SASB’s industry-specific best practices, and benchmarking against your peers.

2. ESG Readiness Assessments

Next, we’ll evaluate your company’s preparedness to communicate an accurate, effective, and compelling story to all your stakeholders based on your ESG goals. We’ll do this using our ESG Starter Kit, which includes surveys, key personnel interviews, an evaluation of your current policies and processes, and a final ESG rating/score that’s based on those findings.

From there, we’ll perform an ESG materiality and risk assessment based on stakeholder importance and business impact. We’ll then help you develop an action-oriented implementation roadmap along with a timeline for its execution.

3. ESG Program Implementation

In this stage, we’ll assist in the implementation of governance structures, ESG-related policies, data mapping, metric calculations, technology, and processes against key ESG frameworks such as SASB, TCFD, or GRI, choosing what’s most relevant to you and your peer group.

We do this to give you a sustainable method of ESG program management and reporting based on the roadmap developed that includes identifying data sources, data management, and assisting with ESG system implementation. We’ll also work with your marketing team to help develop an ESG impact report that helps communicate your ESG story.

4. ESG Program Management (Outsourced / Co-Sourced)

Once we implement your program, we’ll take a step back to evaluate its process effectiveness, to enhance your reporting process. We’ll operate as an outsourced / co-sourced ESG Controller to manage your ESG program via KPIs, continued education, process, and control enhancements.

We’ll also work alongside your accounting and finance teams on any required disclosures or regulatory requirements. Plus, we’ll continue to communicate progress to management and any oversight board committees in charge of governance. As a piece of that, we’ll even support your marketing and legal team in the review of your impact report and continue supporting your teams as they continue to communicate progress towards your ESG goals, actions taken, and related metrics.

5. ESG Program Maturity Assessment

In this final stage, we’ll take a step back to evaluate your ESG program’s maturity and effectiveness by revisiting your ESG ratings and scores. We’ll also benchmark your ESG program against your peers and competitors. From there, we’ll assess any avenues we can help you explore to continue driving improvements.

Looking For More Support?

Here are some other related services that can be helpful depending on the goals you have for your business.

Related Insights

Meet Our ESG Advisory Practice Leader

Centri’s team of experts is ready to help you with your ESG Advisory needs. You can learn more about our specialists on the One Team page.


Mihir Jhaveri

Partner

Risk & Sustainability Practice Leader

Need Our Comprehensive ESG Advisory Services?

Please fill in the form to get in touch with our team of advisory experts.


"*" indicates required fields

Name*