The Founder Accidentally Became the Sustainability Department

A customer questionnaire arrives by email. It has already been forwarded twice before it reaches the founder.

Someone has added a short note at the top: “Can you just check this before we send it?”

The questions are not dramatic. They ask for sustainability policies, carbon data, supplier information, environmental commitments, maybe a short statement on targets. Nothing that looks impossible. Nothing that feels urgent enough to deserve a meeting.

But then the familiar pattern begins. Finance has some of the numbers. Operations knows something about the suppliers. Marketing has used a line on the website. Someone remembers a policy being written last year. Someone else thinks the answer was already used in a tender. Nobody is quite sure where the final version lives.

So it goes to the founder.

Not because they are the best person to answer a sustainability questionnaire. Because they are the person most likely to know enough of the business to hold the answer together.

That is how it starts.

The founder does not usually decide to become the sustainability department. It happens by default.

In small and growing businesses, sustainability rarely arrives as a neat job title. It arrives as a question. A customer asks where materials come from. A tender asks for evidence. A bank asks for emissions data. A larger client asks for supplier policies. A partner wants reassurance before signing something off.

The request looks specific. The response is not. It cuts across the whole business.

That is why it ends up with the person who remembers everything.

This is not really a sustainability problem. It is an ownership problem.

SMEs are being asked for more sustainability information through finance, supply chains and larger customers. The OECD notes that sustainability-related data is becoming more important for access to green finance and participation in global value chains, while many SMEs struggle with limited resources, lack of expertise, data collection and the complexity of different reporting frameworks.¹ ACCA makes a similar point in its SME sustainability reporting guidance: smaller businesses are increasingly having to prepare sustainability-related information for regulators, stakeholders and value-chain requests.²

So the pressure is real. But inside the business, the issue is usually much more basic.

Who owns the answer?

That question matters because sustainability does not sit comfortably in one department. Carbon data may sit with finance. Supplier information may sit with operations. Claims may sit with marketing. Customer pressure may sit with sales. Policies may sit in a folder nobody has opened for months. The commercial judgement may sit with the founder.

If there is no structure connecting those pieces, the work returns to the person with the widest memory and the most authority.

At first, that can work. In the early stages of a business, the founder often is the operating system. They know the clients, the suppliers, the numbers, the story, the tone, the risks and the promises already made. Their closeness gives the business speed.

But what works in the beginning can become fragile later.

Research on sustainability in SMEs often describes smaller businesses as informal, owner-managed and dependent on individual judgement. Sustainability practices are frequently ad hoc rather than embedded into the core strategy of the business.³ Another review found that top managers are often major drivers of sustainability in SMEs, which makes sense. In smaller companies, leadership values and judgement matter. They are often the reason anything happens at all.⁴

So the problem is not founder involvement.

The problem is founder dependency.

There is a difference.

Founder involvement means the business has judgement. Founder dependency means the business cannot respond without one person stepping back into the middle of everything.

That is when the work starts to become expensive, even before anyone pays for anything. Not expensive in the obvious way. Expensive in time, attention, delay, nervousness and repeated rework.

A questionnaire comes in. The business searches for old answers. Someone rewrites the wording. Someone asks whether the data is right. Someone worries that marketing has overstated something. The founder reviews it, not because they want to, but because nobody else feels confident enough to sign it off.

Then it happens again.

And again.

Every request becomes a small reconstruction exercise.

This is where role ambiguity becomes more than an academic phrase. A recent meta-analysis of role stressor research, drawing on 515 studies, looked at role ambiguity, role conflict and role overload across decades of workplace evidence.⁵The language may sound dry, but the point is very practical. When people are unclear about what belongs to them, what success looks like or who has authority, work slows down and stress rises.

That is exactly what happens when sustainability enters a business before ownership has been defined.

Nobody is refusing the work. Nobody is necessarily incapable. The task simply does not have a proper home.

So it travels upwards.

This is why I find forwarded emails interesting. They often reveal the real organisational chart. Not the one in the handbook. The one the business actually uses when pressure appears.

Who gets asked? Who hesitates? Who approves? Who rewrites? Who has the final say? Who knows where the evidence is?

A procurement form can expose more about a business than a strategy workshop.

It shows where information lives. It shows where responsibility is vague. It shows where confidence is missing. It shows whether the business has a system or whether it still relies on the founder’s memory.

That memory may be impressive. It is also a poor filing cabinet.

The founder should shape the judgement. They should not have to become the archive.

This is where decision rights become important. Bain’s well-known work on decision roles argues that decisions stall when accountability is unclear and when people do not know who has the authority to decide.⁶ Sustainability creates this problem quickly because the decisions are often mixed. They are part technical, part commercial, part reputational and part operational.

Can we say this to a customer? Do we have evidence? Is this target realistic? Who checks the data? Who updates the policy? Who answers next time?

If those questions are not assigned, they return to the top.

Not because the founder is controlling.

Because the business has not built another route.

This is also part of the wider scaling problem. McKinsey has written about the difficult transition from founder-led growth to more industrialised scalability.⁷ The language belongs to the world of scale-ups, but the pattern applies more widely. A business can grow for a long time on energy, memory and proximity. Eventually, the work needs rhythm. It needs ownership. It needs a way to move without everything passing through one person.

Sustainability is one of the places where that gap becomes visible.

It is tempting to solve this by hiring someone. Sometimes that will be right. But often the first sustainability hire is not a person. It is a decision rule.

Who gathers the evidence?

Who owns the data?

Who checks the claims?

Who signs off the response?

Who updates the answer after it has been sent?

Who makes sure the business does not start again from memory next time?

These questions are not glamorous. Good. Glamour is not the point.

The point is to stop sustainability becoming another loose responsibility that sits nowhere until it becomes urgent.

For many growing businesses, the first useful move is not a report, a campaign or a new page on the website. It is a clearer internal agreement. This is where the information lives. This is who owns it. This is what we can honestly say. This is what we are still improving. This is who decides.

That alone changes the pressure.

The next questionnaire does not become effortless, but it becomes less chaotic. The business is no longer reconstructing itself every time someone asks a question.

The founder can still be involved where judgement matters. They should be. Sustainability touches trust, risk, reputation and growth. It deserves senior attention.

But senior attention is not the same as operational dependency.

A founder should not have to approve every phrase, chase every number and remember every supplier decision for the business to give a credible answer.

If every customer question, supplier form or sustainability claim still ends up back on the founder’s desk, the business has not built capability. It has built dependency.

That may work for a while.

Then it becomes the ceiling.

The founder accidentally became the sustainability department because the business needed a response before it had a structure.

The next step is not to carry it better.

It is to stop carrying it alone.