Archive for September, 2011
|How to Hire Green Vendors, Part II
Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
By Mike Tobin, Director of Sustainability
In Part I, I discussed some first steps in the process of hiring green vendors: recognizing that the number of green vendors has grown exponentially in the last few years and defining your company’s objectives and requirements for hiring the vendor.
Once you have clearly defined the objectives and requirements, then the next thing to do is think through how you will rate the different vendors. You will need to outline what criteria you will need in order to make a selection. In this emerging field of sustainability, there are some criteria that I suggest are important to request of any vendor:
1. Experience – Ask for specific experience they have had providing the requested products or services. Ask them to detail the service provided including the type, size, and scope of their client engagement plus the results. In addition, ask for references that you can contact. This is a young field and everyone is trying to get into it. So be wary of “green washing” where the marketing looks good but is different than what is actually practiced.
2. Professional Credentials – Having credentials from a third party accredited organization bears a lot of weight when working in a new or unknown field. For example, a prominent credential in the market today for design and construction
professionals is a LEED Accreditated Professional (AP) designation. If your tactical goal was to achieve a LEED certification for a new office space, it would be prudent to bring on vendors that understand the LEED program which can be illustrated by their LEED AP status.
Fortunately, many professional organizations are mobilizing to provide education and training for their members that
specialize in sustainable real estate practices. Unfortunately, a lot of these efforts are still in their infancy and are underdeveloped. So, as you review credentials for vendors, you may have to do some investigation of your own to validate the authenticity and strength of those credentials. For example, there are two major certifications for sustainably harvested wood products: Sustainable Forest Initiative (SFI) and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). One is a self prescribed certification (SFI), and one is third-party verified (FSC). By asking the questions and doing some investigation, you will quickly find out which ones have sufficient merit for your needs and those that do not.
3. Financial relationships – Ask what their compensation structure is and what their revenue streams are within the company. This will quickly tell you if they are a sales company masquerading as a consultant or a solar power rep trying to be an all encompassing renewable energy engineer.
4. Cost – Ask for cost of service broken down into understandable pieces. Hourly rates should be easy to decipher and compare to other similar services.
5. Green costs – Ask if there are any other unknown costs or expenses that may be associated with their services as it relates to your sustainable goals. One common example is that some companies will charge an additional cost for the documentation associated with the LEED certification program. The goal is to compare proposals as “apples-to-apples” and expose any potential cost additions.
Next you must develop a list of potential vendors. Since this is a young field of service, you may have to cast a wider net than you may normally. It is not uncommon to go quite a distance geographically to find the expertise that you need. Do not be afraid to do so as this will likely increase your odds of finding the right fit for your need. For that effort, I would recommend contacting
the local and national trade organizations for recommendations or other sustainable resources (e.g. UGBC, GreenSpec, etc.). You will be surprised at how small the world gets when looking for the best sustainable vendors.
As a side note on this step, I have found it beneficial in some instances to select vendors from a distant geographic location to join a local team. The transfer of knowledge and the adaptation to change has been much faster in those instances. Subsequently the local vendors adapt too and become more competitive in the future which helps the future bottom line.
The final step is to send out the request for proposals, receive the proposals, conduct interviews and make the selection. Easy enough! Well maybe not that easy but hopefully you will have the information you need to make an educated decision to support your sustainable real estate strategy.
Tags: corporate real estate, green, vendor, vendor selection
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How to Hire Green Vendors, Part I
Thursday, September 8th, 2011
By Mike Tobin, Director of Sustainability
So you have decided to implement sustainable real estate strategies within your organization. Congratulations are in order as that means you have gone through a strategic planning process that included a focus on sustainability and its relation to the built environment. Now comes the hard part of implementation. How do you find vendors that know how to help implement your carefully crafted strategy?
First and foremost it is important to recognize that there are MANY different types of vendors that claim to support sustainable
practices—a number which has grown exponentially in the last five years. So whereas before there were one or two choices for vendors providing a specific sustainability service, there are probably ten times that amount today. In addition, they each say roughly the same thing but in a slightly nuanced way so that they all seem to blend together. I like to think of it in the same was as assessing how to select an air conditioner repair vendor. There are hundreds to choose from and some can repair all systems, some can only work on major brands, some on only one brand, some also sell new systems, some sell components, some are licensed, etc. At this point, before you just give in and go with the first one that appears on a Google search, stop and recognize that a simple search will not suffice. You will need to set up a selection process.
The next step is to establish this selection process. Again this is no different than any other vendor selection process, but now, because you recognized how complex the sustainable vendor field has become, you must think of this as a more complex vendor selection. The first thing you must do is clearly define your objectives and requirements for hiring the vendor. This will help your organization think through the details of the implementing the strategic goals before you let a vendor enter into the conversation and potentially steer you one way or another. Now you may talk to a few different vendors to better understand the tactical options available in the market—this is not a selection interview, just an informational interview. The amount of time and effort you put into this step—tackling your internal issues first before you expose them to the vendor community—will pay off handsomely down the road.
In Part II, I will discuss the remaining steps in choosing vendors to implement sustainable real estate strategies: developing your criteria for the selection process, developing a list of potential vendors, and sending and processing RFPs. I will particularly concentrate on the criteria I think you should focus on in your selection process.
Tags: corporate real estate, green, vendor, vendor selection
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