Dave Carter forged an entirely new sustainability career path

Like many people, although he had seen success and progression at McKinsey & Company for almost five years, and later across financial services and startups, Dave felt he was lacking purpose. The work was interesting, involving, and challenging but it didn’t deliver a sense of real achievement or proper value.

Although he hadn’t spent the past five years working directly in sustainability, Dave had been broadening his horizons, expanding his knowledge and involvement in that space and others he was interested in exploring. In 2019, he joined fashion disruptor PANGAIA, where his sustainability career began. He explains his journey below.

My focus at McKinsey was absolutely nothing to do with sustainability. I was a specialist in the banking practice working with big data and leading engagements with multinational banking clients. It was fascinating work, delivered at very senior levels and it helped shape and inform multimillion dollar strategies. It also helped me build what is often described as a ‘consulting toolkit’ – the ability to support businesses (even without deep sector specialist knowledge) to solve challenges.

It may be cliché but what I felt I was lacking was a purpose. After a year-long stint in Toronto with Scotiabank, I returned to the UK and enrolled on a career change course through Escape the City. This really opened my mind to the skills I had, where I could go, and what I could do as a new career path.

The course helped me understand that some of the barriers I’d assumed would stop me from changing my path just weren’t real. Sure, I had specialist knowledge that I’d gained around banking and financial services, but my skills and experience could be turned to any space and any number of other things. That’s how I came to find my initial break with PANGAIA, a fashion company built around producing clothes with sustainable technology and science. It was pretty impressive; we were making T-shirts with seaweed-based cotton alternatives, winter jackets using plant material as a substitute to down, and ‘leather’ trainers from fruit fibre.

I was helping scale the company into a multi-million-dollar business while learning all about sustainable materials and products; how to roll out and implement ESG values, ethics and policies; and how to achieve B Corp certification.

I took my learning and experience into different roles at PANGAIA. I was part of steering committees, owning DEI initiatives and ESG working groups. Over the next few years, although the roles I held weren’t squarely ‘sustainability focussed’, I maintained as much involvement as I could and, when I finished my last contract as an Operations Director towards the end of 2023, it felt like the right time to strike out.

I saw an opportunity to help make sustainability pay for UK businesses, joining carbon management and sustainability experts Auditel as a Principal Sustainability Consultant. Auditel is a consulting franchise, which means I work independently, but I can lean on and leverage the rest of the network to help support clients. Joining Auditel not only gave me the ‘clout’ to be able to support clients with challenges outside of my immediate skillset, but also helped wrap my knowledge with credibility as I am now accredited and partnered with the likes of IEMA, the British Standards Institute, and NQA (an accredited certification body).

In terms of what my day-to-day looks like, a lot of my focus is centred on continuing to build my network and my client base. I’m a little over a year into this journey so it’s no surprise I’m not swimming in clients tripping over themselves to work with me – but that’s all part of the learning curve.

When I started, I initially wanted to focus on measuring impact (carbon foot-printing and Science Based Targets etc.) as experience has long shown me that if you don’t measure something, you can’t manage it, but unless a business is already knowledgeable, this can be a hard sell or a step or two too far away from what feels achievable. As a result, I pivoted towards helping organisations more holistically. Businesses often know they need to act but don’t know where to start.

What I now focus on is helping to guide businesses through their journey. My job is to alleviate their worry about working out what to do, and where to focus their energy or effort. I put together plans of attack that they can just sign off – rather than having to create them themselves – and then support them when it comes to implementation. This works excellently in a fractional ESG director capacity – giving the business a regular touchpoint of contact and support, which can flex up and down as needed.

Typically, the ESG responsibility gets added to an existing team or persons remit, but the problem is they don’t know where to begin and when their performance review comes around, sustainability doesn’t feature as it’s a side-of-desk focus. The issue then grows over time until it becomes a big enough problem that it can’t be avoided and in a number of cases, the breaking point is when the business starts identifying that they’re losing work to competitors who are doing more.

The other real challenge we have in the space is that as sustainability professionals, we too often rely on the attitude that businesses should drive change purely ‘for the planet’, rather than taking a ‘for the business’ approach. Understandably, this turns businesses off – especially SMEs – who are being squeezed with rising costs like NI, a faltering economy and having to tackle sustainability, all whilst keeping afloat.

There is absolutely a time and place for discussing investing in more efficient hardware, plant, machinery, heat pumps, and EVs, but we need to shift the conversation to identify how businesses can act in a way that benefits both the environment AND the bottom line. Without a commercial lens, it’s far harder to drive action and this is where I spend my time and effort.