Small Business, Big Impact: What Running My Own EcoVadis-Rated Consultancy Has Taught Me
It sounds almost like a joke. A solo consultant who helps other companies reach EcoVadis Platinum gets assessed herself and lands at Platinum. Kemi sits in the top 1% of EcoVadis-rated companies globally. I want to talk honestly about what that actually means, why it's less glamorous than it sounds, and what I've learned from being on the other side of the questionnaire I usually guide people through.
Why a one-woman consultancy goes through EcoVadis at all
The honest answer is: I had to. Being an accredited EcoVadis Training Partner requires holding an EcoVadis rating yourself. So the decision wasn't really a decision. It was a condition of doing the work I do.
What I didn't expect was how useful the experience would turn out to be. Sitting on the rated company's side of the questionnaire, with my own evidence to gather, my own policies to write, my own KPIs to track, gave me an understanding of what my clients go through that I couldn't have built any other way. I had been advising people on submissions since 2017. Doing one myself, end to end, changed how I think about the methodology and how I work with the people I support.
There's also the credibility piece. What you sell, you should be able to live. If I'm asking clients to invest serious time and money into a structured sustainability programme, the least I can do is run one myself.
What sustainability actually looks like for a solo consultancy
The first thing I had to work out was what sustainability even means at this scale.
A lot of the standard playbook doesn't apply directly. I don't have a manufacturing footprint. I'm not asked the kinds of supply chain questions a packaging or chemicals company would face. Most of my client work happens through digital meetings rather than on-site visits, which keeps my travel footprint low without much effort on my part.
But the smaller the operation, the more visible each choice becomes. Energy use, even at a small scale, gets attention. Policies have to be written, even when the "company" they cover is one person.
The exercise of going through it forced me to think about each of those areas in a structured way. Not because the points required it, but because the questionnaire is, at its heart, a checklist of what a responsible business looks like. Doing it for yourself is a useful mirror.
Three things I learned about my own blind spots
The biggest surprise was the Labour and Human Rights theme.
In a one-person business, I am simultaneously the employer and the only employee. That sounds like a footnote, but in EcoVadis terms it raises real questions. What's my approach to working hours? What measures do I have in place to manage stress, prevent repetitive strain injuries, support ergonomics? These aren't questions I would have asked myself before the assessment forced me to. The answers shaped my actual working practice afterwards.
The second blind spot was around formalisation. I had good practices in many areas, but they lived in my head rather than on paper. Writing the management system, the employee handbook, the KPI dashboard, the policies, took longer than anything else in the entire process. By a wide margin. It's also the part of the work I now consistently warn clients about, because I know from experience how much time it eats.
The third was the gap between intention and evidence. I knew this gap existed for clients. Living it myself, where I would think "of course I do X" and then realise I had nothing to upload that proved I did X, was a useful reminder of how much of the EcoVadis work is about making the implicit explicit.
“Sustainability, for me personally, comes down to one idea: only taking as much as you can also regenerate.”
What small companies often get wrong
There are three things I hear regularly from small businesses that I want to address directly, because I held some version of these beliefs myself before going through the process.
"EcoVadis is only for big companies." It isn't. The methodology adjusts to your size and industry. The questionnaire I received as a solo consultancy looked very different from the one a 5,000-person manufacturer would see. Fewer criteria activated, less detail expected on supply chains, lower bar on coverage questions. If you're a small company being asked for an EcoVadis rating by a customer, you can do this.
When a small business owner tells me they're too small for EcoVadis, my honest response is: look at me. I'm on my own and I did it.
"We have no policies, so we can't do this." Most small companies have practices that simply haven't been written down. Writing them down is the work. The policies don't need to be twenty pages each. They need to be clear, dated, signed, and reflect what you actually do.
"Bronze is enough." Sometimes it is, if the customer asking for the rating accepts Bronze. Often it isn't, because Bronze signals that you have some practices in place but limited evidence and few measurable targets. If you're going to invest the internal hours anyway, the gap between a poorly prepared submission and a well prepared one is usually not as large as people assume. Companies whose scores stall in the Silver range often have less of a practice problem than they think and more of a structure problem.
Being honest about what didn't go well
A blog post about reaching Platinum that doesn't talk about what went badly is just marketing. So here's the part I'm less proud of.
I don't hold ISO 14001 (environmental management) or ISO 45001 (occupational health and safety). For a company my size, the cost of obtaining and maintaining these certifications would be substantial, and the operational case for them in a solo consultancy is thin. So I made a pragmatic decision not to pursue them, and I lost points in the assessment because of it. I may continue to lose points, or eventually a few more, as the methodology evolves and rewards certifications more heavily.
That's the kind of trade-off I now have to discuss with clients honestly. Sometimes the cost of a points-earning certification doesn't make business sense at your scale. The right answer is to acknowledge the gap, not to chase the certification just because EcoVadis would reward it. Living that trade-off myself has made me much more comfortable having that conversation with people running small or mid-sized businesses.
What changes when you've actually done it yourself
The biggest shift I've noticed since being assessed is in how I empathise with clients during the harder phases of a submission.
When someone tells me their team is exhausted from chasing evidence in week six, or that they've spent three Saturdays in a row writing policies, or that they're stuck on a KPI they can't quite operationalise, I know what they mean in a way I didn't before. I've done the version of that work that has no team to delegate to, no procurement department to ask, no HR colleague to draft the handbook section. Every part of the submission was on my desk.
It also changed how I talk about what's hard. When I tell clients that the management system setup is the longest part of the process, that's not theory. That was my December, and parts of my January. When I say documentation takes more time than you think, I'm speaking from a slightly bruised place.
What I'd say to other small businesses and solo consultants
A few things I wish someone had told me at the start.
Start with the management system, not with the questionnaire. The hours you spend writing policies, drafting an employee handbook, building a KPI dashboard, are the foundation everything else sits on. Try to shortcut this and you'll redo it.
Don't try to imitate a large company's approach. The methodology adjusts to your size. Your evidence should look like a small company's evidence: focused, clear, honest about what you do and don't do.
Be selective about certifications. Some make sense at your scale, some don't. Losing a few points on a certification you can't justify financially is fine. Spending tens of thousands on a certification you'll struggle to maintain is not.
And when in doubt, write things down. The single biggest gap between a Bronze-level submission and a Gold or Platinum one is, very often, documentation rather than practice.