From 0 to 1: Establishing Sustainability in a 1,000-Person Scale-Up with Julien Weyl

About the Episode:

In this episode, host Max interviews Julien Weyl, a serial entrepreneur and former head of sustainability at Stuart. Julien shares his journey from aviation to leading sustainability initiatives at Stuart, a 1000-person scale-up in the UK. He discusses his unique 'pressure cooker' analogy, offers tips for overcoming data paralysis, and emphasizes the importance of quick wins. Tune in for practical advice on engaging stakeholders, integrating sustainability into business strategies, and maintaining focus in your efforts. This episode is full of actionable insights and inspiring stories for anyone passionate about sustainability.

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Timestamps

00:22 Introduction

02:00 Rapid Fire Questions

03:33 Julien's Sustainability Journey

12:55 The Pressure Cooker Analogy

17:17 Driving Change

21:25 Engaging Key Stakeholders

25:11 Overcoming Data Paralysis & Pragmatism

27:43 Keys to Success

## In this Episode

[00:00:00] 

**Julien:** Very often, if you look at a company quite rapidly, you can understand roughly where most of the problem is, and we have a tendency to want to have all the numbers, all the details, Before doing anything, and that's really like the data paralysis.

And I think because we are in a race, because we need to accelerate, being pragmatic and using common sense can also help us go there.

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## Intro

**Max:** Hi, everyone. Welcome to "The Sustainability Leaders Show". I'm Max, co-founder of TSC, and I'm your host today.

The purpose of this podcast is to share the stories of amazing sustainability leaders and the hands on lessons they've learned throughout their careers. With this show, we want to cut through the noise and provide short sessions packed actionable insights, success stories, and also practical advice from sustainability leaders who actually drive [00:01:00] sustainability in organizations worldwide.

And this podcast is brought to you by the Sustainability Circle, the exclusive leadership network that sustainability leaders lean on to accelerate their careers. through access to top tier leadership programs and a carefully vetted community. Sustainability leaders joined TSC to level up their leadership impact alongside trusted peers. 

And today we have the pleasure to speak with Julien Weyl, serial entrepreneur, sustainability leader, and former head of sustainability at Stuart. Julien has been instrumental in establishing and scaling sustainability at Stuart, a 1000 person scale up in the UK at the time. In fact, as I already said, he created this role by pitching his sustainability vision to the founders.

And this is exactly the topic that we are going to discuss today. 

Julien, welcome to the show. Pleasure to have you here.

**Julien:** Thanks a lot for having me and for all the great things you've been saying about me [00:02:00] already. 


## Rapid Fire Questions

**Max:** So I'd say let's warm up with some rapid fire questions. As I said to you in the prep call, these should be answered in a very short manner, two sentences max. Are you ready?

**Julien:** Yes. Let's go.

**Max:** All right, as a French guy living in London, coffee or tea?

**Julien:** Coffee.

**Max:** What's your favorite eco friendly product? 

**Julien:** Not buying any or Patagonia jackets.

**Max:** Oh, that's yeah, that's the classic startup thing. What is the best career advice that you received so far?

**Julien:** I would say none. The one that I'm receiving from myself, just by thinking about it.

**Max:** All right. And do you have any kind of role models?

**Julien:** Yes. Big politicians, you know, people that created, I don't know, European election have, are just like past. 

Maybe the people that created the European union after the second world war would be like some kind of people, very inspirational to me.

**Max:** That's cool. And the last question, what was the favorite place you've traveled to so far?[00:03:00] 

**Julien:** That's a tough one. I would say the Porquerolles Island in France. 

**Max:** Oh

Wow.

That's a special one. 

**Julien:** Yeah. It's lovely. And it's my country. So I'm like, you don't have to travel very far to find beautiful places.

**Max:** Absolutely. I agree. 




## Start of the Conversation 

**Max:** All right, Julien, I have to admit, I was very much looking forward for our episode because you are in serial entrepreneur who basically transitioned to sustainability and I think you are definitely an inspiration for myself and I am very sure also for others.


## Julien's sustainability journey

**Max:** Tell us a bit about your journey. What was your path to sustainability?

**Julien:** yes, that's a very broad question and it takes us back to quite a few years. So I studied my career actually in aviation and aerospace or something that can be considered really the antithesis of sustainability, but because I was someone which was very passionate about technical things, flying things a bit of a geek at the time, and I had a great time working for Airbus for quite a few years.[00:04:00] 

During that time, I actually had the opportunity to start to do pro bono work with an NGO in the Philippines called Gawad Kalinga and got very lucky to be able to do work with their founder. It's a very exciting organization which managed to scale a way to take people out of extreme poverty and then bring them back to social and economical work.

So I was really exposed to this work at the same time working in a large organization. And I started to feel a bit of a disconnect within me. And after a bit of like soul searching, I decided that basically that was not the thing I wanted to do anymore. And I decided to explore another path.

To do that. I basically decided to learn again, to go back to school and to learn a very important part of our society, which was the one around business. And so during the studies, I had the time to explore the topic of impact, business and technology in different ways and forms, and basically decided that I wanted to continue down that path.

At [00:05:00] the back of this, I did a couple of jobs and started my own companies, trying to have the most impact I could in those various organizations. And then COVID happened and the world stopped. And that's basically at a time where I had the chance to meet with um, One of the leaders of my previous company, Stuart, who at the time were growing very rapidly, just as an anecdote, just to tell you, Stuart is a last mile delivery company a B2B brand that operates across Europe. So we had a chat, you know, they wanted to grow the team. They liked what I was doing and offered me a job. And to their surprise, I said, no. Because I actually wanted to do something else. And I knew what I wanted to explore. I wanted to try to spend all my time and energy to explore and implement and strategize about that idea of sustainability, which was nascent.

And to be honest, I didn't understand very well at the time, but I knew I wanted to get a job that aligns with that. [00:06:00] And basically I pitched them that's what I wanted. And they came back to me two days later, said actually, we were thinking about it. The importance of that topic would you be happy and interested to join us to try to sort that out and understand what it means for us and drive it?

And that's how it all started.

**Max:** That's such a funny story to tell. So cool that you actually pitched yourself into that company. For somebody who actually did that, what were the main arguments that convinced them to hire you as a head of sustainability?

**Julien:** Honestly, what is interesting, and I was not trying to convince them. I was just trying to honestly express what I wanted. And I think that's maybe something interesting. We tend to try to fit to a specific job requirements. But what I learned from that experience is actually being honest with yourself and being able to share that transparently with the people you are interacting with might create very interesting opportunities.

And that's how I approached it. So really by sharing what I understood from [00:07:00] myself and not trying to match or sell myself. And I guess they, in a way they found that interesting. And they probably at the same time, we're thinking about it more generally, and that's how, you know, serendipity happened.

**Max:** So if you could basically give Any advice to somebody applying for a head of sustainability role? What would that be?

I think the first one would be, of course, prepare, but not too much. The second thing, which would be around think and use your best judgment. I think very often we try to complicate things quite a lot. We tend to maybe use a lot of jargons and to be fair, a lot of people, especially the people that are hiring, you probably don't really understand the topic very well, don't understand what's happening and need someone that can express the things quite simply to them. And so I would really make sure that I use very simple words, and I discuss the topics and the agenda of the [00:08:00] company and coming back to first principles and really understanding what makes sense and what doesn't make sense.

**Julien:** And really think by yourself, not just repeat things that other people tell you.

**Max:** Definitely makes sense. I think this is always a good advice for leadership roles. And as you said, you created that role, but also the whole sustainability discipline when actually entering as the head of sustainability. Did the C level have any kind of specific goals or objectives for you when they hired you?

**Julien:** To figure it out, they didn't have any special metrics or deep understanding what they had done is they had done an exercise internally to kind of like reframe their vision. And that's at the time where the word sustainability kind of like stood up. And I think that's where it started, but they really didn't understand well what it meant.

They didn't necessarily understand what kind of KPIs or measurements they wanted to track, and not even understood where they wanted to take that [00:09:00] forward. And so it was really like a blank page without clear mandate. And basically that mandate in a way evolved over time from figure it out, tell us what should be, what we should be doing, what it means to, of course, after a bit of time the KPIs, the implementation of the strategy of the different programs and so on and so forth.

**Max:** So you had a blank page. Could you describe for us the first 100 days? Maybe. How did you actually assess the baseline and how did you come to that general action plan?

**Julien:** Okay that's a very wide one. I think there was nothing really extraordinary or unusual in my approach there, I think. The first one was about, of course, going around the company and trying to have interviews with many people to understand what was happening in the organization, what were the expectations, what was the current situation, what were some ideas that people had and really to try to understand a bit more what was [00:10:00] happening.

In parallel to that, it was also for me personally to understand what it meant. I didn't have any formal training in sustainability, I just had a really strong desire and a link with what I felt what was needed, but I didn't really understand what it meant in detail either, so upskilling myself at the same time.

Did, of course, a bit of a benchmark, understanding what the other companies were doing. What it meant, reading a couple of sustainability reports. And that's why you start to see that it's a bit of a mess. You have a lot of words, you have a lot of different regulations that were starting to pop up.

Very complicated things or very simple things. Really kind of like a messy situation. So it was bring all those information together and try to formulate something that made sense. That was simple, easy to understand that made sense. And the approach I had there was really to kind of like, come out of those 100 days with having seen a lot of the different people and [00:11:00] having formulated a high level first strategy that I could then share with the C-Suite and the larger organization, secured a little bit of resource being human and financial to start to implement and play around and iterate and start to really create that momentum.

But I really didn't have all the answers and that was really an iterative journey. On which we started to implement things, learn, adjust, and kind of like iterate as much as we could on that specific topic.

**Max:** So did you everything by yourself or were there any kind of other resources?

**Julien:** No. I was, I think in, in, in that type of role, you cannot definitely, you cannot do all of this by yourself. I was lucky to have already a bit of uh, colleagues helping me on that. We were able to recruit quite rapidly two additional people as well to help us grow the team and the brain power.

It was really, as it always is, a collaborative [00:12:00] effort, working very closely with the general managers, the C-Suite, the operation leaders, to try to do things that made sense, show quick wins, and again, iterate. It's really working with others, more than doing things on your own. Absolutely.

**Max:** Okay. Yeah. It definitely makes sense. Otherwise it would be completely nuts to actually go about it completely by yourself.

**Julien:** You would fail, for sure. You would never go anywhere.

**Max:** That's true. Until like, how many people did you actually scale the team when you have been there? 

**Julien:** When I left, I think the people working in sustainability were around eight, eight full time dedicated people to the team, which is a lot, you know, and, and very, very kind of like, uh, happy and, and it demonstrates a commitment from the organization in what they wanted to deliver on that specific topic.

Yes,

**Max:** Yeah. Yeah. Eight people for 1000. That's a good head count as far as I know. 


## The Pressure Cooker

**Max:** So in our prep call for this podcast, to use an analogy [00:13:00] that really stuck with me, you described your work in establishing and then scaling sustainability efforts as being like cooking with a pressure cooker. Can you maybe elaborate a bit on that? 

**Julien:** I kind of like, like the cooking analogy because I, I love to cook and I remember stories. Of, my grandmother cooking in this pressure cooker that, was always fascinating for someone that tries to understand physics at a young age. And basically why I use that analogy because it represents well to me how I approach the topic.

It has basically three main compartments. There is like the structure and the body and what is inside the pressure cooker. Then you have the bottom, which is connected to the fire and increase like the temperature. And the top, which also enhance like that cooking capacity. So it's really the three dimensions that are related to in that analogy.

So if we take basically maybe the first one, the top one, it's to demonstrate that actually we need to [00:14:00] engage very closely with a few key people in the organizations, from the shareholders to the C suite and a couple of key people within the company. And you need to do that in a very strategized and one to one approach.

You need to speak their language. And I think that is very important because it can get very confusing otherwise. So to give you an example, if you talk with the head of sales, you will talk about opportunity for growth, the increasing pressure of company expecting or customers expecting sustainability metrics and lower emissions and so on and so forth.

Then if you talk with the financial director, You might talk about opportunities for less operating costs, for instance, through more green vehicles being on the road and so on and so forth. And so that is very important to target the message to those key people and spend a lot of time engaging regularly with them and providing them with update in the language they understand.

At the bottom is [00:15:00] basically all the employees of the organization. I I think that's a focus that is very important because that will help the combination of the top and the bottom to accelerate our transition to a net zero world. And that's why engaging them is very important. The way you can think about it is first through education, providing them with the understanding and the tools to appreciate the topic.

As workers, but also as citizens. I think that's something we should not forget. They're also citizens. And then opening the channels, engaging regularly to empower that workforce, to increase the pressure to their manager, asking questions, building dashboards, providing more transparency to what's happening.

So it's really the idea about empowering the workforce to increase the pressure to the entire system. And then the last part, which is basically the structure of the pressure cooker, Relates to all the processes and the way the organization [00:16:00] is managed. And the more you can use the systems, those processes, and embed sustainability within them, the more you will benefit from all the existing way that the company is working on.

And so when you try to implement it, sometimes it's, it might be the only way available to put it as a silo or something separate from the strategy, from the objective of the company. But if you can bring that within. You will benefit by default to all the reporting, all the shareholder briefings and so on and so forth because it's built within the existing structure.

And so that's why we, I took that that example, the importance of the top and the targeted, the bottom that increase the pressure to accelerate the transition while building within the existing processes.

**Max:** yeah, I think especially when the sustainability discipline is new to a company, it's a huge change management process because most of the people don't know a lot about sustainability and also they [00:17:00] don't know what they can actually do in order to make the company more sustainable, but then maybe also how to make their personal lives more sustainable.

Are there some specific? Hacks that you actually found to propel that change management forward. 


## Driving Change

**Julien:** One will be to find quick wins. You can have the mandate, but you need to demonstrate and progress. And I think it's quite important to identify early on if you are building that type of uh, organization to find those quick wins that you can, market internally, get people excited.

And that really creates movements. And I think the idea of sustainability is, in my opinion, an idea of movement because it's all about the acceleration. It's not about just waiting to happen through regulation, which could be an approach. So it's always, how can you go faster? How can you accelerate that movement?

And so those quick wins can be very important, especially at the beginning of the journey, being able to communicate about them, not forgetting [00:18:00] that communication piece. And I think really trusting the people, if you empower the individuals, With the knowledge and the space to communicate with your ideas to push and challenge the hierarchy around the way things are done and to get that support.

That's also something that can be very powerful and really shine the light on those individuals that deliver the projects because it's never about you. It's about them shining, feeling proud and inspiring others to do the same.

**Max:** Was there any kind of special like workshop format or some presentations that you use in order to convince them?

**Julien:** Yeah. It's something we did. We used a climate education workshop called the climate FRESK. It's an NGO that tries to unpack in a very collaborative way, the IPCC reports to make it digestible through an interactive game and then being able to discuss it. Highly recommend for the people that listen to us.

It's called [00:19:00] the climate FRESK. F R E S K. It's an NGO, so there's no commercial incentive there. But basically what we did, we wanted to do a big day of sustainability. And so we took a couple of volunteers across our geographies that were very involved or wanted to get involved. We trained them to be able to deliver that workshop.

And then on a day, we actually, we delivered all the workshops on the same day across all our geographies through the colleagues that got trained. So it was quite an exciting day. Everybody was talking about it and you were being trained by people from the company people, because it's a very collaborative way, people met other people from different teams.

So it was really exciting from a human point of view that enhanced the experience of the learning. And so that's something that was very, very powerful and people talked a lot about it. And then the challenge at the back of that, that we need to remember is how do we keep the people engaged? And that's something That is also very important not to forget that climate for us was very powerful for us.[00:20:00] 

**Max:** I can imagine that this was definitely a pivotal moment in the company, this one special day and everybody was then on board to your vision. So how did you then, when you had all of the people on board actually operationalize that? So how did you actually make sustainability core of the business strategy and therefore also the company processes?

**Julien:** So the first one is identifying how the company works, the image of kind of like the ball and the structure of the pressure cooker. Our company, as many companies used OKR objective and key reserves to define their quarterly and yearly objectives and cascading them to which are the KPIs and the key results we want to monitor. And then be able to within that system. So there was really the structure, the backbone of the way the company was operating. So first identifying how the company operates, which was with these OKR examples in my case, and then try to build within that process. And so how did it [00:21:00] happen for us?

We basically went to the management and suggested to implement one and two Sustainability. objectives within those key elements of the company. And we needed to convince a few people, very few people, but once we get that validation, then by default, it's calculated across the entire organization. So the effort was very much worth it.


## Getting key stakeholders on board 

**Max:** Yeah. You also said earlier that you found the key stakeholders in the company and actually got them on board as well. How did you go about that process? And do you feel that there are always the same key stakeholders for sustainability in the company that one should actually get on board first?

**Julien:** Yeah I mean you have the formal and the informal people within the organization. So of course you need to engage with the formal uh, leaders uh, mainly, you know, the C-suite, the shareholders, depending on your shareholder structure, that's the one which is not to be [00:22:00] forgotten and maybe the country leads or the heads of different departments, depending on how much time you have at hand.

So going with the formal, you know, hierarchical structure and ensuring you're covering all of it. But something that we tend to forget is informal ones. And so trying to appreciate as much as you can, who has a voice in the organization, who matters? And that to understand that you can observe meetings, you can try to talk to people and ask questions.

And being able to engage with those individuals can be also very, very powerful.

**Max:** Yeah, I can definitely see that in every company there are those people who are actually either very long there and therefore actually have a very high buy in or they are just thought leaders in one kind of discipline and therefore people are looking up to them. So if you could start all over, what would you do differently?

**Julien:** That's a tough one. I think one challenge is clearly the focus. I would [00:23:00] focus more on the things that matter the most. One thing that is always difficult in sustainability, we want to do everything. Everything is important because at the end you have people or emissions and you know that once you've emitted something, it's there.

So you really want to go fast and move as fast as possible on many different topics. But sometimes you cannot. And so being able to focus and ensuring you deliver some key elements and then the next one, I think is very important. That's something I would definitely do more, focus and maybe do less, but more rapidly.

The other one, 

**Julien:** would of course try to be much more strategic if I can. I think I spend a lot of time, getting ideas everywhere, kind of like being very engaging, but at the detriment of maybe speed and agility. And. I think that's the main ones. 

**Max:** You have any kind of advice how, a fellow sustainability leader could actually find their focus quite fast. 

**Julien:** I think it's always on the metrics of uh, [00:24:00] impact uh, impact potential and, and cost or rapidity to implement. And I think depending on the journey of the organization, you might choose differently. If it's very early on. You might want to focus on things that can be implemented and show results very quickly, even if the impact is not that big. And the more mature you get as an organization as a function, then you can focus on some of the very key programs. But those ones will deliver results over time. So I think you need to appreciate where your organization is, but really on those two dimensions, which are very classic.

**Max:** Yeah, starting with a materiality assessment, or if you are basically CSRD relevant, then with a double materiality assessment could also always be a very good start. But then of course there are some programs that you can actually deliver quite fast and which could get you even more buy in and yeah back you up from the C level but also from all of the stakeholders that are important to you.

**Julien:** Absolutely. Of course, materiality, double materiality are things that are very important. [00:25:00] Sometimes they can be very detailed and time consuming. So that's why I think we need to be mindful of that. And something that I've been seeing a bit is to my point, I was making about common sense and good judgment earlier.


## Escaping "data paralysis" & being pragmatic

**Julien:** Very often, if you look at a company quite rapidly, you can understand roughly where most of the problem is, and we have a tendency to want to have all the numbers, all the details, Before doing anything, and that's really like the data paralysis.

And I think because we are in a race, because we need to accelerate, being pragmatic and using common sense can also help us go there. So, Yes for the materiality, the double materiality, absolutely. But use your common sense. Maybe you can already try to tap on or implement things on topics that you know will be important and material for the organization.

**Max:** Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I mean, Like also it's always the same. One thing is basically you deliver the job and right now you're talking about it. And it has been successful and it also has been a major learning [00:26:00] journey for the company, but also for yourself. But then there's also the realities of the job.

Right. Let's dig in there for a minute. What were maybe some things that you discovered that you wouldn't have expected before? at this role as head of sustainability.

**Julien:** First, maybe how much I enjoyed feeling that I was working and learning on something that I really cared. Bit of finding the flow. That was a very interesting learning, but at the same time, the appreciation that type of role can be quite frustrating because of the understanding, because you're always thinking about it.

For instance, if we take the climate change, we know it's tough. We know it's hard. It takes time and every minute counts and businesses can work at a different pace. And that conflict. Especially for someone that really believes in it can be very frustrating and being able to [00:27:00] manage that frustration.

It's something that clearly I think people that do similar jobs might find commonalities and to manage that. I would definitely say that. But at the same time, it gives you strength because of that alignment and because of that frustration, if you manage to manage it well and use maybe communities and like being able to share and bend those elements.

I think that's very helpful and that gives meaning and that gives strength to continue push and push and learn.

**Max:** So based on your experience right now, what would you think does it need to be successful as a head of sustainability in a scale up of the size of Stuart, like roughly 1000 people at the time? 


## What it needs to succeed

**Julien:** So I think the soft skills are very important. More, I think, than the hard skills. You can learn them, you can outsource them, but what is very important is to be able to connect with the people in the [00:28:00] organization, to be very human centric. I think that's really important in terms of skill set .To be strategic and to be able to think um, quite classic , nothing crazy out there, but being able to understand a bit what's going on and being pragmatic and being able to share that vision. And being aware of, your mental health, the journey you're on, the changes that are constantly happening, the complexity of that function that is changing, that is. Going through a lot of regulation, debate, people agree, disagree, and so on and so forth. And being able to live through that and have a healthy way of life and habits to be able to manage that.

**Max:** Yeah, that's true. I looked at the clock right now and I can't believe that we are actually at the end of this episode already. I'm sure we could talk about this for hours, but it's actually time to wrap things up. If you could, any famous [00:29:00] last words, anything to be mentioned or to be added to our conversation, Julien?

**Julien:** I think we covered a lot. I think, maybe that idea of pressure cooker can stay. The importance of the top, the bottom, and the processes. I think that was something that really helped me structure my way and how I would approach it. That's maybe what people can take out of this. And being humble, being pragmatic and think. More than just repeat.

I think that's something that we tend to forget. But it's actually very important as a worker ahead of sustainability, but also as a citizen.

**Max:** Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us today. It was a pleasure having you and to all of the listeners. If you take anything with you, then establishing and scaling sustainability, the right way is like cooking with a pressure cooker. At least if you do it, how Julien did it. And to anyone who's actually listening here, stay tuned for [00:30:00] the next episode.

Don't forget to subscribe and leave a review. See you next time at "The Sustainability leaders Show". 

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