Sustainability as a new business line

Building sustainability into an AEC firm requires passion, patience, collaboration, and a focus on business value and long-term impact.

When I joined Cushing Terrell in 2006, I was excited that sustainability was already part of the company’s values. Since then, the firm has expanded its commitments in this area. We’re part of an industry-wide movement pushing for all new buildings and major renovations to be carbon neutral by 2030. Along the way, I’ve expanded my knowledge as well. In 2012, I earned a master’s degree in sustainable design from the University of Texas, School of Architecture.

Our firm’s sustainable design initiative, aligned with the AIA Design Excellence Framework, provides our teams with baseline best practices for application to our projects. It includes 10 measures that cover integration, community, ecology, water, economy, energy, wellness, resources, change, and discovery.

We also expanded our commitment with a new sustainability business line, which I’m proud to have helped develop and launch in 2022.

Here’s some of what I’ve learned in the past few years about the challenges and opportunities that this path poses:

1. It helps to spend time establishing a firm-wide team and buy-in for sustainability. At my firm, much of this concentrated effort began when a grassroots group of multidisciplinary designers got together several years ago and formed a Green Advocacy Council. This really set us up to engage with leadership and point to the ways we were making a difference and how our teams were engaged in moving the needle forward on sustainability. In the last few years with so much growth and change, it was really important to research and present on the industry imperatives and business opportunities for sustainable and carbon-neutral building design.
2. There is no clear roadmap for building sustainability into your firm’s structure. The AEC industry is not alone in that we will need to be inventive and creative to transform our practices into a long-term carbon-neutral approach centered on holistic sustainability. At my multidisciplinary firm, our Green Advocacy Council essentially became a community of practice, and we accomplished tremendous things in that space. But at a certain point, it felt like we needed to formalize it to be more directly responsive to industry demands and client needs. We considered several models, including working groups and studios. After investigation and research, we landed on forming a sustainability “service sector.” This enables us to operate as a firm-wide internal consulting group with the capabilities to do direct consulting for clients who are strictly seeking sustainable design services.
3. Get comfortable talking business and finance. As director of sustainability, I’m still learning about the business side of AEC as we’ve sought to promote this work and embed it into our design process. My advice is to invite some skeptics onto your team so they can bring up questions you might not have thought of. Get with the CFO of your company. Find out what information you’ll need to collect and analyze. Learn how to be responsive to questions at a business level.  Most likely, you’re not only going to need to show how sustainability fits in with your company’s mission, vision, and values, but also show ROI and how it makes business sense.
4. Progress can be slow – but it’s so powerful to see the work in action. We’ve just recently celebrated our first full year operating our sustainability service sector. Currently, our team is in a beta testing phase on a new internal sustainable design excellence framework tool. Two of our team members presented their findings of this analysis to a project team, and it was a beautiful thing to witness. This is something we’ve aspired to have for so long and my team members are killing it. It gives us motivation and hope for the future of these efforts and provides case studies demonstrating success for our leadership, project leads, and clients.
5. Bring passion, because you’ll need it. I’ll be very honest that this business model is still in an early phase, and it takes patience to see things through! I won’t deny that plenty of challenges are ahead as we try to continue to find ways to measure our success and drive progress forward. If you don’t believe in this work at a bigger picture and larger scale, you’re not going to last as a changemaker. But I can tell you, it has been worth it for me and for our team, and we are excited to see just how impactful we can be.

I’ve learned a lot since we launched this business line in 2022, and I hope these lessons I’ve learned in that time are helpful for any other architecture or engineering professionals who are interested in promoting sustainability-focused operations and design solutions at their company. 

Ashleigh Powell is an associate, LEED AP BD+C, WELL AP, and director of sustainability at Cushing Terrell. Her academic emphasis was energy-efficient building design, construction and operations. She is based in Austin, Texas. Connect with her on LinkedIn.