Cape Town - Running a business within the green economy can be tough as a company must honour its commitment to protecting the environment as well as make a profit.
For entrepreneur Lynn Maggott, the success of her business, Green Connexion, lies in the fact that she helps small businesses and large corporates see the opportunities in the green economy they might have overlooked.
Maggott said for half of her career she was a financial controller - responsible for business planning, financial reporting and financial forecasts. “I spent fifty percent of my career in the corporate sector in a very plastic world, working for those who have so much already and are looking to accumulate more. I realised that this can’t be my purpose in life.”
In 2002, she started her first business which was a tourism company and the business was doing well until the financial crisis of 2008. Maggott said: “It was then that I got the opportunity to be a part of a company called Green Cab, and this was five women coming together to look at using alternative transport with a view to reducing carbon emission.”
She was the managing director of Green Cab but said that business just sharpened her focus and made her want to achieve more.
“In 2012, I again questioned my purpose, so I thought I would look at my skill set, which was business management and also environmental conservation,” said Maggott.
“In 2018, I registered my own company, Green Connexion and it seeks to create awareness first and foremost of our responsibility as human beings to save this planet for future generations and, secondly, the dire economic situation we find our country in it’s necessary to inform people of the many opportunities that exist in the green economy.”
Lynn Maggott believes that the green economy has many job opportunities for those who want to protect the environment and start a business
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Working on her own, she identifies business opportunities in the green economy and then helps others set up a business to take advantage of the opportunity while protecting the environment.
She said: “I initiated a waste project in the Overberg that created jobs for people who ordinarily would not have thought about making money out of someone else’s trash. There are real businesses to be had.”
She said it was important to be aware of not only the opportunities for profit but also for environmental change: “You are also helping the environment because there is no more space at landfill to continually plonk our rubbish on so we need to think about what we use that waste for and the waste can, in fact, be used as feedstock into thermal and other energy type solutions and composting.”
Magott believes that it’s often the case that people within a neighbourhood cannot see the employment opportunities that the green economy offers: “There is just too little knowledge and information about opportunities for people on the grassroots level.”
She said: “I disseminate information about business opportunities and I work with small businesses to help them set up and develop their businesses. As part of that process, there is always a need to tell them about what they should do to reduce their environmental footprint and when they do that they immediately make their value proposition better than others for corporates. Corporates are now also seriously looking at reducing their carbon footprint to prevent paying carbon taxes.”
Part of her future plans is to grow the reach of Green Connexion and to create even more business ventures for people who would otherwise have not been employed or even considered that saving the environment makes good business sense.