Like many of you, we are watching COP27 with some trepidation. Despite the myriad threats to the planet from manmade climate change, there seems to be little real progress to limiting the global rise in temperatures to 1.5 degrees centigrade.

COP27 will of course be focused at a governmental level yet with 5.5 million SMEs in the UK, clearly the small business sector, like all others, is going to have to make some fairly significant changes over the coming years.

Yet sustainability and the move to Net Zero represent further massive challenges for already stressed out business owners having to deal with the after-effects of Covid, the energy crisis, the move to digital and post-Brexit uncertaintly.

However, we over at DNAsix maintain an air of optimism about the future and it could be that the solutiuon lies in organisations having an over-arching medium to long term plan for their business which includes sustainability, digitisation and a degree of flexibility.

For example, moving towards greater energy efficiency now makes absolute sense when bills are rocketing. Similarly, reducing travel through better use of online meeting platforms clearly helps your bottom line and the planet's.

Our own training programme takes into account three separate footprints - your financial one, your digital one and your environmental one. For any business now, these should form the cornerstone of any long term strategy you have for your organisation.

So while we may be looking at world leaders to make the important macro decisions about the future of planet earth, as small business owners we really need to get our own houses in order and starting to incorporate sustainability into everything we do.