When you have sustainability or energy management goals to achieve across your built estate and you’re not sure where to go to get advice, a Google search is often your first port of call. And this will likely produce a whole raft of options across many disciplines, from strategic carbon consultancy to niche technology providers.

There are many ‘energy’ companies that claim to offer a suite of services from procurement, to point of use optimisation and demand side management. Then there are also technology resellers who will direct you towards you the specific smart buildings solutions they are associated with, at preferential rates. This is fine if it solves your problems and makes the impact you anticipated.

But how do you know for sure what is the right solution or package of options for your specific business? Who are you best placed to put your trust in – a sustainability consultant, an energy manager, a procurement broker or ‘other’?

This very much depends upon your starting knowledge of the industry, your knowledge and understanding of your company’s goals and what your experience biases are.

Having been operational in the energy management industry for over 20 years, we at ETS have seen and experienced many types of emergent energy management technologies and supporting sustainability consultancy offers across our works with our clients.

There are some very good generalists in the sustainability & energy management world who have experience in many types of industries and are able to support a client to their respective goals. Conversely, there are generalists who skim across very complex topics very thinly and cannot identify when a deep dive is needed into a particular client aspect.

This can be similar in the specialist world: a lighting specialist will make sure you have optimal lighting for a specific application, but will they stray into the mechanical/electrical operation of the facility or business? Possibly not, nor are they qualified to do so.

Theoretically, there is a place for both; the good ‘market aware’ generalist and the laser-sighted specialist, who should work hand in hand to achieve clients’ goals to reduce energy consumption and carbon emission. The generalist must be able to identify when a specialist is needed and not feel threatened by this inclusion. Similarly, the specialist should be aware the generalist sees the wider regulatory picture and their work is a very important piece of the solution.

However, surely the best option is to have all of this under one roof. A company that has both the full market view of all movements in the sphere of strategic carbon consultancy and can support the business with overarching ‘route maps’ to improved energy efficiency and sustainability performance, whilst also having the deep technical knowledge to make granular and building-specific interventions to drive these performance improvements as well as protecting asset value and improving the occupant experience.

This is the ethos of the ETS offer to the market: a fully integrated energy management and engineering consultancy that supports businesses from the very outset of their journey, through detailed energy and engineering project implementation, legislative compliance, and ongoing performance reporting.

By engaging with us, our clients have access to everything they need to drive their business forward, without the potentially adversarial scenarios that can occur when many different consultancies (with differing market views or offers) are bound together to collectively deliver for a specific business.