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Kevin O’Brien is incredibly passionate about his work as the Group Sustainability Executive at Spar. Having stuck with the group through tumultuous recent times, Kevin is focused on Spar’s role as a corporate citizen in South Africa and the European markets in which it operates.
There’s an important difference between governing sustainably and the governance of sustainability. ESG far too often becomes a tick-box exercise rather than a way to embed better business practices throughout a group.
In this discussion, the first such example of a Ghost Stories podcast that puts the spotlight on corporate reports beyond just the earnings announcement, Kevin shares his journey with us and his approach to sustainability. You’ll find Spar’s sustainability report at this link for further reading.
Full transcript:
The Finance Ghost: Welcome to this episode of the Ghost Stories podcast. This is going to be super interesting because this is the first time on Ghost Stories that we are bringing you, I suppose, a spotlight on the rest of the reporting suite that gets put out by listed companies.
We all focus on the earnings announcement on SENS and then the analyst presentation that goes out. But there is so much more inside this broader concept of integrated reporting, and we’re going to start exploring some of that on Ghost Stories, which I’m really looking forward to.
We’re actually going to kick off with something on sustainability reporting. Now, before you start groaning about ESG and all of that “abused” nonsense that I write about often in Ghost Bites, and you’ll know my feelings about it if you do follow my writing – you’re in safe hands today, because our guest today is passionate about this space for the right reasons and for the reasons that go very far beyond how investment bankers will use ESG to just “help capital flow” in convenient directions, shall we say. We are instead talking about genuine, sustainable business practices and the real-world challenges of actually doing this.
Our guest today is Kevin O’Brien. He is the Group Sustainability Executive at Spar. Speaking of firsts, Kevin, you told me that this is your first podcast, which is very exciting. I’m very happy to help you get that ticked off your list. This is a man who once had an audience with the Dalai Lama at Cambridge University. I genuinely cannot think of an event that defines my varsity experience at Wits all those years ago, but even if I could think of something I did at Wits that was pretty cool, Kevin, I don’t think I’m going to match an audience with the Dalai Lama.
Thank you for being here. Welcome to the show. Maybe you can share some of that Cambridge experience, actually. But most of all, you’ll be able to share all these real-world insights into sustainability.
Kevin O’Brien: Good afternoon, Mr. Ghost, and thank you so much for an opportunity to talk about something I’m passionate about, but also maybe just some practical things that we’ve done to hopefully back up that passion in a corporate sense. So, yeah, the story of the Dalai Lama is something really special to me. It’s one of those defining moments, I think, as you develop your own thinking. That development comes at different stages. It could come early in life or could come later in life. I was very fortunate when I was doing my Master’s degree at Cambridge a few years ago that we had an audience with the Dalai Lama in St John’s College Chapel, a 1300s building that is quite something. And he said – he said a number of things – but the thing that stood out mostly for me was when he said: you people at business schools learn the art of negotiation. You learn how to prepare for it, do your research, make sure your arguments are all in place, know what your plan A, your plan B and your plan C said. But listen to you. They’re all your plans. Where’s the negotiation in that?
I think for me the defining part of that is really about – we so often go into discussions, when you’re thinking about collaboration, we go into discussions with a preconceived idea of what we want out of it as opposed to going into discussions with the thought of wanting to develop an answer in a collaborative way and therefore embrace the richness of what whoever is involved in is able to bring to it. It’s something I’ve tried to follow in my thinking and also in my doing, but it’s not easy because we are wired to get what we want out of things. And I guess sustainability is a challenge to that. But yeah, thank you. It was a wonderful experience.
The Finance Ghost: I don’t know how many times in history someone has referenced the Dalai Lama and then had a response that references Mike Tyson, but here we are, it’s a fun day. And of course he said: “everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face” right? The Dalai Lama approach is make sure everyone agrees to the plan before someone klaps you in the face. That’s the combined lesson here! I think it’s a good one. Probably a lot of truth in both of those quotes.
Kevin, you’ve been at Spar in a pretty difficult time. You’ve been there for a long time and recently Spar has had a tough run, particularly at board level. There’s been major management changes. I think Mike Tyson may be particularly apt here because Spar did get hit in the face, bluntly, that’s what happened essentially. I think it’s a lot easier – when things start to get really messy at a corporate – in some respects, it’s easier to jump ship, right? As opposed to actually looking and saying, well, I want to see this through. Now, there’s obviously a reason why you stayed and decided to see this through. There’s obviously something that’s keeping you at Spar that makes you excited about the future.
What made you stay? Was it the sustainability mindset of wanting to do this long-term thing, or was it something else?
Kevin O’Brien: Yeah. So it’s been a challenging time for Spar and myself in particular. Over the past few years, being a longtime member of the Spar family, went through pretty difficult times. Spar is a very unique business with quite a unique culture given the mix of a corporate business and independent retail. That mix is very, very exciting. I think to be philosophical about this, the difficulties experienced by Spar I think needed to be experienced by the company, so that Spar could take the next step in its growth as a relevant business in the 21st century. The voluntary trading model in particular needed to evolve to unlock I think the uniqueness of the business model that is Spar, so that it did remain relevant.
Change like this doesn’t come without pain and without challenges. We’re through that now hopefully and the future is looking bright for a business that – really important for me and maybe to answer your question – for a business that’s reconnecting with its DNA, because I believe the DNA of Spar is where its success was born. I think over time, we may well have strayed from that and I think the opportunity to reconnect with that is an opportunity to leverage a business which is based in something very strong and the reconnection will ensure its strength going forward.
The Finance Ghost: And do you think that DNA comes top-down, or do you think it comes bottoms-up? Because for example, I do my grocery shopping at Spar because I have a really good local Spar and a good Spar is very hard to beat, in my opinion at least. I think a good Spar that’s run by a passionate franchisee, they understand the local community in which they operate. That’s what makes Spar interesting, right? It’s franchise run. There are a lot of differences between Spars, it’s definitely not just cut and paste with exactly the same experience at each one. A good Spar is great, genuinely great. So do you think that DNA comes top-down as I say, or do you think it comes from these franchisees and it kind of filters up into the group? Or do you think it should perhaps?
Kevin O’Brien: A very good question. I believe that where we originated, it came from bottom-up. We were right there 60-odd years ago when this voluntary trading model in South Africa was imported from the Netherlands, with those individual retailers, and what held them together was the objective of being able to become a force against the bigger retailers. I think that’s where the DNA grew. And ironically, that’s where it needs to come from again right now. I think that’s been a bit diluted as a result of becoming a corporate without adapting a model that would be a mixture of the two. I think what I’m really saying to you is that the bottom-up, without a doubt, because that’s where the heart of Spar lies, is independent retail. But the corporate is reality for us and how you manage that and moving into an environment whereby compliance issues, around governance issues, around potential reputational issues, there needs to be some type of a consistency which needs to enter this model.
That’s the change I believe that we need to start making to combine this again, because I think that’s what’s been lost as it’s grown to be bigger and bigger. As it gets bigger, it becomes more difficult. So bottoms-up, because that’s where the spirit lies, but the reality of being a corporate needs to find its way into this as well. And that’s the challenge that I’m very excited about because I think it can put us into a very relevant model, particularly in South Africa, where small business is very relevant to the future from an economic growth point of view.
The Finance Ghost: Yeah, absolutely. It’s not easy to manage Spar. Some of your competitors have gone away from the franchise route to try and beat that consistency into their offering, bluntly. And it’s not an easy thing. So, kudos. Royal Ascot SUPERSPAR, we love you. That’s my local one and it’s very, very good. If that message ever gets back to whoever’s managing or owns that store, well done to them.
I like the thought of this DNA coming bottoms-up, but also recognising there has to be those corporate processes otherwise the whole thing falls over. It’s not a straightforward model. I think it can be a very powerful one if it goes right. For what it’s worth, I’m actually currently a Spar shareholder, so I’ve backed this recovery period. The share price – I’m an investments guy so you’ll have to forgive me for looking at the valuation – the market certainly dished out a hiding to Spar and created an opportunity to jump back in and believe that underneath all of this, there’s actually something there. And of course, something “being there” directly speaks to this concept of sustainability, right? That there’s something that actually has the power to survive business cycles, changes of management etc.
The role of group sustainability executive, some would be very quick to bucket that, as you know, as Head of ESG, bluntly. I can imagine that drives you slightly mad and I’m sure it happens to you, but I think from speaking to you before this podcast and getting to know you a bit, I don’t think your approach is like that at all. I think for you it’s very much a case of trying to make sure that sustainable thinking is embedded in the business to the greatest extent possible.
This is not just a form that you’re filling out for the bank when you’re next asking them for funding. And there’s a little section there that talks about, I don’t know, electricity usage or food waste or, you know, whatever might be on that form. Who knows?
So how do you actually focus on getting people to govern sustainably rather than focusing on the governance of sustainability? Because those two things are not at all the same, are they?
Kevin O’Brien: Absolutely right. So maybe to answer the question just by starting there. For me the difference – I mean, the governance of sustainability focuses on oversight, so that includes the work done by dedicated committees within the organisation etc. whereby governing sustainably is broader than that. It involves integrating sustainability principles into every aspect of governance at Spar, from high-level strategic decisions to day-to-day operations. This means that every decision, whether related to supply chain procurement or even customer engagement, is made with sustainability in mind.
ESG is business’ way of monitoring and evaluating business compliance with sustainability reporting frameworks like CSRD, CDP, ISSB and the like. This is almost a tick-box type exercise, maybe a little bit like IFRS compliance in a way. I understand the importance of that, but sustainability for me is about the opportunity for business to create value while addressing the challenges of an uncertain future due to environmental, social and ethical abuse. And I use the word abuse specifically because I think it has been abuse.
Sustainability is where collaboration and collaborative innovation can take place, which will result in value creation for business, for society and actually for the planet. An interesting concept, creation of value for the planet and I guess the sustainability of the resources within the planet, is what that creation is. Traditional business thinking is often about value extraction. New business thinking, which incorporates sustainability thinking, is about value creation. To me, that’s like the new economy, a new economy built out of the creation of value while addressing the bigger issues which face the future of our business, our planet and our societies.
I see that as a sort of a new economy opportunity. I think an example of this is our Spar Rural Hub business which is featured on pages 67 to 69 of our 2024 Sustainability Report. Maybe if I can just spend a little bit of time on that and why I believe it’s a good example of this, is that when we started the rural hub business, we started on the back of funding that we received from the Dutch government. This was match-funding whereby the Dutch government provided an amount of money and then Spar effectively matched that. That match funding model took us down a road which actually concerned me at the start. That road was we were getting funding from an organisation that felt – I’m probably being a little bit controversial here, felt sorry for the plight of farmers in Africa. And I understand that. Whereas we were looking at it on the basis of how do we develop more scaled farmers who have not had access to formal retail in a sustainable way so they can become sustainable businesses themselves. It’s not a handout.
The Finance Ghost: Yeah, the “G” in ESG is not supposed to stand for guilt and I think there’s a lot of that style of thinking in these European impact organisations. Honestly, historically it’s easy to understand why, right? The G stands for guilt half the time. It really does, without a doubt.
Kevin O’Brien: And I think, again, a bit controversially, CSI thinking in my opinion is guilt money of the rich for the poor. I honestly believe we need to be moving to thinking around socio-economic development to actually address the issues which the guilt money gets paid out for, thereby not needing to pay it out anymore. The uniqueness of this model I think shows our attempt to try and create a business which was based on premises that were a little bit different. For instance, the business focus is to develop farmers to be able to bring them into formal retail and therefore obviously the integration of those and the inclusion of those farmers into this process.
A couple of unique things we do is with the farmers is obviously we provide a lot of the technical services to the farmers. We also have agreements with the farmers where they supply us with their product. Now what we do which is different to normal things is we guarantee a price to the farmer thereby actually saying, Mr. Farmer, with you we are developing crops that we believe are of sufficient value to warrant going into our Spar Freshline business and that’s the price we would get. Now, what that then does is puts the pressure on us, our pack house facility, to in fact find a market that can give that price.
Here’s the other interesting thing, is that the market currently is not only Spar. Our farmers sell to our competitors, our product goes there. Because to me, if you’re going to develop a farmer on the back of an exclusive arrangement with you and you fail, the farmer fails. That’s not development.
Those are quite key aspects. One of the other key aspects is that the relationship between the technical teams on the ground with the farmers is not just creating financial independence, but actually also independence of thought. That’s a really key aspect because again, financial independence created on the back of somebody who you always rely on is not true independence. This model, through which we believe – and in the last two years, every one of the farmers has made a profit – within small scale farming on two to three hectares, is quite unique. The pack house which we own and we operate, yes, we do fund the losses made in that pack house, but they have become less and less as we’ve become more efficient in the operation.
One last really important part of this business is that the rules that we’ve applied as a food retailer to our other suppliers, big or small, with regard to food safety, have been applied to these farmers. They are all GlobalG.A.P. certified. Our little pack house facility in the Mopani district is GFSI Intermediate certified. These are some key aspects of developing a model which may well be able to be scaled in a way that reflects the new economy that I spoke about, the creation of value within the system and not just value for ourselves. I could go on quite a while with that, but I know we don’t have the time.
The Finance Ghost: No, it’s a passion point which is good and it’s an interesting point because it really reflects a lot of stuff. One thing I’ll say is this concept of the farmers needing to be able to sell to anyone is actually so embedded in Spar’s model because the reality is that your franchisees can actually buy – as I understand the model – they can actually buy from whoever they want. Obviously, buying from Spar head office is the easiest, but all of them procure from elsewhere as well, is my understanding. So you’ve got a scenario here where Spar needs to go and develop suppliers who can then adequately compete. And yes, the pack house is maybe making that so by making sure that the farmers are sustainable and Spar is carrying some losses, but it does have some startup elements to it and most startups do have losses in the beginning as a platform is built out.
I would imagine, and you don’t need to go into detail on it if you don’t want to, that the typical government incentives also apply here. The way this maybe translates into B-BBEE scores and supplier development spending and all of that, there are some very creative ways to actually structure it so that you’re doing sustainable stuff and you’re bringing the cost down for the corporate by using the tools that are there, using the incentives that are there. I’m sure that you guys are doing that as well.
Kevin O’Brien: Without a doubt. I think this is the creative thinking that we need in business to address issues that are really big in our society that we can’t just rely on government to sort out. Because at the end of the day, the sorting out of these issues is to all of our benefit in one way or the other. That’s why collaborative innovation to me is really key in a lot of these areas.
The Finance Ghost: That’s the power of tax, right? That’s the power of regulations. The interesting side of tax is how governments use it to drive outcomes. They incentivise very specific behaviours and B-BBEE is not completely unique in the global context, but it’s kind of unique. It’s not a tax, but in some ways, it almost behaves that way a little bit and then it kind of doesn’t. It’s a very interesting regulatory regime in general. It’s there to drive behaviour and it’s there to drive a specific outcome that government has decided is something that we should do. And it’s silly not to take advantage of these things to the greatest extent possible and then do it in a way that actually creates a better business over time. It sounds like that’s what you’re doing with this whole project, which I think is fantastic.
It talks to that new way of doing business, as you said, which is value creation, not extraction. I think people are just more and more aware of how scarce resources are. How often have you – well, I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but I’ve often heard people reference The Simpsons where you have a look at it and Homer Simpson could fall asleep in his day job at the facility there but he was still managing to support a family, car in the garage and a few kids and everything else. That very old-school American dream. You can’t do that anymore on one salary. It’s just not possible.
People always say, oh, why is this? The cost of living and everything’s so expensive and inflation and property – it’s because there are a lot of humans trying to be in similar places at the same time, competing for scarce resources. That’s certainly my view on it. If you don’t recognise how scarce these resources are, this problem only gets worse. It definitely doesn’t get better over time. There are way more people now than there were 50 years ago. That’s what’s driving this thinking.
Kevin O’Brien: Correct. Absolutely right.
The Finance Ghost: Do you think listed companies take it seriously enough? You pointed out to me when we started chatting before the podcast that there are only two board committees that are a statutory requirement. When you mentioned that to me, it obviously jogged my memory a bit about when I studied the Companies Act, which was now some years ago! That’s the Social and Ethics Committee and the Audit Committee – and the Audit Committee, I think that gets a lot of attention and you would never dream of having someone in charge of that who isn’t necessarily very experienced in that space. But does the Social and Ethics Committee actually get the same level of attention? Does it carry the same weight at board level? Do you think that it should?
Kevin O’Brien: It’s quite a passion of mine. I think often, like you said, we all studied a while ago, and sometimes the nuances and the little things as time evolves we don’t go back to first base in a way to just try and establish where we came from. Mervyn King has commented on the belief of many people, and this belief is that shareholders own the company. They don’t own the company, they own shares in the company. As you know, a company is a juristic person like you and I. If shareholders own the company, it would be tantamount to slavery. A company cannot think for itself. The board has a duty of care to ensure that the company delivers on its purpose, whatever their purpose might be.
You can draw similarity between the duty of care that effectively that you and I would have, if we had to, I suppose, sign a power of attorney over a loved one who was incapacitated, not able to make decisions for themselves. That’s the type of duty of care that the board needs to exercise and needs to exercise it in such a way that the company acts in the best interest of all its stakeholders, which would be inclusive of the environment and society.
Companies and boards should take this seriously. And as you mentioned, the board members who are members of the Social and Ethics Committee of companies need to take the accountability of the company’s performance in sustainability areas as importantly as they do the company’s financial performance. I don’t necessarily believe that companies and boards or even shareholders take this as seriously as they do the financial performance of the company. They however should, because the board, Audit Committee, as you said, and the Social and Ethics Committee are the only three statutory committees in a company. These committees should, in my opinion, all have equal weight.
As a sustainability professional – and this is aligned to what you’ve said – I don’t think the board would appoint me as a head of an Audit Committee as I’m not a CA(SA). I don’t have that background. Likewise, a board member who’s not a professional in issues relating to social and ethical matters or sustainability matters shouldn’t chair the Social and Ethics Committee. That’s my opinion, because then you aren’t taking these as seriously as they should be. They are statutory committees.
The Finance Ghost: I would imagine there’s quite a skills gap. I am a CA(SA) and I wouldn’t appoint me to an Audit Committee because I’ve never audited anything in my life. I did my articles in banking. I’m the last person you should appoint to an Audit Committee because I’ll probably be focused on all the wrong stuff. I’m guessing there is quite a skills gap out there in terms of professionals for this. I guess the other part of that problem is that especially for smaller listed companies who, let’s call a spade a spade, have been dealing with a really tough economic situation in South Africa for a decade now or more. They are watching where they spend every cent and to invest in a sustainability professional is a number. Yes, they might see the long-term benefit in their business, but when you are dealing with a really tough economic situation and we’ve had some bad times in South Africa, you’ve got to ask yourself: do you spend the money on that sustainability professional and hope that it helps you 10 years from now or do you go and spend the money on a new sales exec? You can see where I’m going with this – it becomes that short-term survival thinking versus long-term sustainability. I guess that has had an impact?
Kevin O’Brien: Without a doubt. I think that what we find from a sustainability thinking point of view is that and what we need to be careful of, and I’ve almost got to now stand on my own toes here, is that sustainability thinking needs to be embedded into a business’ way of doing business differently. It becomes part of what you do as opposed to being something that is separate. I think that from a sustainability point of view, the skill around sustainability needs to be something that is understood by all senior people. It becomes just a way of going about things as opposed to seen as something separate.
Within my company here, it’s taken a while where if you want to say, well, how are we going to reduce our carbon emissions, go and speak to Kevin. I don’t run the operations. I’m not a logistics person. Accountability for these things need to be held in organisations where the operations are taking place. Sustainability people, in my opinion almost should become thought leaders in the sense that they provide the thinking and then facilitate the operationalisation, if there’s such a word, of that thinking within the business. Therefore, the business goes about things in a different way. That’s the ideal. I hear what you’re saying about obviously not being able to have the resources to employ a particular professional in that sense and I do understand it, which is why I think that a lot of what we as big business can do for smaller SMEs and smaller businesses is to provide some leadership and training within smaller SMEs like we are doing say with our farmers around developing and growing crops. How are we able to try and assist? If we truly do buy into this idea that sustainability is important for the future, how are we able to address this in a broader way given the constraints?
Skills are critically important and business skills change all the time. As you say, you’re a CA(SA), but doesn’t mean you say you can run the Audit Committee and that’s right. I might be a sustainability professional, but I might not be the right person to run a Social and Ethics Committee. They are skills which need to be developed, again if we take all of this seriously.
The Finance Ghost: A piece of that skill set almost needs to be sitting in all of the execs, right? The people running supply chain don’t need to know anything about financial reporting standards. They really don’t. They don’t need to know anything about IFRS. That is really the CFO’s role. I think what I’m hearing from you is if you’re going to operationalise this thing – it can’t be an easy job because you run the risk of being “oh, what does Kevin do up there in his ivory tower? We’re doing it all for him. We’re managing the emissions, he just does an interview and puts it in a report.” The more you push down and the more you do your job, the less it looks like you’re doing your job. It’s not easy. I don’t envy you.
Kevin O’Brien: No. And you touch on a really important point there. As the environment around reporting becomes more mandatory, particularly sustainability reporting, one of the challenges for a sustainability professional, I think, is that you don’t just become a gatherer of data and reporting. You need to be able to use that information to innovate because it’s in the innovation that you can start addressing the issues around sustainability and the challenges of sustainable thinking. So that’s key, is that you don’t end up becoming a reporting person and therefore tick a box. You actually continually drive change within a business to achieve the objectives of sustainable thinking.
The Finance Ghost: I’ll tell you what, let’s talk about reporting. Because of course that’s the basis really of the podcast, is we get to talk about some of the reporting outside of financial stuff. But I’m very happy to have spent this 30 minutes or so with you just setting the scene because we really needed to understand that sustainability is not just the report, it’s the other way around. The report is sustainability. The report is trying to say, hey, what have we been doing? If you’re not doing anything, the report doesn’t fix that problem. You can’t just throw some pretty graphics on a page and some feel good pictures and some “guilt” stuff and be like, hey, look, sustainability! You’ve really got to bake it in. I would like to spend a few minutes definitely on the report and then we can just send people to go and check it out, those who are interested.
It’s been a big shift for you, your 2024 sustainability report, as I understand it, because the previous year was called an ESG report. I’m sure you’re happy to have that behind you. I think let’s just talk – I’ll actually just open the floor to you for a few minutes to maybe just walk us through what makes this report interesting and special and different. Why should someone go and read it? What is it about this report that captures everything we’ve talked about?
Kevin O’Brien: Thanks very much for that. I think as I mentioned earlier, ESG is really a compliance matter. I think last year, we’d come through as an organization with this whole ESG thinking and we jumped onto it, including me. But I very soon realised that it is quite a compliance driven issue. Sustainability, as I’ve mentioned, is more about creating value while addressing the big issues posed by climate change and societal dysfunction and poor ethics. So again, I want to just reference Mervyn King where he considers that this thing between ESG and sustainability is a tussle between conformance and performance.
Now for me, sustainability is about performance. So, fundamental to sustainability thinking is collaboration and the big issues that challenge the world, many of which are non-competitive actually, should be tackled collaboratively to ensure greater impact. I think that goes without saying.
Business needs to understand and identify the value creation opportunities in this collaboration to address issues like climate change and societal inequalities. It’s for that reason that we chose collaboration as a theme for our 2024 sustainability report. It’s the importance of you can have the measurements, you can have the reporting, but the reality is to actually achieve what you say you want to achieve. You want to achieve net zero. If you want to make an impact around issues with regard to poverty, you want to deal with issues with regard to gender based violence, which is part of the work that we also do, you are not big enough, you can’t be arrogant to think that as a brand you’re big enough to be able to make that difference. You actually need to work together because everything’s part of a system and this involves a system change. And you can’t change the system on your own because if you’re in the system as yourself, all you want to do going back to the extraction and creation of value, is you extract value out of that part of the system that you play. You don’t create value to improve the system.
This collaboration theme for me is really important and what we tried to do in the report was, obviously going down the CSRD route, that’s clear from the report, but we’re not in a position to be able to provide a fully-fledged CSRD…
The Finance Ghost: …for those who maybe don’t know what that is, because I think we have to assume not everyone listening is actually au fait with that term. What does that stand for?
Kevin O’Brien: CSRD is really a European reporting standard for sustainability. One of the questions would be why did we choose CSRD since we’re a South African company? Is it simply because at the end of the day we’ve got two international subsidiaries that would need to comply with CSRD? Again, I think that the CSRD was really more about – the process of that reporting platform is about double materiality. That’s a really important issue for me anyway, that I drove to try and ensure that we followed, because it measures our impact on the environment and on society and the financial impact and similarly the environment and society’s impact on us.
Also, the data points within that reporting framework are data points which are very broad. If we in South Africa ended up having a mandatory reporting framework which was not CSRD, it was our own, the chances are pretty good that the data points would be similar. So one of the challenges we have this year is to actually find a system we are able to manage all of this data within and thereby draw reports, depending on which report we actually want. Those were some of the reasons why we chose to early adopt the thinking around the European framework.
It was incredibly interesting because the start of that is a materiality assessment. What we had to do was we surveyed and made contact with a wide variety of our stakeholders, from suppliers to our retailers to the community to government to the shareholders and asked them to answer a survey related to their opinion of what issues impacted Spar the most. A very interesting exercise for a number of reasons. Not an exercise which I would lay 100% belief in, because it was interesting that many of the organisations we approached were quite reticent in answering the survey because nobody’s ever really done this before, but the outcome of it has been very, very interesting.
The material issues which face our organisation now provide us with some focus within which to start addressing these issues and obviously identifying the risks and opportunities related to addressing these issues. This process, through the CSRD, I think was very powerful for us as a business to once again, I think, provide another reason why sustainability is critical to be part of the business going forward. I think a lot of evidence for this was provided in this assessment that we did.
The Finance Ghost: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And that’s why these reports are interesting, right, even if you are not really an environmental enthusiast or you’re not really someone who would typically go and read this stuff, if you’re just an investor who is looking for long-term positions in companies, then you need to understand how they are addressing these core risks. That is key.
So, Kevin, if we were stuck in a lift together – we would probably be doing the stairs together because you do strike me as a man who takes the stairs – but let’s say we had to do 10 floors and we were in a lift together and you had a minute to tell me why I should read your sustainability report from 2024. Why do you think I should read it? Why would you like people to read it?
Kevin O’Brien: Great. I like this. I believe that the report is a transparent, readable record of what Spar has achieved and what it stands for and what it should be held accountable for by its stakeholders in the area around sustainability and the work that we do there.
In that report, given the board statement on page three of the report, which includes its commitment to being accountable for what is in the report, I’d encourage stakeholders to read the report, interact with the company on the contents of the report, and also encourage stakeholders to consider collaborative opportunities that are contained in the report, thereby creating a sustainable future for business, society and our planet.
The Finance Ghost: Fantastic. Speaking of reaching out and contacting you about this stuff, I’m guessing LinkedIn, those who would like to connect with you, unless you post exotic and controversial things on X, in which case you might be on there like I am, but I’m guessing you’re on LinkedIn. Would that be your preferred place?
Kevin O’Brien: I am.
The Finance Ghost: There we go. Look for Kevin O’Brien on LinkedIn.
Kevin O’Brien: Great. And I think like you. I must stay off X as well, or I might find myself maybe not being ever allowed in certain places.
The Finance Ghost: Look, X is my jam. But yeah, I’m not, I’m not in corporate. I do get to say what I want, which is kind of helpful!
Kevin, thank you so much for your time today and for just lifting the lid on the kind of sustainability thinking that is needed in corporates and also just how that filters through into the report. I’ll include a link to the report in the transcript and in the show notes and I encourage listeners to go have a look. You don’t need to read the thing cover to cover and put hours aside. Just go flick through it, find something that piques your interest. Go and read it in a bit more detail. Go and check out the Spar rural hub. You’ll learn something, something will stick and it’ll help you the next time you look at one of these reports or when you read a risk that a company is facing somewhere.
You can never waste your time by reading. I think that’s part of what we really want to get across here is just go and open your mind with stuff you maybe haven’t read before. I think it’s a worthwhile exercise.
Kevin, thank you so much. Good luck for the start of 2025. I’m sure it’ll be a busy year for you guys. As I disclosed earlier, I am a shareholder. So go and create some shareholder value, asseblief! Otherwise, all the best and thank you for doing this.
Kevin O’Brien: Well, thank you so much as well, Mr. Ghost. I’ve really appreciated the opportunity to chat and really enjoyed it, so thank you.
The Finance Ghost: Ciao.
