Turn what you already know into a sustainability consultancy companies actually pay for

The uncomfortable truth

Sustainability jobs are being cut. Sustainability consultants are being hired.

You've seen it. ESG teams deprioritised, standalone sustainability roles first on the redundancy list, and a political climate that makes the whole field feel like a dead end.

Here's what the headlines miss: companies are still buying sustainability, quietly, because their clients demand it. A New York events agency came to us for ISO 20121 certification, not out of values, but commercial survival. Their clients require it.

The people winning that work are not "sustainability professionals". They are professionals who layered sustainability on top of a skill companies already pay for. When you're the strategist, the facilitator, the operator who also carries the green expertise, you're not the line item that gets cut. You're the differentiator.

That layering is the whole method. It's why it's called the Green Entrepreneur Method, not the sustainability course.

Sound familiar?

You're not short on knowledge. You're short on structure.

Every person who joins GEM arrives with expertise, a career, often a degree or an MBA, and a genuine pull toward this work. And almost all of them say a version of the same things on our first call:

• "I sit in meetings thinking none of this actually matters."
• "I know my stuff, but I have no idea how to package it into something a company would pay for."
• "I need someone to remove the administrivia and give me structure."
• "The stress is showing up at home. I can't keep pouring from an empty cup."
• "What do I even charge? Day rate? Hourly? Per project? Everyone says they undercharged for years."
• "There's so much admin: agreements, proposals, documentation. If you want to make money, you need to sell, and the paperwork keeps eating that time."
• "Do I build the thing now, or do I get comfortable and let another year pass?"

If you nodded at two or more of those, keep reading. The rest of this page answers, honestly, the exact questions people ask us before they join.

The outcome

What you walk away with after six weeks

• One fully designed signature workshop, priced and ready to sell for €3,000 to €10,000.
• Your first corporate opportunity in motion, a real conversation with a real prospect from your own network, started before the programme ends.
• Your niche, named. The specific entry-point problem you solve, for a specific kind of client.
• The Consultant's Playbook: draft client agreements and SOWs, proposal templates, a discovery call script, client email templates, end-of-project feedback surveys and a pricing ladder, so you never build from a blank page.
• Facilitation skills that survive AI. Rooms, decisions and people. The part of consulting that doesn't get automated.

One workshop sold pays the programme back. That's the maths the whole thing is built on.

The method

Three pillars, six weeks

1. Find your niche. Through sustainability frameworks in the food system and climate change, you pin down the specific problem you solve and who pays for it. Knowledge isn't the product. Applied knowledge is.
2. The Sustainability Sprint method. The delivery mechanism we use with corporate clients: silent-first, time-boxed, every voice equal, ending in decisions rather than discussion. This is where your signature workshop gets designed and rehearsed.
3. Business systems. Niche, offer, price, first client. The Consultant's Playbook does the paperwork (agreements, proposals, client emails, surveys), the pitch gets written, and the first conversation booked.

You work with me directly. I'm in the trenches with you for six weeks.

This is not a course where I hand you videos and say good luck.

• Weekly one-to-ones with Heidi. You bring questions from the content, we answer them live, on your actual business.
• Live delivery practice. You run a 15-minute slot, we watch, and you get honest feedback on what worked.
• A private community channel for the in-between moments.
• The week-six strategy call, where it all ties together: your niche, your workshop, your first pitch, in front of me, finished.

The First Client Ladder

Nobody's first client is a stranger. That's not a hack, it's how this actually works, so we built it into Pillar 3 as a ladder you climb one rung at a time:

1. Practice on a warm room, free. Your team, a co-working space, a conference slot. Practice is what removes the fear.
2. A founding client who already trusts you. A former employer or someone in your network, at a founding rate, in exchange for a testimonial. You leave GEM with this rung already in motion.
3. Referrals and that testimonial carry you to strangers. By then you're not pitching cold. You're showing receipts.

What the ladder looks like when someone climbs it

Because a good workshop always creates its own next project

You run a strategy sprint. The client leaves with a ten-point plan. Who executes the plan? That's the next engagement. Then the six-month check-in. You're never selling workshops. You're selling a transformation, and transformation has stages.

Don't take our word that companies pay for these rooms

This is the method you're learning. Same sprints, same structure, taught to you.

Honestly? Five hours a week. Here's how people fit it in.

We won't pretend it's less, because the people who trust us most are the ones we're straight with. Five hours a week, minimum, for six weeks.

But it doesn't have to be at a laptop. Students listen to the content walking the dog. One hour each morning before the house wakes up, or a weekend deep dive, whatever fits your life. We plan your calendar together before you start.

And the six weeks exist because you're busy. Every student who ever went open-ended is still "in progress". A deadline is not the pressure, it's the finish line: on a specific date, you show me a finished workshop. The content stays yours for life.

Who's teaching this

I built this from a kitchen table, with no list, no followers, and a rejected CV

I'm Heidi Spurrell, founder of Future Green, a B Corp certified sustainability consultancy working with some of the biggest property, retail and events names in Asia and Europe.

It didn't start that way. It started with a stay-at-home mum whose CV kept getting rejected, who feared she'd never have an identity beyond mum and wife. I had the sustainability knowledge. What changed everything was learning to facilitate, and layering my expertise on top of it. My first sprint sold for almost nothing. Recent ones have sold for €25,000.

Seven years on, this is where that kitchen table stands:

Built in rooms paid for by names you'll recognise:

Every name above is a written-up project, not a borrowed logo: read the case studies.

GEM is the method I wish someone had handed me in year one.

If you only remember one thing: I am not special. I had a structure. That's what you're buying.

There are a few hundred more where those came from: read the full wall of love.

The price, and exactly what it buys

It's €2,500. We'd rather tell you here than dance around it.

For scale: I've spent £65,000 on my own professional development over the last six years. The courses, the coaches, the certifications, the wrong turns. GEM is that, compressed into six weeks, minus the wrong turns, for a fraction of what it cost me. This is what your €2,500 buys:

And the honest frame on the number: the goal of the six weeks is one workshop you charge €3,000 to €10,000 for. One project pays this back. So the real question isn't the €2,500. It's whether you believe you'll have that workshop ready. That part is my job.

If you're not successful, it isn't successful for me either. My business runs on testimonials.

Why now, honestly

Try the five-year picture

No countdown timers here. Just a quick thought experiment.

Fast forward five years, and nothing changed. The same meetings that don't seem to matter. The same expertise, still unpackaged, still unpaid for. The same "one day I'll do something with this", except it's five years older now, and so are you. Sit with that picture for a second. Whatever you just felt reading it, that feeling is the honest answer to "is now the right time?"

Now the other picture. Five years from now you're the consultant with a niche that's unmistakably yours, clients who rebook you year after year, and a workshop you've run so many times it feels like home. The people in that picture aren't smarter than you. They just started, and the whole thing began with six weeks.

So the question isn't really whether to do it. It's which of those two pictures you're building towards, because you're building towards one of them either way. (GEM graduates also get first access to our in-person practice retreats in Portugal, where you run the signature Sustainability Sprint workshop you built for a room of peers before your first client ever sees it.)

Waiting doesn't create clarity. It just delays building it.

The questions people actually ask

Straight answers