Software entrepreneur Donal Daly is doing his bit to save the planet with a new ‘buy better’ sustainability platform, writes Nick Mulcahy
Donal Daly has been making waves in business for more than three decades. Twenty-one years ago, Daly featured on the cover of Business Plus in relation to a startup called New World Commerce, which he sold shortly after the article was published. The October 2020 magazine cover reflected the dot-com mania at the time, and though that bubble burst Daly went on to leverage the internet to make a sizeable personal fortune.
The Cork entrepreneur doesn’t need to make more money, and Daly says that’s not his objective. But he probably will anyway with his new venture, Future Planet. In the coming decades, the net-zero carbon emissions agenda looks like it’s here to stay, at least until an energy crunch turns out the lights. For many large businesses, and some SMEs, taking the issue seriously has become a commercial imperative, in terms of supply chain partnerships, and sourcing investment, finance and state aids.
Future Planet is billed as a transformation platform that enables businesses to map and deliver their sustainability ambitions, and what they have to do to get there. Prospective users can glean an idea of what Future Planet is about by accessing the company’s app for individuals, Personal Carbon Footprint.
This app consists of questions relating the user’s household energy and food consumption, transport modes, consumer purchases, travel behaviour, and more. After taking the survey, the app estimates your annual CO2 emissions and benchmarks the results.
In Association with
Expect an app test result that reads: “We think your emissions are too high. You are above average and considerably above where we all need to be. Climate change can be overwhelming, but you can start to take the right steps. While real solutions will require action on a global scale, there are choices you can make in your day-to-day life to lessens your personal impact on the environment.”
Tap on the app for the various categories, and fairly simplistic recommendations appear, such as change your household lighting to LEDs and improve your home insulation.
The Future Planet service for business is built around the same principles, though it’s more sophisticated. There’s an in-depth questionnaire for companies to complete, which results in an emissions snapshot. Customers are then presented with target outcomes and an actionable plan.
According to Daly: “Using a sustainability consultancy takes on average six weeks for in-depth analysis. Future Planet will reduce this to less than a day. The challenge for many enterprises is that they view the measuring and reporting of action as costly and complicated. Our mission is to be part of the solution, making it easier for companies to build a clear roadmap that will help them define and achieve their sustainability goals in line with scientific evidence.”
Altify Exit
Daly made his fortune in October 2019 when his previous venture Altify was acquired by Upland Software for $84m. Nasdaq-quoted Upland, based in Texas, has a strategy of acquiring online services with strong annual recurring revenues, which in Altify’s case amount to c.$24m per annum.
Altify’s specialty is a customer revenue optimisation (CRO) cloud solution for sales and the extended revenue teams. Built natively on Salesforce, Altify’s CRO product automates the selling process, defining a set of actions for sales reps and managers to win deals and grow accounts, maximise revenue for new business, up-sell, cross-sell, and manage renewals.
The origin of the Altify venture was the purchase of sales management software called OnTarget in August 2005. Orcale inherited OnTarget after buying Siebel, and decided that the business was surplus to requirements.
At the time, Donal Daly was working out of an office in Mespil Road in D4 in Select Selling, a small SME. Daly had done some work for the Enright family in logistics company Walsh Western. With their funding and capital provided by Trinity Venture Capital, Daly sourced the $10.5m required to acquire OnTarget.
From the off, the Target Account Selling Group Ltd incurred heavy losses, booking a loss of $5.4m on sales of $12.9m in 2007. In 2018, the year before the sale to Upland Software, the company, renamed as Altify Ireland Ltd, booked a loss of $2.7m on turnover of $23.8m. Capital invested by shareholders in January 2019 stood at $24.5m, and accumulated losses were $32.3m.
The profit and loss account tells only one part of a business story. “In a software as a service business with recurring revenue, it’s all about cashflow,” Daly explains. “The important thing about a SaaS business is to maintain growth. My objective in Altify was always to be cashflow break-even. We didn’t have to make a profit, but we couldn’t run out of cash.
“People used to ask me whether I had an exit strategy. I'd tell them I don’t, but I have a value creation strategy. When you create value, an exit will happen.”
When Daly, now 62, checked out of Altify in October 2019, he grossed around €10m. After building up the venture from its 2005 startup to annual sales of €21m, Daly had stepped back from day-to-day operations a few years previously, assuming the chairman role. He happily admits that his legacy carbon footprint isn’t impressive, as he spent much of his career criss-crossing the Atlantic on business trips.
One day, Daly recalls, his teenage son asked whether he should be worried about his future. What do you mean, son? Well dad, you know, how global warming is going to destroy the planet, the young lad replied.
“Being the geek that I still am, I started to research global warming, the IPPC reports and all that kind of stuff,” says Daly. “It quickly became clear to me that it’s hard for people to interpret the science, and to know what to do. In order to prompt behaviour change, it’s important to help people to understand what they should be doing. This wasn’t my intention a few years ago, but someone has to do it.”
Buying Better
The nexus of the Future Planet approach is the supply chain for business and personal consumption. “The simple answer to the climate change problem would be everybody to stop consuming,” Daly observes. “That's not practical, so how can business consume less? The answer is to buy better. If we can help people understand that buying better is the path to a fewer emissions, then they are more likely to put in place structured better practices.”
This small steps approach is also reflected in a Future Planet Twitter page called CarbonWatchIreland. The page monitors Eirgrid for peak daily electricity demand, and showcases the daily split for fossil fuel and renewables power generation. The idea is to prompt followers to reduce their power usage at times of peak load i.e. using the dishwasher at 9pm instead of 6pm is less damaging in terms of carbon emissions.
Daly’s partner in Future Planet is Ingrid De Doncker, a supply chain expert. Her input has informed the automated Q&A process that delivers the sustainability analysis, and the recommended onward path. What comes out depends on what goes in, and Future Planet addresses 30 different sustainability issues affecting business.
According to Daly: “Our platform will ask between 20 and 40 questions on an issue, and we know the possible answers that you could give. We also know the consequences of those answers. It's classic survey assessment with a score, but what it also does is recommend what you should do about it. If you choose a certain course, we indicate the sustainable development goals that you’re going to affect, or ratings agency metrics. The data is there too for all the work that you have to do from a compliance perspective.”
Subscription Model
Future Planet launched formally in October 2021 after 18 months of development work. There is a team of six people developing the knowledge base and the technology. The subscription fee is €1,500 per month and there are additional charges for each sustainability ‘journey’, such as low carbon procurement, circular economy, energy management systems etc. The target market is corporates with an annual spend of €100m and over on goods, services and people.
“I would love people to turn us off because they're done, but I don't think that's ever going to happen,” says Daly. “All these carbon emission issues centre on multi-year targets, and the goal is to see if we can help move the needle. I’m reaching out to the large corporates I used to deal with in Altify, and initially we only expect a small number of customers. I could end up partnering with somebody in order to scale Future Planet.”
Daly adds that he’s working as hard as he ever did, driven by the same sense of urgency that inspired the thousands of street protestors at COP26.
“Global warming is a problem we have to solve. In the sales methodology sense, you'd ask where’s your burning platform to make something happen? Unfortunately, the burning platform is all around us,” says Daly.
“I mean, look at all the news reports about fires and floods in July — the most depressing thing ever, right? But I think it's fixable, I think it's an optimistic story. I think people can do what they need to do, and I have fundamental faith in the goodness of humanity. But people don't know what to do, so I'm going to see if I can help them to it.
“Even those people who have tweeted me to say they turned on their dishwasher at 10.30pm last night, that's a good thing. I'm trying to scale that. I have no pride of ownership or authorship any of this stuff, I really don't. I'd rather be golfing.”
Photo: Future Planet founders Donal Daly and Ingrid De Doncker. (Pic: Michael O'Sullivan /OSM)
