Achieving Sustainability-Driven Growth with John Mennel of Deloitte

July 29, 2025

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John Mennel is a Managing Director and leader in Deloitte’s U.S. Sustainability practice, specializing in guiding Fortune 500 companies through their decarbonization journeys. With over a decade of experience in sustainability, he focuses on strategies such as renewable power purchasing and sustainability-driven growth and innovation. John is also responsible for overseeing digital assets and data initiatives within Deloitte’s U.S. Sustainability practice and led the Responsible Enterprise strategy for Deloitte’s CEO, including the establishment of Deloitte’s Net Zero goal. Drawing on his extensive experience designing sustainability-led transformations across various industries, John is well-positioned to provide insights on the sustainable solutions that should be top of mind for business leaders in the years to come.

John Shegerian: Get the latest Impact Podcast right into your inbox each week. Subscribe by entering your email address @impactpodcast.com to make sure you never miss an interview. This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com. This episode of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Closed Loop Partners. Closed Loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in the United States with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts and impact partners. Closed Loop’s platform spans the arc of capital from venture capital to private equity, bridging gaps and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. To find Closed Loop Partners, please go to www.closelooppartners.com.

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John Shegerian: Welcome to another edition of The Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian and I’m so excited to have back with us today. John Mennel. He’s the managing director of Data and Assets Leader and the head of Deloitte Sustainability. Welcome back to the show, John.

John Mennel: Hey, John. Thanks, sir. Thanks for having me back.

John Shegerian: Thrilled to have your back. Deloitte is such a big and important iconic brand around the world, so when your team and your colleagues around the world say something or do something, it really moves the needle. So it’s great to have you back as a sustainability leader. Before we get going in all the impactful things you and your colleagues are doing at Deloitte and sustainability, I want you to share a little bit about your backstory. For those listeners who didn’t hear it a couple of years ago when you’re on the show, where did you grow up and how’d you get on this journey that’s so important?

John Mennel: Yeah, there’s probably a long version of that and a short version of that, so I’ll try to air on the short side, but I grew up in Dallas. After college, I was really interested in working overseas and my first job out of college was with Deloitte in Moscow, right during the Paris period, the privatization period, as you probably remember. So it was super interesting time and on that stand, I was there promised five years. There was a period later in my career where I did another international stint in the Middle East and eastern Europe and Africa. The way that I got into this work was really when you work in those kinds of environments, you see that large international companies can be a real force for good in the economy. They can provide jobs and prosperity and raise their business environment, or they can be a terrible influence and really not operate very responsibly in those kinds of economies. Usually, when it’s the latter, when it’s the bad case, the companies aren’t doing it on purpose, it’s just they haven’t thought through it or they don’t have the expertise on how to operate in an environment like that. So I started working with companies a long time ago on what at that point we were calling purpose and social responsibility and really how can companies be a force for good, where they’re working, whether it’s in emerging markets or whether it’s in their home markets. I started doing a lot of work for C-Suites basically on those issues, on purpose of the company, social responsibility of the company. It was in about 2015, so almost a decade ago, that I really started reading all of the literature on climate change and sustainability and said, yeah, this is really the issue that I want to focus on. So a few years after that, I started mostly focusing on decarbonization and sustainability. Over the course of my career, I’ve done a bunch of other stuff. So I spent time in the tech industry and with a venture firm. I’ve been a strategy partner at Deloitte for a long time. So I do all of the things that we do in strategy, helping companies think about how to grow and think about innovation and their customers. One of the perspectives that I try to bring to sustainability is really the linkage with all that. So how can sustainability be good for the business? How can it help you grow? How can it help you get closer to customers? That’s as Deloitte, that’s a lot of the perspective we try to bring to the practice.

John Shegerian: What’s changed since we spoke class in sustainability?

John Mennel: A lot.

John Shegerian: Everything?

John Mennel: Yeah. There’s been a lot of change. If there’s one key message, and I think we probably talked about this last time, is that the sustainability and in particular the energy transition, so renewable power, energy efficiency, efficiency in manufacturing practices, sustainability related products, those are all good for the business and if anything, over the past couple of years, the business case has gotten better that solar, just as an example, is having in price about every two years. So, the business case to use these kinds of technologies and think about how to take carbon out of the company is for many reasons, just a good investment.

John Shegerian: How about though, we have the rise of this alphabet soup of acronyms from ESG and DEI, and there’s a lot of acronyms out there, that trend has seemed to have eroded somewhat and maybe for the better because those terms all became very politicized and weaponized, which then becomes a net negative instead of being the positive that they should be. Has then the trend been, let’s just talk about what we’re really trying to do in terms of reduced carbon emissions and the shift from the circular economy, circular society instead of a linear society. Is that really where then we are leaning in and we’re focusing on more than getting caught up in the webinars and politicized acronyms that it’s just a waste of time arguing about?

John Mennel: Yeah, I think so. At the end of the day, my clients are doing things that make sense with a company. I will say it’s interesting because ESG investing, we started seeing outflows from ESG funds in about 2022. The reason for that is not that I don’t think companies were bought in, investors in particular were bought into the importance of bringing in other kinds of data to investment decisions. It really started because people decided that it was just a buzzword and that there wasn’t enough action. So what we’ve seen over the last couple of years is I would say on the investing front of flight to quality, that you’re still seeing sustainability investors, you’re still seeing investors trying to bring in environmental data, governance data to really understand the risks and opportunities around the companies they’re focused on and that’s just logical, right? That’s what investors should be doing. They should be getting data to make better investment decisions and to generate alpha for their funders. That’s what we’ve seen companies doing. So that kind of investment is still important for a lot of funds and a lot of bond investors. There’s still a lot of money. Companies are still raising green bonds, but they’re doing it… I would say the more serious investors are still in that market and they’re being really clear about how this kind of data, the environmental social governance data, whatever they call it, makes them better investors, helps them better understand risk, helps them seek opportunities better. It’s just a logical thing. If I was an investor in real estate and I told you I was trying to raise money from you, and I told you that I wasn’t going to think about climate change at all, I wasn’t going to think about extreme weather, you would just think I was a bad investor. So, I think what you’re seeing is sophisticated investors still emphasizing these new sources of data as a way to make better investments.

John Shegerian: John, when I started this podcast about 16 or 17 years ago now, when the word sustainability came up to a C-suite, the CEO or other leaders of the company, all they thought about for the most part was, oh my gosh, how’s this going to cost me money. Disavow me of that attitude and talk a little bit about the evolution that sustainability really, when done correctly, can really create outcomes like more profit, more resiliency, better cybersecurity standards, and all sorts of other great outcomes that you see your clients achieve when they follow the path that you and your colleagues lay out for them.

John Mennel: Yeah, so it’s interesting. What you’re saying, I would say five plus years ago is absolutely right. When I started doing this work, often we’d build out a sustainability strategy for a client, we’d help them think about all of the things they had to do. About 90% of those things lost money on a dollar and cents basis, say 10 years ago. There were still reasons to do them. There were brand reasons, there were risk reasons, there were talent reasons to do them and a lot of times the conversation we’ve had with the client was about those intangible reasons. I can think of a number of skeptical CFOs who would look at the bill and say, okay, I understand the whole business case, and even though there’s a cost from a financial perspective, I understand the reason why we’re doing this. What’s changed really over the past five years is because of, largely because the cost curve that renewable energy is on. Now, 80, 90% of the things in that strategy just make or save money for the company. So it tends to be a much more dollars and cents kind of conversation about the business case for decarbonization. The way that we think about it, Deloitte, many, many years ago and for many years has had something called the enterprise value map where we look at any kind of investment a company would be making, any strategic choice they’d be making in all of the ways that contributes to the financials. We use that as a way to say, when you’re thinking about this investment, how can you improve the returns on that investment? A few years ago, we created a version of that for sustainability called the sustainability value map. So not very innovative name, but basically applied that model to all of the ways that we know that sustainability increases value for the company. There are 50 some levers that we think about when we do that analysis, but it really boils down to three things. It boils down to increasing revenue on the top line, reducing costs, so both cost of goods and other direct costs that are part of the finance of the company. The third thing is it improves cost of capital and it does that through risk or opening up to other kinds of investors. To just say a little bit more about that, on the revenue side, we see a good business case in many industries for the customer loyalty, customer trial and brand impact of sustainability claims on products. So customers will try products and we’ll stay with products more if there’s sustainability claims. I could talk more about some of the specifics of that. Then we also see companies setting up whole new businesses around carbon assets, carbon capture. So just really thinking about energy transition as a major economic development that we’re going to be part of the next 30 years and how do you get relatively early on in creating those businesses of the future? That’s a lot of work we’re doing on that first lever, the revenue lever. On cost of goods or cost in general, their direct costs. We see that a lot of what you do in energy efficiency in using more renewables saves money. There are cheaper sources of power when you take a sustainability lens and you’re looking for how can I save energy and how can I make my processes more efficient? You also just take cost out of the business. Taking carbon out is taking waste out, is taking cost out. So there’s that whole cost lever. Then there are other indirect costs, like for example, the cost of recruiting and retaining staff. There’s very good quantitative data that sustainability benefits reduce your recruiting costs, help you engage high value staff And so that’s on the cost side. Then the third side on cost of capital, it’s what I talked about before with savvy investors, managing the risk of the business and thinking about all the risks associated with climate change of the business, and then also opening yourself up to new kinds of investors. One example, are the green bonds, which typically have a thousand basis points sometime more advantage because you are working with investors to manage inherent risks in the business, and therefore you can raise capital more cheaply. So those three levels, revenue cost, cost of capital is the way that we think about the business case for sustainability.

John Shegerian: That’s what resonates the most when you’re meeting with either existing clients or potential clients.

John Mennel: Absolutely. Yeah.

John Shegerian: It is not a CSO anymore that I interview on this show. They all are in harmony on the issue of attraction and retention. They say it’s absolutely become a great, great tool for attracting great talent to their companies and retaining good… because it gets them very engaged. Really, there’s a new generation now, John, as you and I know of young people that want to really feel like you and I get to feel every day. We get to make a paycheck and pay the bills, and there’s no shame in talking about that, but we also get to make an impact every day or make a difference in what we do and companies dig that. That’s a great part of a culture now for companies that really want to go the distance.

John Mennel: Absolutely, and I was doing some work for a pharma company, and as you can imagine, a big part of the differentiation for any pharma company is the people they recruit and what that means for their R&D pipeline, really highly educated STEM candidates who have a lot of options to choose from. When we started running the numbers on their staff engagement surveys, exit interviews, campus recruiting interviews, it was really clear that just on a dollar and cents basis, that alone kind of justified all of the capital expense for the strategy. We didn’t even have to go look at those other levers, right? The business case was clear enough based on that, and so it tends to be really compelling. There was a Columbia University study, interestingly enough that looked at this, and one of the things that they showed was a very good benefit from sustainability and broader kind of purpose, and what employees would choose to work at that company would choose to accept potentially a lower offer to go work at that company and would stay at the company. The data was really compelling. What they found, it’s really interesting, to be honest, it had never made sense to me that to that many people that would be so important that they would turn down a higher offer to go work for a company that had these attributes. Even though it’s important to me, I didn’t really realize it was important to so many other people. But what the interview has found is a lot of people use the company’s commitment to sustainability as a proxy for how that company is going to treat them. So, the way that the company thinks holistically about their environment and ethics is that’s a really important way to choose who you want as your employer.

John Shegerian: That’s really interesting. Talk a little bit about your day to day though. Compared to five years ago when you took a team and a bunch of colleagues in to go pitch a Fortune 1000 or Fortune 500 company was walking in the issue of we need to really explain this to them and we hope they buy into what we’re telling them because this is science backed and it’s the truth and it’s an either or. They’re either going to buy in and come with us and go on this journey or they’re not. Is it now five years later more that you’re going in, you know, you have a willing listener on the other side of the table and it’s not go or no go anymore? It’s are they going to go with us because I have three other competitors that are coming in and pitching them on a path to sustainability. So I know the brand is going to have to do this, and I know they’re very interested in doing this. And is it now just now you sharpening your pencil in terms of how you promote and show the, as you said, the top three compelling reasons that your potential clients should do this? Is that sort of the evolution, anecdotally speaking of your client base out there that is interested in going on these sustainability journeys?

John Mennel: There’s definitely been a lot of change. What I would say is, and when you talk kind of large companies, the Fortune 500, the Fortune 1000. Five years plus years ago, we were going into a lot of clients who didn’t have a plan, hadn’t set a goal, were still kind of deciding what to do. So a lot of times the initial engagements were, should we have a goal? Should we be public about it? What should that goal be and what will our strategy look like at a high level? If we’re going to cut 50% of our emissions, how are we going to go do that at a really high level? And so just put that plan together and roughly how much is it going to cost us? Right? And sustainability investments are interesting is they generally stave operating expense. So they have a good return on investment, a good net present value if you will, but they often require capital expense upfront. And so it’s operating conversation about how much capital are we going to have to invest and how much of return are we going to have on that? But it was initially at a very high level to help companies put that initial strategy together. Then we went through a period where companies had those high level strategies and they said all of a sudden, oh, we need to do external reporting either for the EU or for states like the state of California, we need to report things and we’re really not sure we have a good enough strategy or good enough data to put out a public report that our CFO signs and investors see. There was a lot of work around getting that data together and really thinking through that reporting strategy. Where we are now is most clients have done a lot of that work, and there are some exceptions, but when you talk about large companies, they have a plan, they’re doing the reporting they’re required to do, they have a strategy to do additional reporting and other jurisdictions that they may be required to do in future. So a lot of that stuff is done and what they’re thinking about now are two things. One is we’ve done all the easy stuff in our strategy. How do we think about harder pieces? So things like manufacturing processes for example, and manufacturing processes that require high heat. How do we move to decarbonize sources of that or how do we think about low carbon steel and cement for construction and what’s the business case with that? So those are some of the hard things or supply chain and what’s called scope three in the industry as how do we deal with all of that? There’s some pieces of the strategy that they maybe haven’t gotten to yet because they’re hard and we’re helping them do those, implement those pieces and really figure out those harder pieces. The other thing that they’re doing is they’ve made a lot of investments in technology and data largely for reporting, now that we’ve done that, we have all this other data that we didn’t have before, this non-financial data, how do we use that to manage the company better? So we have clients saying, we put all of this reporting data together on our carbon footprint. Could I have a custom quote for every one of my customers that says, if you use our products versus competitor B products, this is going to save you this much in energy cost and it’s going to save you this much in reporting and have that be something that we can create automatically and have it be accurate and have it be tailored to each customer. So those two things, the hard parts of the strategy implementation, and then also how do we use all this data to generate value? Those are the two challenges of the day that we’re working with most of our clients on.

John Shegerian: Talk a little bit about pitfalls. Where do clients left to their own devices make their biggest mistakes that you try to help them avoid? Where can our listeners who are either thinking about going on a sustainability journey or on a sustainability journey already at their company or organization make mistakes that you could coach them here on, Hey, these are things that don’t work and others have tried and they look like easy things to do, but they’re going to lead you down a black hole. What are some common mistakes that people and organizations making on these sustainability journeys?

John Mennel: Yeah, it is a good question. I would say that most of our clients are pretty sophisticated and smart, so they’re not falling into the obvious pitfalls and we’re just helping them perform better. I would say the biggest one we see is thinking about one-off investments and data and reporting is an example. If you say that there’s this regulation in the EU, which I need to be able to comply with, and this is what it says today, I’m going to figure out how I build a system to specifically answer those questions, you’re generally going to get lower ROI than if you think about, well, what’s likely to happen? What’s going to happen in multiple jurisdictions? How is this going to evolve over the next five years? Then, like I said before, if I’m going to make an investment in gathering all this data, which sometimes is quite complicated, it has to go all the way back to your suppliers and your operations processes. What other things am I going to use that for? So am I going to use it to have better supply relationships, to have better customer relationships? Am I going to use that to manage on the shop floor and find places to take waste and cost out of my operations? That’s generally a better approach that has a higher ROI over time.

John Shegerian: So, on a macro basis, its information gathering and data analytics, which then potentially lead to great predictive analytics in all different sectors of the company that can save them or make them more money.

John Mennel: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. Yeah. What I think about is if you think about there’s financial reporting information and there’s management information; a lot of that management information is used for predicted analytics.

John Shegerian: Got it, got it. How compelling, we used the word compelling earlier without giving away brand names of course, and being, of course protecting the goodwill and brands of all the amazing iconic brands you do represent. Talk a little bit about how big in terms of compelling can the increase in revenue be or the savings be when sustainability is done, right?

John Mennel: Yeah, and Liz, we’ll sound a little anecdotal, but I’ll give you a couple examples.

John Shegerian: That’s great.

John Mennel: We worked through a large retailer purely on energy efficiency, so what could they do to be more energy efficient in their stores? That was something that was driven by the sustainability team. And so even though it made business sense, it just wouldn’t have been as high on the priority list if not for sustainability. But that was something that we did a series of projects that all had good RO, I changed out the lighting building automation systems so that they could manage the thermostats, not overheat, not over refrigerate in the presidential food sections, all of that kind of stuff driven by the sustainability team, but that reduced their energy cost by about 18%, which for a company of this size was an eight figure per year kind of saving. And so that’s one example. We worked with another company that’s an agriculture company and they’re producing a line of lower carbon proteins, so beef and chicken, that’s something that had a, I would say now is over a 100 million dollars business, has a potential to be a multi-billion dollar business and is something that’s just a new product, a new business they wouldn’t have been in. Those are two good examples. The other one that I’ll think of is we worked the hospital system, which has large hospitals all over the country, and we helped put together a portfolio of renewable energy investments for them. That was everything from solar panels on the roofs and the parking garages to virtual power purchase agreements where if you think of them, they’re investing in large utility scale solar agreements. That portfolio of investment or portfolio of renewables investment is generating about a 13% IRR for the business. And so those are things that, again, they started looking at that from a sustainability perspective. It’s probably not something that they would’ve felt they had the context or the expertise to do if it weren’t for their sustainability efforts, but it created a very positive return investment for the company.

John Shegerian: That’s awesome. For our listeners and viewers who’ve just joined us, we’ve got John Mennel with us today. He’s the manager, director of data and assets leader at Deloitte. He’s also the Deloitte sustainability leader. To find John and his colleagues at Deloitte, please go to www.deloitte, D-E-L-O-I-T-T-E, deloitte.com. John, there’s not a day that we turn on Bloomberg or read the New York Times or Wall Street Journal or any other great news organization, and we hear more and more about AI and robotics. Talk a little bit about the technological advancements that are being made right as we live and breathe and work and how that impacts positively on the sustainability initiatives that you are promoting to your clients and potential clients.

John Mennel: Yeah, so it’s a really interesting question. Of course, everybody’s focused on AI now, and I went from being, I wouldn’t say a sceptic, but being someone who saw this as an interesting new technology via the advances in AI to through a couple of experiences, really seeing it as potentially transformative. So just to give you some ideas on that, Deloitte does a CEO survey. The last survey found that 94% of C-suite executives indicate that AI will be critical to the success of their organizations over the next five years, and they’re already making major investments in it. To give you an idea of the scale, and this is on the power demand side, Deloitte’s renewable survey and the predictions of power generation AI all over the place so you can find predictions that are all over the place. The Deloitte Renewable Energy, I’m sorry, the Deloitte AI outlook estimates, the power consumption from data centers is going to go from something like 60 to 70 terawatt hours today to 130 to 140 terawatt hours by 2030, so in five years, so a rough doubling. That is, like I said, you can find predictions, they’re all over. That’s in about the middle. So that kind of doubling in five years of data center energy capacity, it is very reasonable, and it could be higher. So you have these investments and expectations from the corporate sector, I would say experiments that are starting to get bigger than that, which are really taking off and really are substantially different than what we’ve seen in the past and have real potential for productivity. So then the question you asked about how does this affect sustainability? What you hear a lot is about the power demand and that it’s going to be negative for sustainability and there is a risk of that. I think there needs to be significant attention paid on how we do generate the power for this AI revolution. I think when you talk to states in particular, there’s a realization that a lot of the success of specific locations over the next 10 years is going to be based on this battle for AI, the battle for the energy to fuel AI and I think that’s going to be really important. The question you asked about how does it positively impact sustainability? There are a number of ways, and there are three use cases that I’m really interested in. The first one is in material science and material discovery. I’ll explain a little bit what I mean. The second is in physical ai, what you can think about is putting AI into robots out in the physical world. Then the third is in AI agents that I think we’ve heard a lot about. Let me give you an example of each of those. In material discovery. One, I think the most interesting opportunities with AI is to be able to sift through a huge amount of data and test hypotheses. Where we’ve seen that so far is in the early model for protein folding and for pharma discovery using AI to discover new drugs. There have been some really amazing advances there, and I think there will continue to be amazing advances. As an aside, my father’s an oncologist who retired in his 80s just a few years ago, and he said his biggest regret is that he’s not starting his career in our oncology now because of all the innovation we’re going to see largely through AI and the understanding of genes. But where that impacts sustainability is if you think about the ability to discover new materials, what’s happening with battery improvement, looking at new battery chemistries and battery configurations, they’re really interesting startups out there focusing on that. I talked to a startup that claims that they believe that they’re going to be able to double the efficiency of the membranes in hydrogen for hydrogen reaction, hydrogen paralysis if they really do that and I don’t know if they really will be able to do that, that has dramatic economic perspective potential for green hydrogen would really change a lot of industries pretty dramatically. So that’s material discovery. Physical AI, like I said, there’ve been robots forever. We’ve had, not forever, but since what the eighties for a long time, they’ve mostly been in highly controlled environments like on a shop floor, where you know what’s going to happen, you know who’s moving around, you can stake out specific areas, you know what’s coming into that area and out of that area. So it’s relatively easy to develop the software to run that kind of robot in that stable environment. What we’ve seen, what we’ve all seen in Waymo and self-driving cars is the ability for those kinds of physical things to operate out in the complex world where there’s a lot of ambiguity and things change and things move around, there’s lack of ability to predict it. What you’re starting to see is that kind of intelligence moving into, ”Industrial applications.” So to give you an example, there are two German companies that are developing robots for solar panel installation, which is really important because these solar panels often weigh up to a hundred pounds. So when you have people installing them, it’s slow. There could be injuries, you have to have equipment for them to do it. These robots are able to operate on any kind of terrain, any kind of weather, 24/7 because they have machine learning algorithms built in. The more they do it, the better they get at it. The initial pilots on this is that it can cut the installed cost of utility skill solar in half because it cuts so much labor and so much time to deploy out of it. So that kind of physical AI, AI in the physical world is the secondary where I see a lot of impact. Then the third in AI agents is what we’re basically developing is the ability for large language models to interact with each other and to perform specific tasks and then negotiate those tasks with other models or other instances of models. We’re starting to see that in areas like reporting, which I talked about. So gathering all the data for reporting, we’re starting to see it in supply chain a lot in procurement. So instead of having a human who’s going out and doing a lot of these interactions, I’m going to have an AI, read the contracts, read the product catalogues, go out and negotiate with a supplier, often with the agent supplier. That also has the potential to really change the way we do a lot of processes in large organizations, including for sustainability and taking cost and timing out.

John Shegerian: Go back to the robot that’s been beta tested that installs solar panels. I assume as they perfect that model, the converse will be true as well, that same robot or some version thereof will be able to de-install those panels as they come to their end of life as well.

John Mennel: Correct. Yeah. So now I spoke to another startup that’s doing the maintenance use case, so automate all of the cleaning with sensors and then robots to do all the cleaning, and then same end of life and recycling. You’d also want to automate that.

John Shegerian: As two macro concepts to most of the clients you work with make sure that it’s part of their initiative to A, try to reach net zero in relatively the shortest and most efficient time period without the wheels coming off, and also want to become much more circular in their behavior with regards to diversion and other issues with regards to circularity. Are those two of the biggest macro trends that most of the smartest organizations are now working on?

John Mennel: I think so. There’s maybe one nuance I would add to that. There’s a concept that comes out of sustainability reporting called, which you and your listeners probably heard of, called double materiality. That’s about how do we affect the climate and how does the climate affect us? So the two things that you said, a net zero goal and a circularity goal on the how do we affect the climate. Most companies still do have those aspirations and I think are being held to account by their management teams and their boards to do it in a way that’s a creative and value creating to the company, as I talked about and that’s a lot of where we get involved and help. The second piece about how does the climate affect us is companies thinking more about the climate risk and practically what do they do? That can involve where do we locate, what do we do with our physical plant? Do we need to move? Do we need to reinforce buildings? Do we need to have larger reserves for extreme weather? Then it reaches into things like supply chain, like what happens if a major supply chain node goes down and what do we do about that? The hurricanes that we had, and this is a pretty famous case in North Carolina, I forget what that was a year or two ago, brought that to for a lot of companies because there was a major manufacturer of ID bags with sailing solution that was completely disrupted by that weather. There were a lot of companies that realized how dependent it could be on specific nodes of their supply chain, especially in environment will add large from other.

John Shegerian: John, I should have done this earlier, do a little tee up. How big is Deloitte? Not revenue or anything, how many people and how many offices you have around the world, generally speaking, you don’t have to be exact, but just so our audience understands the scale of your company.

John Mennel: Yeah, so I will not give you any numbers because I will get them wrong and we’ve also been on our pretty fast growth path, so every time I look up the numbers, they’re different.

John Shegerian: I got it.

John Mennel: We’re the largest professional service firm in the world. We are present in most global markets that you could think of and have a very significant business that’s across all the areas of professional services you would think of. So consulting and financial advisory, and we have tax advice and we have an audit business and accounting business, as you know. So, we’re a very large-scale organization and in the US they have more than 80 locations.

John Shegerian: That being the truth. How big then, is your sustainability practice? How has it grown since we’ve spoken last?

John Mennel: Yeah, so it’s grown pretty significantly. We don’t, as you said, give out revenue numbers, but there are two areas of, well, we obviously the CEO investment that Deloitte has. Not surprisingly, the two are sustainability and AI, and we as a sustainability business have grown significantly faster than the firm as a whole, about twice as fast as the firm as a whole. I think given that, like I said, we’re still on the relatively early innings of a major probably generation long change. I will say we have some competition, but we’re even growing faster than the AI practice.

John Shegerian: So now since you have visibility on the planet and reach around the planet, talk a little bit about the difference of pitching a Fortune 500 or 1000 company in Shanghai, New York and Paris. How do things differ based on how does sustainability and the approach to sustainability differ when it comes to continents and different cultures and practices around the world that you get to see?

John Mennel: Yeah, it’s interesting, and I don’t want to over generalize because obviously there are major differences, but there are companies at different stages of the journey in different places. I think it’s a general stereotype, which I think is a true stereotype, is that Europe and European companies have been at this longer than most other regions. There’s a view that both regulators and consumers are pushing companies harder than they are in other parts of the world, which I think is generally true. I think that’s a positive thing for the transition. I think that what both European and US companies operating in Europe would say is that the US has really come along and is also becoming a major player, and I should say the Americas, but in a different way. I will say a way that’s much more market focused, less regulatory driven, more market driven. Asia, huge disparity. So I don’t want to talk about the region as a whole, but the one thing that I’ll say about China, and I don’t have all of the data at my fingertips, is that China’s on a amazing sustainability transition that’s driven largely by energy security and resilience concerns and kind of wanting to have more generation internally, and the size of the investments in renewable energy, for example, in batteries are just staggering. I want to say that more than half of the solar installation in 2024 was in China, is in one country.

John Shegerian: Wow, got it. It’s 2025, Your dad makes a great point. It would’ve been fun to live to do what he does during this new explosion of AI and technology, but we got to live… when we’re put on this earth. We got to take the cards as we’re dealt. Now that you are in this position and you have the ability to have the leverage of great new technologies that are coming at us faster than we could probably keep up, what are you the most excited about when it comes to Deloitte and sustainability in 2025 and brought beyond in terms of working with your clients and how much you could actually accomplish with them and make a huge impact on this planet?

John Mennel: Yeah, in general, I’m excited about where things are. As I’ve said a couple of times, we’re still at the early end of a transition, and we’re right in the first couple of years of where the economics are behind us that we have tailwinds as an industry economically. I think there will be fits and starts of the way that we develop over the next 10, 20 years, but kind of the trajectory is pretty clear and it’s exciting time to be involved in. One of the things that I’ve always loved about being with Deloitte and being a consultant frankly, is that we’re so big and we’re involved in so many different things. I like to evolve kind of what I’m doing a little bit over the years, and one of the things that I’ve been spending a lot more time with personally is smaller, high growth technology companies that are broadly in the climate tech arena. One of the things that always makes me feel more energized and more optimistic is when talking to new companies and the venture investors and just seeing the amount of brain power and the amount of capital that’s going into some of these new technologies, whether it’s carbon capture and carbon dioxide removal, greener materials, renewable energy. It’s just a really exciting time and it makes me feel like this is a pretty significant problem for us as a world, but it’s also one, it’s totally in our capability to address.

John Shegerian: That’s awesome, and that’s very hopeful. We’ll leave it on that note. For our listeners and viewers to find John and his colleagues in all the important impactful work they’re doing in sustainability with their clients at Deloitte, please go to www.deloitte.com. John, as you already know, because this is your second time back here, you’re always welcome back on the Impact Podcast because sustainability is a journey. It’s constantly evolving. There’s so many great new things coming out, so I’d love to have you back on to continue sharing the journey that you’re doing in sustainability with your colleagues at Deloitte. I want to thank you not only for another great hour together today, but more importantly, John, I want to thank you for all the great impact to how you make the world a better place.

John Mennel: Thanks, John. I appreciate you having me again, I appreciate your time.

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