StepZero: Umesh Kathirvel on Making Sustainability Actually Doable for SMEs

Two out of three UK small businesses have already tried to do something on sustainability. A commitment, a strategy document, a good intention typed up and forgotten. Almost none of them have gone much further than that, and Umesh Kathirvel doesn't think that's a willpower problem.

Umesh is Head of Product and Delivery at Teckollab, a software studio that builds for purpose-driven founders, and co-founder of StepZero, a free platform built to solve exactly that stall. StepZero doesn't start with a certification or a consultant's fee. It starts by asking a business four or five simple questions about its size and constraints, then builds out a plan a solo founder or a five-person team can actually work through.

The platform is organised around eight pillars, deliberately wider than the usual carbon-accounting focus. Community and team involvement sit alongside energy, water and waste, and every action plan is sourced from university, council or government research rather than invented in-house.

The idea started as a weekend project. Umesh met Becks Neale through the Cotswolds People Planet Pint group, where Becks, a solo founder herself, shared with him practical, half-day-sized sustainability resources rather than the solar-panel-and-heat-pump scale advice he'd found everywhere else. What began as a checklist for people in the same position grew into a personalised plan, and eventually into StepZero as a registered non-profit CIC, a structure that's let the team start formal conversations with councils, universities and combined mayoral authorities.

Some of the platform's most distinctive features came from listening rather than planning ahead. A conversation with the sustainability lead at the Royal Agricultural University surfaced a problem small businesses rarely say out loud: local procurement is often blocked by cost, not commitment. StepZero's answer is a community pool-buying space, where nearby businesses can club together to buy from the same local supplier at a price none of them could get alone. A related surplus-sharing feature, loosely inspired by apps like 'Too Good To Go' but built for organisations rather than individuals, lets businesses pass on unused packaging, spare space or even a regular van journey to their neighbours instead of it going to waste.

None of that was the hard part, according to Umesh. "We have the problem, and we know what the solution should be, but putting it into a product perspective sometimes could be challenging." Commercialisation is what actually slows things down: turning a genuinely useful idea into something that can find investors, partners and enough businesses using it to make it matter.

What's kept it moving is the kind of recognition that opens doors. StepZero recently presented to the South Cotswolds MP's team, who responded well enough to offer volunteers to help develop the product further. Research from Manchester University and Liverpool Council on running large events more sustainably is now being built directly into the app's action plans, down to specifics like offering a discounted bus ticket instead of just asking attendees to consider public transport.

The platform's use of AI is similarly deliberate. Where it generates policy and commitment documents for a business, it runs on GreenPT, an alternative to mainstream AI models hosted on renewable-powered European servers, chosen because it uses only the processing power a task actually needs rather than defaulting to the largest model available.

Umesh's spoke was Policies, and his answer went straight to why so many good intentions don't survive contact with a growing business: they stay informal. "For any purpose-driven initiatives to survive it should be done in a way that everyone comes together and they're all involved in it. And once it is formalised, it should go into the official policies, otherwise it would be a one-off thing that would be done and everyone's happy, but then it's just forgotten." The same applies to suppliers, he said: a formal commitment to working only with sustainable suppliers does more than a statement of intent ever could, because it holds even when no one's watching.

StepZero is free to use at stepzero.eco. Umesh can be reached directly at umesh@teckollab.com.