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May 2025: The People-Planet-Profit Pulse
- Chris Wormall
- Jul 10
- 4 min read
April showed us that every small and medium-sized enterprise is juggling People, Planet and Profit at once. May’s headlines confirmed the same truth but the pieces on the chessboard have moved. In this post I’ll break down what changed, share three DIY quick wins you can action today, and show how Lessr can take each of them further, faster and deeper.
Rising rules, stubborn skill gaps & the race for resilience
May tightened the screws on compliance. The draft Employment Rights Bill is on track to deliver day-one unfair-dismissal protection, re-shape zero-hours contracts and mandate sick pay from the first shift. On top of that, April’s jump in the National Living Wage (£12.21) and employer NIC (15 %) had its first full-month impact on the May payroll cycle. Margins in hospitality, logistics and light manufacturing felt the pinch.
Meanwhile a paradox emerged: nine in ten SMEs still expect talent shortages in 2025, yet fewer than one in three worry about retention. Translation? Finding qualified people is the choke-point; keeping them is almost easy once they’re through the door. Finally, sickness absence hit a 15-year high, forcing owners to treat well-being not as a perk but as operational insurance.
Quick win #1 | The manual “power-down hour”
Pick a low-risk window, say Friday at 4 p.m. and walk the floor with a clipboard. Note every piece of kit that’s idling: printers, conveyors, CNCs, hand-dryers. Label the switch or plug, and post a friendly sticker that says "Off when idle". Put the tally on the break-room noticeboard next Monday so the team can see the watt-hours and pounds saved. People love visible victories.
Where Lessr makes it effortless: our dashboard shows every asset’s standby draw and highlights the most effective behaviour nudge so the habit forms automatically and you never need the clipboard again.
Ambition grows, yet the net-zero finance wall gets higher
A fresh FSB pulse survey (one I keep pinned to my monitor!) found that over half of small firms rank sustainability as a “high priority”, but only a quarter believe they’ll reach net-zero by 2050. The stumbling blocks remain depressingly familiar: cash, expertise and time. Two in five owners blame the price tag of green upgrades, and just 13% feel “finance-ready”.
Yet May also revealed a strategic pivot: energy independence now outranks brand reputation as the prime reason to adopt low-carbon tech. Rising electricity prices have made rooftop solar and high-efficiency LEDs look like savings vehicles first, climate plays second. The policy winds may soon help as FSB’s New Growth Blueprint argues for a business-energy advice service and zero-VAT on EV charging for SMEs.
Quick win #2 | A pocket-size “solar ROI” sheet
Open a blank spreadsheet, add three columns: “Panels quoted (£)”, “kWh generated per year” and “Unit price paid (p/kWh)”. Grab a single online quote for a 10 kW roof array and paste in last month’s kWh rate from your utility bill. The sheet will spit back a simple payback period. Even if it lands at seven or eight years, you now have a ballpark figure to defend internally or haggle down with suppliers.
Where Lessr makes it effortless: We automatically collect site-level demand data meaning they can easily be pulled into solar-generation forecasts, so you see exactly how much grid electricity and carbon you’d avoid hour by hour. That compresses the finance conversation from days to minutes.
Inflation, financing gaps & the efficiency dividend
May brought a nasty surprise: CPI ticked up to 3.5%, cooling hopes of a summer rate cut. Manufacturing order books slipped again and corporate insolvencies nudged 3% higher. Bank lending remained scarce, SMEs are 60% of UK employment yet still under 4% of bank assets.
The bright spot? Tech spend is holding up. Eighty-four percent of businesses plan to invest in AI this year and the most popular use case is energy-management software, the fastest way to squeeze OPEX without sacking staff.
Quick win #3 | The weekly “energy cashflow” huddle
Print last month’s electricity bill and highlight the top three cost drivers: peak-period rates, reactive-power fees or sheer volume. Every Monday, spend ten minutes with the team asking one question: What can we try this week to shave 5% off one driver? Maybe it’s shifting a batch process to cheaper hours or tightening compressor schedules. Track the bill again next month and celebrate even a £20 drop, that’s morale fuel and a proof-point for lenders who now ask for carbon data in loan files.
Where Lessr makes it effortless: our AI spots those drivers automatically, estimates the pound-impact of each tweak and generates an audit-ready export for anyone to look at, including mainstream lenders, saving finance teams 80 % of their reporting time.
Integration beats isolation
May reinforced a core lesson from April: treating People, Planet and Profit as siloed projects is yesterday’s playbook. When you weave them together, each strand makes the others stronger.
Lessr is built exactly for this. We ingest live electricity data, run behaviour-change algorithms and surface board-ready evidence of savings. In a single view the MD sees ROI, compliance sees an audit trail and the sustainability lead sees their stamp on climate progress.
Why speed now trumps intent
UK SME sustainability challenges May-2025 were never about whether to act; the battlefield has shifted to how quickly you can prove results. Manual quick wins with clipboards and spreadsheets and Monday huddles will get you moving today. They’ll also expose the friction: the hours lost collecting data, the blind spots between buildings, the nagging doubt that you’re missing bigger savings.
That’s where we come in. Lessr automates the grunt work, amplifies every small habit into measurable impact and frees your smartest people to chase growth instead of chasing sockets.
Ready to see what your first 30 days could deliver? Let’s talk—and start making more with Lessr.