My name is Richard Odendaal,
and I'm the Managing Director of AGS Support Facilities Limited.
AGS Support Facilities Ltd is a business
that provides two bespoke solutions into supported housing.
The first one is a concierge and safeguarding service, which covers
our customers' homelessness, accommodation properties
overnight and on weekends when the support workers go home.
The second service we offer is more of a recruitment offering
whereby we place staff on temporary contracts to cover day shifts
such as support workers recovery workers, reception
staff, etc..
We decided some time ago that we wanted to make a change
to our fleet of vehicles within our business.
So we approached Barclays
who were very helpful in helping us fund some new electric vehicles.
Several benefits we've noticed since moving across to
electric vehicles are the tax incentives available for companies
who switch to electric vehicles or fleets of electric vehicles.
The other thing
for us was obviously lowering our carbon footprint and becoming more sustainable
as a business in terms of our CO2 emissions, etc..
Having been in business for 25 years, I believe that business is all
about relationships.
Reciprocal relationships is obviously the type of relationship you want,
but we're very, very fortunate to have that sort of relationship with Barclays.
Our Relationship Manager at Barclays is very responsive,
always available when we need them.
I believe that we all need to make little changes to try
and protect our future in terms of being more sustainable,
such as driving EVs, switching the way we power our home
and just making little changes across the board.
Sustainability doesn't need to be an insurmountable challenge for businesses.
Our suggestion would be looking at it in bite size chunks
and all the little changes that you can make, make a difference.