There are around 5.7 million small businesses in the UK. That’s 5.7 million people (give or take – some might have co-founders; some people will have established more than one) who have taken the entrepreneurial plunge to start their own company.

I am not one of them. I’ve had many dreams in my life, but starting my own business has never been one of them – unless you count those months as a university student when I was treated as a lending bank by some of my flatmates as the only one who seemed able to properly keep track of their budgets. The Bank of Scone as it was called (uni nickname, long story) was short-lived and I never truly saw myself as a real competitor to NatWest, Midland (remember them?), or Barclays.

I have nothing but respect for those who, even when they were in short trousers and playing hide and seek in the playground, already knew destiny lay in launching their own ventures. I’ve met and spoken to many of them while working here at Lancaster University. They tell inspiring stories. They are brilliant. I have no desire to join them.

My dreams as a child were different. In primary school I wanted to be a writer of some kind. I wrote – and later read out to the school assembly – reports on our football team’s matches after my skills as a goalkeeper went unappreciated in trials. I wrote a Choose Your Own Adventure book that was so long it required the teacher to bring in an assistant to type it out.

Twelve years later, I was employed as a reporter on the local paper and went on to spend almost 20 years in journalism. Mission accomplished for me – and any freelancing that went on was purely a side hustle, as we’d call it now. I was quite happy to have someone else paying my wages and not having to worry about where my monthly income was coming from.

When I was at university, spending far too much time in the student radio station when I wasn’t handing out loans, I imagined working on radio or TV. I never quite pulled that one off, but I was interviewed several times by regional radio and television programmes as an expert on some sporting matter or other (usually Barrow AFC, Barrow Raiders, or similar such nonsense for those of you who don’t follow semi-professional football or rugby league). Now I host a podcast every week, so that’s close enough for me. No need to set up my own podcasting company thank you very much, nor set up a pirate radio station (do such things still exist?) in between the cardboard boxes in my loft.

Getting back to the point, speaking to Dan Lavinskas, CEO of Canadian-based Citera, and hearing him talk about his journey from university to running his own company hammered home the point to me that I’m not keen on going it alone.

It’s not that Dan’s journey isn’t uplifting – in fact, anyone who can withstand an early encounter with Jan Bebbington when landing on these shores for the first time and still succeed in his studies is definitely to be admired. Nor is it that his work helping other businesses in North America with their carbon footprints, analysing their energy usage, and promoting sustainability in general isn’t a grand achievement. The bottom line, it turns out, is I’m just not particularly entrepreneurially minded.

One thing I have discovered in the three years recording Transforming Tomorrow is the tie-in between entrepreneurialism and sustainability that has threaded through discussions. As well as Dan and Citera, with their work across multiple industries and with organisations resisting the rightward political swing of environmental attitudes in America, we also spoke to someone much closer to home who is working hard on embedding sustainability in his work.

Steve Parkman is someone I have worked with for six years now in his role as a designer of our Fifty Four Degrees magazine in Lancaster University Management School, and various other ventures – including the original Transforming Tomorrow publication that landed before the podcast was a glint in our eye.

Steve was a guest on the show last year, and he talked us through his own efforts to make his design studio greener, and to work with printers who do likewise. Steve revealed how he has come to be part of a group of like-minded individuals in and around his home in South Cumbria. All of them small business owners, and each of them committed to more sustainable actions in their operations.

For Steve, this has included a switch to using solar power, using green servers for his digital work, printing on more sustainable paper, and much more. It has been a deliberate effort on his part, and he has been able to achieve results because he is motivated and in control of his business. While I may not be entrepreneurial as such, I would certainly love more autonomy in big decisions such as this. But inside an institution that employs thousands, if we all had such powers chaos would almost certainly descend at speed.

If Steve and Dan can speak to their own individual experiences of blending entrepreneurship and sustainability, there have been numerous times over the last few years where we have heard from experts whose research looks at just why this might be – or, in one case, why it might not.

Whether it was our early interactions with Lancaster’s Entrepreneurs in Residence network, our discussions with Allan Discua Cruz on family businesses and their attitudes to all things green, or the conversations we have had with Barbara Salopek about on businesses and innovation, there is ample evidence that small business leaders are pushing the sustainability agenda.

That’s not to say I can’t do it in my role as well. But just imagine what I might be capable of if I had an entrepreneurial mindset.

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