It turns out planting trees has a lot in common with running a SaaS company.
Upsales have been a member of 1% for the planet since 2016, which means we donate 1% of the companies revenue to environmental organizations. I decided to join the organization after I read the book Let my people go surfing by Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, specifically after watching this video. There are many organizations under the 1% for the planet umbrella. At Upsales, we have decided to support One tree planted that plants trees worldwide, and the Swedish organization Solvatten that delivers an intelligent device to help people access clean drinking water.
The first two years, we were only working with One tree planted and donated around $100 000, which resulted in around 100 000 trees in Kenya. Last week we met with Matt, who founded the organization while working as a marketing professor. We learned that we were the first big donor and a catalyst in getting the organization off the ground. We had no idea about this since their website was really nice and gave a very professional impression (Matt is after all a marketing expert 😊). The organization is now more than 50 people, planting millions of trees every year and still growing. I always find it interesting talking to founders of organizations that are completely different than mine, you learn a lot, and you realize that regardless of what industry you’re in, 90% of the challenges with growing an organization are the same. You need to find, hire, train, coach, and sometimes fire people. You need to deal with budgets and plans that rarely work out. Find partners, suppliers you can trust, as well as the endless hustle of building and maintaining a sales team (yes, non-profits also do that, just switch the word customer to donor).
It was inspiring to see the success Matt’s had with growing the organization fast and we are looking forward to continuing supporting them and growing more trees.
If you’re looking for a very concrete way for your company to fight climate change, check out what Matt and his team are doing at www.onetreeplanted.org.
