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The use of the term sustainability has exploded in recent years: Companies are in a race to present themselves as "sustainable". In many cases, substance is being replaced by marketing: Sustainability as a PR objective.
In the FORUM family, we define sustainability as a way of working that ensures that any resources used are not degraded or exhausted ("overexploitation"), but have the opportunity to renew themselves and even grow. We therefore want to "give something back" for what we receive/use. We have a time horizon of two to three generations, which makes sense for us as a family office.
When it comes to sustainable management, we focus on CO2 sustainability, the sustainability of our customer relationships and sustainability in the area of employees. And, of course, sustainability in the area of company succession in family information.
All FORUM affiliates are working on projects to reduce their carbon footprint. The starting point is always the inventory, on the basis of which we derive goals and action plans. These points are on the agenda of almost all review meetings, and in the meantime the exchange between the holdings is also increasing significantly.
Our principle of decentralisation leaves the local entrepreneurs free to decide on the pace of CO2 reduction themselves. From our point of view as shareholders, complete CO2 neutrality by 2030 (including offsets) would be desirable.
One of FORUM's central credos is the claim that sales should be generated with products or services that create the most comprehensible benefit possible for our customers. For example, our corporate customers spend money on software because digitalisation measurably reduces the effort required for processes, or because it helps them to better achieve their own goals.
Our goal is for all of our group's sales to be based on such "win : win" situations: our customers benefit by using our products, and in return they return part of their productivity gain to us as sales. The resulting profits are therefore good, sustainable profitsfor us.
With our emphasis on sustainable sales based on comprehensible customer benefits, we give our employees the feeling that their company is doing something meaningful - it makes its customers more successful. We believe this is a central tenet of "Purpose" - the search of many employees for an employer where they can give something back to society. But "Purpose" at FORUM encompasses more, for example the training of many young people with a successful degree, the integration of refugees or the aid projects we talk about in the next paragraph.
"We look at our clients as investors. We work hard to make sure they get a good return on their investment in us."