The board meeting ends with five words aimed at you: can you handle the ESG thing. No budget conversation, no headcount, no definition of done. If you are the CFO or the ops lead who just caught this, here is a 90-day plan that gets you to a defensible position without hiring anyone or buying software.
Key takeaways
- The goal of the first 90 days is not a sustainability report. It is a defensible position: knowing what applies to you, what your numbers are, and what you will do next.
- The sequence that works is ownership, then materiality, then data, then a board memo. Doing it in any other order creates rework.
- Everything below uses records you already have and tools that are free.
Days 1 to 30: find out what is actually being asked of you
- Trace the pressure to its source. ESG lands on a CFO desk for a reason: a bank questionnaire, a customer request, a tender condition, an investor query, or a director who read about the rules. Each has a different deadline and a different depth. Write down exactly who is asking and for what. If it was a bank, our bank questionnaire guide tells you what is coming.
- Check your actual obligations. Most Singapore SMEs have no direct climate reporting duty. See the current reporting timeline to confirm where you sit, then stop worrying about ACRA and start worrying about counterparties.
- Name the owner. One senior person, probably you, with a fixed review slot each month. Document decisions from day one; governance is the first thing every questionnaire asks about.
- Collect twelve months of records. Electricity bills, fuel and vehicle records, waste invoices. No system needed, one folder.
Days 31 to 60: build the smallest baseline that holds up
- Work out what actually matters for your business. A materiality assessment sounds heavy; a right-sized version is a structured conversation. List the environmental and social issues that genuinely affect your revenue, costs and key relationships, rank them, and write down why. Ten issues maximum.
- Compute Scope 1 and 2. Scope 1 is mainly your own fuel and vehicle use, Scope 2 your purchased electricity. Gprnt, the MAS-initiated platform, generates free basic emissions reports from your records. Keep the method notes; a number without a method fails the first serious check.
- Write a one-page risk note. What could hurt you: flooding or heat affecting operations, carbon-linked costs, customers dropping non-compliant suppliers, and what you are doing about each. Plain sentences beat frameworks.
Days 61 to 90: turn it into a board position
- Write the board memo. Two to three pages: where we stand, the three gaps that matter, what we will do in the next two quarters, and what it costs. Boards do not want a sustainability essay, they want a position and asks.
- Decide build versus buy. With a baseline in hand you can price the options properly: keep it in-house with templates, use a grant-supported programme, or bring in fixed-scope help. Our breakdown of what ESG consulting costs in Singapore and the grants guide cover the numbers.
- Assemble the evidence pack. The memo, the baseline with methods, the risk note, the policy basics, in one place. This pack answers the next questionnaire in hours, not weeks.
What good looks like at day 90
You can answer, in one sitting: who owns ESG here, what are our emissions and where do the numbers come from, which issues actually matter to our business, and what are we doing next. That is more than most SMEs can say, and it is exactly what banks, customers and boards are checking for. You will notice a report is not on the list; reports come later, if a counterparty actually requires one.
Where Smartu fits
The Smartu Quick Diagnostic compresses the first sixty days of this plan into 10 working days from intake: gap assessment, benchmarked score, and a board-ready report you can table at the next meeting, for a fixed S$2,800. If you want the full picture of how we support SMEs beyond the first 90 days, see our ESG consulting for Singapore SMEs. If you would rather run the plan yourself, the ESG Template Pack includes the board memo skeleton, the materiality model and the self-audit checklist for S$200.
Related reading
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