A true story from our work. We have changed the industry, the people, and every identifying detail. The situation, and the lesson, are real.
A Singapore company came to us last week with a deadline. Around thirty employees, three related business lines built around premium corporate gifting: curated products, imported goods, a retail arm, and a long list of corporate clients. One of those clients is a global financial services company, the kind of account that represents meaningful revenue and helps win the next one.
Three years earlier, during a routine supplier renewal, they had signed a sustainability addendum. Like many SMEs, nobody expected to hear about it again. It was filed away with the rest of the contract and business carried on.
Then the email arrived. The client now required its suppliers to disclose Scope 1, 2 and 3 greenhouse gas emissions, with science-based targets expected as the programme matured. The response deadline was less than two weeks away. Neither of the two managers suddenly responsible for the request had ever produced an emissions inventory. ESG was not part of their job description; it had simply become their problem overnight. And walking away was not really an option, because losing this client would have meant risking one of the company's most valuable commercial relationships.
If your business supplies large corporates, some version of this email has probably already been written. It may already be sitting inside a procurement platform waiting for its release date. What happened next is worth your time, because the company's first instinct, and the correction to it, are both common.
The first reaction was predictable: we need our emissions numbers, immediately. Find someone who can calculate Scope 1, 2 and 3 in two weeks, submit the figures, and move on.
Except that was not what the client was asking. Read these supplier requests carefully and, more often than not, they ask for something different: where you are today, what your plan looks like, and when key milestones will be delivered. For an SME starting its sustainability journey, a response that says "we have engaged external support, our assessment is underway, and here is our implementation timeline" is not viewed as failure. It is exactly what many procurement teams expect. Large organisations understand that a thirty-person supplier is not a listed multinational, and many run tiered supplier programmes with different expectations for SMEs, because they know capability develops over time.
The requirements themselves are phased too. The first stage is usually understanding your obligations, establishing governance, identifying your emissions sources and building a roadmap. More advanced expectations, such as external assurance or mature reduction programmes, typically come later. Trying to deliver everything immediately rarely impresses anyone. More often, it creates rushed work, weak data and unnecessary costs.
Many SMEs assume sustainability becomes relevant when regulators tell them it does. In reality, it often arrives much earlier, through customers.
Large companies increasingly have their own climate reporting obligations and supplier sustainability commitments. To meet them, they ask their suppliers for information, and those suppliers then ask their own suppliers. That is how supplier sustainability requirements move down a supply chain, and it is why, for many businesses, procurement is the first place ESG shows up, long before regulation ever does.
The company's second instinct sounded equally logical: forget the assessment, just calculate the emissions.
The obstacle here was data, not methodology. Every emissions inventory depends on information your business already owns but rarely keeps in one place: electricity bills, fuel records, business travel, purchased goods, freight, waste and supplier information, spread across multiple entities, departments and systems. Before anyone can calculate emissions, that information has to be collected, organised and validated. A consultant who produces emissions numbers without doing that work is not measuring anything. They are estimating, and eventually your client will ask how those numbers were produced. Being transparent about your timeline is almost always better than presenting figures you cannot defend.
The sensible sequence is straightforward: respond with a realistic implementation plan, organise your data, understand what applies to your business, then measure. Not the other way around.
One detail made this case particularly familiar. The business assumed most of its emissions would come from its office. They did not.
For companies built around imported products, logistics and distribution, the largest source of emissions is usually Scope 3: purchased goods, international freight, packaging, suppliers and transport. For many businesses in retail, events, hospitality, food distribution and corporate gifting, those activities account for the overwhelming majority of the footprint.
That matters because it changes where you invest your effort. We have seen companies spend time and money measuring office electricity and air conditioning because it felt achievable, only to discover their customer's questionnaire focused almost entirely on supply chain emissions. They ended up paying twice. Getting the sequence right determines whether your first investment actually answers your customer's questions.
For a business in this position, we recommend four practical steps.
First, appoint clear owners. In this case, two managers were given responsibility for coordinating the response. Neither was an ESG specialist, but both knew who was accountable.
Second, reply with a plan, not panic. Meet the deadline with realistic milestones: explain that your assessment has begun, outline when gap findings will be completed, when emissions measurement will start, and when targets will be developed.
Third, complete a structured assessment before measuring anything. Understand which customer requirements apply to your business, where the gaps are, what each improvement will involve, and which actions should come first. This is exactly what our Quick Diagnostic is designed to do: within 10 working days of receiving a completed intake, you get a board-ready assessment that gives directors and procurement teams a clear implementation roadmap, at a fixed fee. Some SMEs may also qualify for simplified reporting pathways depending on factors such as revenue and reporting obligations, which is why we assess eligibility before recommending an approach rather than promising it on a call.
Finally, measure with the right foundations in place. Once your organisational boundaries are clear and your information is organised, Scope 1 and Scope 2 calculations become relatively straightforward, while Scope 3 can be developed in phases alongside your customer's own supplier programme.
If you have ever signed a supplier code of conduct, a vendor agreement or a procurement addendum with a large corporate, there is a good chance you have already agreed to sustainability commitments. They simply have not been activated yet.
Across Singapore and globally, large organisations are steadily extending their sustainability expectations through their supply chains. Today's requests are arriving first from procurement teams, not regulators. And the businesses handling them best are rarely the ones with perfect emissions data already prepared. They are the ones who already understand where they stand, have a credible roadmap, and can answer with confidence instead of scrambling after an unexpected email. When the form itself arrives, our guide on how to answer a supplier ESG questionnaire walks through it step by step.
If one of your customers has already asked about emissions, or you would rather be ready before they do, book a consultation with Smartu. We will help you understand what applies to your business, where your biggest gaps are, and in what order to address them, so you only have to do the work once.