Nicole Brose: Co-Founder of Sheeco

Sheeco is a sustainability consulting firm designed to help people make sustainable decisions. Sheeco offers consulting for events, offices, individuals, and more. Sheeco is based in Nashville, and was launched in March 2021.

Sheeco was founded by two friends, Nicole Brose and Diana Andrew, who have a passion for helping people, and making the world a better place. Both Nicole and Diana have advanced degrees in sustainability, and between the two have in-depth experience in event production, and working for non-profits.

MUSE recently spoke to Nicole Brose about Sheeco.

Hi Nicole! We’re excited to learn more about you and Sheeco. How did Sheeco get started?

My partner, Diana, and I met when we both worked at a small, nonprofit here in Nashville. We bonded over wanting to have an even greater impact on our community. . Last summer, we started getting together once a week to figure out how to make this dream a reality. We would sit on my back patio wearing masks, six feet apart, and daydream about what kind of business we wanted to start.

We both have advanced degrees in sustainability. I have a Bachelor's degree from the University of Central Florida in Event Management, and my Master's degree is in Sustainability Leadership from Arizona State University. Diana has a Bachelor's degree in Environmental Science from University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, and then got a Masters in Sustainable Food Systems from Lipscomb University.

Our backgrounds are really diverse; I've worked mostly in the entertainment industry focusing on events and hospitality. She's worked at nonprofits, and academia at Vanderbilt University. Having these different backgrounds helped shape what we wanted to do with this business. I knew there was a big opportunity for sustainable events in Nashville because when I used to produce events, I couldn’t find anyone to do the sustainability aspect.

How did you get started in sustainability?

My first job out of college was at CMT, Country Music Television, owned by ViacomCBS. I had an amazing leader, Trevor Perkins, who empowered me to bring my passion for sustainability to the table. This wasn’t a primary part of my job, but I was able to create a sustainability program from the ground up, and received a lot of recognition. I spoke about the initiatives I put in place at the Nashville Sustainability Roundtable, which led to an invitation to speak at Tennessee Women in Green.

I say “sustainability” but I want to clarify it was mostly waste diversion with some responsible product sourcing. The programs I implemented at the office got us to a 70% diversion rate. Our break rooms were 99% zero waste, we no longer had disposable cups for coffee, and we held monthly employee engagement events to get our staff onboard and excited.

Eventually, I approached our event production teams, and asked about incorporating sustainability at the award shows and concerts. The production teams were amazing, and they were like “Yeah, absolutely.”

I did a diversion two years in a row at the CMT Artists of the Year Award show, and at several CMT Crossroads shows. We also did a large waste diversion at the CMT Music Awards, which is a huge event that takes place all over downtown Nashville. This is when I noticed that there's nobody in Nashville doing this. I even had a budget to pay someone, but there wasn’t anyone to hire.

When I changed jobs, and I was leaving CMT, everyone was like, “You should start a sustainability company.” But I was 26 years old, and I didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing. Later, I realized that this voice was imposter syndrome and started to see value in my skills. So, I went back to school, and graduated in May of 2020. And then in June, we just started talking about starting a business. And things have just kind of gone from there.

Arizona State University has an excellent sustainability program. Tell us a little about your experience in grad school.

I got so much out of the ASU program. Unfortunately, I don't have a background in environmental science, I have a hospitality degree in event management. But here I am, getting my Masters in sustainability. In fact, I haven’t taken a biology class since tenth grade. But what I loved about the program is that it was business based. It’s all about getting business leaders to understand the science, but speak the business language. We know that scientists don't communicate well with business leaders, which has been a problem since the dawn of time. So that's the kind of leaders this program aims to create. And I think they do an amazing job.

Tell us some of the things that speak to both science and business. Where do these worlds meet?

We know that the climate is warming, and we know that this is caused by humans. Traditional business principles tell us to value the dollar over people, the land, the water, the air, and everything else. This is a business problem, not a science problem. Greta Thunberg famously said, “The climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and the solutions. All we have to do is wake up and change.” To clarify, we’re not waiting for science to figure out how to fix the climate crisis . We're waiting for billionaires and businesses to listen and change.

Something I learned in school, and also in my experience at CMT, is that when implementing sustainability practice in a large business, you have to get people to understand it, and get them to care. You have to depoliticize it. You need to talk to people about issues they care about, and that they understand. Not everybody cares about the bees or the whales. But most people care about their house getting flooded. And that's a big problem in Nashville because we've had several catastrophic floods in the past decade.

People see floods, they see their house getting destroyed, they see local roads in terrible condition. They realize it's happening because as we construct more and more buildings, we don’t have enough green space to absorb the rain water. Humans are changing the environment in so many ways. So, even if you can't get people to admit the climate is changing, and how quickly our current infrastructure is failing us, and then it starts clicking.

Why is Nashville a great place to host sustainable events?

Diana, my business partner, was born and raised in Nashville. She loves this city, and has seen it change a lot. I've been here for six years. Personally, I love the idea of bringing sustainable events to Nashville because it’s one of the centers of the music industry. Music creates change, and that's part of why I wanted to be in the entertainment industry. I grew up hearing stories of my dad at Live Aid. That event brought great awareness to the pressing issue of hunger in Africa. When I was eight years old I thought, if Bob Geldof can change the world with music, so can I. I still channel that inner child. People look up to musicians, and in Nashville, the music industry has so much power. Nashville hosts thousands of concerts, events, and festivals every year, and we have a tight knit community.

There's a growing pressure from entertainers, because they're starting to realize the impact of touring. The band, Coldplay, aren’t going back on tour until they can figure out how to do it without any sort of negative impact (read more here). These conversations are happening with country artists as well. This excites me because when artists are talking about it, the record labels start talking about it. Right now, Nashville is building a lot of new music venues. If you want to attract the important artists to your venue, you need to be thinking about sustainability. That's gonna set your venue apart from everyone else’s.

I’m also excited about the resources we have in Nashville. We're incredibly lucky to have a local, industrial composting company aptly named, The Compost Company. Because their facility is industrial, we can collect all types of food waste, including meat, plus compostable plastics. (see the list here). This local facility makes it a lot easier to do truly zero waste events. We also have a great company called Compost Nashville. They go door to door, and pick up your compost, so composting is becoming a part of the culture here. Both companies also work with companies and events.

That’s so great that you don’t have to truck the compost hundreds of miles away. It makes a huge difference.

We have many great nonprofits working in sustainability, and great city officials. As a company, we’re connecting the dots. We're focusing on making partnerships throughout the city, and talking with PR firms, and organizations to collaborate with to strengthen our shared mission and message. We went public with Sheeco in March. Since then, many people have reached out and said, “I'm so glad you're doing this, because we have all the pieces, we just need somebody to put them together.” That kind of validation really excites me.

We're in the middle of the South. We’d love to see companies like ours pop up here in the Bible Belt, but most cities around here don’t have the same resources. There's many southern cities that don't even do recycling, let alone composting.

What are some of your challenges?

One challenge is that we want our work to encompass more than waste diversion. We want our clients to be thinking upstream, and focussing on the decision making and planning processes. This reminds me that another thing we’re focused on is offsetting carbon. One of our current partners is a startup called Clearloop. They're building solar installations in communities that have no access to clean power. You can buy offset credits, and they build solar panels. We're looking forward to using the GHG calculators to encourage our clients and larger companies to purchase offsets. So, our goal is to make sustainability implementation more than just about recycling.

Yes. Sustainability is muti-faceted, and there are many ways, beyond waste diversion, to incorporate sustainability into projects.

True, something as simple as not having meat at your event can have a much larger positive impact than recycling.

Another important aspect of sustainability for business is about telling the story; they have to publicize what they’re doing. I wrote a paper about the impacts of a company being socially responsible. It's not just the impacts on the community, and the climate, It's the impact on the employees. When your employees feel that the company is doing the right thing, they’re 70% more productive, you have less turnover, and they're more creative. But if you're doing all these great things, and you're not communicating it to your employees, you're missing a huge opportunity to recruit the best talent and maximize employee retention.

It's the same thing with events, we need to tell these stories to our attendees so they know they’re making a difference by attending the event. They need to know that event organizers are offsetting their travel, we're composting their food scraps, and that the leftover catering is going to a good charity to feed the community. It’s important to put this story front and center.

Here’s another example, a company will spend $5 million on a Super Bowl ad with no tangible proof that the commercial is tied to growth in sales, you just assume it probably helped. But with sustainability, we have hard facts that it will help sales. There's a marketing dollar value tied directly to your sustainability efforts.

We know it works because when you go to a retail store, every aisle has a product that says it was made from 15% recycled plastic, for example. Many times, this is greenwashing, but in any case, marketing departments realize the dollar amount attached to it: people will pay more for something that's more sustainable. With events it’s the same. If your event is net zero, and nothing is going to the landfill, people will be ok with paying more.

There’s more: Climate change feels overwhelming. This summer, we are seeing floods in major cities around the world. In Nashville it hit 100 degrees for the first time in about 12 years. The enormity of climate change can make us feel very powerless. You can spend every day picking up litter, and there’s still going to be litter tomorrow. That’s why marketing departments see the value of sustainable products. Because I can feel good that I'm buying something that's made of recycled materials, or something that’s plastic-free. I feel like at least I'm contributing to part of the solution.

Anything you can do to make your attendees feel like they are solving this enormous crisis that they’re concerned about, they're going to feel good spending that money, and because it took minimal effort. It's all about instant gratification. If I can spend $100, and know that I just planted five trees, and this event isn’t going to produce any plastic waste, it feels really good. And I'm going to tweet about it, or put it on Instagram, or make a Tik Tok.

Thanks for laying out the strength of the business case. You’ve really hit the nail on the head about why events can charge more to cover the costs of sustainability, and why people feel good about paying extra.

Next question: Where would you love Sheeco to be doing five years from now?

In five years, I’d like Sheeco to be at the point where we've got contracts with the bigger music venues in town like the Bridgestone Arena, the Ascend Amphitheater, and the Nissan Stadium, to help them on the front end with events. Our company is a sustainability consulting company, and we want to be working with the big event planners for CMA Fest and the SEC Tournament. There’s so many events here in Nashville, I can't even tell you, there's a race car race going through downtown this summer. And then there's a marathon. Hundreds of thousands of people are here for these events, so we want the event planners to consult with us to figure out how to lessen their negative impacts. We want this to be a part of the culture, we want people to be thinking about it from the beginning.

People should be saying, “We have a security budget, we have a bathroom budget, we need a sustainability budget.” You would never have an event without bathrooms or security, you shouldn’t have an event without sustainability. It should be the first thing you're thinking of, and we want to guide event planners to help them make this easy. Planning events is hard, if you've been an event planner or production manager, you know that you are focusing on 50 million things, and you don't sleep for three weeks leading up to an event. If you can pay somebody to make a part of it easier, that's the dream. We want to be the people you can lean on to research, and find the best vendors, and better processes, and help with the education, and the PR, and more. That’s the goal.

In the beginning of this business, we're going to be doing a lot of waste diversion. And that's fine, because there's nobody else doing this in Nashville. But within the next five years, hopefully much sooner, people will realize that consulting is necessary, because of all of the benefits that we've talked about today.

What else would you like people to know about Sheeco?

Diana and I came from nonprofits, and we knew the importance of creating a value set. When you start making money, it's easy to focus on just making money. We wanted to make sure that we’re sticking to our values as this business grows. Therefore, we wrote values based on being inclusive and being approachable, and the social equity piece, and that we’re doing this for the betterment of our community. We’re not doing this to get rich. We published these values on our website. And they're at the beginning of every proposal that we send out. We're being clear about what this business stands for, and why we're doing this.

I know it will be helpful as we continue to grow. When we make business decisions, we can ask, “Does this fit into our values?” Or “How do we make it fit into our values?” Also, we want people to know who we are as people. Diana is a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, and we want people to know that we don't tolerate intolerance. We're not going to let clients use our name just to make their brand look better. That's not something that we want to be a part of.

My business partner and I have a great relationship because I’m a dreamer, and she's got both feet on the ground. We are brand new. We just started a few months ago. But we're getting calls, and we're getting contracts, which is super exciting. Every time we're like, “Oh my gosh, we're owners of a sustainability consulting firm. How cool is this?”