Episode 52 – Corporate Responsibility & ESG: How Doing the Right Thing Drives Business Performance

In Season Six of Doing the Opposite: Business Disruptors we’re turning the spotlight onto host of the podcast Jeff Dewing. Jeff is Founder and CEO of Cloudfm Group, keynote speaker, bestselling author, and a leader who rebuilt his life and company by doing the one thing most people fear: the opposite.

In this episode, Jeff and Sam explore what it truly means to do the right thing in business – not as a PR exercise or a tick-box, but as a daily habit that reshapes culture, attracts talent and creates real competitive advantage. Jeff traces his own turning point to 2015, when a childhood memory of two lungs in a pharmacy window, one black, one pink, collided with his love of petrol engines and he could no longer justify the roar of a V8 over the health of the people around him. From that moment, he went fully electric personally and then drove the same shift across the entire Cloudfm fleet.

Jeff unpacks ESG beyond the jargon and brings it to life through the story of CloudFest: a solar-powered event for 250 people that produced just one bin liner of non-recyclable waste. The lesson was simple – it didn’t cost more money, it just required focus. And the pride that followed rippled back into everyday office behaviour, shaping how people saw themselves and the organisation they worked for.

Jeff and Sam consider the cultural pushback on ESG playing out in parts of the world. Jeff’s response is to point to norms that have already shifted permanently: nobody throws litter from a car window or lights a cigarette in a restaurant anymore, not because they were told to stop, but because the culture changed. The same trajectory is possible for ESG. His message to leaders is direct: find someone who cares deeply about it, appoint them, set goals you can measure, and let ethics quietly guide every decision.

In 2026 Cloudfm Group celebrates its 15^th anniversary. 

Find out more about Cloudfm here.