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Analysis Of Ray Anderson Inc., With The Help Of Carpets International Plc

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In 1973, Ray Anderson founded Interface Inc., with the help of Carpets International Plc. (CI), when his former carpet employer decided to pass on the strategic opportunity involving flexible floorcoverings for modern offices and companies. In 1994, Mr. Anderson shifted the company’s strategy with the hope to redirect industrial practices to focus on sustainability while continuing to be a profitable business. This initiative was started with “Mission Zero.”
“Mission Zero” was a challenge as well as a goal set forth by founder Ray Anderson to have Interface, Inc. be at net-zero environmental impact by 2020. Since then this mission has been modified to “becoming restorative through the power of influence.” With this mission in mind, …show more content…

for various portions of the business. Interface Inc. is a carpet company, and although they built InterfaceRAISE based on the successes they had in changing their company to a sustainable and environmentally friendly business in a petroleum based industry, they don’t allow much growth outside of helping the manufacturing industry.
As mentioned before, InterfaceRAISE utilizes the successes and failures of Interface’s path to sustainability as examples to help consult other companies on their path to sustainability. In addition, they only have one part-time employee and three full-time employees in this division to build it to the $5 million business in five years. They could tap 20 “peer experts” from other divisions of Interface; however, these experts can only speak to Interface’s experiences with sustainability. Interface’s experience, although valuable, is traditionally only useful when consulting with other manufacturing companies.
This leads to the second main problem: who is the target market? The middle-market approach casts a wide net into company size and industries. Is there, or was there, a plan of who to start helping first? The manufacturing industry is very large and most likely where they started when approaching the sustainability consulting, but where do they want to go from there? In the case it mentioned that “InterfaceRAISE’s customers ranged in size from $30 million to $400 billion in revenues, and hailed from a wide

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