We put solar panels on roofs for a living and we're good at it. We can tell you the annual yield of a south facing warehouse roof in Swindon, the payback period on a 1MW array and how many tonnes of CO₂ a cold storage site stops sending into the sky once we've finished with it. What most of us couldn't tell you, until fairly recently, is when we last had our blood pressure checked.

Eden is a business built on long term thinking. We talk about 25 year panel warranties and 25 year power agreements like they're nothing, because planning decades ahead is the whole point of the job. Then the same men who will happily map out a solar farm's performance until 2056 will ignore a strange ache for three years because they're "probably fine." We've noticed the irony. This November we're doing something about it, and we've decided to do it with our faces.

Some of us have grown a moustache before and know exactly what we're in for. Others are about to discover that their facial hair arrives patchy and slightly to the left. A few of us will look like 1970s detectives. At least one of us will look like a man selling a van with no MOT and a story about the mileage. All of it will be photographed and our partners, children and clients have been warned. If you have a meeting with one of us this month and find yourself staring at our top lip, that's fine. That's the point. Ask us why.

Here is why, and this is the part where the jokes stop for a minute.

In the UK, men die around four years earlier than women on average, and far too much of that gap is made up of things that could have been caught, treated or talked about in time. One in eight men in the UK will be diagnosed with prostate cancer. Testicular cancer is the most common cancer in young men. Three in every four people who take their own lives in this country are men. Those numbers are not about some other group of people somewhere else. Run them across any company with a few dozen men in it and they are about the people in our office, on our sites and in our vans.

Our installers start at six, work at height in whatever weather the British Isles throws at them and drive hundreds of miles a week. They've grown up in an industry, like a lot of trades, where saying "I'm not alright" has been treated as a weakness. That idea is wrong, and it is expensive. It costs families their dads, brothers, sons and mates, and it costs them far earlier than it should.

So what motivates this team? Care, which is the first of our core values and the one that has to mean something when nobody's watching. We tell clients every day that their buildings are worth investing in for the long haul. Our people are too. We also believe sustainability has never only been about carbon. A business that burns through its people isn't sustainable, however many megawatts it puts on roofs.

Every pound you give goes to Movember's work on prostate cancer, testicular cancer, mental health and suicide prevention. That means research that finds cancers earlier, treatment that leaves men with a better life afterwards, and programmes that get men talking before it's too late to talk.

If you can donate, thank you, genuinely. If you can't, there are two things you can do this month that cost nothing and are worth more. If you're a man over 45, or over 40 with a family history, ask your GP about a prostate check, and if you're younger, learn what's normal for your own body so you notice when something changes. Then text a mate you haven't heard from in a while and ask how he's actually doing. Wait for the second answer, because the first one is always "fine."

We'll shave these off in December. What we want, more than any total on this page, is for everyone reading it to still be here when we grow them back next November.