Ecopreneurist

This is a guest post by John Simonetta, owner of Proforma Simonetta Freelance, an eco-friendly promotional items consultancy (see proformagreen.com). John’s blogs are designed to keep us up to date on the “greening” of his industry.

Just in time for the holiday season Owl Line has released two eco-friendly covers for the amazingly popular Amazon Kindle. They are the Owl Kindle Book cover – style dimensions 8.375″H x 5.75″W x .75″D -  and Owl Kindle Easel – style dimensions 8.5″H x 5.625″W x .875″D. Both models come with the OWL id patch, explaining that the units are made from eco-friendly materials.

Both the Easel and Book models are offered in 100% post-industrial OWL™ recycled bonded leather model or 100% Post-Consumer recycled PET fabric with leather trim. Owl defines these two materials as follows:

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You can get legal advice, accounting services, marketing consulting and more.  But sometimes the key to entrepreneurial success is just stick-to-it-iveness.  Where do you turn when the whole process of running your own business (or getting one off the ground) is just overwhelming? One place is a book.

Tuesday, Tina Seelig spoke at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco about her new book “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20“, and her words can be a great reminder of how fun (and important) being an entrepreneur is, if your motivation or energy ever diminishes.

Seelig’s first point is that problems are opportunities; bigger problems are bigger opportunities. Playing a video clip of Vinod Khosla saying something to the effect of, “No one is going to pay you to solve a small problem.” So, if you’re overwhelmed, it could be a good sign. You may have taken on a very worthwhile opportunity.

You can see other videos of speakers at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, which Seelig heads at ecorner.Stanford.edu. A free Stanford education! Read the rest of this entry »

Earth Day takes place this April 22nd.

As a green leader or entrepreneur, the day begs the question, what will you be doing?

In a mad public relations world that anchors on events as a tangible “touch point” in lieu of diving into the messier (and harder to track or control) world of ‘awareness’, Earth Day is one of many symbols (i.e. polar bears) we use when speaking to some of the starker and concrete practices of the planet’s ecological anxieties. Read the rest of this entry »

I couldn’t help but be curious about a book called “Do You Matter?” It is a great question for an entrepreneur to ask. And the book’s subtitle “How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company” is compelling. Doesn’t sustainability make our companies matter? Doesn’t our value of the environment make us matter? Is design really THE thing?

The authors, Robert Brunner (once a product designer for Apple and now a principal in the design firm Pentagram) and Stewart Emery (author of “Success Built to Last” and a leader in the Human Potential Movement) did not just rely on their own experience, but also relate numerous case studies about what other companies have done right in developing design-driven (and customer needs focused) organizations.

As you can see on the authors’ site, they are not just talking about package design and logos. The briefest synopsis of the book is, “We’re talking about design as a total concept—not just about how a product looks, but how the product operates, how it sounds, and how it feels. Also included in this idea of design is the quality of your purchase experience, of what happens when you actually open up the box, how you start to feel, and what all this communicates to you. And of course, there is the chain of events through which you became aware of the product. This is part of the design connection too—what all those touch points mean to you as a customer.”

One point I particularly liked is, “If you have your own brand-driven approach to design, others can’t really take this from you. People can try to copy it, but they they become merely derivative. If you do a good job at it, you have something that becomes a very strong and defensible strategy… when a customer purchases your product or pays for your service, they feel they have joined something.” Read the rest of this entry »

I’m reading an advance copy of Auden Schendler’s “Getting Green Done,” coming out next week. It’s filled with lots of wisdom from the front lines and its a great read. It has also given me some great insights for the book I’m writing on greening small businesses. I thought I’d share three nuggets of wisdom with you here:

1. Sustainable practices are proving to make business sense—but ethics also have to play a role. We all know that sustainable business, is good business. For example, a recent Aberdeen Group study of green practices among retailers found that green mandates were “essential cost control and customer service practices.” On average, best-in-class retailers achieved a 20% decrease in energy costs, an 8% decrease in their overall logistics and transport costs, and a 5% decrease in merchandise costs through their green initiatives. But, Schendler says, ROI is not enough:

“Ethics have to play a role…an economic pitch in a vacuum may not make sense to managers if there’s no context, no broader environmental mission within the company.”

His point is that it may be easier to “sell” sustainability when you start by getting everyone at the table to agree/admit that businesses have a responsibility to help protect the environment.

2. Do a sexy project. Schendler’s advice is to start the greening process with things that you will find fun to implement. Things that interest you. Things that are sexy. This will get everyone engaged.

Read the rest of this entry »

In a previous posting, I wrote about an increasing trend to host parties to generate interest for your green product.  I was hosting a book release party for my book, Build a Green Small Business:  Profitable Ways to Become an Ecopreneur, and was curious to see whether the event would be a worthwhile marketing event, as opposed to just a good time. 

 I decided to go big with the event.  Host it at a nightclub.  Provide hors d’ouvres.  Co-host with a non-profit group and raise money for them during the evening as well.  Solicit over $2,000 worth of gift certificates to raffle away.  Send out invitations to over 2,000 people. 

In other words, we were ready for success.  Read the rest of this entry »

Book review–

75 Green Businesses You Can Start to Make Money and Make a Difference

by Glenn Croston, Ph.D

This book is a nice complement to Ecopreneuring by John Ivanko and Lisa Kivirist, in that while the latter is a lifestyle book, i.e., what would it be like to be a social entrepreneur, this book cuts to the chase and describes, as its title says, 75 different green business opportunities that people can start.  It gives a relative scale on how much capital may be required, and how long it may take to get started for each kind of business.

The potential market for this book is huge.  As described in the preface, “77% of Americans are concerned about the environment and feel it is urgent to get involved and make a difference.”  Add this sentiment to the powerful entrepreneurial spirit in this country, and the center of your Venn Diagram becomes a large and potentially powerful group. 

Croston describes opportunities as diverse as sugarcane ethanol production to Read the rest of this entry »

Book Review: 

Ecopreneuring:  Putting People and Planets Before Profit, by John Ivanko and Lisa Kivirist. 

“One of the biggest ironies of our growth model is that we’re coming to relize that it has failed to make our society particularly satisfied–indeed, the number of americans who say they’re very happy with their lives was higher in 1956 than it is today, though the standard of living has trebled over that half century.”
Bill McKibben, in the Foreword. 

In Ecopreneuring, Ivanko (a writer for Ecopreneurist) and Kivirist give us an inside view of what it’s like to be a social entrepreneur.  There are frequent interviews with other social entrepreneurs, as well as an in-depth look at the Inn Serendipity (Ivanko and Kivirist’s green bed & breakfast), as models of social entrepreneurship lifestyles and business models. 

If you’re wondering who these social entrepreneurs are, how they operate, how they think, and what their values and lifestyles are, this book demystifies it all–and replaces the conventional American Dream along the way.  Read the rest of this entry »

Consider the gift of a green book this Holiday season.

Ecobrain, a green publishing company offers ebooks, the ideal green reading choice.  Ebooks can be instantly downloaded to your desktop. Ecobrain has a series of ebooks that make ideal reading for Ecopreneurs.

The Next Sustainability Wave: Building Boardroom Buy-in, by Bob Willard ($16.95)

This book provides a compelling business case emphasizing the importance of how sustainability is presented to corporate leaders. It applies effective selling techniques to reposition sustainability strategies as a means to achieving existing corporate ends, rather than as a separate priority to worry about. It sells sustainability as a solution, a business strategy, and a catalyst for business transformation. Read the rest of this entry »

A post by contributing guest writer Melissa Chungfat.

I’ve been seeing a lot of Thomas Friedman on the tube talking about his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded. The three-time Pulitzer Prize winner is getting a lot of buzz stressing the necessity of a green global industry. Ecopreneurs are key in developing innovative solutions to deal with the tremendous global environmental problems.

The book title refers to the convergence of global warming, the rise of the middle class, and the exponential population growth. These factors drive the following five trends over their tipping point:

• Energy and resource
• Petro dictatorship
• Biodiversity loss
• Climate change
• Energy poverty

In our culture of convenience, so many people want to help the environment – if they can keep all of their luxuries; they want to green their habits – if it’s convenient enough; they want to buy green products – if it’s easy enough to find. But this attitude won’t fly anymore with the problems we are facing. Read the rest of this entry »