Category: Entrepreneurship

By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Entrepreneurship, media-general, Publishing Tagged with , , , ,

He doesn’t just disagree; Warren Buffett just bought 63 newspapers, including 25 daily papers. In his letter to the publishers and editors of his new properties, he lays out a rosy future for papers that focus on local news, and notes his lifelong love of newspapering, which runs in his family. He even delivered papers in Washington, DC for four years.

Like me, he sees a free press as an essential cornerstone of democracy, and he promises editiorial independence from the bean-counters. I personally have my doubts if mainstream media can regain its credibility in a world where so many media properties convey the message of their corporate masters. It will be refreshing if the papers in the Buffett group can really show their independence.

Click the link above to read his letter.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business, People Helping People, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Very interesting article on Sustainable Brands, “Climate Change – Good For Business” by John Friedman.

Friedman cites Richard Branson on the opportunties in the environmental field:

“I have described the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as one of the greatest threats to the ongoing prosperity and sustainability of life on the planet,” he says. “The good news is that creating businesses that will power our growth, and reduce our carbon output while protecting resources is also the greatest wealth-generating opportunity of our generation.”

And I agree. I have profiled many entrepreneurs over the years who are succeeding with creative green businesses. In many cases, they are creating whole new market sectors—such as an entrepreneur who saves water by selling a spray fluid that largely neutralizes the odor and stain of urine, thus substantially reducing a family’s need to flush.

What is perhaps most interesting about the Friedman article is his historical perspective of energy and transportation not only as wealth-generators, but as environmental problem-solvers for their time:

A high percentage of the wealthiest people in history – excluding despots and conquerors – have made their fortunes in the areas of energy, transportation and construction. The Rockefeller fortune was based on oil (energy), Andrew Carnegie (steel), Cornelius Vanderbilt saw the revolution from wind to steam engines and built an empire in shipping and railroads. Henry Ford took the automobile from the purview of the wealthy to a staple of the average American household by increasing production efficiency, thereby reducing costs for consumers and creating an entire industry that was much of the basis for the American economy for decades…

Indeed many of these changes in industry and transportation have followed the evolution from individual power (feet or paddles), to animal power (horses and horses and buggies) to steam (initially powered in the U.S. by wood and then coal) and finally to internal combustion and electricity. It is important to note that in addition to increasing speed and efficiency, many of these changes were furthered by the desire for more environmentally friendly alternatives [emphasis added]; streetcars and buses in New York were seen as a solution to the manure that was lining the city streets.

Of course, there’s an obvious caution here. The message from the past, viewed through the lens of 2012 and catastrophic climate change, is that sometimes, solutions to old problems cause greater problems. This is a principle that must inform us as we go forward, to avoid blundering into even worse situations as we fix the urgent problems we face.

The good news: we know a lot more about what works and what doesn’t. For instance, we already know that nuclear power is not a solution to climate change and has enormous catastrophic potential. We know that fracking to drill for natural gas not only pollutes water but probably causes earthquakes.

And we also know that we have to be careful to develop solar, wind, hydro, tidal, magnetic, and other clean, renewable energy sources in ways that are both environmentally and economically sustainable.

This is our mission, our duty, our responsibility. Let’s get it done—the right way.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Entrepreneurship, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Shel's Personal Life, Technology, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , ,

In Part 1, “Steve Jobs Introduces the first Macintosh, January 1984,” I discussed why “the computer for the rest of us” was such a big deal at the time. Now, I want to show you how the Mac allowed me to completely reinvent an old business model and dominate my local market for ten years. You might find some marketing lessons you can apply to your own business.

In 1984, when I bought my first (and one of the first) Mac, the bulk of my work was typing term papers and writing résumés. The difference for résumés, even with the dot-matrix printer that was all the Mac had back then, was amazing. Being able to bold or italicize, having the words appear on the screen exactly where they’d show up on paper, and most importantly, knowing exactly where the bottom of the page was and being able to adjust typographically to make things fit—W O W !

Up to that point, I would write a draft of the resume without worrying about formatting during the first interview, send the client away, type it up on an IBM Selectric typewriter (which sometimes took two or three tries, although it got better when I realized I could type on legal-size paper for photocopying onto letter-size and not worry so much about matching the top and bottom margins), and then bring the client back in to review the final product. Changes either required whiting out the error with a special paint, letting it dry thoroughly and very carefully inserting the correction, or retyping the whole bleeping page.

Now, here’s the lesson: Having access to this better technology meant I was not only able to change my business model, but create an unstoppable marketing advantage—and even back then, I was thinking like a marketer.

I went into the Yellow Pages with a little half-inch in-column listing that said “Affordable professional resumes while you wait.” (Couldn’t do accent marks in the Yellow Pages at that time.) Almost instantly, I had the busiest résumé shop in my whole three-county-area. And that slogan was my USP (Unique Selling Proposition) for the next decade. Résumés were not only more lucrative but a lot more fun than typing term papers, and within a few years, they (along with the growing percentage of students who had access to a computer) pretty much pushed out the term paper portion of my business. We rode the résumé train as the bread and butter of our business until Windows 95 started to catch on, with a résumé template that let people think (incorrectly, in most cases) that they could do their own résumés. And oddly enough, none of my local competitors offered the while-you-wait service that attracted so many people to us.

If you missed part 1 of this two-part series, https://greenandprofitable.com/steve-jobs-introduces-the-first-macintosh-january-1984

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By Posted on Posted in Entrepreneurship, Shel's Personal Life, Technology Tagged with ,

Part 1 of two related posts.

Here’s a video of Steve Jobs introducing the very first Mac, taken by Scott Knaster, who wrote software documentation for Apple.

If you’re under 35 or so, it may be hard to see what all the cheering was about—especially when you realize the audience was drawn from the smartest and most tech-savvy people in the country. After all, it’s a black-and-white computer with a terrible speech synthesizer and a 9-inch screen, running off a floppy disk, for goodness sake.

But compared to what else was out there, it was like going from a hand-crank-to-start Model T Ford to, let’s say, a Prius. There were no PCs in the under $8000 range that could do half of what the Mac did effortlessly, at a price under $3000. None that could:

  • Be controlled with a mouse instead of typing arcane instructions
  • Display type on the screen in multiple fonts, sizes, and styles, including handwriting-like script fonts
  • Create pictures using painting tools instead of massive amounts of computer code
  • Play chess on a realistic-looking 3D board, using the mouse to move pieces
  • Synthesize speech this clearly and easily
  • Have all the pieces in one relatively lightweight box, be carried around in a bag, and still have a screen big enough to work (there were portable computers back then, like the Kaypro and Osborne—but the Kaypro was big and awkward and had sharp metal edges, and the Osborne’s 5″ screen  was kind of like using something the size of an iPhone but weighed 24.5 pounds and had screen quality like an old non-cable black-and-white TV screen

Along with the “insanely great” slogan, Apple also called the Mac “the computer for the rest of us.” And it was! I had actually begun shopping for my first computer in late 1983. Frankly, although I recognized that I needed a computer and it would make writing my second book a lot easier, I was intimidated. I didn’t want to have to learn code, didn’t want to struggle with awkward and unintuitive commands. I had used computerized typesetting equipment on one of my newspaper jobs, and it wasn’t fun.

So I took my time researching. I looked at the Kaypro, Osborne, Morrow, Commodore 64 (which had the worst word processing software I’ve ever seen) and various others, and by March, 1984, I was pretty much set to buy an Apple II, but not excited about the learning curve, or about not knowing how the page would look until I hit print. But my dealer, who was a friend, told me, “wait a month, we’ve got something really cool coming.” When the Mac was released to the general public in my area in April 1984, I bought one of the very first ones.

In Part 2 of this series, “How the First Mac Gave Me a Monopoly Marketing Advantage for 10 Years,” I draw marketing lessons from what that first Mac allowed me to do that none of my competitors were doing.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,

This is quite exciting: solar systems for remote, off-grid areas in developing countries, set up with near-zero upfront investment and a pay-as-you-go model, converting to full ownership when the system is paid for.

If you’ve read The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, this will make sense right away. If you haven’t read it, you might want to grab a copy. This is the future: bringing technology to the poorest of the poor, not as charity but as a profitable business model that maintains affordability even among customers who have almost nothing.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business, People Helping People Tagged with , , , ,

It’s nothing new to have bicycles as commercial haulers. In much of the world, bicycles are commonly used to haul both freight and passengers. In the US, where I live, I remember hundreds of delivery bikes on the streets of New York when I was a child: industrial-frame one-speeds with huge boxes on the front. More recently, many cities have added bicycle-rickshaws to their public transportation fleets, competing directly with gas-powered taxis. They’re cheaper and of course much greener than motorized ones, and in congested, traffic-clogged cities, often just as fast.

My much more rural area has had Pedal People, a bicycle-based trash-hauling and farmshare-delivery company, since 2002. Oh yeah, and when I was a high school student in the 1970s, I commuted by bike, 5-1/2 miles uphill in New York City traffic, when the weather permitted. It saved me half an hour each way over the bus, because the bus route was far from linear (although I could read on the bus and not on my bike).

So what makes this decade different?

First, the growing green consciousness. When people who are already disposed to lower their carbon footprint (and their costs) learn that bicycles are really viable transportation alternatives in many cases, the switch becomes easy.

And second, the rapidly developing technology of bicycles. The kind of high-tech freight-hauling bikes described in this article about a bike-powered cargo company in Victoria, British Columbia would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Ethics: General, Green Business, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice, Socially Responsible Investing, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with ,

It’s been a good year for recognition of my work for a better world. In October, I was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame (View pictures and read the transcript here.)

And then last night, I received notification that I (as the human face of GreenAndProfitable.com) am the very first business in the country to be certified by Green America at the Gold level (which was a fairly arduous process involving several reviews of an extensive questionnaire covering socially responsible investing, supply chain, commitment to social and economic justice, and, of course, environmental benchmarks, among other things).

I’m thrilled. After 40 years in the environmental world, it is nice to have people notice.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business Tagged with ,

Good article in Renewable Energy World, showing that despite such setbacks as Solyndra, solar is actually a pretty solid player these days.

In fact, for the first time ever, the U.S. solar industry installed more than a gigawatt of new capacity. That’s like a whole nuclear power plant, without the risks.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, Entrepreneurship, Green Business, Socially Responsible Investing, Uncategorized Tagged with

In honor of the push to bank local by Green America, the push to buy local by Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, and because business bankers want to see business plans and December is National Write a Business Plan Month, I present this guest post from Tim Chen of NerdWallet, on sustainable banking.

Take it away, Tim:

Seems like everywhere you turn these days people are promoting something green. From locovore diets, to green building and green business, there’s a big push for more sustainable living, and a certain trendiness that goes along with it. Chances are if you’re reading this blog, you’re already in the know. Maybe you have your own sustainable business venture, and you’re looking for tips and ideas to make it work. Here’s one for you: Green banking.
Green banking means different things to different people. Maybe you switched to online statements, and you’re darned proud of it. If so, good for you. If not, check it out. Going paperless with your banking is one of the easiest ways to give the environment a little help, and just about every bank offers the service.
But there are other ways to green your banking, and options you may not have heard of. Take, for example, New Resource Bank in San Francisco. The bank only offers accounts to green businesses, and allows accountholders to network with each other. New resource composts and recycles in an effort to meet their goal of 95% waste diversion away from landfills, and every swipe of your debit card earns money for their nonprofit partners.
There’s also GreenChoice Bank, which is based in Illinois. The bank targets their lending to the sustainable business community, and half of the management is accredited in Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).
Houston-based Green Bank will donate $50 to one of a list of local environmental organizations when you open a business or personal money market or checking account. The bank headquarters are LEED Gold-Certified, with minimized resource consumption and rainwater irrigation.
If these banks aren’t in your area, don’t despair! Green America offers a list of community development banks and credit unions, as well as a campaign to “break up with your mega-bank.” Switching to a greener bank can help you take your business sustainability one step further. It will also put you in good company––who knows, you might even make valuable connections with likeminded entrepreneurs.
Tim Chen is the CEO of NerdWallet, an unbiased resource for the best business credit cards.

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