|
|
| Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,
December 2013
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Will My 2014 Goals Inspire YOU to Greatness? |
|
|
|
| Recently, on a LinkedIn discussion group, someone asked about our goals for the coming year. I thought my response, as well as some of what I posted as follow-up, might be very helpful as you think about your own goals for the coming year—as well as the action steps necessary to make them real—and perhaps encourage you to think a whole lot bigger.
Here’s my first post on the topic.
1. Find a publisher for the three-book series I’d like to write next—or figure out a viable path to reaching the size audience I want to reach if I self-publish (I’ve self-published successfully several times, but the number of people I each that way is smaller than what I need to achieve what I’m trying to do, by orders of magnitude)
2. Make my monthly column financially viable and/or develop other passive-income or very-light-workload sources that can support me as my 60s draw closer (I turn 57 next month).
3. Find more paying markets for my speaking on green business profitability, especially in exotic locations.
This was a very spirited discussion, with more than 70 comments so far. The original poster asked me, publicly, how big an audience I wanted and what held me back. To which I replied:
I really appreciate your question to me…
—> I had kind of forgotten that a lot of the reason why I started the monthly column was to build my platform large enough that a big NYC or NYC-style publisher would find me worthy of their attention—in a world where they’re looking for 20,000 Twitter fans and I have (as of this morning) 6502. That seems to me the easiest place to focus, because it should vastly increase my desirability to the people who can bring about #1 and #3. Thank you for reminding me of that.
Meanwhile, I’ve also started building up my youtube channel, redone my speaker demo video and both my speaking and consulting onesheets, improved my Making Green Sexy talk both visually and verbally, put up a new website offering green marketing audits (with another one to follow once the design is improved, for marketing audits not focused on the green world) and approached a few literary agents with a onesheet about the three-book series. In short, I’ve done a whole lot to grow my business, but basically nothing to grow the column. I think focusing my own energies on that direction could bear some good fruit in all these areas.
This has also been a year of intensive professional development. Among others, I went to a four-day speaker training very early in the year, which I found quite useful (and resulted directly in both the improvements in my visuals and my commitment to have a meaningful video presence) and a six-day business-growth intensive, which unfortunately (despite its very high price) did not add much to my tool bag and so far, six months out, has not led to any new work either directly or indirectly.
I’ve actually just hired a very bright outside contractor who is leading me through a strategic process and will then be calling companies on my behalf: sounding them out about where they need help in the green marketing world, and then making an individual offer that addresses that need: a marketing audit, creating new marketing materials for them (which I hope will flow from the audits), speaking or training, and/or the column. Hopefully she will produce some great results.
I have both the asset and the liability of being interested in everything; I always say that’s why I became a writer. It keeps me fascinated by the world around me, which is a great skill for a speaker/writer/consultant—but it does lead to a lack of focus and a case of shiny-object syndrome. If anything has been holding me back, it’s that—trying to grow my business in too many directions at once, and therefore not bearing down with single-minded focus to accomplish one of the tasks.
I’ve tried to mitigate that by unsubbing from 50 or so newsletters and discussion lists this year, but that still leaves another 50 clogging my inbox. I’ve also essentially declared e-mail bankruptcy and am ignoring most of what comes in. I flip through on the servers and note the 10 or so I need to respond to—and yet it still takes a couple of hours a day. I could probably find more time in the day by backing off my participation on online discussion groups…
After several people offered reality checks on the nature of book publishing, I went pretty deep on my latest response:
Having published four of my books (plus six foreign editions) with traditional publishers, I’m well aware that most publishers do almost nothing for most of their titles. I’m always telling my clients this, and many of them opt to have me guide them through true self-publishing.
However…most publishers do put significant resources behind the handful of titles they have chosen for superstardom—you could call them (tongue firmly in cheek) “the 1 percent.” These are the big-print-run books that have a chance at changing the culture. Yes, I am aiming high—but I think I can be one of them. This is an audacious goal for someone who’s always been a modest-selling midlist author. To use Kevin’s lovely phrase, I want to “be epic.” It’s not so much that I want to be a household word (though that would be lovely)—it’s that I want to change the culture. I want to be able to arrive at the end of this lifetime knowing that I made a difference not just to the few thousand people whose lives I’ve already touched, but to millions of people being beaten down by poverty and war…and to a planet that has been heavily harmed by our particular species. And I think I’d have a hard time living with myself if I felt that I *could* have done this but backed away because it was too scary. It took me a long time and a lot of work to be able to think this big. I am not a megalomaniac but I really do think I was put on this earth to make a big difference. And the small but significant differences I’ve made in my time here so far have prepared me to really make an effort here to make a much larger difference.
I am a realist. I know this is a huge goal. And I know that the odds are long—particularly for someone with a track record of eight books including two from big NYC publishers (and two from small commercial publishers too, not to mention the various books I’ve produced for my self-publisher clients) that didn’t come anywhere near this success level. This is one of the several reasons why I really want to build up my syndicated column, Green And Profitable—and get my first clients for the sister column, Green And Practical, aimed at consumers. In order to be taken seriously at that level, I need to demonstrate that I already have a much larger audience by orders of magnitude than I did at my last at-bat in the book industry (almost four years, now). I know that I may not make it to that level—but this is my deep motivation.
I’ve felt comfortable enough here to share my deeper goals and motivations, and now you have more of the context.
So my questions to you as the New Year approaches: do you take the time to work not just IN your business but ON your business? What are your goals for 2014, and how will you turn those goals into reality?
Please respond to shel AT greenandprofitable.com with the subject line, “Newsletter subscriber: 2014 goals. Tell me whether I have permission to publish or excerpt your response on my site and;/or newsletter, and how you’d like to be attributed. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Connect with Shel on Social Media |
|
|
|
|
|
About Shel & This Newsletter
As a marketing consultant and copywriter… award-winning author of eight books… international speaker, blogger, syndicated columnist — Shel Horowitz shows how green and ethical businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green competitors. His most recent book is category bestseller Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.
He was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.
Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company
He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
|
|
|
|
| “As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).” |
|
|
|
|
|
I’m under consideration for a few exciting speaking opportunities (including a couple in other countries). But so far, the only definite is
May 10, 2014, I will once again be presenting at CAPA University, a one-day book publishing program in Hartford. More info: gaffney AT kanineknits.com
–> Remember: you can earn 25 percent of my speaking fee if you get me booked someplace. Who do you know that needs a speaker on green business profitability/green marketing? |
|
|
|
|
No offers for you this time. I guess everyone’s in holiday mode. Best of holidays to you and your loved ones. |
|
|
|
| Another Recommended Book—The Three Secrets of Green Business |
|
|
The Three Secrets of Green Business: Unlocking Competitive Advantage in a Low Carbon Economy, by Gareth Kane (Earthscan, 2010)
This UK book has quite a bit to recommend it: an attitude that green can be good for business, a thoughtful and not-much-seen analysis of a number of the issues involved in transforming society (e.g., should you sell off your renewable-energy credits, or take them out of circulation so other companies have to work harder to meet their targets?), a holistic approach influenced by the likes of deep-thinking and deep-acting practitioners like Amory Lovins of Rocky Mountain Institute and the late Ray Anderson of Interface Flor, and the rare combination of a strong technical background with the ability to explain things in simple, understandable terms—at least if the Britishisms don’t throw you.
|
|
Kane’s three secrets:
1. Follow the business case; be able to justify your green initiatives on economic grounds
2. Follow—where possible and practical—”the ecological model of sustainability—Solar, Cyclic, Safe”; where not practical, strive for at least a 10-fold increase in efficiency
3. Take both huge leaps and small stepsEarly in the book, he proposes that green entrepreneurs strive for something deeper than mere regulatory compliance. Rather, do the best you can at engineering a deep-green solution. First, you won’t have to do it over every time the laws get tougher. Second, you begin to address the core issues of your company’s role in the world. And third, that gives you bragging rights in the marketing sphere (as I’ve been pointing out for years, most notably in my eighth book, Guerilla Marketing Goes Green).Some of the advantages ripple through. If you cut the weight of a component down, you might be able to cut the weight of other components that support the original one.Additionally, that perspective leads to what he calls “Industrial Symbiosis”: turning “waste” from one process into raw material for something else (you can see a great example of this in my profile of the Intervale, an integrated industrial complex near Burlington, Vermont, US: https://www.frugalmarketing.com/dtb/intervale.shtml ). I’ve been a fan of the concept for years, but the term is new to me, and I like it. Kane notes that you should put your Industrial Symbiosis systems into place before you focus on reducing the volume of waste. After all, if you can use it somewhere else, it becomes an asset. He cites one business that diverted 150,000 tons from the landfill while creating a multimillion dollar revenue stream.
As this concept begins to integrate itself into your operations, you can even design for easy disassembly, and thus easy reuse and recycling.
Kane is quite a fan of biomimicry, pointing out that in nature, recycling does not degrade the product quality. When trees produce the oxygen that we breathe, and we in turn convert it to carbon dioxide that the trees need, there’s no friction loss, no fall-off in production or quality.
But when we humans recycle, too often, we go from higher uses down to lower ones. High-quality printing paper is turned into newsprint or toilet paper. Plastic soda bottles become tote bags. Drinking water runoff could become graywater to feed plants, and then from there to run an industrial process, and then at last for sewage. This, of course, is far better than wasting it, but not as good as nature’s zero-waste, zero-degradation model. The best Industrial Symbiosis systems avoid this rap. A lesser alternative is to balance out any downcycling to lower functionality with upcycling to a higher purpose.
A particularly useful concept for going deeply green is “backcasting”: reverse-engineering from your goal, rather than your impact projecting forward. Again, I’ve been a fan but didn’t have the language to name it. This is an extremely useful technique that has led to major innovations including the light bulb. Combine it with biomimicry—looking to nature to model how to solve problems and achieve our goals—and the power is palpable.
On a less big-picture level, Kane also has a lot of solid practical advice to green and improve any business. For starters, he notes the importance of an engaged workforce. Too often, he writes, he tours industrial sites where hoses are left running, cracked windows sap heating and cooling energy, and so forth. Creating a climate that replaces “why doesn’t somebody fix that” to “let’s take care of this together” may be a very high-ROI investment—not to mention other benefits like improvement in morale and productivity.
The book is also full of useful checklists like the Top 10 recycling tips for offices and factories, as well as water conservation tips (did you know that push faucets can save 50 percent of your water compared with traditional turn faucets?), environmental questions to ask before any purchase, and—going a little into my bailiwick—five tips for more effective messaging.
In short, the book is very useful. Recommended highly.
|
|
|
