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| Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, February 2015 |
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| This Month’s Tip: These Kinds of Questions Can Shape Your Business and Your Life |
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I got asked two questions in discussion groups, recently. The first was “What makes you a stand out in what YOU do?” This was my response: |
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As a profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter, I think I do offer something unique: my combination of ability to:
- see both the forest and the trees;
- bring in perspectives across many industries and situations that may have been overlooked;
- see opportunities/possible partnerships for others, and open up new markets as a result;
- understand the implications for the individual, the organization, and the wider organism (the planet);
- look at the intersections of business success, greening the planet, and improving the world;
- deliver a very clear message, both as a writer and speaker (and particularly my emphasis on effective but non-hypey copywriting);
- be friendly and helpful, even with those I disagree with;
- anchor my actions in a detailed vision of a world free of hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change, because of the actions of profit-motivated business people.
And the second was to sum up my life in 25 words:
Passionate about business fixing hunger/poverty/war/climate change, blessed with wonderful family/living situation, optimist, lover of life/travel/arts/food, skilled writer/speaker.
I took the time to answer these questions because I believe, strongly, that self-examination is a critical part of moving forward. And because as a writer who is sometimes long-winded, I like the challenge of being pithy. I could write a 200-page memoir, easily. Distilling that down to 25 words is not an easy thing. But it helped me focus on what’s important tome, right now, as we begin to roll through 2015.
Now let me put the challenge to you. If you’re reading this via email, click the link at the top to read on the Web. If you’re already on the Web version, just scroll down. Underneath, you’ll see a comment box. Please post your answers to one or both of these questions, or something else that you feel sums up your personal or business challenges for the remaining 10 months of 2015.
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| Special Offer Only for World Changers/Better World Dreamers
—> If you have a project that materially advances a cause such as sufficiency for those at the bottom, peace (global, national, or even neighborhood), or planetary healing, and you could benefit from expert guidance in marketing, profitability, or product development, I will do two things for you:
- Instead of my usual 15-minute no-charge exploratory consultation, I will expand that to a full 30 minutes. In half an hour, you’ll normally receive quite a few concrete, implementable ideas from me.
- I will also knock $50 off my normal $195 per hour consulting rate for the first hour beyond the freebie session, so the first hour is only $145—OR take $50 off the price of any fixed-fee copywriting such as a story-behind-the-story get-attention press release or book cover text—OR take a full $1000 off the price of in-person speaking or on-site training (all prices in US dollars).
Why? As a reader of my monthly Clean and Green Club newsletter, or as a member of the Business For a Better World website, you already know that I’m on a mission to show the business world how to make a profit while turning hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance.
I’ve been laying the groundwork to build my career around this. And I feel that at age 57 when I started (58 now), I finally know what I want to do when I grow up.
However, my client portfolio hasn’t moved as quickly into this new direction. I’ve certainly had a lot of really cool green businesses in my portfolio, but not enough that are really about turning those planetary wrongs into rights as their core DNA. Rectifying that seems like a logical next step on this exciting journey.
So…if you have a business that’s wired to do this, or you’ve written a book or created any infoproduct that moves the world in a much more positive direction, you qualify to take advantage of this offer. Just send me a quick note (shel AT greenandprofitable.com) with a few lines about what you’re doing and what kind of help you seek. Please use the subject line, “Subscriber: 30 Minute Consultation?” If you qualify, I’ll send you a few questions and we’ll set a time for your half-hour consult. If your project isn’t within the parameters, I’ll still give you 15 minutes on the phone, no charge (if you haven’t had one before).
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Connect with Shel on Social Media |
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About Shel & This Newsletter
As a green business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of eight books… international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware 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.
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 was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.
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).
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| “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).” |
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| Another Recommended Book—Thriving Beyond Sustainability |
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Thriving Beyond Sustainability: Pathways to a Resilient Society, by Andrés R. Edwards (New Society Publishers)
While the book is full of great examples of companies and communities thriving by doing the right thing, Edwards saves the best for last. The eighth and final chapter, “A Thriveable Future,” states that big changes can result from small steps. It begins with three quotes. I especially like the third one, from techno-pioneer and futurist Alan Kay, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
In fact, I liked this quote so much, I did a whole blog post: https://www.business-for-a-better-world.com/inventing-future-desire/
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| The chapter goes on to introduce the SPIRALS framework: Scalable, Place-Making, Intergenerational, Resilient, Life-affirming, Self-care. While this had to be forced a bit to come up with a workable acronym, it’s a pretty good framework for examining the transition from sustainability to “thrivability”—something I’ve become ever-more-convinced over the past few years that we very much need to do.
Sustainability, by definition, is creating systems that maintain the status quo. But thriving goes beyond that, to regeneration, to leaving the world BETTER than we found it. So that means, for instance, buildings and vehicles that are net-energy-positive (producing more than they use) and net-waste-negative (generating more inputs for other systems than things that need to be thrown away).
Among the examples Edwards cites:
- A Native American tribal timber project in Michigan that has been restoring and regenerating the forest ecosystem for more than 150 years, growing the forest by more than 30 percent even while harvesting 30 million board-feed per year (p. 156)
- A program in Berkeley, California (and replicated elsewhere) that allows ownership of solar systems without the huge capital outlay; this is, from the homeowner viewpoint, a big improvement over leaseback programs that had been the only way to get a solar system without plunking down thousands of dollars (p. 160)
- An initiative that lets residents of Sonoma County, California monitor—and thus control—their waste generation (p. 161)
Edwards ends with a beautifully optimistic call for replacing the scarcity mentality with abundance consciousness (something I’ve been saying for years), so that, for example, we can turn a declining ecosystem into a place “that teems with diverse wildlife and is integrated with flourishing human settlements…We can meet the challenges ahead with a vision in which creativity trumps knowledge and imagination is recognized as one of our most powerful assets. These timeless attributes will light our path toward a thriveable future for generations to come.” (pp. 164-165)
While not reaching the heights of the final chapter, there’s plenty of merit in the rest of the book, too. Edwards’ emphasis on accounting for true lifecycle costs make clear that renewables are actually cost-competitive with fossil fuels; he puts the indirect costs of a gallon of gasoline at $12. (p. 69). This is one of several key organizing principles he highlights. Others range from “glocalization” to biomimicry to preserving biolinguistic diversity to putting a dollar value on the environmental services that our ecosystems perform for us.
I’m particularly glad about the many wonderful examples of communities and businesses thriving by doing the right thing. I’ll list a few among the many examples. Projects that:
- Turn confiscated illegal liquor into biofuels, in Sweden (p. 39)
- Use closed-loop systems to recapture all byproducts, so that a Danish industrial plant heats 3000 homes with its surplus steam while a fish farm’s water treatment waste fertilizes agriculture (pp. 53-54)
- Provide a mechanism for recovery and recycling of any computer sold in Texas (p. 55)
- Created 142,000 new jobs in the German wind industry, though tax policies that favor renewable energy (p. 69)
- Allowed an entire Kansas town to rebuild as a green community after being wiped out by a tornado (p. 86)
And just what is possible? Consider this: On average, a resident of the United States generates 20 metric tons of carbon per year, while a resident of the European Union produces half that amount (10 metric tons). But when the green community of Vaxjo, Sweden—a place that obviously needs to create a lot of heat in the winter—turned its attention to reducing carbon, its per-capita output plummeted all the way down to 3.5 metric tons per person per year. That’s one-third of the rest of Europe, and one-sixth of the US. (p. 88).
In other words, we already know how to do much, much better. Let’s do it! |
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