The Clean and Green Club

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 Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.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).”

Another Recommended Book—80/20 Sales and Marketing

80/20 Sales and Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More, by Perry Marshall (Entrepreneur Press, 2013)

Wow! Rarely have I encountered a marketing book that packaged so many key insights into business success, or one that was so applicable to the environmental justice/social change lens that you and I bring to our businesses.

Right from the start, Richard Koch’s foreword reveals the biggest insight (which Marshall states on page 37 and explores in more depth throughout the book): the fabled 80/20 rule, a/k/a the Pareto Principle, is fractal. In plain English: If 20 % of your clientele spend at or above the average (and the rest are probably not even worth your time), then 20% of the first 20%—4% of your total customer base—will account for 16 times the average sale. Marshall represents this graphically in the “power curve,” which looks quite different from the typical bell curve that identifies medians and averages. He includes numerous examples of power curves, which crawl along the bottom left before escalating steeply—exponentially.

Now, turn this into strategy. After you identify the top-performing 20 % to focus on, rinse and repeat: take the top 20% of that 20%, and run it up several iterations. By the end, you’ll have identified a core group of buyers willing to spend thousands of times more with you than the average buyer. Then craft offerings for them. Sports teams understand this, and make half their revenue from the handful of wealthy fans willing to spring for season skyboxes and other very expensive perks.

—> Go read those two paragraphs just above one more time. They’re that important.

But don’t stop there. Read the rest of the book.

On page 87, I found out exactly why my attempts at affiliate marketing have been so poorly received—and how to fix it if I want to try again. On page 50, there’s a copywriting formula that I can’t wait to try, revolving around simple, elegant, and complete solutions to pain points. Page 89 offers a process of continuous tweaks that can multiply results by orders of magnitude, again and again. And then there’s the incredibly powerful lesson in split testing that fills Chapter 9; the chapter title, “It’s not Failure. It’s Testing,” takes my own insights about persisting with “impossible” goals to its enormously profitable mathematical/logical conclusion. Pages 93-100 explain why your most expensive offering should always be at least 100 times as expensive as your entry-level offering. And then there’s Marshall’s double-80/20 saddle curve (p. 155), which goes a long way toward explaining the polarization of politics (among many other things)—and the market opportunity (pp. 158-162) that may be waiting for you on both sides of that polarization.

The Clean and Green Club, August 2014

12 Aug, 2014 No Comment

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

August 2014

This Month’s Tip: Speak at a TED Event and Do It Right

This spring, I got to do a TED talk “Impossible Is a Dare: Business For a Better World.”

You can see it at https://www.ted.com/tedx/events/11809.

I’ve written often about public speaking as an outreach, brand building, and marketing tool. There is perhaps no better training ground for speakers than TED. If you’re not familiar, TED—an acronym for Technology, Education, Design—is a prestigious (and very expensive) conference featuring short talks by very bright minds. No TED talk is supposed to go longer than 18 minutes, though I’ve seen a few that snuck in a bit extra.

Presenters have included Bill Gates, Isabel Allende, Seth Godin, James Cameron, Viktor Frankl, Gabby Giffords, Malcolm Gladwell, Bill and Hillary Clinton (separately), Stephen Hawking, and hundreds of others at the top of their game. The world is a richer place for this body of elegantly delivered wisdom, and the TED.com website is extremely popular. Many superstars of the speaking world were virtually unknown until their TED talks went viral.

The smartest thing TED has done is to video-record every presentation, and put them up on a public website, freely accessible to all. And the second-smartest thing TED has done, under the management of Wired Magazine founder and bestselling author Chris Anderson, is franchise the TED concept. Hundreds of cities now post TEDx talks, as official satellites of the main TED event.

To put a coherent message together in as little as five or as much as 18 minutes is no easy task. Even for experienced speakers, it’s a challenge. For many years, I’ve watched lots of TED talks—both to gain knowledge and insight about the world around me, and to study presentation techniques from these excellent speakers.

And for many years, too, I’d wanted to present a TED talk. I answered speaker calls for several TEDx events, reached out to people I knew who had presented at TED, and tried to be patient. I even volunteered to coach a TEDx presenter over Google Hangouts. (It’s quite fascinating to help shape someone else’s TED talk.)

Then, on April 10 of this year, the same organizer for whom I’d coached a speaker chose me to do a TEDx Salon event on May 8 in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, just 35 miles from my house. Instead of a day in a big auditorium with lots of speakers, I would be the only speaker in an intimate evening in a very small room (it was crowded with 15 people), and I would also choose two related TED talks to show. But it would still get posted on TED.com, and that was good enough for me.

I had less than a month to prepare. Most TED speakers have a lot more notice. Yes, I felt the pressure. I wanted thousands of people to watch my video, and I wanted it to leverage change in the way business is done.

This organizer wants all her speakers to have a rehearsal/coaching session, usually in person (I don’t know if that’s standard TED procedure, or just hers). After creating a whole new talk and slide show, I was on the third major draft (plus numerous minor edits) by the time I drove up to the venue for the dry run. Having been a speaker for decades, I was feeling pretty confident (and a little resentful of giving up an extra evening). But my volunteer coaches showed me I still had room for lots of improvement. Fortunately, I still had ten days to get it right. I simplified and clarified the messaging and slides, reworked certain awkward points in my narrative—and successfully delivered Version 4.0 in front of my packed and enthusiastic audience of 15. I ended up being quite grateful for the coaching session.

Fairly late in the process—the day before the rehearsal—I decided to build my talk around this quote: “Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare.” In my talk, I attributed it to an author named Elna Baker; I later found out that she took it from Muhammad Ali. The complete quote is “Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

And that gave me a structure. I brought up several examples of things we used to think were impossible and now accept as fact: from human beings traveling at 17,500 miles per hour (aboard the International Space Station)…to the invention of the lightbulb and the iPod…to ending apartheid without vengeance…to saving a mountain in my own neighborhood. Then I took it global, challenging the business world to “turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance.” I pointed out the profit potential in doing this work, and cited companies already profiting with their social enterprises.

If you watch my TED talk (once again, the URL is https://www.ted.com/tedx/events/11809 ), I’d be grateful if you send me a comment that I can put on a web page. If you can spare 15 minutes to listen, please take another minute or two and share your reaction. If you can forward to people you think would like to see it and link to it on social media, you’ll have my gratitude.

Friends/Colleagues who Want to Help

Jay Levinson Memorial Conference is On Hold

My wife was the one who noticed that the Guerrilla Marketing conference I mentioned last month had been scheduled for Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. When I brought this to the attention of the organizers, they immediately cancelled the conference (to their credit). At press time, they haven’t set a new date.

Starting a new website? Or tired of your existing hosting company? Have I got something for you: Hostgator, the hosting company I’ve been happily using for the past few years, is allowing me to give you a whole month of hosting—for a penny. Such a deal! All you have to do is go to https://www.hostgator.com/shared and when the time comes to give your coupon code, use my full name, all capital letters: SHELHOROWITZ (1 L, 2 Os).

Hear & Meet Shel

Thursday, September 11, 6 pm ET/3 pm PT: Webinar, “Selling Your Self-Published Book to a Bigger Publisher,” Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. Details & Register Here https://tinyurl.com/onlz3hw

HOLYOKE, MA: Saturday, September 13, 9:30-10:30 a.m., Making Sustainability Sexy: Marketing Secrets for Green/Local Businesses/Organizations, Co-op Power’s Sustainability Summit, Holyoke Heritage State Park, 221 Appleton Street, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

September 26-28, Dover, Vermont: Scaling Change for Social Good is a fascinating “un-conference” with a keynote by Ami Dar, founder of Idealist.org, and an emphasis on getting your deep social change story sharp enough to present on video. This is a skill set that every marketer *and* every social change agent or environmental activist needs. I’ll be there as an advising mentor—but what happens there is really about the group, about a new way to collaborate for change. https://www.scalingchange.org/

I am participating because 1) I love the theme of achieving deep social change; it’s very much aligned with the direction I expect to be going for the next 15 years or so, and 2) I’m betting that this could be the start of something very big—kind of like being able to say you were at the first TED conference

Largest rally on climate change in US history, Sunday, September 21, NYC. I am going to be in the city Saturday as well, and could squeeze in a couple of meetings. Even, if someone wants to organize one, a public event. Please respond to me (shel at principledprofit.com) with the subject line Meet in NYC or Speak in NYC

Monday, October 6, 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT: It’s been a while since I’ve done the Making Green Sexy talk as a webinar. I’m doing it once again for Green America—a much-improved version compared to the last time I presented it online. No charge.

Remember: You can earn a generous commission if you book Shel into a paid speaking engagement.

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).”

Two Recommended Books—Talk Like TED, How to Deliver a TED Talk

Talk Like TED by Carmine Gallo (St. Martin’s Press, 2014), How to Deliver a TED Talk by Jeremy Donovan (McGraw Hill, 2014)

Whether or not you ever hope to give a TED talk of your own, if you do any public speaking at all (and that includes teleseminars and webinars), you can learn a lot by studying the best TED talks. There are quite a few books on the subject. I found these two quite helpful.

Yes, it’s unusual for me to cover two books in one review; I think I’ve only done that once before in 11 years of writing a monthly book review. It’s also unusual for me to review books when I haven’t taken several pages of notes while I was reading.

But these two books are two windows on the same need, and they complement each other nicely. Both books cite dozens of examples of successful TED talks, complete with the URLs to watch them. Their lists of talks overlap—both, for instance, cite Sir Ken Robinson’s talk on the need for creativity in education and Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s fascinating talk on how she, a neuroscientist, deconstructed her own experience of having a stroke. But they also each cite numerous examples that the other does not, and they provide different frameworks for constructing your talk.

Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds, by Carmine Gallo (St. Martin’s, 2014) was recommended to me by my friend Jim Bowes, who used it in preparing his own TEDx presentation.

I read this during those few weeks I had to prepare, and I found that often, I’d get up from the book to watch one of the examples he refers to. And almost as often, I’d go from reading the book or watching one of the referenced TED talks to the edit window in PowerPoint, and immediately make changes based on what I was learning.

A few weeks after my TED talk, I met Jeremy Donovan at Book Expo America, and he gave me a copy of his new book, How to Deliver a TED Talk: Secrets of the World’s Most Inspiring Presentations (McGraw Hill, 2014).

And even though my TED talk was over, I started reading it. First, because I do plenty of speaking beyond TED, and second, because I might do other TED talks (Malcolm Gladwell has done at least three).

Some of my takeaways (or reinforcements of my existing ideas) from Gallo:

Talk to the amygdala: to the part of the brain that reacts viscerally, emotively
Use strong sound bites
Incorporate humor, abundance, and optimism
Group concepts in threes (in my case, I had three social problems for the business community to solve, and three examples of how people worked backward to reach an “impossible” goal—but I’ve been speaking and writing in threes long before I read this book)

And from Donovan:

You can organize a talk either through inductive or deductive logic
If seeking to move people to accept a controversial idea, bridge from a non-controversial idea
Know what persona you’re going to adapt, and to what purpose; will you be a magician? A creative genius? A teacher of science? A lover of nature? A catalyst for change?
Understand the components of your talk (for example, you might alternate between stating premises and proving them)—he deconstructs numerous talks
Use the full complement of tools at your disposal: body language, tone of voice, visuals, humor, etc.
Provide the person who introduces you with a script that reinforces both your message AND your delivery style (great advice for ANY speech).

The Clean and Green Club, July 2014

11 Jul, 2014 No Comment

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

July 2014

This Month’s Tip: Grab Unexpected, Out-of-Genre Media Opportunities

I wrote to Dear Abby this month—not to solve a problem, but to grab publicity.So why does a marketing and publishing consultant and copywriter specializing in green business think he can benefit from writing to Dear Abby?

Because Abby handed me an opportunity on a silver platter.

Someone identifying herself as “Reader in the Southwest” complained that a friend’s self-published book was so badly done and full of typos that she couldn’t even finish it, but the friend was eager to get her to post a rave review on Amazon.com. And Abby told her, among other things, “Find SOMETHING you liked about the book and mention that on the Amazon page. You could call it a ‘page turner’ because you had to turn from Page 1 to Page 2, didn’t you?” (Read the full question and Abby’s response—as well as 358 reader comments as of five days after publication—at https://www.uexpress.com/dearabby/2014/7/5/0/friend-has-hard-time-finding-a#disqus_thread)

I still make a fair piece of my living as a book shepherd/publishing consultant, and when I saw this response in my morning paper, I immediately put down the paper and dashed off this letter, which I submitted through the Dear Abby website and posted as a comment on that day’s column:

Dear Abby,

Your advice to “Reader in the Southwest” was 30 years out of date. These days, most self-published books are printed only to fill orders; the author of the badly done book is not sitting on inventory. You ask Reader to lie and call it a page-turner—which does harm to the author (misleading), the reviewer (trashing his/her reputation), and anyone who buys the book (misleading into a purchase). It would be far better to say, “I love that you’ve gotten your book done. But I have to tell you, it could reach a much wider audience if you went back and fixed all the grammar errors. It’s always hard to proofread your own work, and you might not realize what a negative impression it makes right now.”

Abby, I’m a book shepherd who helps writers become published authors, and I’ve had similar conversation with many of my clients. They’re always glad they took my advice once their beautiful books are out in the world.

—Shel Horowitz in Hadley, Mass.

At best, this will run in hundreds of newspapers around the country and the world—at no cost to me. At worst, it will only be seen by those who go to the website and scroll to the second comment page (it did generate one positve response there)—and perhaps by those who are searching Dear Abby or Google for advice on dealing with a friend’s terrible book. I felt that my letter might be blocked if I put in a web link—but by including my real name and city, I’ve made it possible for any prospective clients to find me.

It took me only about fifteen minutes to write this letter. I frequently spend that much time on a HARO (HelpAReporter.com) media pitch. Again, you don’t know if you’ll actually get media, but if you do, the results can be spectacular. Over the years, I’ve been quoted multiple times each in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur magazine, and even Woman’s Day (among many others). This kind of national publicity has been a major credibility builder for me, and was even instrumental in keeping my Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shel_Horowitz) when it was challenged as too promotional.

Friends/Colleagues who Want to Help

Freebie Session with My Own Business Coach
My business coach, Oshana Himot, writes:“I am offering complementary business coaching sessions for entrepreneurs and others who desire to expand their business. Sharing, as you know many people in a growth phase who can benefit from mentoring.”

I have found working with her quite transformative in my own
business. Contact: oshanaben@yahoo.com

Disclaimer: I do not earn a commission or benefit financially from
this. Doing it because I’m thrilled with what we’ve accomplished
together and would like to share that good karma.

The two new brands around Business For a Better World and Making Green Sexy would not have happened without her.

Save the Dates: October 3-5
Jay Conrad Levinson, the original Guerrilla Marketing man and my coauthor for Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, passed away last October. His widow, Jeannie Levinson, daughter Amy Levinson, and another of his many co-authors, Loral Langemeier (Guerrilla Wealth) are marking the year since his death with a fantastic conference featuring many of the superstars with whom Jay collaborated in his life. This will be a very affordable event (the figure of $199 has been tossed around, though it’s not firm) that will be the catalyst for relaunching the brand in the post-Jay era. I am hoping to speak.

Hear & Meet Shel

THIS Saturday, July 19th, 2014, 1:30 to 2:30 pm, Workshop Tent #2, “Making Green Sexy,” SolarFest, Tinmouth, VT, USA, July 18-20: www.solarfest.org.

Webinar for Green America’s Green Business Network DETAILS TK

Thursday, September 11, 6 pm ET/3 pm PT: Webinar, “Selling Your Self-Published Book to a Bigger Publisher,” Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. Details & Register Here https://tinyurl.com/onlz3hw

Remember: You can earn a generous commission if you book Shel into a paid speaking engagement.

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).”

Another Recommended Book—The Trader Joe’s Adventure

The Trader Joe’s Adventure: Turning a Unique Approach to Business into a Retail and Cultural Phenomenon, by Len Lewis (Dearborn, 2005)

As a subscriber to my newsletter, you’re well aware that I advocate consumer-centric, ethical business practices as a business success strategy: it’s not just the right thing to do, it’s also very good for business.

Trader Joe’s, the very popular supermarket chain emphasizing its own private-label gourmet and natural products, eliminated GMO foods in its own brands all the way back in 2001—over a decade before Whole Foods agreed to label GMO products on its shelves. It was an early endorser of Fair Trade products (though to this day, there are plenty of non-Fair Trade products right next to some of the Fair Trade ones, particularly in chocolate, where the Fair Trade label probably makes the most difference). In 2003, it was one of the first 30 companies to win an award from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). The following year, Rainforest Action Network saluted the company for changing its bag purchasing to avoid paper made by a company known for cutting old-growth forests. It sells 100%-recycled paper products at very attractive price points.

So Trader Joe’s scores pretty well on social screens.

But that’s only part of its success formula. As of a decade ago, when this book was written, it was doing twice the typical supermarket sales per square foot, and was expecting to raise that as it started entering into and expanding in affluent, educated urban markets like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston.

Some of the other major keys to its success include:

A workforce that’s well-treated, collaborative, and among the best-compensated in the entire supermarket industry—and whose managers are not only willing to get down and dirty and pitch in wherever needed—sweeping floors, running registers, etc.—but also genuinely welcome input from line employees. New hires are actually told, “If you’re not having fun within 30 days, quit.”
Workers who are trained to be customer-centric, have lots of information on the products, and happily interact with customers (gently upselling when it feels appropriate).
A unique and constantly changing product mix. For many items, there simply is no other place to buy them. As of when this book was written, the store was introducing about 25 new products per week, and removing about as many. So shopping becomes, in Lewis’s words, “a treasure hunt.”
Near-zero use of traditional advertising, relying instead on word-of-mouth and a magalog-style catalog distributed by direct mail (to shoppers who request it) and in stores.
A contrarian approach to most industry practices: Unlike most supermarkets, he company favors small-footprint stores with limited selection, often in second- or third-tier locations with inadequate parking. It does not try to be a one-stop shop but instead a boutique destination experience. Unlike most gourmet shops, Trader Joe’s focuses on multiple niches: ready-to-eat frozen foods, gourmet, organic and natural, wine and cheese. And the store gets by with fewer workers per square foot, but pays them better and treats them better. It doesn’t do “loyalty programs” (encouraging frequent shopping, e.g., buy 10, get one free, rebates, airline points).

Many years ago, I actually wrote to Trader Joe’s and mentioned that the Whole Foods in my own town was doing really well, and it might be a good site for a new store. I didn’t get a response, but a few years later, TJ’s arrived (and was instantly successful). The store’s location is across the street from the mall that contains the Whole Foods, and many shoppers combine trips to both of these destination stores. It turns out I’m not the only one. Lewis cites actual organized campaigns by residents to bring the company into various cities—something I doubt any other supermarket chain experiences, ever.

On the very last page of the main text, Lewis shares eight research findings from the Organic Consumers Association about the impact of social responsibility on shopping patterns. No matter what kind of business you run, take heed that you are not only socially responsible, but that your customers and prospects know it. Among the highlights:

92 percent felt more positively toward companies that back social causes
91 percent are prepared to switch if their current vendor is not a good corporate citizen
85 percent would tell their family and friends
87 percent are more likely to remember companies when they learn about their social responsibility initiatives

While the book is very repetitive and somewhat dated, it still carries important lessons for business owners in today’s world. So far, Trader Joe’s has managed to stay true to its roots while expanding rapidly, and being enormously profitable.

The Clean and Green Club, June 2014

9 Jun, 2014 1 Comment

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

June 2014

Learn with Shel from the Comfort of Your Own Phone:
“Virtual Intensive” on Green Marketing and Creating a Better World
Six group calls with Shel—at a very affordable price.

If you are seriously interested in this training, I want to make sure to design something you’ll be happy with. Please take the short survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/9Y538SN and be part of the process. It should take you between 2 and 5 minutes.

Nominate a Business-Change-the-World Project at Business for a Better World
Do you have a favorite cause around turning hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war and poverty into peace, or climate catastrophe into planetary balance? I’m starting a directory of social change projects that businesses can get involved with, at https://www.business-for-a-better-world.com/ (you’ll see a link labeled Nominate, near the top of the home page.) This is your chance to be among the first to put up a project, and be more likely to attract attention. Let’s get some GREAT projects up there! No cost to list—but the submissions are moderated, so don’t bother spamming it.

This Month’s Profile:

Hawthorne Valley Farm

Here’s a community that combines top organic and Biodynamic farming practices, education, social action, and the arts: Hawthorne Valley Farm, in New York State’s Hudson Valley.

I heard Martin Ping, Hawthorne Valley’s Executive Director, at the Slow Living Summit in Brattleboro, Vermont last week, and decided to share some of his story with you.

Founded in 1972, the 900-acre farm uses Biodynamic agriculture: a vigorous standard developed by the visionary educator Rudolph Steiner, who also created the Waldorf Education movement–that goes far beyond organic into a much deeper relationship with the land.

Hawthorne raises vegetables, grains, chickens, goats, sheep, cows, and pigs. Its store sells raw milk, homemade cheeses, live lacto-fermented sauerkraut and veggies, and home-baked breads made from its own grain. It also distributes its wares through one local and three New York City-based CSA (community supported agriculture) networks, as well as through three of New York City’s farmers markets, including the massive thrice-weekly market at Union Square.

And it packages and wholesales yogurt and quark: a spreadable creme fraiche cheese.

Ping calls these packaged dairy products “our secret weapon. We make yogurt–and people in Atlanta read the container and say, ‘ooh, they’ve got a summer camp.’

Hawthorne Valley’s social action and education/farm apprenticeship programs are fully integrated into the farming operation, as are Waldorf teacher training and numerous visual and performing arts programs. The farm regularly brings in 600 children and teens a year, many of whom inner-city children with no previous exposure to nature.

“We find nine years old is the sweet spot for education. You pull out a carrot and they say, ‘whoa, food comes out of the ground!’ They’re just beginning to see the warts on their parents and teachers, you get them mucking out a stall, taking care of another sentient being–a chicken, a goat, a cow–for the first time in their lives. Kids are not standardized. They’re individual and spiritual,” just like farms.

“They get a sense of the relationships, that it doesn’t magically appear. They make all the food, all the accouterments, they understand. There are 100 pounds of milk in 10 pounds of cheese. Kids get a lesson in economics, in food miles, in the relationships of the whole food system.”

Hawthorne Valley also reaches out to prisoners, immigrant farmers, and veterans, even developing theater works for inmates to perform.

A convergence of factors led to the farm’s founding. As Ping puts it, “At that time, a bunch of farmers and Waldorf teachers were meeting. Farms were being told, get big or get out. Agriculture was being pushed out by agribusiness, the culture was getting lost. And teachers were saying kids had less and less opportunity to interact with the natural world. They mooshed the two themes together.

“They said, let’s buy a farm and decommodify the land. And children will be welcome. ‘We are founding the seed of a living organization: agricultural, artistic, educational. The goal is to become full human beings.’ I get to go to work each day at a place where the goal is to become full human beings!”

The farm’s mission is nothing less than “renewal of society and culture through education, agriculture, arts. It’s a food shed, a watershed. We think of the whole farm as a living organism. Inputs and outputs should stay on the farm.

“Farmers grow soil [through manure and compost]; soil grows plants. We’ve been ‘making good shit since 1972.’ I hear people talking about hedge funds. We plant hedges and watch them grow: bird and insect habitat.

“Our disconnection is at the root of every crisis we face. We’re not displaced, we’re DEplaced. This is what we’re doing at Hawthorne Valley: that healing, that connection, that sense of higher purpose.”

The farm also has a Center for Social Research, which explores Rudolph Steiner’s ideas on how society can be organized, and another research arm studying eco-friendly farmscapes. It supports a microlending program and a two-year Waldorf teacher training program that “looks at art in relation to social life and to money, to supporting it freely and decommodifying it.”

And this has far-reaching implications, both in and beyond Hawthorne Valley’s own bioregion: “We’re starting to see Columbia County as a farming organism, not just to our own borders. We’re growing farmers. 65 new farms in Columbia County, they did profiles, put pictures in every library. One of our farmers got those 65 new farmers and some others together for a one-day charette. We had 75 and had to turn some away. They look at practical things, like how to share equipment.

Despite his zeal, Pink is remarkably nonjudgmental. “Even the multinationals are filled with good people, and we need to help them help us. People at Johnson & Johnson [makers of hand sanitizers, among many other products] understand what we’ve lost in the rush to sanitize everything.”

Where else to Hear & Meet Shel
(beyond the Virtual Intensive)

“Making Green Sexy,” SolarFest, Tinmouth, VT, USA, July 18-20:
Saturday, July 19th, 2014, 1:30 to 2:30 PM, Workshop Tent #2

Discussions in process about several other possible talks. Remember: You can earn a generous commission if you book Shel into a paid speaking engagement.

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).”

Another Recommended Book—The Business Solution to Poverty

The Business Solution to Poverty: Designing Products and Services for Three Billion New Customers by Paul Polak and Mal Warwick (Berrett-Koehler, 2013)

Several years ago, I reviewed The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, a remarkable book about improving people’s lives at the very bottom while monetizing that improvement in the form of business profit. The Business Solution to Poverty picks up where “Fortune” left off.

Based not on academic theory but on real-world hands-on experience starting such companies in places like Bangladesh, Polak and Warwick say there’s a great deal of money to be made serving the world’s very poorest inhabitants: 2.7 billion people living on $2 per day or less.

However, it’s not a mater of just walking in and rolling up your sleeves. Succeeding in these markets–plural, because conditions and cultures vary widely in different parts of the world, or even different parts of a single country–requires extensive research, following key design and economic principles, and DEEP understanding of the local cultures.

Products must be items that people with almost no discretionary income will pay for and use, because these will better their lives, directly and rapidly. They must be durable…extremely cheap to manufacture…designed so a non-literate population can use AND maintain them…and systematically deliverable to places with no roads, no infrastructure, and no tradition of buying from the outside. And they have to both fit well enough into the existing culture and be disruptive enough to dramatically improve people’s lives.

Examples?

Treadle pumps that can be installed for $25 including the cost of drilling a well
Ceramic water filters
An ultra-low-cost warmer for premature babies
Artificial knees that cost $75 instead of many thousands.

The authors cite numerous failures, many at the hands of governments or NGOs who, in the authors’ view, don’t scale up enough to make a big difference because they lack the profit motive and thus have less need to make sure their projects actually WORK on the ground. Private businesses, including those run by the authors, have had their failures too–but their batting averages tend to be higher, especially if they do plan for scale. Polak and Warwick say successful businesses will talk to at least 100 customers before going forward–and this research may lead to creative marketing strategies such as theatrical presentations, in situations where traditional Global North media won’t work. If people can’t read, the newspaper will not tell them about you. If they have no electricity, then marketing on radio, TV, or online won’t work very well. Aware of the marketing challenges, Polak and Warwick list “aspirational branding” as a crucial ingredient.

The chances of success are highest, the authors say, when the ventures address basic core needs: energy, water, health care, and jobs (oddly, food is not on their list)–and when there’s accountability. They are critical of many microloan programs, for instance, because they often see the money diverted away from seeding a business (a long-term approach that lifts people out of poverty) and into basic survival–and then the money is gone and there is no business to funnel in capital.

I agree with almost all their numerous success principles in these challenging markets. However, they make–and I question–the assertion that successful businesses must be able to scale up within the first decade to 100 million units and $10 billion in revenues per year in order to be worthwhile. While I recognize that a systematized, replicable infrastructure capable of those numbers is a good thing, I also do believe there is a place for the smaller venture that might be working in just one or two communities, yet still makes a real difference in people’s lives. And a place for the entrepreneur who still wants to make a difference but wants to stay small.

To make this whole thing concrete, Polak is starting or consulting to four specific businesses that meet the authors’ criteria:

A bicycle-delivered safe drinking water company
A low-carbon biofuel made from agricultural waste that in the past had been burned without capturing the energy
Solar-powered LED lanterns that are safer, cheaper, and more effective than kerosene lamps–and pay for themselves in the savings of a few months’ supply of kerosene
Door-to-door health education and sales of franchised high-impact health products that protect against malaria, diarrhea, and worms

The Clean and Green Club, May 2014

12 May, 2014 No Comment

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

May 2014

This Month’s Tip:

Even Experts Need Coaching

When I walked into the rehearsal/coaching session nine days before my TEDx talk, “Business For a Better World,” I was feeling pretty confident. After all, I’ve made hundreds of public presentations, know my material very well, get great feedback on my talks, and make a portion of my living as a paid speaker. Plus, I’d already gone over the material a whole lot. In fact, I was on my third complete draft, not to mention numerous tweaks and revisions.

TED prides itself on presenting ideas that change the world, and doing so in ways that capture attention. They tell their speakers, “don’t trot out your usual shtick.” And they limit presentations to a very short time—in my case, 18 minutes or less.

The challenge of fitting material into TED’s format was something I’d never faced, and I knew this could be the most important speech I’ve ever given, because it would be displayed world-wide on the enormously popular TED.com website, forever. I’d also had the experience of being one of this organizer’s coaches for another speaker last year, and I saw the value it had for the featured speaker.

So I was grateful that the organizer asked me to come up to the venue for a live-audience rehearsal and critique—even though it meant an extra 70 miles of driving.

And boy, was I ever glad I did!

People liked the material, and liked my familiarity with it—but they had lots and lots of good advice for me. There were specific slides that were much too confusing, specific tones of voice that felt wrong to the listeners (for example, sounding accusatory in places I didn’t mean to). And they gave me overall feedback on the talk that was invaluable in terms of what should and shouldn’t be included, how it was being perceived, and what I could do to increase my impact.

It was, in short, incredibly useful. It also left me with a lot of work to do: three days rescripting Version 4.0, and five more rehearsing and tweaking, rehearsing and tweaking. Even as late as the morning of my talk, I added a new element as the very first thing.

But it meant my talk is much more likely to reach more people, and to have more impact. And that, after all is why I did my talk.

Hear & Meet Shel
After doing four completely different talks within just a few weeks, I’m kind of glad to report a very light schedule.

I’ll be walking the floor at Book Expo America, May 29-31 in New York City, and a guest on Ana Weber’s radio show June 9 at 11:30 a.m. ET/8:30 PT.

I’ll be visiting Israel in late June—if you live there, drop me a line.

I might be at SolarFest in Vermont the week of July 18, but I’m not on program and I’m not sure if I’m going.

You can watch my recent interview on The A-List with Alex Cequea at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvfQI4taV-w&list=UUx_T7l1Ft-iIwsK-L5CsQUg

Nominate a Business-Change-the-World Project at Business For a Better World

Do you have a favorite cause around turning hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war and poverty into peace, or climate catastrophe into planetary balance? I’m starting a directory of social change projects that businesses can get involved with, at https://www.business-for-a-better-world.com/ (you’ll see a link labeled Nominate, near the top of the home page.) This is your chance to be among the first to put up a project, and be more likely to attract attention. Let’s get some GREAT projects up there! No cost to list—but the submissions are moderated, so don’t bother spamming it.

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).”

Another Recommended Book—Hug Your People

Hug Your People: The Proven Way to Hire, Inspire, and Recognize Your Employees and Achieve Remarkable Results, by Jack Mitchell (Hyperion, 2008)

Don’t let the folksy style, the approachable writing, or the aging copyright date fool you—this is a ninja human resources manual disguised as a conversation. And not only does he have the attitude that work can be fun, so do his employees.

Like his earlier book, Hug Your Customers, Mitchell proves the value of extreme niceness as a business success strategy. By treating employees as empowered, loved, people with not just unique skills but unique passions—and not as cogs in a machine to be checked up on—Mitchell inculcates a culture of greatness at his small family-run chain of upscale clothing stores. This shows in little things like knowing who would appreciate a bottle of good wine, and who is a nondrinker. Who roots for the Yankees and who would rather read a book. These personal touches are among the metaphorical “hugs” the executives at Mitchells give their associates, and they are very aware that such a hug given in ignorance to someone who doesn’t appreciate it will do more harm than good.

The core of Mitchell’s philosophy is laid out right in the prologue, in five principles that each get their own multi-chapter section: Nice, Trust, Pride, Include, Recognize.

Within each part, Mitchell uses anecdotes to show how putting these principles into play creates that loving and productive climate, and then sums up each section with an easy and accessible one- or two-page summary.

Mitchell believes in hiring people who are already nice, and training them in the product skills—a much easier process than finding product experts who don’t fit the corporate culture and trying to shape them to fit. In hiring (a process that starts with Mitchell—the CEO—greeting the candidate at the front door and introducing the person around as they walk to his office and continues through multiple interviews; not just decision-makers but also the line workers who will be alongside them), he looks for integrity, positive attitude, passion to learn and grow, competence/confidence, and of course, being nice.

This emphasis on nice doesn’t mean hiding the warts, or keeping on an employee who isn’t working out—but it does mean not micromanaging or overmonitoring, and trusting your people. Conflict resolution is a key piece of Mitchell’s approach. Conflicts that are dismissed without resolution have ways of bubbling up even uglier, so the Mitchell’s team works on clear communication and examining the issue.

Sometimes, Mitchell is delightfully out-of-the-box, as in his rejection of the phrase, “let me be honest with you.” Mitchell dislikes that phrase because he values honesty all the time, and not just on special occasions. In fact, those sots of language changes show up a lot in his book. He sees his employees as “working with” his company, rather than “working for.” He starts e-mails with a you-focused sentence like “you’ve been on my mind.”

And I love his idea of building an “‘of course’ culture,” with very few rules.

There’s much more wisdom in this book. If you have people working in your company, read it.

The Clean and Green Club, April 2014

14 Apr, 2014 1 Comment

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

April 2014

The Research Phase of Reinvention, Part 1

Introduction

Once again, I take you behind the curtain as I shift toward making a living while helping business solve poverty, hunger, war, and climate catastrophe—I feel deeply in my heart that this is the work I was meant to do. Frankly, I don’t know how it will all shake out. But while I’m figuring it out, the process creates learning opportunities for you if I choose to be transparent and reveal it–which I do. I feel you can benefit a lot by seeing my process, including how I plan to make money from these offerings.

Common business wisdom says, “research before launch.” But I’m research by doing. I’m putting a lot of things out there, and seeing what has resonance

with my market and my fans (that’s you!)
with the larger work, and
with my own passions.

I can do this because most of them cost me only time (and maybe buying a domain name). And I also NEED to just jump in and do it because it would take far too long to research all the various pieces enough to know whether they’ll fly (and I wouldn’t necessarily trust the data anyway). And because opportunities have been zooming at me lately that I want to share with you.

For each, I’ll answer three questions:

What’s in it for you?
How does it advance the planet?
How can it boost revenues?

I want your feedback. And I want you to “vote with your feet” and take advantage of the offerings that make sense. So tell me what you think of these—send me an email telling me which ones you’re interested in personally, and which you think will sing to a larger market (if you can include a quick line or two about why, I’d be very grateful):

The most exciting mobile marketing platform I’ve ever seen
I sat through a demo expecting to smile and move on. Instead, I was totally hooked. Retail, entertainment, and appointment-based service businesses could totally transform their marketing.

I was so enchanted that I worked out a new revenue model for the company (which until now, relied on face-to-face presentations by salespeople). I got them to do a demo video to show you this very powerful platform–something they can scale up and make available to other affiliates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvjgtnbU4d0&feature=youtu.be

What’s in it for you?
Reach highly targeted, segmented portions of your customer and prospect list instantly…customize the message situationally…increase revenue during slow times…fill cancelled appointment slots…build customer engagement, community, and loyalty.

How does it advance the planet? A full marketing campaign that’s paperless…AND nimble enough to respond instantly to new developments or events. It’s also interactive, builds relationships, and recaptures lost time that can be used to grow a business…or to organize on your favorite issue. And it’s integrated with social media.

How can it boost revenues? I earn a commission if you become a customer.

No-cost green marketing strategy tune-up
Brand new: 15 minutes to discuss your strategic marketing and branding objectives to advance your green and ethical business. Limited to the first 10 qualifying business owners who sign up. Please have clear objectives in mind for your call.

What’s in it for you?
No-charge tweaking by an expert green business profitability strategist should improve performance. Personally, I’ve learned a great deal from no-charge initial consultations from others.

How does it advance the planet?
Your improved positioning should make you a better green marketer. And since your green business helps the earth, your success helps the earth too.

How can it boost revenues?
Indirectly. You could hire me to write copy, critique and/or tune up your full marketing documents portfolio, and bring new prospects into my orbit. Or even hire me to speak on effective marketing :-).

More info: e-mail shel at greenandprofitable.com with the subject “Please schedule my green strategy tune-up”. In the body of the email, please provide a paragraph about your business. Describe your current marketing efforts in general terms, and your goals for the session. (Note: only people who provide this will be considered for the consult).

Telesummit
Starting next week—you’ll get a full solo mailer on this. Listen to 17 amazing presenters at no cost, plus eight extra calls in the inexpensive recording package. Leading lights in green business AND marketing, sharing deeply—several who almost never do teleconferences. I learned quite a lot as I was recording the calls! It’s really an extraordinary series.

What’s in it for you?
17 (summit calls) or 25 (with bonus calls) info-packed audios offering great information on working with the media, building networks, running a green and conscious business, using business to change the world, activism as a business, marketing to introverts, and even running a green business in a conservative area.

How does it advance the planet?
Gives you new tools to convey your message powerfully to your best audiences—AND provides information on the green and activist world (especially in the bonus package).

How can it boost revenues?

Commissions on speakers’ product upsells
Sales of recordings
Adding newsletter subscribers—future clients?–into my tribe
Building deeper relationships with well-connected presenters—possible future opportunities
Actively promoting the spring intensive at my house (see below) and the summer mentorship coaching program (see next month’s newsletter)

More info: https://business-for-a-better-world.com/telesummit

The famous three-day marketing and social change intensive
Small-group intensive in my beautiful antique mountain-view solar farmhouse, in historic ecovillage.

What’s in it for you?
Learn hands-on skills in identifying different audiences and creating specific messages for each…media skills (including on-camera interview practice as well as writing compelling press releases)

How does it advance the planet?
Makes you a better green marketer

How can it boost revenues?
Tuition, future work, mentorship sales

More info:
https://making-green-sexy.com/come-learn-with-shel-3-day-green-marketing-intensive-in-beatuiful.html

This is only part of the list. Next month, you’ll get part 2.

Friends who Want to Help

Paulette Ensign’s Booklets and Beyond: Making More Money Today Online and Offline course has already started—but you can catch the session you missed on the recording. Paulette is an expert on tips booklets, an easy way to package your knowledge and create revenue. She’s building a community around it, too. (This one does have a cost).
https://www.kickstartcart.com/app/aftrack.asp?afid=889945&u=www.tipsbooklets.com/teleclass.html

D’vorah Lansky’s Book Marketing Challenge includes content from many leading lights of independent publishing (including me). Hands-on, no-charge, interactive training on a wide variety of online book marketing strategies. Workshops, expert interviews, articles, action steps, hot tips, special gifts, and opportunities to expand your online presence.

– Develop Your Author platform
– Learn how to build a list of thirsty readers
– Discover ways to create multiple income streams with your book
– Access specific book marketing strategies that deliver results
– Find out the most powerful ways to reach more readers, globally
https://buildabusinesswithyourbook.com/access/aff/go/shelhoro

Shift Network, the same people who bring you the wonderful Spring of Sustainability series—I sent you a special mailing on that last Thursday—host a call with environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill, who lived for several months in a beautiful old tree to prevent it from being logged. I heard Julia speak several years ago and was impressed. Julia will be speaking May 7 on Igniting the Power of Courage ~ 4 Steps for Transforming the Ordinary into the Extraordinary. No cost. I don’t have the link yet, but I did find out that in addition to the freebie call, she’ll be doing a course. Contact marykay AT theshiftnetwork.com to get all the details.

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).”

Living in Oneness 5 Pillars For Success Summit, from Humanity’s Team, offers training in the 5 realms of Self, Parenting, Relationships, the Business/Professional world, and Leadership and Public Service.

Featuring Neale Donald Walsh, don Miguel Ruiz, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Patricia Ellsberg, Gay & Katie Hendricks, Bruce Lipton, James O’Dea, and many others. https://vg165.infusionsoft.com/go/lio14reg/shorowitz

Hear & Meet Shel–A TEDx Talk, Green Festival & More

April 21 through May 2: I interview all 16 other presenters on the Business and Marketing For a Better World Telesummit. My overview call describing all the other calls will be available at any time. And then on the last day, Tom Antion interviews me about how business can create sweeping social change AND make a profit. No cost to register, and you get all the other presenters too: https://business-for-a-better-world.com/telesummit

April 26, NYC, 12:30 p.m. (note time change) Speaking on Business For a Better World AND message points for different audiences at the NYC Green America/Global Exchange Green Festival. I’ll be signing books afterward. The Green Festivals are wonderful events. I spoke at one in 2010 and have attended a couple since then. Pier 94, 55th Street and Hudson River. https://www.greenfestivals.org/nyc/schedule

May 8, Shelburne Falls, MA: Speaking on Business For a Better World at a TEDx salon! Who-hoo! Speaking at a TED event has been on my to-do list for years. If you’re in Western Mass, please come. McCusker’s market, 7 to 9 p.m. Contact: stacy at TEDxShelburneFalls.com

May 6, Tech SandBox, Hopkinton, MA, near the I-495 interchange off the Mass Pike: The brilliant entrepreneur and networker Ken McArthur, bestselling author of The Impact Factor and a really nice guy, is doing a one-day Boston-area intensive with a bunch of other very smart marketers. I’ve traveled as far as Florida to and one of his events, and I don’t remember him doing one north of NYC before. I’ll be attending, and though I’m not formally a presenter, if past experience is a guide, I’m likely to have some role as a resource.
Also, if past is a guide, he will put together an awesome group of people who have a lot of knowledge to share. I expect to take lots of notes :-). Let’s put out a great New England welcome for him. $497 Early Bird price. https://onedayintensive.com/boston

May 10, Hartford, CT: I will once again be presenting at CAPA University, a one-day book publishing program in Hartford. More info: gaffney AT kanineknits.com

May 16-18, Hadley, MA: Marketing Green in the Wider World: 3-Day Intensive.

Another Recommended Book—An Edible History of Humanity

An Edible History of Humanity, by Tom Standage (Walker & Co., 2009)

Standage argues convincingly that most of the major changes and many key events throughout (and preceding) history are about food. It’s a fascinating and well-written book,

I was particularly drawn to it right now, as I’m launching Business For a Better World—with the idea that most of our current biggest social problems are resource-related.

He starts the history some 10,000 years ago, when humans began to domesticate crops and move from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies. He notes that very early, people started selecting for grains that were more appealing, even if they were less resilient.

Agriculture began the process of allowing people to develop skills beyond feeding themselves and their families—because, as agricultural surpluses began to accumulate at least as early as 3200 BC, not everybody had to be involved in food production. Thus, Bronze Age toolmaking, crafts, and eventually, industries. With irrigation, these trends increased and spread around the world.

And this led to a move away from the egalitarian hunter-gatherer ways to stratified societies of professionals, laborers, and of course, a ruling elite.

Standage offers a new, food-related view of so much of what we take for granted. And he draws a fascinating parallel between the amount of democracy (including a free press)—and food security. Authoritarian regimes tend to have a lot more problems feeding their populace.

Examples: Did you know the Dutch used violent suppression and caused eco-catastrophe in order to monopolize clove production on two islands, all the way back around 1700? Why Stain’s dictatorial regime was based in his complete misunderstanding of agriculture—and how Mao repeated and multiplied the mistake, causing the greatest famine in human history and 30-40 million deaths? (Post-Mao China, however, has made huge strides in food sufficiency, and at least some progress on democracy.) How Mugabe’s country-destroying rule in Zimbabwe saw 80 percent decline in agriculture, 10,000 percent inflation, 20 percent reduction in life expectancy, and unemployment at 85 percent?

He looks at positive and negative aspects of the Green Revolution’s roots in the development of synthetic ammonia and other nitrogen fertilizers, and of the much more recent shift to GMO (genetically modified) crops. Personally, I think he’s rather too uncritical of some of these technologies—but I do recognize that the Green Revolution, in particular, helped create a more solid footing of sufficiency.

He also looks at how enlightened consumers have used food purchases to support a social agenda, starting with the first known values-based food boycott in 1791, when Quakers started refusing to buy slave-produced sugar. (I guess he doesn’t see the Boston Tea Party as values-based.)

At the end of the book, he shares some startling and deeply disturbing statistics about genetic diversity. I find it very scary to learn that in the 20th century, 6800 of 7100 American apple varieties have gone extinct, as have 75 percent of varietals across all crops. Yikes!

The Clean and Green Club, March 2014

13 Mar, 2014 2 Comments

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

March 2014

Lessons from a Lost Launch

Within 48 hours after I sent out the newsletter extra edition announcing the Business and Marketing for a Better World Telesummit that was supposed to start this past Tuesday, I had to move the event back a month. The new dates are April 22-May 3.

We thought at the time I sent out the mailing that we were ready to go–but then we ran into a cascading series of technical problems starting with some registration buttons that weren’t loading the form (others were working fine) and culminating in a server that started crashing when we tried to update the site. That last one was such a doozy that I got myself a new webhost last Sunday and moved the site over–a multi-day process that cemented my decision to move the dates. It meant that we couldn’t tinker with the site during the migration and then couldn’t test our changes before the calls would have started going live.

So I thought I’d build this month’s article around the lessons I learned from this whole process.

1. Make sure your deadlines are realistic. Mine weren’t. The five weeks between sending out the first invitations for speakers to participate and the date the calls were supposed to start turned out not to be a realistic timeframe. My web designer and I both put in very long days for the two weeks before the launch date, and I at least had to put my client work on hold for a week. I was even editing pages on my laptop while hanging out at a family function in New York–something I’m generally very careful not to do.

2. Understand the scope of the project, and how it might differ from what you’ve done in the past. If I’d known just how much work it was going to take, I would never have done this project. I’ve put up lots of websites over the years, but this one required functionality I’d never needed before. Essentially, my designer created a WordPress site in the very complex and powerful Jupiter theme that duplicated many of the features of Instant Teleseminar, and I kept finding missing pieces that needed to be in place. Some of this was because I apparently hadn’t clearly explained the full scope, and some because the designer had never worked on a teleseminar product before and didn’t know certain pieces that I thought were obvious from the job description. And there turned out to be a fair amount of trial-and-error with plugins that only gave us part of the functionality and had to be replaced.

I took responsibility for the scope creep. And the designer took responsibility for recommending the wrong plug-ins. And we both put even more time to make it all work.

3. If integrating pieces from different providers, allow extra time to make sure they play nicely together. (See above.)

4. Know when to use off-the-shelf and when to go custom. In retrospect, it would have been much faster and cheaper to simply buy a license for Instant Teleseminar. However, now that I have all the infrastructure, I hope to do more telesummits in the future and amortize the investment. And meanwhile, I have to say the new site, https://business-for-a-better-world.com , is simply gorgeous. If you haven’t checked it out yet, please go have a look. The home page reminds me of those cool-looking infographics and the speaker presenter pages are a marvel in the way they compactly present enormous amounts of information in a clean, readable layout.

5. Plan for growth; make things scalable wherever possible. In Phase 2, this site will eventually become my web hub, and my other sites will be part of it, though the individual domains will still work. (It’s been explained to me that this has search optimization advantages over my current model of lots of separate sites). And Phase 3 may be another series of teleseminars, or some other product. Knowing this ahead helped us avoid stupid decisions that would have to be undone later.

6. Have one person coordinating the project, and channel all communication through that person. The designer hired and managed two coders, and managed the SEO expert who had actually hired the designer. He could talk programming-speak with them, and they received only one set of messages, so nobody was second-guessing anyone else.

7. Keep lines of communication clear, open, and in-use. The designer hadn’t told me that a certain change I made would wreck his layout. After that, I asked before making changes in parts of the site we hadn’t discussed. And several times, he said either that I should let him handle it, or that I should wait until some other step was completed first. Without that information, an awful lot of extra work would have been created for no benefit. Also, as I explained what I wanted, we had extended discussions on how to achieve the task. These discussions resulted in a stronger, more resilient, more elegant, and more functional site.

Overall, I’m deeply pleased with the new site. The delay will not cause any significant mischief, and I feel much better knowing that when the telesummit actually starts, all the pieces will have been tested and are working smoothly.

Friends who Want to Help

Third Annual Spring of Sustainability Series, April 22-June 24: I don’t have the list yet of the 100(!) speakers who will be participating–but if it’s anything like the last two years, it’ll be awesome. I’ll send more details when I have them.

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).”

Living In Oneness Summit, May 7-18: Neale Donald Walsch, don Miguel Ruiz, Barbara Marx Hubbard and her sister Patricia Ellsberg, Bruce Lipton, Gay and Katie Hendricks, James O’Dea, Bill Uri, Hazel Henderson, Patricia Cota-Robles, Steve McIntosh who wrote “Integral Consciousness And The Future of Evolution,” Steve Bhaerman aka Swami Beyondananda, Barbara Fields, Lance Secretan called the ‘Guru of Oneness in Business,’ Deborah Rozman who founded HeartMath, Anakha Coman, Arthur Joseph who coached Stephen Covey, Arnold Schwarzenegger & Angelina Jolie and many others will be presenting. Details in the April issue.

Get paid to speak; David Newman of Do It! Marketing is a seasoned professional speaker who spent almost a full year “on the other side of the desk” booking speakers for 160+ events. He’s sharing all his secrets, strategies, tactics, and tools in a powerful new 7-week program, The Speaker Marketing Workshop. https://shelhorowitz.com/go/NewmanSpeaking/

Hear & Meet Shel

Two 30-minute radio interviews next month:
April 1, noon ET/9 a.m. PT: Warren Whitlock interviews me: BlogTalkRadio.com/Warren

April 9, 5 p.m. ET/2 p.m. PT: Billions Rising, the Self-Reliance Radio Show at BlogTalkRadio.com/Selfreliance

April 26, NYC , 2 pm. Speaking on Making Green Sexy AND Business For a Better World at the NYC Green America/Global Exchange Green Festival. This will be my first time combining these to areas into one speech, and I’ll be signing books afterward. The Green Festivals are wonderful events. I spoke at one in 2010 and have attended a couple since then.

May 10, Hartford, CT: I will once again be presenting at CAPA University, a one-day book publishing program in Hartford. More info: gaffney AT kanineknits.com

May 16-18, Hadley, MA: Marketing Green in the Wider World: 3-Day Intensive.

–> 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? View my demo video, workshop descriptions, and other goodies at https://making-green-sexy.com/speaker.html.

Another Recommended Book—Sacred Economics

Sacred Economics: Money Gift & Society in the Age of Transition, by Charles Eisenstein (Evolver Editions, 2011)

This is an absolutely fascinating book. I took seven pages of tiny-handwriting notes.

It’s also one that made me cry out “Is he crazy?” at least as often as “Yes!” And it’s also long and dense. I’ve been reading it for two months and I’m not quite done yet.

Eisenstein wants to completely reinvent the money system. He wants to factor in social and environmental capital so it becomes more economical to preserve natural resources and social customs than to exploit or destroy them.

All well and good. But his solutions are deeply radical. Some make sense to me, and some don’t–and I’m not going to tell you which is which; you should make up your own mind.

He envisions not only eliminating interest paid and rent collected, but instituting degradable currency that loses value as it ages, thus providing incentive to keep money circulating and disincentive to hoard it. He believes we’ve been greatly harmed by moving away from traditional gift economies that created obligations on the gift recipient. He sees the commoditization of exchanges that used to be freely given as a tragedy, and one that leads us not only to inequality but to surrounding ourselves with cheap junk instead of high-quality artisanal goods.

Interestingly, he bases these ideas in an attitude of abundance. How could there be scarcity in a world where so much is wasted or hoarded? He wants more efficient distribution and an end to waste–including, for instance, the waste of housing space created by super-rich who snap up multiple mansions and leave them empty for all but a few days each year, when dozens of people could be housed with those same materials, that same land. In his view, that waste and that hoarding is an inevitable consequence of monetizing formerly-free transactions. Child care and medicine are two among many examples he cites of things we have to pay for now but didn’t a few hundred years ago.

Eisenstein wants all of us to be able to afford to do good work in the world, and/or create beauty (art, in all its forms, including sacred ritual).

This is hard when work has gotten so out-of-balance and all-consuming. He claims that hunter-gatherers typically only worked a few hours a week, and lived very healthy lives. However, he doesn’t discuss their much shorter lifespans and the many survival tasks they engaged in beyond collecting food. It was rare in some of those societies to live even past 50, and I don’t believe their lives were so full of leisure after building, taking down, transporting, and reassembling their houses, making all their own clothing, etc.

But this insight is certainly true: nomadic hunter-gatherer societies did not strive to accumulate possessions; they were as much a burden as a status enhancer, since they had to be constantly brought from place to place or else abandoned every time the tribe moved on.

He notes that in nature, growth is followed by maturity–and maturity enables stasis. Once a hardwood climax forest is established, the growth phases of bare earth to small plants to shrubs to conifer forests to hardwoods can give way to a stable ecosystem. Yes, individual organisms will continue to die–but the forest as a whole is self-sustaining. This can be a model for our economy: we can move from growth (and its rapaciousness) to steady-state. We may even see a bubble first: the population and economy crest at an unsustainable place, then level off to something that can maintain itself.

And he reminds us that money has little or no intrinsic value. The actual worth in silver of a silver coin is typically far less than the value we assign to that coin. Money is something we use to transfer goods and services between parties when direct barter is too cumbersome. If you sell pigs and I don’t want a pig, money allows me to provide marketing services to you without having to take a pig I don’t want and try to find someone who would trade it for something I do want. It’s essentially an accounting system.

He has quite a deep critique of many aspects of our society: from the idea of a job (and job creation) as a positive to his deep arguments against microlending. As I said, fascinating–whether you agree or disagree.

One point he makes that I totally agree with is that we have to stop allowing business (or government, I’d add) to externalize costs–right now. When companies privatize profit but socialize the cost of cleaning up pollution or depleting natural resources or transporting cheap goods halfway across the world, the earth is deeply at risk. This is a point I’ve made numerous times in my own writing, especially in an as-yet-unpublished essay I wrote last year called “From Save the Mountain to Saving the World.”

The Clean and Green Club, February 2014

13 Feb, 2014 No Comment

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

February 2014

Two Exciting Green Business Training Opportunities for You

1. Happy Valentine’s Day. And here’s a Valentine’s Day surprise for you: a series of no-cost teleseminars from mostly NOT the “usual suspects.”

Business and Marketing for a Better World Telesummit

You’ll get to hear from at least ten groundbreaking experts: some who run successful green businesses, some who are pioneers in new marketing techniques–and some who combine both green businesses and creative marketing. Presenters hail from at least four different countries, and one of them–a great speaker and a major influence in making coffee a much more sustainable industry–actually won the Right Livelihood Award (known as the Alternative Nobel Prize).

To name a few: On the marketing side, you’ll learn about cool success stories like building an online community of more than 8000 people, green perspectives on Guerrilla Marketing by the late Jay Conrad Levinson (never before released) and secrets from a wildly successful “blogging goddess.” In the green world, we’ll look at how sticking to your values can change a whole industry, what it’s like to run a green business in a very conservative area, and humor as a tool for global change.

I’m still finalizing the lineup (might be adding a few more speakers) and working out the tech–I’m expecting to start in March. I’ll send an email out to everyone when I have a registration page. If you want to be SURE you get notified, hit reply and change the subject line to “Notify Business and Marketing for a Better World Telesummit,” I’ll also send you a personal email.

2. The first-ever Green Marketing and Social Change Intensive at my beautiful solarized antique farmhouse in Massachusetts is happening Friday, May 16 through Sunday, May 18. Only 12 seats will be sold and the price goes up after March 1 (and again April 1). Registration is now open at https://making-green-sexy.com/come-learn-with-shel-3-day-green-marketing-intensive-in-beatuiful.html.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, there will be almost no overlap between the telesummit (which has expert instructors from several disciplines and industries) and the intensive (I’ll be doing all the formal teaching, but of course, we’ll all learn from each other).

The intensive will cover (among other things):

• Writing your marketing plan

• Identifying story ideas that will be sexy to the media

• Creating talking points for multiple audiences

• Locating the people who already reach your best prospects, and creating offers that make them eager to help you

Yes, You Need Goals–But It’s Okay to Shift Them

Two months ago, I shared my goals for 2014 with you and challenged you to turn your own goals into reality.

Now, I’m going to tell you how and why my goals made a radical shift, just a few weeks later.

The goal of signing a contract with a major publisher and a large advance to do a three-book series (my ninth, tenth, and eleventh books) is not likely to happen this year, and I’m totally OK with that. In fact, at the moment, I don’t plan to write a book at all this year.

Instead, I have a much bigger goal: to begin shifting the business culture to address the biggest problems of our time: things like poverty and hunger, war, and catastrophic climate change. And oddly enough, I don’t see a book series as the best path to that goal.

My thought in the summer and fall was that I’d need to lay the groundwork with the first two books in the series: one for green business people, and another for green consumers–to widen the concentric circles of my influence and create enough of a base that the real book I wanted to write could find a market. But by that time, a few more years would have passed. And there was no guarantee that I would even find a publisher who was willing to commit major resources to this project.

But my amazing business coach Oshana Himot has been leading me through a very exciting process of looking at my deepest goals and examining how to turn them into viable parts of a viable business. And with her guidance, I’m convinced that I don’t have to wait several more years to do the work I was put on the planet to do. The work I’ve done for the past 12 years around green and ethical business practices as success principles should be enough of a springboard. And the time is now.

–> The mission: to rethink the interaction of business and natural resources so powerfully that we can address the biggest problems of our time. Issues like hunger and poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change.

I believe we can make significant progress on these issues, and that the business community is the most powerful lever we can have to make those shifts. To this end, I’m creating a new brand around the concept of Business For a Better World. Already, just a couple of weeks into this I’m tremendously energized and full of plans and ideas. At age 57, I think I may have finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up ;-). I’ve always wanted my legacy to be a reduction of these huge problems. And now I think I have actually found a role to play and a way to play it.

I hope each of you will join me on this journey. Together, we can accomplish far more than we can alone.

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).”

Friends who Want to Help

Creating Joy in My Life and Society is a 6-week teleseminar which assists you to create joy in your life and to achieve your goals. Joy enables us to use our creativity more fully, communicate in ways which empower ourselves and others, and accomplish our goals. To hear more this class, which begins March 18th, email Oshana Himot, at oshanaben@yahoo.com.

–> Also, if you want to open yourself up to the kind of amazing transformation I’ve experienced, I heartily recommend Oshana as a business and clarity coach who can help you find paths to your true goals, develop products and services (and revenues) in line with them, identify needs and opportunities from within your community. She does have a few openings in her schedule; contact her at oshanaben@yahoo.com, 480-353-7312 (9 a.m. to 5 p.m. US Pacific Time). NOTE: She did not ask me to do this, and I am not an affiliate for her. I am doing this because I’ve experienced the power of her work and I know what it can mean to you.

Cut your trash bill in half–pay only a portion of your savings
Reminder: If you run a business big enough to have employees and a location outside your home, you can cut your trash bill–often by 50 percent or more–and it doesn’t cost you a thing. Visit https://greenandprofitable.com/slash-your-solid-wastetrash-bill-50-or-more-at-no-cost/ to get the scoop on how Brendan can save you some big bucks.

COMING NEXT MONTH:

The Coolest Mobile Marketing Platform I’ve Ever Seen
Fund Your Favorite Charity with Every Merchant Card Transaction You Process

Hear & Meet Shel

FEBRUARY 24: I’ll be Jim Glover and Dave Hayduk’s guest on Ask Those Branding Guys radio, 1 p.m. ET/11 a.m. MT/10 a.m. PT. Live stream: https://www.santafe.com/stream/?station=thevoice Podcast: https://www.santafe.com/podcasts/ask-those-branding-guys
Santa Fe-area listeners: KVSF, 101.5 FM

MAY 10, Hartford, CT: 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? View my demo video, workshop descriptions, and other goodies at https://making-green-sexy.com/speaker.html.

May 16-18, Hadley, MA: Marketing Green in the Wider World: 3-Day Intensive. See description near the beginning of the newsletter.

Replay of Corey Pinkney’s interview with me on Self Reliant Radio https://www.blogtalkradio.com/selfreliant-now/2014/01/29/self-reliant-now———-green-and-profitable

Another Recommended Book—Farm City

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, by Novella Carpenter (Penguin, 2009)

“And so I became a pusher. A chicken pusher. Everyone in our neighborhood had a hustle, and this became mine. Chickens are, after all, the gateway urban farm animal. I wanted others to join in the fun. ‘You’ll get tons of eggs,’ I would whisper to my coworkers, ‘lots of fertilizer.'”

Urban food self-sufficiency has been an interest of mine for decades. I had my first garden in my tiny yard in Brooklyn, in the 1970s. And I remember that I was talking about New York City’s rooftops as sources of both food and solar energy even before I moved away in 1980.

So when I saw this book on the bargain table at Denver’s fabled Tattered Cover Books during a recent visit to parts west, I grabbed it.

This is a memoir, not a how-to. It’s about life in a dangerous ghetto neighborhood in Oakland, California, raising animals and vegetables as a squatter on a vacant lot adjoining her apartment, in a place where many people think nothing could grow. And it’s about building community with a wonderful and very diverse cast of characters from homeless Bobby to the Vietnamese former farmer Mr. Nguyen to colorful Lana who runs a nightclub/speakeasy in her apartment.

She even spends a month on a “100-yard diet,” eating only what she can grow, raise, or scrounge on her own block.

And she has some fascinating trivia thrown in: Epicurus was urban farming in ancient Greece, before the time of Christ. Densely populated Shanghai, China grows an astonishing 85 percent of the vegetables consumed by its 14.35 million inhabitants.

Carpenter writes with a sweet, light touch about everything from chasing escaped poultry down the street to Dumpster diving to feed her voracious pigs. But be warned—she’s not shy about the gory details of turning her animals into meat.

Yet, even though I became a vegetarian 40 years ago precisely because I didn’t want to kill my own food and didn’t think I should have others do it for me, I was not offended by the intimate details of her adventures as a chicken, turkey, and rabbit slaughterer (the pigs, weighing more than the author, were taken to a slaughterhouse). I don’t miss meat and don’t ever want to kill animals for food, but I recognize that if you’re going to eat meat, raising and killing your own and processing it all is a way of eating meat with integrity.

Maybe I wasn’t turned off because she’s just such a good storyteller. The book, the humans in the neighborhood, and her animals are brimming with personality, and she has a wonderful eye for the humor and irony of what she’s doing. She also has a social conscience. As the daughter of 1960s hippie back-to-the-landers, she knows she could do a more typical back-to-the-land lifestyle in the country, but she chooses the heart of the city, and has sharp observations about how society keeps the downtrodden down.

The Clean and Green Club, January 2014

12 Jan, 2014 No Comment

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

January 2014

Before we get to the tip: three important things

1. Slash Your Trash, and Your Trash Bill
How cool is this? You can cut your waste hauling bill, sometimes as much as 50 percent. You can generate less waste and be better for the planet. And you can do this without spending a penny out of pocket.

I’ve partnered with a solid waste expert who wants to save you big bucks—and he gets paid a percentage of what he saves you.

This is important enough that I’m going to be sending you a special mailing on it toward the end of the month. If you’re too excited to wait that long, go ahead and visit https://greenandprofitable.com/slash-your-solid-wastetrash-bill-50-or-more-at-no-cost/ right now.

2. A Few Minutes of Your Time = Great Gifts from Me
Some of you received an invitation to speak for a few minutes with my associate–my business development coach, actually—to help me set priorities to serve you, and the planet, better. Here’s the key result:
—>People see the green world bubbling up into the mainstream, and want to create communities around this. I’m considering organizing a community like that, and I’d like your input into what would be most helpful to you.

The responses we’re getting are so fascinating, we’d like to get a bigger sample.

If you help me with this, I’ll reward you with your choice of
1) a no-charge 15-minute consultation with me on any aspect of green business, marketing, or book publishing
2) or a review of the effectiveness of any single marketing document (up to five pages)—worth up to $195

Either way, you’ll also get another gift: my acclaimed e-book, Painless Green: 111 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life-With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle.

To participate: just hit Reply and tell us
Your name
Your phone number
Your country and timezone
Times you like to be called
Your business
Which of the two main gifts you prefer (you get the e-book either way)

The original request was called “Green World on the Cusp of Greatness—Let’s Make it Happen Together.” You might find it hidden in your inbox already. If you don’t have it and want to see the full invitation, hit reply and ask me to send you that e-mail. Just use the subject line, “Cusp of Greatness”

(Tip: If you use GMail, highlight just the part of the email you’re replying to, and your reply will only quote the relevant part–pretty cool, huh?)

3. My First Intensive, Marketing Green in the Wider World, Coming in May
The survey results also point to some strong desire for more in-depth training in the green business world. As a result, I’m going to be leading an intensive green marketing and social change training in my historic 1743 farmhouse, the weekend of May 16-18. I’m getting really psyched as I’m working out the agenda (and what I’ll cook for you :-))—this is going to deliver extreme value. I’ll be back to you with the details in a few weeks. There will be a maximum of 12 seats, and up to four of you can actually stay in my house. The price for this first one will be under $1000 (I expect to raise it for future intensives—my co-author charged $4997 for his three-day in-home intensives). With so few seats available, let me know ASAP if you’re planning to come.

Is Turkey on the Brink of a Green Marketing Revolution?

I spent two weeks of December in Turkey, a fascinating destination and one I’d recommend heartily to most travelers other than those with walking disabilities. Whenever I travel, I keep my eyes open for trends in the country’s environmental progress. And in Turkey, I see a lot of evidence that the country is about to bubble up with environmental awareness—but it’s certainly not there yet. Here’s some of what I noticed:

Alternative Energy:
Everywhere we went outside of Istanbul, water is heated by the sun, and stored in rooftop tanks. From the look of them, a large percentage of these tanks are many years old and had no visible evidence of insulation. Even in frigid Cappadocia, where the temperatures dipped well below freezing every night of our visit, the water is stored outside. I wonder if these tanks are drained in the fall, or if the Turks have found a way to keep the water from freezing and bursting the pipes. The water temperature patterns in all our hotels were consistent with solar.

I saw very little photovoltaic. Wikipedia’s article on solar in Turkey notes that the country is just beginning to take photovoltaics seriously. Currently, most PV installations are off-grid (and thus likely to be in very remote locations, not near power lines). The installed base for PV is only 5 megawatts across that vast and sunny country, compared to 10 gigawatts—2000 times as much—for solar hot water.

Consider that Germany, much smaller and with a far less solar-friendly climate, is already generating 35.5 gigawatts of PV, which is 7000 times as much as Turkey. Clearly, the government and private industry have some pretty big incentives to move Turkey much farther up the solar ladder.

And the government realizes this; one planed 100-megawatt facility alone will multiply the amount of photovoltaic power by 20 when it goes online. I’m confident that as it becomes more affordable to the average Turk, solar will grow rapidly.

I noticed that Turkey has a lot of volcanic areas and lots of natural hot springs. So, while I didn’t actually see any, I wasn’t surprised to learn that geothermal is a significant contributor to the energy mix. As of 2010, the country generated 100 megawatts of geothermal electricity, and another 795 megawatts of direct energy capture.

I did see a few wind farms. Turkey has embraced wind and is on a massive growth path: from just 19 megawatts in 2007 to 3 gigawatts (3000 megawatts) today, and permitting already in place to bring that up to 10 gigawatts.

Eating Green:
Turkey is one of the easiest places I’ve experienced for vegetarians. Nearly every restaurant has half a dozen choices or more: lentil soup (and they all brag about how theirs is the best), esme (a spicy salad of tomatoes and paprika, ranging from just a little prickly on up to salsa intensity), thick and wonderful yogurt with various herbs, eggplant dishes, bulgar salads, vegetarian versions of gozleme (filled crepes), humous, white beans or green beans in tomato sauce, vegetarian stuffed grape leaves, vegetarian pides (similar to pizza), an enormous variety of very fresh cheeses, nuts, dried fruits, fresh fruits, and even the occasional vegetarian kebab–which is not always roasted on a stick. Fresh bread is everywhere, but whole-grain is rare.

It would be harder, but not impossible, to eat vegan or gluten-free.

But it would be very hard to stick to organic. We did see some, but surprisingly little. Given the emphasis on ultra-fresh foods, this was puzzling. I’d think after a year or two of educating its public and establishing distribution, a Turkish natural foods industry would be extremely popular.

As for beverages…Turkey is really schizophrenic. Quality is either superb or absolutely awful. As an example, it’s very easy to get fresh squeezed pomegranate or orange juice, which is absolutely delicious (and you can feel the vitamins flowing into your blood stream)—but we were also served something resembling Tang. The tourists tend to be served lots of tea: usually either Lipton Yellow Label or apple tea—the latter usually from a powdered mix that’s mostly sugar, unfortunately, and at least one brand of which contains no actual apple. But the Turks themselves favor a strong, bitter brewed black tea. The markets offer a bewildering array of herbal blends, but I didn’t encounter people actually drinking them much. One of our hotels did offer bagged Lipton herbal teas in choice of sage or apple. The sage was quite delicious and the apple was a big improvement over the instant mix. And one pomegranate juice vendor, in front of a mosque in a small town where most of the tourists were Turkish, did offer organic, from his own trees. He seemed to be doing quite well.

I saw no one drinking tap water, even in the cheapest restaurants. I read that the objection is on taste, not health—which means there should be a nice market for eco-friendly water filtration systems—though when brushing my teeth, I thought it tasted pretty good. Bottled spring water is inexpensive, readily available, and tasty; if you know where to look, a single lire ($0.47 US) gets a liter and a half as of December 2013, even in on the streets of touristy Old City Istanbul—but there’s no evidence of consciousness about the harmful environmental effects of bottling. A lovely yogurt drink called ayran is popular, as is Turkish coffee. The local beer, Efes, didn’t impress me, but I liked raki, an anise liqueur.

Public Transit:
Between cities, you can get pretty much anywhere on buses and trains. And the buses are sized appropriately for their ridership. In many places, dolmuses (minibuses of 20 seats or so) or even minivans take the place of full-sized coaches. Most cities and towns also have internal bus routes.

Istanbul has a complex and very heavily used transit system, including trams, subways, buses, ferryboats, and even a funicular and a cable car. The system is well-maintained, but do expect crowds. Yet, enough people drive that traffic is a big problem, both on the narrow streets and the big boulevards. Stick to the tram and metro where possible.

Hear & Meet Shel

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).”

Marketing Green in the Wider World: 3-Day Intensive, May 16-18, Hadley, MA See description near the beginning of the newsletter.

January 29, noon Eastern/9 a.m. Pacific, I’ll be Corey Pinkney’s guest on his brand new Blog Talk Radio show, Self Reliant Now. https://www.blogtalkradio.com/selfreliant-now/2014/01/29/self-reliant-now———-green-and-profitable (yes, that funny-looking URL is correct)

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? View my demo video, workshop descriptions, and other goodies at https://making-green-sexy.com/speaker.html.

Friends who Want to Help

Take Your Business on the Road, with Help from Marcia Yudkin
Want to chuck your desk for a few months and get out and explore the world? But you still have a business to run! This Udemy course from Marcia Yudkin walks you through, step by step, all the infrastructure and systems you need to run your business from far away, and even ways to make the trip pay for itself and build your business. Normally, it’s $37. While that’s a very reasonable price, I’ve arranged for you to get it during January only for just $17. Visit https://www.udemy.com/take-your-business-on-the-road/?couponCode=ShelH between now and January 31, 2014.

Another Recommended Book—Billions Rising

Billions Rising: Empowering Self-Reliance, by Anita Casalina with Warren Whitlock and Heather Vale Goss

Want a good solid dose of inspiration to start your 2014 on a good foot? Every time you encounter naysayers who tell you we’re stuck with the world we have and can’t make things better for ourselves or others, grab this book and open at random. Think of it as a megavitamin, pumping up your immune system to ward them off. As the authors say within the first two pages, “a very basic idea we can spread to the whole world at zero cost is that, no matter where we happen to land in life, none of us is permanently stuck there.”

The authors recognize that there are times when people need some old-fashioned charity to get over a crisis–but their focus is on developing self-empowerment and community-empowerment tools that build resiliency, end dependency, and prime the pump for long-term success—through entrepreneurship, deeply involving elected and community leaders, and massive creativity.

Page after page of wonderful people doing wonderful things: creating alternatives to poverty and hunger, building individual and group self-reliance, and giving a permanent hand up to the most disempowered people in our world. And doing so, for the most part, with lean, green, collaborative organizations that lose little or nothing to bureaucracy, reduce pollution, and can be set up with very little money or infrastructure.

Here are just a few of the many inspiring world-changers you’ll meet (some well known, most not):

Scott Harrison, founder of Charity: Water. He says that bad water causes 80 percent of all diseases, and bad water is easy and cheap to fix—$20 per person can eliminate the problem.

Dean Kamen, inventor of Segway, who developed a water purification system that can produce 10 gallons of clean water every hour, with just one kilowatt of electricity.

Gretchen Anderson, teaching urban farming and chicken raising so that even economically marginal urban Americans can have a dependable source of protein—and showing how to overturn restrictive laws that interfere with food self-sufficiency.

Howard Buffett (Warren Buffett’s son), who offers desert land in Arizona at no charge to researchers combatting famine in the arid parts of Africa.

Tonya Prince, who developed and teaches a six-point program for women recovering from abuse.

Wafa Al-Rimi, who led a team of teenage girls in Yemen to develop and market solar-powered lanterns, fans, and even patio umbrellas—in a society that faces not only unreliable grid electricity but social mores that encourage women and girls to stay home and uninvolved.

Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who discusses (in her commencement speech to Harvard’s Class of 2008) the benefits of failure: “Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have fund the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized…rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

Billions rising uses these and many other stories to explore successful examples of collaboration and alternative institutions, often started or run by people from disadvantaged communities (including youth), often using technology and existing infrastructure creatively—I particularly love the example of how Kamen partnered with Coca-Cola to deliver clean water to potentially billions of people.

The book does have some flaws. It could have benefited somewhat from one extra editing pass. It cries out for a more modern and appealing design. And worst of all, it has no index, which means you’ll need to take good notes with page numbers if you’re going to get real value out of it, because otherwise you probably won’t find your particular inspiration a second time.

But jot down those pages; it’s worth the effort. This book could easily start you on a journey to make the world a better place while creating a very nice livelihood for yourself.

The Clean and Green Club, December 2013

11 Dec, 2013 No Comment

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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.

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