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The Clean and Green Club, June 2018

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, June 2018
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No-Cost Resources from Ryan Eliason’s Visionary Business School

It’s been at least 10 years since I first encountered Ryan Eliason. He has perhaps been the most successful person at combining entrepreneurial profitability with social change. He’s “walking the talk” that I’ve been advocating for years. It’s been a while, but I’ve mentioned him to you several times.

Ryan ALWAYS puts out a lot of value. Starting today and for the next couple of weeks, he is releasing a whole series of training pieces to make you a more skilled and successful social entrepreneur. Each piece is time-limited, so if you want the full collection of goodies starting with the manifesto and opening video, do yourself a favor and do it right away.

I know you’re an intelligent person who doesn’t need to be beaten over the head with offers of new content every day or two. Because this is only a monthly newsletter, I’m relying on YOU to take initiative and get the gifts. I will send one more note near the end of the cycle but not a constant stream. I benefit by knowing that YOU will benefit from the high-quality information and refreshing perspective he always provides. (And yes, if you sign up for the paid program, I earn a commission.) You will find him inspiring, I’m sure. I certainly do!

DOWNLOAD: The Revolutionary Entrepreneur Manifesto

You’ll learn a far more satisfying (even revolutionary) approach to business including:

  • The 4 essential foundations of all highly successful revolutionary entrepreneurs.
  • The unexpectedly simple way to build a lucrative career rooted in profound service.
  • Why you must avoid the deathtrap of isolated techniques!
  • The system used by over 6,200 of Ryan’s clients to collectively generate tens of millions of dollars while contributing to the greater good of the world.

Ryan spent the last 25 years coaching and training thousands of socially conscious entrepreneurs from 85 countries.

So if anyone’s qualified to teach you about this, it’s Ryan.

Go get a copy here to see for yourself 🙂

If you want to revolutionize your life, you definitely want give this a read today.

Enjoy!
Shel

P.S. When you download the manifesto you’ll also get instant access to Ryan’s video training on Revolutionary Success — How To Make A Lucrative Career Out of Profound Service. Be sure to check out minutes 5:18 to 19:02. Ryan’s personal story is captivating.

This Month’s Tip: Grow Your Business with the RIGHT Public Speaking
I was 12 or 13 when I gave my first speeches to 3 consecutive assemblies of several hundred junior high school students each (I ran for school office), and I’ve been speaking ever since. While most people have been programmed to be scared of addressing an audience, I really enjoy it. I love delivering an important message in an accessible format, even to people who might not read my books. And I love being able to grow my business just by opening my mouth.

  1. Practice to the point where you’d still be comfortable if you lost your slides (which happens sometimes—I’ve seen power failures bring down PowerPoint at least twice, including one of my own presentations).
  2. Keep text on slides pretty minimal, and NEVER stand there like an idiot reading them verbatim to the audience.
  3. At least some of your practice should be with a live audience, even if it’s five friends gathered over pizza. You need to know how people react to your material, and more importantly, how you react when people are in the room. Tweak what isn’t working and keep doing what is.
  4. Get to the room early, scope it out logistically, and MEET some of the early arrivals. Chat with them a bit, and if you’re feeling brave, feed off what they tell you: “Mary told me earlier that she struggles with ________ because __________. She’s not alone in that…”
  5. Control the introduction. Give the emcee something you’ve scripted out. Make the print really big, like 32 points. Keep it brief (1 to 2 minutes, maximum) but salient.
  6. If there’s a podium and the tech people allow it, stand to the side of it and not behind it. You can see your notes/computer screen but you don’t build a wall between yourself and the audience.
  7. Consider having your question period BEFORE your finale, so you don’t have the wind knocked out of your big finish and you leave them with the strongest reinforcement of your message.
  8. Unless there are legal compliance issues, don’t script out every word. Know the points you want to cover but use the natural language of the moment to cover them. But don’t ramble. I find PowerPoint helps me stay on track; I use it as my outline in the presentations where I use it (some of my talks, particularly on book marketing, don’t even use PowerPoint; I give the audience choices about what to cover, and I cover what they want to hear).
  9. Be your authentic self. Use approachable language. Smile. Make eye contact. Act like someone who not only has great information, but would be fun to go out to coffee with.
  10. Enjoy the perks but keep your ego in check. As a speaker, you can start a conversation with anyone in the room, so network away. You’re in demand as a meal partner, you get to go to the VIP events, you’re seen as important and having a message to share. As long as you are authentic and not arrogant, and not a prima donna, you have far more opportunities than most attenders to meet the key people (including other speakers), expand your network, offer informal advice, and build your client roster. You get more of these opportunities if you participate actively in the whole or most of the event. Fly-in/fly-out “helicopter” speakers get a lot less benefit.
  11. Remember that they are in the room because they want to hear what you have to say—and they want you to succeed. Be relaxed and have fun.

I won’t go into detail here about how to get speaking gigs, but I will give you two tips.

1) More than anything else, you need a “sizzle reel”: a quick video showing highlights of your talks. This is something that will evolve over time as you speak more often. My current (third) version is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tooSVbHQ5Ik&feature=youtu.be (and presented in context on my speaking page, https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/social-change-business-profitability-speaking-and-presentation/ ) The decision to stay authentic and somewhat homespun, rather than glitzy was deliberate. Authenticity is a key component of my brand, as is the message that ordinary people can change the world.

2) I also pay commissions to people who bring me paid speaking gigs. It helps to have other people bragging about how great you are.

New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel

 
Carole Murphy of Heart Stock Radio interviews me live June 15, 6 p.m. ET/3 p.m. PT (the previous interview didn’t record due to technical failure). Carole has a very interesting green business of her own, making purses of wild-collected Indonesian rattan, which grows among the rainforest trees and makes them too valuable to log. KBMF 102.5 FM, Butte, Montana, on Facebook, iTunes, and elsewhere.
I’ve been taping several other podcasts lately, and will post the links in future newsletters as I get them.
Friends Who Want to Help

Looking for a Job? Visit Our Job-Finding Widget
If you’re looking for a job in marketing, visit the home page of https://frugalmarketing.com. If you’re looking for a job in some other field, try the widget on the home page of https://accuratewriting.com

Order your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.

Is Anyone REALLY Reading Your Sustainability or CSR Report?

Repurpose that expensive content, without using any staff time. I will extract the key items and turn them into marketing points that you can use immediately: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

Another Recommended Book: Purpose
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Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies by Nikos Mourkogiannis

This book surprised me. I’m a big believer in purpose as a tool of business success, but Mourkogiannis defines purpose rather more broadly than I do. He identifies four distinct categories of business purpose, based loosely on the work of four major schools of philosophy:
  • Choice (Existentialist: including themes such as choice, innovation, freedom, authenticity, and commitment)
  • Virtue (Aristotelian: including themes like excellence, quality, courage, and character)
  • Compassion (Humean, as in David Hume: focused on themes of compassion, altruism, well-being and happiness of others, and promoting the general good)
  • Power (Nietzschian: devoted to the individual’s triumph over others and not typically concerned about the impact on those less fortunate—think Ayn Rand, and descriptors like heroism, self-mastery, strength)

In his framework, I’m clearly a Humean first (with elements of the others, especially choice and virtue). When I think of business purpose, I think about how business can profitably identify, create, and market profitable offerings that turn hunger and poverty into abundance, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance. I don’t put Nietzschian values like maximizing personal wealth in the category of business purpose. If that were someone’s only business purpose, they might as well just learn how to be a successful casino gambler.

Of course, I understand that business has to make a profit. I teach that it is possible, and in some ways easier, to profit by running a socially and environmentally conscious business that is actively working for a better world. But I see purpose-driven businesses as looking well beyond their income statements—looking first and foremost at their impact. And thus I found some of his key examples puzzling because he seems to be conflating purpose with an industry-agnostic, impact-agnostic desire for excellence. Thus, he sees banker Siegmund Warburg as having a purpose, but the purpose he describes is simply to be the best at banking. Writing, most likely, in 2004 or 2005 for his 2006 copyright, he sees Warren Buffet’s purpose simply as to be the best investor—note that this was before Buffett pledged almost his entire fortune to the Gates Foundation, in the summer of 2006.
Despite my disagreement with his model, I found much wisdom and took four pages of notes. To name a few:
  • I like the construct of building purpose around one or more of his four bases: New, Excellent, Helpful, and/or Effective—and the six traits of purpose that immediately follow that idea (p. 16).
  • I love the idea of putting executives, including CEOs, in the front-line trenches of a business (p. 84), so they can gain both direct feedback and deep intuitive understanding about what motivates—or fails to motivate—employees, customers, and other stakeholders.
  • I think the idea of communities of expertise that integrate business folks and academics is terrific (pp. 144-145).
  • I totally agree that it’s cheaper (and more profitable) to create a genuine purpose than to try to fake one (p. 148).
  • I’m fascinated by the concept that a purpose can only continue to motivate if it is not achieved, and thus a true purpose is never fully achieved (p. 172).
  • And I’m thrilled to see acknowledgment that quarterly profits are often the wrong metric; that we need a much longer-term focus, which purpose can steer us toward (p. 189).

And those are just a few of my takeaways.

One gripe I do have is the way Mourkogiannis ignores historically marginalized constituencies. This was a book published only 12 years ago, but reading with a gender or race lens, you’d think it was from the 1950s. All five of his key exemplars are white males, and only Buffett is still alive. I don’t remember the words “she” or “her” appearing in the book. The vast majority of the extensive list of sources are written by people with male names. I do remember a passing reference to Katherine Graham of the Washington Post but don’t recall any other women even being mentioned, at least not by the time I started consciously looking for them, struck by their absence. It is unconscionable to do a book on corporate leadership that not only can’t find other examples but still pretends anyone worth even a mention is white and male.
Recent Interviews & Guest Articles: 

Shel’s done more than 30 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
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Hadley, MA 01035 USA
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About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.

He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).

“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”
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We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.