Green Business Guide

Green is in, and your company has developed a brand identity of caring about the environment and encouraging a sustainable lifestyle. Unfortunately, even though your marketing strategy effectively communicates your company’s eco-friendly message, your employees aren’t exactly beacons of green light.

You can’t honestly tell your clients and customers that your business is eco-friendly without boasting a workforce that is devoted to sustainable practices in everything they do, so it is crucial that you reform your employees’ untenably wasteful ways.

Education

It is entirely possible that your employees welcome the idea of sustainability in their work and home life, but they lack the information and tools that will help them achieve such green goals. You can’t expect them to make changes without providing them the proper education and equipment to become environmentally friendly.

First, you must teach employees about the reasons eco-friendly initiatives are so important. There are dozens of ways to achieve this, including:

• Assigning mandatory reading from books and magazines that illuminate the small ways humans destroy natural environments.
• Hiring an expert speaker to explain the dangers of climate change.
• Hosting lunches during which you play documentaries related to the various signs and symptoms of climate change.

Once your employees fully comprehend the issues at hand, you can furnish them with the supplies they’ll need to accomplish your eco-friendly initiative. For example, recycling bins should be as convenient as trash cans, and you should decrease paper storage areas to encourage organizing business files digitally.

Additionally, you should encourage your employees to extend their eco-attitude to every aspect of their lives. They should consider driving low-emission hybrid cars instead of diesel trucks. Additionally, donating large items, such as vehicles or boats to a charity can benefit the local community, as well as the environment. On top of helping out charity, it will help your employees too. It will clear up much-needed room in their garage if they decide to finally give up that unused boat or vehicle that’s just collecting dust — plus they could use the donation to get additional financial relief when tax season rolls around again.

Eventually, such a green mindset may make your workforce healthier and wealthier, as they opt for local produce instead of processed foods and save money by opting for cheaper energy sources like solar.

Incentives

Then again, some of your employees may be obstinate and remain reluctant to change their wasteful ways even with the proper training and tools. To convince more stubborn members of your workforce, you may consider implementing small incentives to transform your office into a green space. For example, as your office gets greener, you will likely notice a decrease in your monthly costs; expenses like paper and electricity should go down as more sustainable options take their place. You can reward your employees with a percentage of the savings until their eco-friendly decisions become second-nature.

Of course, there are inexpensive ways to reward your employees as well. Many studies conclude that employees respond highly to the simplest forms of appreciation. By sponsoring lunch once a week or hosting a company party every month or so, you can show how much you respect and value your employees’ efforts toward an eco-friendly office environment. Additionally, employees most effective at employing green strategies can receive free, unique perks, like a certificate or a designated parking space. You can even inspire employees with simple statements of praise; daily recognition goes a long way to motivate employee behavior.

Examples

Even corporations who have long been associated with environmental destruction are seeing the value of going green. Here are a few ways familiar companies are reducing their impact and becoming more eco-friendly to improve their reputations:

• Bank of America boasts an internal recycling program that saves more than 200,000 trees from destruction every year, and employees are offered $3,000 rewards for choosing hybrid vehicles as their commuter cars.
• Home Depot — once the world’s biggest harvester of old wood due to its strength and beauty — now refuses to sell old-growth wood products, which significantly diminishes the deforestation of old-growth rainforests around the world.
• Wal-Mart is working toward powering all of its stores and offices with renewable energy sources like wind and solar, which would mean more than 7 billion kilowatt-hours of energy would become completely sustainable by 2020; currently, the store is at 32 percent completion, with more than 335 renewable energy projects underway.
• Enterprise Rent-a-Car owns the world’s largest collection of fuel-efficient vehicles (440,000 in total), and the company is committed to reviving America’s forests with more than 50 million new trees planted in 50 years.

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Even in the darkest days of America’s economic downturn, Silicon Valley shined as a beacon of entrepreneurial hope. Its smaller venture capital-backed technology companies didn’t rely on bank loans, and most companies didn’t have big groups of customers from the housing and financial services sectors. It survived the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, and it continues to churn out high-profile startup after startup.

Silicon Valley got its own start in 1937, when a Stanford professor of electronics and engineering, William Terman, started encouraging his fellow faculty and the graduates from his classes to start new businesses and boost the local economy. Hewlett-Packard was the first notable Silicon Valley startup. By 2008, Silicon Valley businesses produced almost $146.7 billion, which is bigger than the economy of New Zealand and almost as big as Singapore’s economy. Starting more Silicon Valleys everywhere, backed by smart government policies, is America’s ticket to a long-lasting economic recovery.

It Doesn’t Have to Be High-Tech

The key to entrepreneurial ecosystems like Silicon Valley isn’t to fund a bunch of technology companies and hope they’ll take off. Silicon Valley, like many entrepreneurial ecosystems, owes its success to a flourishing local university program. In other words, it built on what was already working for the local economy.

Elected officials and people working in public administration are training and learning to understand that it’s not about cherry-picking desirable industries and pushing people to found companies based on those industries. It’s about taking what’s already flourishing — something like Stanford’s electronics and engineering program — and developing low, mid, and high-tech companies around what’s there.

For example, imagine a local economy built around corn farming. A new restaurant that serves organic corn, a company that manufactures corn-based plastics, and a biotech firm that works on introducing more varied strains of corn back into the ecosystem — all would be vital components of a successful, locally centered entrepreneurial ecosystem built around corn farming.

Build Policies Around Relationships

Entrepreneurship is relational by nature. Founders get their fledgling companies off the ground by forming relationships with potential suppliers and customers, not by having the government throw money at them and hope they succeed. Policies like tax incentives, grants, and subsidies might help to start a lot of new companies, but it doesn’t help entrepreneurs build the connections that they need for long-term growth.

Instead, governments should focus on relationship-building programs. Helping entrepreneurs network, both with existing businesses and with each other, boosts not only new businesses but also many other players in the local economy. With stronger community relationships, those grants, subsidies, and tax incentives have a much better chance of paying off.

Invest in Universities

Not every university has a thriving computer science or engineering presence like Stanford, but just because high-tech works in California doesn’t mean it will work in every locale. Instead, governments should take a look at the local economy and analyze how the university is already contributing. Then, it can invest in programs that will feed the economy’s existing strengths.  Encourage public-centered degrees, such as a Master in Public Administration. Graduates will be able to help further grow communities upon finishing their degrees.

If entrepreneurship relies on relationships, especially at the beginning, an interconnected group of university faculty, graduates, and local industry leaders provides a logical network for budding businesses. Again, governments shouldn’t pick an industry that looks promising and try to transplant it on their soil. Instead, they should build on what the community is already doing well.

Take a Facilitator Approach

Again, instead of throwing easy money at startups, governments should focus more on removing things that make growth challenging. They should address onerous procedures, problems with finding skilled labor, anti-competitive conditions, and policies that make small businesses shoulder a heavier tax burden.

For the most part, it’s not a good idea for governments to game the system by picking winning industries and winning companies. Daniel Isenberg, a professor at Babson College, says that the only exception to this rule might be to pick a big winner right at the beginning of the process. If the government heavily nurtures a small number of high-potential firms to score a fast big win for the community, it can then get out of the way and let synergy take over.

The Next Silicon Valley

Entrepreneurial ecosystems aren’t about high-tech products; they’re about a Silicon Valley state of mind. For governments, that means honoring what’s already working, building the necessary connections, and getting out of the way.

Two entrepreneurs chatting image from StartupStockPhotos.com (public domain)

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The next time you order pizza, it might come in a package that separates into paper plates. That idea is a sign of a growing business trend of being more “green.” The government has entered the conservation arena in a way not seen since Teddy Roosevelt created the national park system and Franklin put Americans to work improving the infrastructure to make them available to the public. There is an ever-increasing amount of environmental legislation that affects the way your business functions.

That is good for the country and good for business because natural resources are limited. For example, an article in U.S. News and World Report states that small business owners are in favor of legislation to preserve clean water. The EPA has responded with a program called WOTUS, or Waters of the United States. The new legislation says that many restrictions which formerly applied only to navigable waterways also apply to the contributing streams or dependent waterways that touch them. “Finally,” says the article, “business owners recognize the practical value of clean water. Sixty-seven percent voiced concern about the harm that water pollution can inflict on their business, and 71 percent of them agreed that strong clean water protections contribute to a healthy economy and local jobs.”

Business is going green. Like the pizza plate package, businesses are coming up with new ideas to be more environmentally friendly, and they are seeing their profits rise as a result. Dupont decided, some time ago, to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 2010. By 2007, the company found it had saved $2.2 billion through energy efficiency. Texaco has determined to be a carbon-free company by 2050. Even though it has been shown that increasing energy efficiency and decreasing pollutants can improve financial competitiveness and profitability, not all businesses are willing or able to determine how they can become “sustainable” corporations. That is where the government, both state and federal, has stepped in.

The greening of business means new and changing regulations. There are permits for emissions, hazardous waste, issues that involve locating a business where there are endangered species and many other environmental concerns. Besides the environmental issues out-of-doors, there are regulations governing things like air quality and safe drinking water inside factory walls. Keeping abreast of the legislation can mean hours spent poring over legal papers. It also means understanding how a law is interpreted.

Business lawyers like Rick Schaden can be the best friend a company can have. They do all the things business lawyers have always done. They write and interpret contracts and assist in the transformation of a business to a partnership, they negotiate vendor contracts and help work through business disputes. They also can help businesses become greener by keeping track of the new laws and by making certain your business has all the necessary permits to function legally. Besides helping you understand your responsibilities in the new green business environment, they can ensure your rights are not being violated.

Becoming better stewards of the environment is a no-brainer. It is good for the environment and good for business. A good business lawyer can help you keep your company compliant with the legal requisites of greening while you watch it grow.

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While shopping for a new car, customers may want to think beyond the price tag that’s on display. Each vehicle comes with a specific cost of ownership that is evaluated based on various factors including driving habits, built-in technology and other external influences. Auto manufacturers often provide accurate estimates of the annual expenses associated with owning particular makes and models. The costs of car ownership include routine maintenance and repairs as well as other projected service that might be required.

The biggest fixed expense of car ownership is fuel. The average car owner in North America spends thousands of dollars per year on gasoline. The grade of fuel plays a big role in this type of major fixed expense. Fuel economy is a big factor that is considered by consumers shopping for brand new cars. Cars with poor gas mileage tend to get little attention from budget-conscious shoppers. The auto industry has evolved tremendously thanks to the fierce competition for making the most fuel-efficient vehicles on the market. Some of the most efficient sedans get about 40 miles per gallon. Similarly, the best-selling crossover SUVs boasts fuel economy well above 30 mpg on the highway. Gas-guzzling car models are simply too expensive to own when the cost of fuel is considered over a long period of time. Analyzing the Camry cost of ownership and the long-term expenses of other vehicles is an example of smart car shopping.

Mechanical technology also contributes to the cost of car ownership. Vehicles with front-wheel drive tend to wear out tires much faster compared to cars with all-wheel drive. The cost of tire replacements might add up to thousands of dollars over several years. When tires are replaced, other services such as tire rotations and wheel alignments are also done.

Automobile insurance rates also play a role in the cost of car ownership. Some vehicles are insured with expensive policies due to a lack of modern safety features. Additionally, luxurious car models such as executive-style sedans usually come with high premium rates for auto insurance.