Small Business

The place in your house you don’t like to go

January 24, 2012

I spent the day today at the GreenBiz Forum 12 in New York. I’m a senior writer at GreenBiz, which does a great job producing events. I interviewed Dan Hendrix, the CEO of Interface, who’s picking up where the company’s legendary and visionary founder, Ray Anderson, left off; more here. And I wrote about Israel Ganot, the co-founder and CEO of Gazelle, a fast-growing startup that recycles electronics. Please read this story if, like many of us, you don’t know what to do with your old gadgets. I first covered Gazelle back in 2009. [See Cash for (electronic) clunkers.]

Here’s how the story begins:

Think, for a moment, about that one place in your house where you don’t like to go.

That closet. The garage. In my house, it’s the attic. Ugh.

The place where you put stuff you no longer want or need.

“How much is enough?” asks Israel Ganot.

Ganot, who is the president, co-founder and CEO of Gazelle, spoke today at the GreenBiz Forum 12 in New York. He has a way to help you de-clutter your home, at least when it comes to electronics. Gazelle buys back cell phones, laptops and other electronics, offers free shipping and then pays you for them. Gazelle makes money by reselling the used goods in the U.S. or abroad. What it can’t resell, it recycles.

“We give new life to old gadgets that still have value,” he says.

You can read the rest here.

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The sharing economy and me

January 18, 2012

You can rent this penthouse in Rio for $258/night on AirBnB

You hear a lot these days about the sharing economy and collaborative consumption, especially if you spend time in northern California. I spent last week in San Francisco, where people told me about AirBnB, which allows people to share their homes or apartments with visitors, RelayRides,  Share My Ride and getaround, which allow people to rent their cars for a few hours or days, and ThredUp, where parents buy, sell and share children’s clothes, toys and books. Meantime, Prosper.com and Lending Club connect people who want to lend money with those who want to borrow. With peer-to-peer lending, who needs Citi or Bank of America?

Last year, Fast Company published a thoughtful and well-reported overview of the sharing economy by Danielle Sacks under the headline: “Thanks to the social web, you can now share anything with anyone anywhere in the world. Is this the end of hyperconsumption?” More than 3 million people from 235 countries have “couch-surfed,” she reported, and more than 2.2 million bike-sharing trips are taken each month.

Many sharing websites, like Freecycle and Couch Surfing, are nonprofits. Seattle and Berkeley have tool libraries, where people can borrow a lawn mower, power saw or drill. But other sharing ventures are business. Some analysts expect the sharing economy to generate real money, Fast Company reported:

Gartner Group researchers estimate that the peer-to-peer financial-lending market will reach $5 billion by 2013. Frost & Sullivan projects that car-sharing revenues in North America alone will hit $3.3 billion by 2016.

I’ve always liked the idea of sharing–hey, I paid attention back in kindergarten–because of its obvious environmental benefits: The more we share, the less stuff we need to own. But I’ve been skeptical of the claim that the sharing economy would end–or even slow down–hyperconsumption. My week in San Francisco made me less of a skeptic. This idea just might spread. [click to continue…]

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Recylebank: It’s not just trash to cash

October 16, 2011

Recyclebank is on a roll.

The New York-based company that rewards people for recycling their household garbage last week announced a $20 million strategic investment from Waste Management, the nation’s largest trash hauler.

As part of the investment, Waste Management said it expects to provide access to Recyclebank’s green rewards program to its nearly 20 million customers in North America.

Currently, Recyclebank has about three million members, so this is a big deal.

Jonathan Hsu

But there’s more to the story, as I learned last week when I interviewed Jonathan Hsu, Recyclebank’s CEO, at the GreenBiz Innovation Forum in San Francisco.

Recyclebank has bigger ambitions than turning trash to cash. It’s seeking to become a Internet marketing platform that will reward people for engaging in more environmentally friendly behavior. Its members will be able to earn rewards points by using energy more efficiently at home, reducing water usage, by buying greener products, even by walking to work instead of driving.

This makes Recyclebank a very interesting company to watch, because it is betting big on the green consumer–a risky but promising strategy. [click to continue…]

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Green business’ go-to guy is going

September 25, 2011

Andrew Shapiro, one of the most prominent sustainability advisers in corporate America, is leaving GreenOrder, the consulting firm he started in 2000.

GreenOrder, which is based in New York, is best known for its work with General Electric on its ecomagination initiative. The firm has also advised such blue-chip companies as General Motors, Hewlett Packard, JP Morgan Chase, along with major utilities and real estate developers.

Shapiro, who is 43 and a Yale Law grad, will stay at GreenOrder until the end of the year, while a replacement is sought. GreenOrder was acquired three years ago by LRN, an ethics and compliance firm led by Dov Seidman, himself a prominent adviser to FORTUNE 500 firms and the author of How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything.

Ron Gonen, a founder of RecycleBank, a company that rewards consumers for recycling, has become an adviser to LRN, “to help lead the alignment of GreenOrder Advisory Services with the company as a whole,” according to Seidman. But Gonen told me by email that he will not be taking over at GreenOrder.

In announcing the change to colleagues, Seidman said: “Andrew’s creative and entrepreneurial vision stands at the core of GreenOrder’s advisory role.”

Before saying more, a few disclosures are required. I’ve known and liked Andrew and his colleagues at Green Order for years, and wrote about the company for Fortune.com in 2007. [See Green business' go-to guys] I consulted for LRN for about eight months in 2009, so I know Dov, too; in fact, Andrew introduced us. GO Ventures, an investment firm co-founded by Shapiro, owns a stake in GreenBiz Group, where I’m a senior writer. And my friend and colleague Joel Makower has been a senior strategist with GreenOrder, as well as a small shareholder in the firm. As ecologists like to say, we are all connected. (Cool music–check it out.) [click to continue…]

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Two Degrees: The business of fighting hunger

September 18, 2011

Buy a nutrition bar.

Feed a starving child.

That’s the simple idea behind a startup company called Two Degrees. For every bar the company sells, Two Degrees will through its nonprofit partners give a nutrition pack to a hungry child in Africa or Haiti.

Fighting malnutrition is “why we started the company,” Lauren Walters, the CEO and  co-founder of Two Degrees, told me during a recent visit to Washington. Lauren, who is 60, is a former lawyer, U.S. Senate staff member, consultant and real estate developer. His co-founder Will Hauser, who is 25, is a Harvard grad who spent a year at Goldman Sachs before choosing to go into business for himself. They knew one another  because Will’s father is one of Lauren’s friends.

You can think of Two Degrees as inspired, in part, by TOM’s Shoes, Newman’s Own and Clif Bar. TOM’s is the company that gives away a pair of shoes for every pair it sells. Newman’s sales of salad dressings, popcorn and the like have generated $300 million for charities since 1982. And Clif, of course, made nutrition bars into popular (and guilt free, sort of) snacks. [click to continue…]

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Kiva: pushing the envelope on “green”

May 1, 2011

You’ve probably heard of Kiva, the peer-to-peer microfinance website. Founded in 2005, Kiva has earned a reputation as an innovative nonprofit: It has enabled loans to be made to about 573,000 low-income entrepreneurs worth more than $210 million in 60 countries. More than 570,000 people, mostly Americans, have done the lending, and the repayment rate is more than 98%. This would be reason enough to cheer.

Not content with the status quo, though, Kiva lately has pushed into new arenas. Last fall, Kiva added “student microloans” to its range of offerings. Last month, Kiva, added a category called “green loans,” permitting businesses and individuals in poor countries to borrow as little as $25 to make their homes or workplaces more energy efficient, to recycle more or to convert to clean energy sources.

Premal Shah

Last week, I talked via Skype with Premal Shah, the 35-year-old president of Kiva about the new initiative. He’s smart and engaging, easy to talk with, and thoughtful about economics, his undergrad major at Stanford. He told me that Kiva, to magnify its impact, he explained, wants to take advantage of the fact that its  lenders are for the most part willing to take risks. People aren’t putting their kids college funds or retirement savings at risk here. So Kiva has the freedom and the opportunity to test new ideas in microcredit.

“The Internet community can come in, take risks, try something that’s unproven,” Premal told me. So Kiva should be constantly exploring the “risk and cost frontiers of microfinance,” pushing the envelope and then hoping that more risk-averse providers of capital, like conventional banks, will follow. [click to continue…]

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Dennis Salazar: the complete package

April 3, 2011

Dennis and Lenora Salazar

Back in 2007, Dennis Salazar and his wife, Lenora, took a leap.

With about a half a century of combined experience in the packaging industry, they decided to start their own company.

And to make it as “green” as possible.

Then Dennis did something smart. He wrote about his plans. He didn’t write a white paper. “They’re long, they’re boring, they take a lot of time and nobody reads them,” he says. Instead he started a blog, which is no easy feat for someone who’s technical skills aren’t top-of-the-class. “I’m not a young techie,” he told me, unnecessarily, as we struggled to connect via Skype.

He called his first blogpost “Am I retrainable for sustainable?” and wrote:

OK, I admit it. I am confused and perhaps even a tad nervous.

After more than 30 years as a packaging professional focused on flexible—dare I say—plastic packaging, this new movement people are calling ” sustainable” packaging has me seriously concerned.

He obviously didn’t have all the answers, but he promised to try to figure out what’s best for his customers and for the environment.  He listed Seven R’s — renew, reuse, recycle, remove, reduce, revenue and read, promising to education himself, his customers and ordinary consumers as he learned more. “That’s the beauty of this market,” he says. “While we teach on a daily basis, we learn on a daily basis.”

Today, Salazar Packaging is doing well. Based in Plainfield, IL, the firm has customers from all around the U.S. including well-known national brands like Stonyfield Farms and Method and smaller firms like Coyuchi, which makes bath, bedding and baby products from organic cotton, and Volcano Island Honey Co, which makes Hawaiian white organic honey.

I ordinarily don’t write about small b-to-b companies–my focus is the FORTUNE 500, and consumer brands–but Dennis, who is now 56, has a story is worth telling, for several reasons. [click to continue…]

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Justin’s Nut Butter: a squeeze play!

March 15, 2011

Little things matter.

Like squeeze packs.

I’ve surely tossed away hundreds, maybe thousands, of the little silvery plastic packs of ketchup, Gu and Power Bar gels, but I’d never thought much about the environmental impact of squeeze packs.

Then I was introduced to Justin Gold, the founder and CEO of Justin’s Nut Butter, a small but fast-growing company that sells gourmet, organic peanut, almond and hazelnut butters in 1.15 ounce on-the-go squeeze packs that retail for $0.69 to $0.99. These packs were great for business at the Boulder, Colorado-based company, which now gets about 80% of its revenues from single servings. But squeeze packs are a blight, albeit a small one, on the environment because they are made out of several layers of different materials that are welded together and can’t be recycled or composted.

Most small-company CEOs  would have shrugged their shoulders at this problem and moved on. Not Justin. [click to continue…]

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Randall Davidson’s 20 green tips for small biz

January 24, 2011

Today’s guest post comes from Randall Davidson, who is the lead project manager at Audio Transcription, an eco-friendly transcription service based in San Francisco. Clients send audio files to the company, which are parsed into smaller clips, digitally distributed to a network of trained transcribers and returned as a complete, quality-assured transcript. In addition, the company offers online transcription services, which are the greenest form of transcription available because no CDs or flash drives need to be shipped through the mail. Randall, who is 28, has introduced a number of the green practices outlined below into Audio Transcription’s marketing operations.

Small businesses employ more than 52% of working Americans, according to the Small Business Administration, and comparable percentages in other developed countries. It follows that small businesses generate a substantial portion of the business world’s environmentally harmful waste. To help small business owners and employees minimize their environmental impact, here are 20 simple ways to more sustainably market a small business. I hope that you’ll contribute your thoughts – what I’ve gotten right and wrong and what I’ve omitted – in the comments.

  1. Print all marketing materials on recycled paper. Whether you’re going to send out flyers, pamphlets or other marketing literature, make sure it’s on recycled paper.
  2. Hold your meetings remotely. As you meet with your colleagues, including external vendors, try to hold as many meetings as possible over the Internet. Try tools like Skype, TokBox and other free videoconferencing technologies.
  3. Send email  instead of paper newsletters. Not only will you save money by switching to an email marketing service, but you’ll also do far less damage to the environment. Even better from a business standpoint is that email marketing provides huge insights into how your marketing efforts are being received that printed flyers cannot. For instance, email marketing services can generally tell you what percentage of your emails were opened, how long they were opened and which links were clicked. [click to continue…]

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Jeffrey Hollender: Life after laundry soap

January 18, 2011

For Jeffrey Hollender, the longtime chief executive of Seventh Generation, business has always been about more than selling laundry detergent and paper towels.

At Seventh Generation, Hollender looked for ways to do business better–better for customers and their health, better for its workers (who were also owners) and better for the environment.

Those efforts came to a abrupt halt in October when he was unceremoniously ousted by Seventh Generation’s board, which was forced to choose between Hollender and Chuck Maniscalco, the CEO he’d recruited as his replacement 18 months ago.

The story behind the falling out remains murky. Neither Seventh Generation nor Hollender have been willing to air their dirty laundry, presumably because their break-up agreement included a promise not to speak ill of one another.

Hollender broke his silence last week, not to talk about the past, but to discuss his future, which he says will involve business and political work to address social and environmental problems that he thinks are mostly getting worse.

“I’m very worried about where the country is headed,” he told me, when we spoke by phone.

Jeffrey, who is 56, divides his time between Burlington, Vermont, where he has lived for years, and New York, where he grew up. (Disclosure: Jeffrey and my wife Karen Schneider were high school classmates.)

So what’s next? [click to continue…]

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