.As you look for providers to support your green business efforts, check out Green Products and Services BIZ. Solar panel systems, organic foods, cleaning supplies and reading on various environmental topics are available.
You can even follow them on Twitter at @gpasbiz.
As I speak to prospective clients on a daily basis, I find that some business owners just don’t get it. “What can sustainability do for me? I’m a home-based small business!”
To those who want to operate more sustainably but don’t see why it makes sense for them, I offer the following:
1) You are already on the path! After all, as a home-based business, you already have a carbon-free commute. As someone who has to buy their own ink and paper, I am sure you print as little as possible, saving many trees as well as your expense budget.
2) When you green your home office, you are reaping the benefits on your home – cleaner water, reduced heating and air conditioning costs, lower electricity bills, less toxic air, etc. As a bonus, your healthcare costs for your family will decrease as well.
3) As you grow your business and bring others into it, you can more easily incorporate your sustainable business philosophy one employee/partner/contractor at a time.
4) Last but most importantly, you can host a Go Green Workshop in your home and get a mini-office makeover as part of the deal!
As you work to secure your economic future, take this opportunity to green the planet one office AND home at a time!
Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Filed under: Green Living
I had a great conversation with a colleague last night about what it means for the average person to ‘go green’. Yolanda Kennedy, owner of Ladies Going Green, and I agreed on a few main points that I would like to share:
1) Living a greener lifestyle is no longer optional, its essential. Polluted air and water, toxic chemicals in food and other consumer products, rising energy prices and geopolitical turmoil over natural resources are major reasons why we must find alternatives to our current lifestyles. After all, when was the last time a windmill blew up (like natural gas pipelines) or a solar farm caught on fire (like a coal mine)? The link between environmental toxins and cancer has been proven time and again.
2) Going green doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, living a greener lifestyle can be simpler than the wasteful, toxic lifestyle that we default to. For example, using a hand mower to cut your grass not only reduces the amount of pollution from a gas powered engine but can also serve as one of your workouts for the week thus relieving you from making a carbon footprint heavy trip to the gym! In another instance, I switched my waste hauler to Evergreen Waste Services because they pick up both the regular trash and the recycling can on the same day! This simplifies my life tremendously.
3) Most people think that going green is expensive, but it doesn’t have to be! One of the icons of the green movement, compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL), is extremely inexpensive. If you compare CFL to the traditional incandescent light bulb on a per watt basis, the CFL is a small fraction of the costs. It only takes a 13 watt CFL to provide the same output as a 40 watt incandescent thus using one third of the energy. The average lifespan of an incandescent is measured in months whereas the average lifespan of CFLs are measured in years so the savings can really add up.
4) Change starts with each of us. Only when we change our habits and make demands with our tax dollars and consumer purchases will structural change happen that will make it easier and less expensive for us to go green. For example, many banks are making online banking easier and simpler because consumers are demanding mobile and remote access.
I invite you to share some of the conversations that you have had around going green. Please use the comments section below.
For the last two days, my shower has been leaking. I put a bucket underneath to capture the water which I then dumped into the tub for future use. After all, I am paying for the water anyway so instead it going down the drain, I can use it for something else! This workaround requires me to dump the container every few hours making sure that I don’t spill it on the trip between the standup shower and the tub.
Drip, drip, drip
I told my husband two days ago about it. First he suggested calling the handyman. Since it is a holiday weekend and the situation is not an emergency, there is no point; we wouldn’t see him until Tuesday anyway.
Drip, drip, drip
So I asked my husband can he just fix it himself. He hasn’t had time in the last two days, but he did this morning. He went to his toolbox, grabbed a wrench and fixed it…or so I thought! He fixes all kinds of stuff so I thought it would be a piece of cake. It turns out that he doesn’t have the right tool after all.
Drip, drip, drip
So our current situation is this:
Like many business owners with no specialized expertise in a particular area, I am still doing the workaround trying to avoid the extra costs.
My husband is frustrated because he couldn’t solve this issue. He is no plumber or handyman but he knows related stuff. When business owners have an issue, we go to an employee or a friend who knows related stuff. We get them to tackle it and realize that they may not have the time, the tools or the expertise to resolve it.
Now we are waiting for the handyman who we won’t see until Tuesday at the earliest. Like a plumber, he has the time, tools and expertise but without the high cost. If my pipe was busted, I would call the plumber but this issue is short-term so the cost of a plumber is not justified.
Many small business consultants are like the handyman, they get the short-term issue resolved at a lower cost. If you have a long-term issue like busted pipe or perhaps a regulatory or IRS issue, you call in the plumber, lawyer or accountant, not the handyman.
Drip, drip, drip
So now, we will wait until Tuesday, pay a few bucks and hope to have the issue resolved by the outside expert who has the time, tools and expertise to get it done.
More to come…
Drip, drip, drip
Filed under: Green Living
Happy Earth Day!
This is a time to celebrate the abundance that we have been provided as inhabitants of this ‘third rock from the sun’. This is also a time of reflection as we come together to help right the wrongs of the past, to do our part in cleaning up the mess we have made of our environment, to assess the impacts of an unsustainable lifestyle. What impact is yourlifestyle (at work and at home) making?
As I always talk about in this blog, I believe in five (5) areas of impact we all need to be aware of: Greenhouse Gas Reductions; Reduce, Reuse, Recycle; Energy Efficiency; Environmental Awareness; Natural and Organic.
To actualize those impact areas, I am proud to introduce GREENProductsandServices.BIZ, an e-commerce site focused on being the online resource to educate and equip environmentally aware business owners. We currently feature carefully selected products from Amazon.com and a full line of Green Irene products and services. More services such as energy audits, renewable energy resources and green business webinars and classes will show up in the weeks ahead.
Enjoy your day!
When you find projects, tasks or activities that you MUST invest your own time to complete, you want to be as effective and efficient as possible. But what does effectiveness and efficiency really mean? It means doing the right things right!
How do you know that you are doing the right things? Strategic planning and goal setting are the key. The right things to you may be different than the right things to me or someone else. The right things are based on YOUR values and beliefs, YOUR goals and dreams….
So once you determine that you are doing the right things, how do you know that you are doing them right? By managing your resources such as time, human, supplies, materials, tools, environmental, goodwill, etc.! Invest in employee training and development, energy efficiency, organizing the workplace, stakeholder relationships and automation/IT infrastructure.
Feel free to share your initiatives for efficiency and effectiveness.
Filed under: Leadership
Never before in our history has there been more opportunity – or more need for leadership. Every day in countless unseen cases, people are looking to you for leadership. Children, friends, peers, co-workers, customers, and many times organizations look to you for leadership. Not formal leadership necessarily. Personal leadership is leadership by example.
Formal leadership is merely an outgrowth of the confident, determined, “solution-oriented” tendencies of internal personal leadership. While personal leadership requires no formal setting, formal leadership is possible only by a person who has developed personal leadership. All of these reasons, and more, convince us that each of us should work to develop our own personal leadership skills.
Please enjoy some of my favorite resources on this topic. What are some of the resources that you have found effective to develop your personal leadership? Please share them!
Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time. |
Jim Rohn – Famous Quotes http://t.co/Mc2fgaD
Time is finite. Once you lose it, pass it or spend it, you cannot get it back. Money, however, can be made, earned and spent, even in these economic times. So how do you make or save money using the same amount or less time? Cycle time reduction, of course!
Cycle Time Reduction is what big corporations do! It involves special project teams, flow charting software and lots of money, right? Wrong. Its something we all do, everyday. It doesn’t have to be something big or complicated. Back when I first started the business, I worked with a client on reducing the amount of running around she did as a solopreneur. One of the biggest time and energy savers was simply moving a portable file folder to a different location! This simple change resulted in a 15% increase in efficiency for her core process. Can you imagine?
Think about HOW you operate and WHY you do things the way you do them. You will be surprised at how easily small simple changes that make a huge impact can be achieved. Then you have to figure out what to do with all that ‘extra’ time…
Filed under: Strategic Planning | Tags: 2010, 2011, business makeover, marketing, P.R.O.S.P.E.R., professional services, retail business, strategic partnership, strategy
In the closing days of 2010, I reflect on the past and look towards the future.
In 2010, after overcoming some personal challenges in the first half of the year, I revised my business model to focus on professional services providers and retail businesses, entered into the first of several planned strategic partnerships and started working with a marketing coach.
In 2011, be on the lookout for my new social media friendly website, public classes and workshops on several interesting topics and the introduction of my new P.R.O.S.P.E.R. business makeover system.
What have you accomplished in 2010? Please share your plans for 2011!
Filed under: General
Let’s get back to this leadership thing for a minute. Just think about all of the situations in which you are a leader formally or informally. With your friends? Clubs? Organizations? Children? Business? You’ll probably be amazed at how many people look to you for leadership!
Often we don’t realize the importance of the leadership role we play because we confuse it with positional leadership such as company president or executive director. However, anywhere we have more than one person together, one individual will emerge as the “leader”. Depending upon the situation, the roles may switch even between the same 2 people. In organizational settings, depending on the issue, problem, or goal, leadership will vary based on the knowledge, interests, and needs of the individuals within the organizational structure.
While it is true that everyone, many more times than we realize, practices personal leadership, it is also true that most of us have never developed our leadership abilities to our fullest. In many cases we’ve learned more of what not to do than what to do. Because of this, many times the “quality” of our leadership varies tremendously.
The degree to which you will develop your own personal leadership skills will most directly be affected by your realization of the responsibility of leadership. When we examine the responsibility of leadership, we begin to realize that we, not others, are really responsible for our lives, actions, and rewards. We also begin to realize that in many ways and many times, we have the opportunity to directly influence (good or bad) the lives of others.
How have you exercised YOUR leadership responsibilities lately? Think about what you do to use that power and influence the lives of others positively.
