When I hear people say that, it reminds me of bees. Their only reason of existence is to collect honey (ok, pollen).

Of course I can’t hold still and have to talk about my truth: that there is more to business than making money. That it is a vehicle to increase the wellbeing of everyone connected to the business (the employees, the clients, the suppliers, our planet).

The argument comes back: “Maybe. But without money none of these other things can be done. So it all comes back to money. Therefore the only reason to be in business is to make money.”

It took a while until I realised that the opposite is just as true: “Without committed employees, delighted clients, dependable suppliers; and in fact a healthy planet, money cannot be earned. Money would have no meaning at all.”

Does that mean the only reason to be in business is to fix the world? No. Making money is vitally important. The better any business does that, the better it can serve its employees, clients and the planet.

What it does mean is that we have a choice as business owners about where we put our focus. Just chasing the Dollars without any concern for the wellbeing of others cannot work long-term. At the same time, running a business without focus on the bottom line is doomed for failure.

The solution: a truly sustainable business. It keeps the different elements in balance: people, planet and profits. None is more important than the other, none is less important. They have to be kept in harmony and balance.

So for anyone with strong environmental or social passion, I recommend getting someone on your team who comes from the mindset: The only reason to be in business is to make money. As long as there is mutual respect for each other’s position, it significantly enhances your chances of building a great business.

For those that are not convinced, I just want to go back to the bees. Imagine bees deciding to collect pollen just for themselves without sharing it. The colony would die within a few days. They are in fact performing a social role beyond their immediate mission. And environmentally? Without bees, no flowers would be pollinated, no seeds would develop, and no flowers would be there. The bees would die.

So even with a single minded goal of collecting pollen, bees are perfectly sustainable, looking out for people, planet and pollen. The only difference is that we can think about what we are doing and can make conscious choices.

I would say the only reason to be in business is to balance the wellbeing of people, planet and profits. Any imbalance might work short-term, but it will always result in failure, either as an individual, a business or a race.

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Alexander

I had an interesting conversation with one of our local councillors two days ago.

Noosa (the community I live in) has been really innovative and forward thinking and worked out how many people can be sustained by its resources. They looked at water, infrastructure and giving nature enough space.

Taking all this into account, the number of people that Noosa can accommodate was calculated. This figure was called the population cap. It is nothing enforcible by law, not directly anyway, just the number of people who can sustainably live in this shire.

To make sure the population does not grow beyond it, extensive areas were turned into National Park and other reserve areas. The Noosa plan further outlined what type of buildings can be built where, effectively limiting the number of people that can live here.

We have not reached the population cap yet, but it is not too far off and its effects can be seen in the problems with housing affordability.

Anything sustainable needs to be scalable

I posed the following question to our councillor: If what we are doing in Noosa is good, it should be good for our planet. So let us assume that we have worked out the population cap for planet Earth. What happens when that is reached?

His answer was that wars, famine and diseases would take care of that.

Taking this back to Noosa, does this mean we need to set up an army once we are getting close to the population cap? “No, the prices will make a natural selection of who can afford to live here.”

But do we really want that monoculture of people?

Cooperation rather than Competition

I do not think such a fatalist view is a good basis for finding solutions.

Instead we need to look at our assumptions and see whether they still hold true.

1. The population cap is based on the amount of people our resources can carry.
2. Technological advancements and smart thinking allow us to achieve more with less resources (just think of rainwater tanks or even using greywater in every household, or using more public transport to avoid gridlock on our roads).

Our population cap is a fantastic way to highlight the challenge of overpopulation. But it should not be used to excuse Noosa from the challenges the world faces.

Our way of life only makes sense when it is shared in a vibrant and varied community, so let us start finding and implementing solutions that are based on cooperation rather than competition.

We were leaders in the past, we need to continue moving to stay leaders in the future.

If you want to raise profits, becoming more sustainable is a great way to achieve that.

This was probably the biggest message I got from the Sustainable Living Festival in Melbourne last weekend. And I also got a better insight into the most important step for becoming sustainable.

Build Your Community

At the very core of all companies that presented was the realisation that it is all about people. Rather than seeing staff as numbers who contribute to the bottom line, an appreciation of the individual and their contribution is needed.

Tim Cotter, a psychologist showed that human values are pretty aligned. The problem is that many people do not live their values.

So to raise profits, a company can raise awareness and support a re-connection between values and action. A fear many traditional business people (especially accountants) seem to have is that this process will reduce the company’s profitability and focus on more intangible things.

Reality paints a different picture. In various studies the return of companies that follow sustainable (or ethical) principals have outperformed their “traditional” counterparts.

Natural Capitalism is a book that shows how to raise profit while being sustainable.

Or should I title this : “Inventors frustration with the world”?

I am currently working on some information memorandums to raise money for 3 companies. Reading their business plans, looking at their inventions, I cannot stop to think what a waste is going on in business development.

They have all developed their ideas to an advanced stage, spend many hours and Dollars, are ready to produce.

Testing the Market

But no one has tested the market. Apart from one, they do not really have a marketing strategy.

It would be so fantastic if there was an easy way to test the market without spending lots of money in research.

Actually there is a way, Tim Ferris calls it microtesting in his book “The 4-hour Workweek“.

Microtesting

What he proposes is to set up a sales site on the Internet, bring some targeted traffic via Google AdWords and see how many are ready to buy.

This tests the demand for the product in general, but more importantly it tests whether the marketing works:

• Are we using the right words?
• Is the price right?
• Is the warranty sufficient?

To really test all of these things, a split test is necessary of course. But all this can be done for under $1,000, probably under $500. Far more efficient than sending sales people around the country to introduce the products into retail shops.

Efficient and thus sustainable.

The Controversy

A lot of inventors will tell me that their clients are not on the Internet. That might be true, even though I think that there are always ways to test the interest of potential clients, even though they might not purchase online.

I have not posted in a week, because I was so focused on two others projects:

www.Freelance-Writing-Career.com is a site I am building in partnership with Marshall Krueger. He does the writing, I do the webmastering. In the last week, we have implemented a feed that shows the latest freelance writing jobs that are posted on 19 bidding and job sites.

I have also had quite a bit of action on my massage marketing blog.  I invited my readers to post questions about massage marketing. Now I am answering one a day.

But now I am concentrating on greentoprofit.com again.

Alexander

This is one of the latest books written by an ethical entrepreneur. It is released in the US tomorrow.

Joel Makeower has spoken to Gary Hirshberg and read an advanced copy. He is full of praise, calling this book much more than the usual “success stories of socially-minded entrepreneurs that tend to border on vanity publishing.”

This one is “an easy, enjoyable read, inspiring and informative, integrating his [Hirshberg's] personal journey with insights and takeaways for others”.

You can order it at Amazon.

I have shown before why I think that business is the solution to making sustainability widely available.

I have also shown that sustainable solutions need to be good for people and planet as well as rendering a profit.

Now I want to find out what the status quo is. Are there existing solutions that achieve that? Are there businesses who have implemented the solutions and see a positive impact on their bottom line?

Does being green to profit work?

I want to start researching the business case from three angles:

1. Businesses that are providing sustainable solutions
2. Businesses that have implemented sustainable solutions
3. Businesses that have decided not to implement sustainable solutions

Sunshine Coast, Australia

My main focus will be on a regional level: the Sunshine Coast in Australia. It includes a few related communities with a total 260,000 inhabitants. Tourism is a big economic factor, but the hinterland also offers a range of food production.

Noosa (which is at the northern end) has just been awarded Biosphere status by the UNESCO. This was not just for the ecologically sensitive area, but also the inclusive management of local council that put a strong emphasis on community involvement.

Worldwide

And I will compare my findings here with other publications. Naturally, the Internet will play an integral part in that.

I’ll start with a review of some major blogs.

Why would business be a good sustainability advocate? Because they can act more logically than an individual. They can also take into account a more long-term view and their actions have a bigger impact.

Making Logical Decisions

Humans make buying decisions on emotion. They might use logic to explain to themselves why they should buy something, but the essential decision is made emotionally.

In business this is different. A business is for profit. Therefore any purchasing decision is made based on its financial merit. If it does not increase the revenue or reduce the costs (thus leading to greater profit) it does not make sense doing it.

And here is where I see the biggest chance. Financial analysis is logical, not based on emotions.

A Long-term View

Financial analysis also always includes time. The return does not have to be immediate, it only needs to be there overall.

Bigger Impact

When you compare anything a business does with what an individual does, the business usually does it in a bigger way:

• they use more power
• they use more water
• they have more waste
• they transport more
• their impact on the community is bigger (just from the amount of people who work in a company)

That means two things:

1. It will be cheaper to deliver a sustainable solution and
2. the direct positive impact is greater
3. there is an indirect positive impact through the team carrying the solution forward into the community

So sustainable solutions for business. That is necessary to push sustainability forward.

Not for Profit Organisations

First of all there are the countless volunteers and activists in not for profit organisations.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for the work you put in. As far as I have experienced that field the main focus in on educating people.

Education is usually focused on creating a more integrated understanding of sustainability. And on creating values that are more long-term focused.

Even though highly important, the issue I see with it is that humans are inherently lazy and short-sighted. Unless something is glaringly obvious or has an immediate impact on us, it is easy to ignore.

Government

Government has an important role to play by recreating rules that more closely place the true costs on the person or company that profits.

The drawback: government is dependent on money and makes decisions based on power within industries. The dirtiest industries (e.g. power production, warfare) have large investments in old technologies. For them it makes sense to protect that investment and turn it into a profit.

Therefore the power struggle of various interests slows the governmental intervention process down. Let alone the international struggle of blame and trying to make changes, while assuring the best outcomes for each individual country.

Individuals

What if all individuals just started purchasing sustainable products? There is this theory that prices for sustainable products would come down. However, economy also states that higher demand leads to higher prices.

Any which way, currently it is too difficult to find many sustainable solutions. And if you find them, they are expensive and often in no way economic in comparison to their “traditional” counterparts.

One example is green power. You pay for the privilege to know that the amount of electricity you use is produced through renewable sources. Many people do it, and it is very commendable, but is it sustainable? Not, if you believe in the power of profit.

Many other solutions are inconvenient.

So individuals are also not the solution to reaching a sustainable society. The ones that work for it would suffer inconvenience and a more expensive life without having any direct benefits.

Business

That leaves business. For many “green” activists, business are the bad guys in this whole puzzle. They are the ones striving for more profit, they are the ones using small powerless people, carting resources away and blasting their dirt into the air without thinking about tomorrow.

However, each corporation is made up of thinking and feeling people. They have children, they know what is going on around us, they want a good life and want to live in peace within their community.

Not acting that way is probably due to external factors, pressures that the system “corporation” puts on them. And if we translated corporations into individuals and the external pressures into examples of our own lives, we would probably find that we are acting the same way (just on a different scale).

However, there are many corporations that are struggling to find solutions that are truly sustainable (e.g. BMW, BP, Proctor & Gamble).

My Contribution

Not for profit: very important to educate on values, but easy to ignore.

Government: very important to create framework for sustainability, but slow.

Individuals: cannot be asked to be inconvenienced and pay extra for it.

Business: under pressure to deliver and filled with passionate individuals.

While all are important, I think that business has the critical role to fill. This is also where my skills can be used the best. So I will dig deeper into how business and sustainability can be merged.

“Sustainability is a characteristic of a process or state that can be maintained at a certain level indefinitely.” according to Wikipedia.

The process I am interested in is that of humans living on planet Earth.

There are 3 major components: People, the planet and profits.

Profits

I need to start with the end. Profits are the driving motor for our global community. It is also what drives each individual in each interaction.

What I mean is that whatever we do, we try to benefit from it. In each interaction we put in time and effort and maybe money so that at the end we have something.

And if it is possible to get the same result for less time, effort and money we go for it.

The problem in our complicated world is that the time, effort and money is not always passed on to the person who gets the benefit.

One of the best examples is global warming. It takes relatively little to dig up coal and burn it to generate electricity. Great profits are made. But now we find that the real costs include the results from global warming. These costs are carried by the community of human beings, even though individual companies and people have profited.

Planet Earth

No matter whether you are sentimental and like nature or you are a hardnosed business person, there is no denying that our lives are intricately linked to the well-being of a multitude of species and systems and processes that are all part of nature. Any imbalance in nature leads to a suffering of humans.

Many of the human actions have lead to unexpected problems elsewhere. In Australia, the introduction of cane toads are a well-known example. To fight beetles that were eating the crop, cane toads were introduced. Today they are still a plague.

Another example are our finite resources. Building a society that is dependent upon oil as its main source of energy is very short-sighted. (Peak Oil)

People

Naturally people come first. After all that is what I am and it still gives me the greatest joy to interact with others.

And anyway without humans, nature would look after itself anyway and we would not have to worry about sustainability.

But there is another aspect. Profits are often made with little regard to the impacts on human beings. Think of the sweatshops in Asia and Africa.

Sustainability - The Ideal Solution

So here is what sustainability means to me:
We use solutions that have a positive impact on the planet and care for people throughout the process of producing, using and discarding them. Additionally, they produce a profit for the company offering them and are no more expensive to me as a user.