photo credit: Victorrjr

Going “green” is big business today. Not only is going “green” an environmentally responsible approach for businesses of all sizes to take and one that is the current rage, but going “green” can leverage profit dollars to your bottom-line too.

First, what exactly do we mean by having your business go “green”? When we talk about “green”, we mean making a concerted effort to save our natural resources concerted action. Actions such as:

1. Saving on paper supplies – consider going digital for all of your internal office correspondence thereby saving on office supply costs and saving trees at the same time.
2. Lowing office energy consumption – lower your thermostat in the winter and raise it in the summer. Consider using an electronic programmable thermostat to lower your energy consumption when people are not in your office in the evenings and weekends.
3. Recycling drink bottles – get your employees to sort their lunch trash and recycle bottles and cans. Encourage the use of environmentally friendly alternatives to Styrofoam cups.
4. Using recycled paper – whenever possible use recycled paper in your print marketing materials saving trees and forests.
5. Using biodegradable alternatives – replace plastic packaging and plastic shipping materials with new biodegradable “plastic-like” alternatives. Many of these new alternatives do not cost more and warrant your consideration.
6. Driving less – drive less by consolidating the trips that you do need to make in your car saving fuel, mileage expenses, and decreasing air pollution in your city.
7. Using mass transit or considering car pooling – save money, conserve our natural resources, and lower air pollution all at the same time.
8. Buying Energy Star products – when you need new appliances or heating and cooling systems purchase those with the Energy Star label for increased efficiency and lower energy consumption. You’ll recover your initial investment and then start saving money in just a few years.
9. Stopping the Use Aerosols – use office and beauty products that are aerosol free. Consider letting your cleaning staff know to limit the use of aerosol based cleaning products in your office as well.
10. Limiting your travel by teleconferencing – not only will you minimize the pollution you would normally create in traveling but will make a significant savings on travel expenses improving your bottom-line significantly.

Although you may not be able to embrace each item in our list above, one of the biggest items that will leverage profit directly to your bottom-line is to increase your use of teleconferencing and decrease the amount of your travel both for long distance and in-town trips.

Teleconferencing provides many of the benefits of “being there” in person and now with the advent of Web conferencing (which is video with telephone conferencing combined and includes computer application sharing), putting in “face time” with a client just got significantly easier and less expensive.

When you as a business owner, do not have to pay for employee air travel, rental car expenses, hotel rooms, meals, long distance calls, mileage, and airport parking fees for even one less trip per month, the savings can be huge! Over the course of a year the potential savings and benefit to your profit can be so significant that you may change your employees to a very limited travel schedules.

What might be some of your actual cost savings? Here is just one example of actual travel expenses for an employee based in Washington DC to traveling to Groton, Connecticut for a three day business trip:

Air fare ;$400

Hotel for three nights ($120 per night) $360

Per Diem ($50 per day) $150

Airport Parking ;$50

Mileage to airport and back $20

Total Expense $980

This is just one example of a potential travel saving and is calculated at the government per diem rates. Your own company’s per diem reimbursement rate may even be higher. It is clear that not every trip can be replaced by teleconferencing, but what about the quick one day trips and meet and greet type contract reviews or routine sales calls. These can effectively be replaced by regular teleconferencing saving a business a huge amount of travel expenses over the year and leveraging a significant amount of profit to the bottom-line.

Before you comment “my clients need to have me in the same room”, consider trying out Web conferencing first. You may be pleasantly surprised to find that the positive statement you make as a “green” company resonates with your clients. Your clients may appreciate your efforts and willingly embrace your change to only occasional travel and more frequent Web and teleconferencing contact in their effort to help with your company’s “green” thrust.

Going “green” can help leverage money to the bottom-line. Just how much flow-through you get simply depends on you and the efforts that you are willing to take. Web and teleconferencing are easy to try, are fairly inexpensive to use, and can leverage the most profit to the bottom-line in the long run. Consider putting a “green” face on your business and improving your bottom-line in the process.

Amy Linley gives practical and usable advice regarding communication and meetings at AccuConference.

Find out more about our conference calling, web conferencing and video conferencing services from AccuConference.

photo credit: thingermejig

There’s one thing you need to know about the green consumer. They want to know.

According to the Roper Green Gauge, over 50% reported they would do more if they only knew what and how. So moving your communications to educate and inform can do a lot to grow your green business.

While representing an eco-friendly paint company, we raised the issues of indoor air pollution which is caused in part by the out-gassing of toxins in conventional paints, stains and cleaning products. We built into their quarterly consumer catalog an educational component called “Did You Know?” Sprinkled throughout the pages were various statistics that enlightened consumers.

For instance, using EPA statistics, we informed them that “indoor air pollution is two to twenty times worse than outdoor air pollution even in a heavily industrialized city.” A few pages later, a statistic from Scientific American stated, “A baby crawling on a conventional carpet inhales the equivalent of four cigarettes a day.”

These eye-opening facts broadened their audience considerably, bringing many mainstream people into their consumer base who now understood the close-to-home benefits of their products. Then we launched the branding line for their non-toxic paints, “Beauty without the Beast.” We struck the balance between the reasons people buy their products: To beautify their homes AND avoid unnecessary toxins – the real reason for that “just painted smell.”

Most of us trust the marketplace to bring us products that are safe, useful and effective. Consumers have not trained themselves nor felt the need to examine everything that’s out there before they purchase. But that’s beginning to change.

The thousands of recalls of everything from children’s toys to chopped meat are beginning to wake up and energize a more informed consumer. They’re demanding to know more before they buy and that has profound implications for marketers.

You can build a viable base by telling an educational story. By informing how your product or service does the job well and helps the environment at the same time. That way the message is not just about saving the planet out there but improving their life right here.

No one, whether they’re an environmentally-conscious consumer or not, wants to bring unnecessary toxins into their homes, or buy unsafe toys, or use potentially harmful products. They just didn’t know they were.

When you educate, you marry emotion to intellect, the heart to the head, the planet to the person. The more you educate your customer, the more you build trust. The more you build trust, the more likely you are to win their business.

http://www.greenmarketingblog.com

photo credit: frozenchipmunk

My family recently decided to upgrade our kitchen and replace our old out-dated cabinets and we were considering going “green.” We thought one factor might keep us from doing our part to help reduce our carbon footprint, and that was the cost associated with going the environmentally friendly route. These questions arose: If there is such a thing as “green cabinets,” where would we find them and how much would they cost compared to standard cabinetry?

We eventually located a manufacturer of cabinetry that did not add as much to the greenhouse effect as most cabinets may. To our surprise, the cost of upgrading our kitchen cabinetry with low impact cabinets wasn’t too much more than traditional cabinets. Once we began to research going green, we realized how important it is to do our part…and how not considering environmentally friendly products adds to the greenhouse effect.

In fact, we found a lot of information that suggested if we chose not to go green, we’d end up paying more in the long run. As it turns out, we’d pay a little extra now and benefit considerably more in the future because of the unseen pay-off. What I mean by pay-off is specifically the benefits green products produce as a by-product, so to speak.

New cabinetry puts out formaldehyde continually, especially within the first year. Formaldehyde can be toxic, is an allergenic, and is carcinogenic–that is, it can cause cancer. Because formaldehyde resins are used in many construction materials (including cabinets), it is one of the more common indoor air pollutants. At concentrations above 0.1 ppm (parts per million) in the air, formaldehyde can irritate the eyes and mucous membranes, resulting in watery eyes. Formaldehyde inhaled at this concentration may cause headaches, a burning sensation in the throat, difficulty breathing, as well as triggering or aggravating asthma symptoms.

Just the costs associated with any health problems that may arise from being exposed to formaldehyde can offset the premium price of environmentally friendly cabinetry. If someone develops cancer as a result, the extra cost is priceless, in my opinion. Any time away from work, school and free-time because of any illness that may be a result of exposure to formaldehyde can eventually add up to a lot of money. Unexpected medical bills, a few days away from work and missing a test at school may not have immediate or direct costs associated with them, but must be considered as hidden expenses that can possibly be attributed to formaldehyde exposure. If you’re following this, and if it turns out these costs are a direct result of such exposure, the choice of going green adds to paying for itself.

My family has come to realize that we really need to change the way we think about our carbon footprint, being as environmentally friendly as our situation allows and doing what we can to find green products that are as effective as non-green products.

As a small business owner, I can appreciate how thinking “locally” can be more productive for the surrounding community and eventually for my own family. What I mean by that is nothing more than what goes into the local economy eventually comes back around to my individual family and friends. The ways that is true are endless and go round and round.

Being green allows us to take ownership of our local economy and encourages a smaller overall carbon footprint. How can that be bad? Yes, maybe a bit more expensive, but in the long run most definitely worth the investments of money and time.

One of the articles that convinced us can be found at evergreencabs.com/articles/costofgoinggreen.htm

Czach H.