posted by Andrew Hartley - Business Consultant & Entrepreneur on Apr 21
Here’s something interesting: Small Business Week coincides with Earth Day. I don’t know if that is the case every year, but in 2007, here we are.
President Bush has praised small business owners in the days preceding Small Business Week, but he has not latched on to the opportunity these shared celebrations present. If you would like to read the full text of the President’s proclamation, click here (HTML) or here (PDF).
Here’s the thing: we all know that the environment is in dire straights. We’ve heard the hullabaloo about Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (both a book [aff]
So what is to be done? Bush missed a BEAUTIFUL opportunity to link Earth Day with Small Business Week. According to the Small Business Administration (SBA), small business represents 50% of the United States’ private, non-farm gross domestic product (GDP). In fact, small business ranged from 18 to 85 percent of each sector of the US economy!
Imagine what could happen if there was a strong call for small business to usher in a “green revolution!” What if all small businesses began to run in an environmentally-friendly (even an environmentally-enhancing) way! How great would it be if the ideas laid out in books like Green to Gold [aff]
Now think about what WILL happen if no small businesses think about the environment. Nothing will change. We’ll continue on exactly the same path we are already on - and, as we entrepreneurs know, avoiding change is not an option. The status quo is a death knell for business. In this case, the death knell would only warn us of the impending doom from climate change. It may not end things, but it would DRASTICALLY change life as we know it.
So if President Bush won’t do it, I will. I (and Aviation of Business) challenge all small business to try to think “outside their box” and “think globally while acting locally.” And putting the clichés aside, I truly do believe that small business is up to the challenge of redefining what business can be. I believe that small business, with its ability to change quickly and with its creativity and ability to mitigate risk (even though it can never be completely eliminated) is more likely to cause the environmental revolution than big, bumbling, slow conglomorates that slog through committees and make tiny, incremental changes so as not to misstep and (god forbid) make a mistake! </rant> Small business entrepreneurs know that mistakes are lessons, and that “incremental” actually means “slow and scared.”
So take the challenge, please! Find any and every way you can make your business “green.” Then let ‘er rip! Leave a comment telling us how you currently “green” your business, and come back and add to the list if you hear about or think of a new, creative way to increase the “greenness” of your company!
Fair Winds,
Andrew
