Lately I have been teaching a uniquely green focused  FastTrac™ Tech Venture program run by ITAC – New York City’s Industrial and Technology Assistance Corporation  and created by the Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation, the world’s largest organization devoted to entrepreneurship.

Our class is full of small start-up and early-stage businesses with state-of-the-art green technology business concepts.  Super cool ideas ranging from solar panel manufacturers to internet-based companies that measure energy usage of your home and commercial buildings.

This week we were going over how to really test their business concept, and how close they are to being a “model” business.

Based on the market research they have been doing, I asked them to rate their businesses based on the following five components:

1. Product / Service Feasibility – Does the product or service serve a purpose?  Is their a need for it?  What makes it better, different or unique from competitors’ products or services?
2. Market Feasibility – Is there a demand for the product/service?  From whom?  What are they currently purchasing instead?  Will you be able to capture some of the market share out there?  How much of it?
3. Financial Feasibility – What is your cost structure?  How much can you sell your product / service for?  How profitable will it be?  How scalable is it?  How quickly can you ramp up production of your product / service to meet demand?  How much capital do you need to make it happen?  Do you have this capital or do you need to raise it?  From where would you raise it?
4. Technology Feasibility – How “current” is your technology?  Will your potential customers “get it” and understand its value?  How difficult is it for your competition to enter your market?  How much of a lead time will you have over the competition?  How will you stay ahead of the curve on your technology as it changes?
5. Environmental Feasibility – How much energy does your product / service consume, including travel, office equipment, etc.?  How much carbon is your business emitting?  Water pollution?  How about chemicals, heavy metals, and toxicity in production and distribution of your product / service?  Natural resources consumed, such as paper, metals, water, etc.?  Design:  durability, reusability, and reused/recycled materials?  Packaging and waste / recyclability of the materials?  How does your supply-chain taking care of the same issues and their environmental impact?

This turned into an hour-long discussion and debate on how to measure these various components and their importance in business.

Especially the Environmental Feasibility component.

The class wondered what was so important about measuring these issues and if all of them applied to each of them.  The answer is by making it important for their business turns into a very serious benefit over their competition, as long as it is well researched and done authentically.  And that most of the components apply to most businesses.  More than the average entrepreneur realizes!

I encouraged them to focus on the amount of savings and/or increased revenue a company can receive by really ramping up their environmental feasibility.

It can effectively put them far ahead of the competition.

Just as important as implementing the changes of these five components of a model business is knowing how to leverage them once they are put in place.  That is this week’s action steps for them to do and I’m really looking forward to seeing the results they come up with next week.

Action Steps for the Week

Rate your business from 1 – 10 on the following five components:

• Product / Service
• Market
• Financial
• Technology
• Environmental

1 = poor – 10 = excellent.  Add them up and compare to a “model” business score of “50”.

Very few businesses ever score a “50”, but use it as a benchmark to strive for.  And look at your “lower” scores and know this is a place to start ASAP.

And for those lower scoring components of your business determine how to ramp them up.  Do you need to do some market research to determine what you need to do?  Do you need to determine how to leverage that part of your business once it is ramped up?

For example, if you got a weak score on technology, how do you get up to speed?  What has to happen?  How much will it cost?  How can you market it as a leg up on your competition?  And then how can you stay ahead of the competition going forward?  Lastly, where do you find this information out?

This can take some work and research, and in the end you and your business will benefit dramatically because of it.

We were sitting in the back of an oversized SUV, zipping to LaGuardia Airport on a warm evening in late May 2008 when Larry pulled out his Blackberry and said, “Stefan, that is a very interesting idea.  I’ll set up a telephone meeting between my senior staff and your team to discuss how we can make this happen.”

Dr. Lawrence Burns had just finished speaking to a group of colleagues at Columbia University’s Earth Institute about “What Sustainability Means to General Motors”, and now I was seeing him off to his flight back to Detroit.

I had met Larry a few months earlier, after reading about him in the New York Times article Mr. Environment for General Motors.  And while he was in charge of strategic planning and R&D for the company, what really had us bond was our commonality around hearing loss.  He had lost all his hearing and I was not far behind him (my hearing has since improved substantially.)  But at the time we enjoyed being with someone who understood what it was like to live without sound.

What excited Larry on the car ride to the airport was a vision I had developed and just finished presenting to him in the car on how to overhaul General Motors by taking them green.

In fact he had never heard such a concept like that before.

A few weeks later Larry and his senior executives were on the phone with my partner an me telling us to put together a detailed proposal on how we would take his two divisions at GM green first, and if successful, the whole company.

But it turned out GM was too far gone.  And by the time we submitted our detailed proposal a couple of months later, they were preparing to publicly announce they were hitting the wall.

And while our team felt a weird sense of comfort when we learned a part of our plan  managed to get into GM’s proposal to Congress for bailout funds a few months later, we were saddened we were not going to help them overhaul the company.

Yes, General Motors is an extreme example, yet any business can fall victim to neglecting the writing on the wall if left unheeded.

How about yours?

Five Steps to Overhauling Your Company

1.  Identify Breakdowns—quickly figure out where the key issues are in your business.  Is your product/service still relevant?  Do customers see its value?  How is it priced?  What is your competition like?  Has the market changed in your industry?

2.  Determine Solutions— here is where many people get stuck.  Often times, you are deep in the woods to see the forest and have an objective way of looking at this.  Find out how to make sure you can get back ahead of the curve in your industry.  How can you narrow down your product or service and/or marketing to a more specialized audience?  Specialists create a uniqueness that is gold in marketing and brand positioning.

3.  Test Assumptions—once you figure out how you are going to adjust your company, rigorously challenge your thoughts and opinions.  Use surveys and speak to your customers, suppliers, even your neighbors.  From the various opinions adjust your plan accordingly.

4.  Implement Quickly—do not hesitate.  Hesitation breeds indecision.  Indecision breeds failure.  Once you have your information, or “enough” to make your choice, go forward ASAP immediately.

5.  Accelerate Through the Mistakes—along the way to overhauling your business, you will make mistakes.  That is fine and it is part of the process of overhauling.  The key is not to not make mistakes, rather to accelerate through them.  Make them, realize them, and adjust as soon as possible until you figure it out.

Doing a major overhaul of your company is not an easy thing for many businesses.  If it were, GM and Larry Burns would have done it a long time ago.

It requires shifting your thinking and being ready, willing and able to let go of things you felt were perfect that may no longer be.

And being ready to act immediately.

Action Steps for the Week:

How is your product or service?  Is it still “current”?  Is it unique and competitive?  Or are a gazillion others trying to compete with you using similar products or services?

If the latter, you need to zoom in and narrow your market share.  Be a big fish in a small pond.

You do this by specializing!  One way to do this is by narrowing your primary customer base.  For example, focus on single women over 40, or first time home owners only, or green business coaching, etc.

Research the market place.  Know who is doing this already and how you are better or different or both.

Next, revamp your marketing strategies and plan.  Recreate your marketing funnel to draw customers in on a regular basis.

Lastly, act ASAP.  Waiting is the kiss of death.

Quickly test, apply and adjust our plan as you go.

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Last week I saw a fascinating movie premier, The Age of Stupid.

Never mind that it was the first time a movie premier was broadcast live via satellite (from here in New York) around the world on over 550 screens in 45 countries.  Or that they had in attendance the likes of Kofi Annan (former Secretary General of the United Nations), Heather Graham and Jillian Anderson as well as music from Moby and Radiohead.  Or that The Huffington Post called the movie launch “One of the most important films of the year (perhaps decade)….” as both a new way independent films will be released and for the environmental message.

Instead, what was fascinating was it was a film about an old man living in the devastated world of 2055, watching ‘archive’ footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change while we had the chance?

Today expert climatologists around the world are agreeing we are about to hit the point of no return for our planet.

And that point is 2015, almost five years away!

What does this mean?  The UN’s Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced in 2007 that if we do not stop our earth’s temperature from increasing beyond the levels it will hit by 2015, there will be no stopping the environmental impacts that will ensue.

A month or so later Time Magazine wrote Can We Save the World By 2015? and quoted David Doniger, the policy director of the world renowned Natural Resource Defense Council’s climate center, “We’re almost at the point of no return. If we don’t turn these emission trends down soon, we’re cooked.”

Does this sound dramatic and doom and gloom?  Ok, it does!

And we’re here to learn about being UnReasonable in creating powerful results.  Quickly.

What I teach, train and coach businesses on is the fastest way we will not only stop this disaster from occurring but actually reverse it is to show people how to make money regenerating the earth’s resources.

And a new major player just joined the contest to being the greenest.  And it’s not the United States.  You may be surprised by whom…

China.

Yes, Red China is now going green!

Just this past week Thomas Friedman, writer and three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize wrote an Op Ed piece for the New York Times:  The New Sputnik, arguing, “I believe future historians may well conclude that the most important thing to happen in the last 18 months was that Red China decided to become Green China.”

Examples from the past few weeks are China announcing at the UN last week it will cut carbon emissions by 2020.  While they did not explain more clearly what they meant by this, they have already recruited America’s premier solar equipment manufacturer, Applied Materials, to open the world’s largest privately funded solar research facility… in China.  This is after already having the world’s largest supplier of solar panels, Suntech, in China.

So this is where YOU come in.

It’s kind of like playing basketball here on the street in Brooklyn.  There is a lot of “trash talking”, a form of insulting that is meant to challenge and often poke fun at the other team.  And when that happens, often times it motivates the other team to play much better.

Experts predict that before the end of the next year, China will surpass the US in energy technology.  And so perhaps we ought to take this as a form of China trash talking us to really step up.

Have you been thinking of going green and catching the “green” wave?  Now is the time.

Have you already down this path?  Now is the time to raise the bar to take on this competition from China.

Are you not interested in going down the path of “greening up” your act?  You may want to seriously rethink that.

Because in case the predictions of 2015 looming just six years away isn’t enough to get you reconsidering, being caught holding the modern-day equivalent of the buggy whip might be.

Action Steps for the Week:

- Take a look at your business.  How can you “green it up” big time?
- It does not matter what type of business you have.  Look at energy consumption, travel, water and pollution issues.
- Ask yourself, “How can I:
- travel less?” (i.e. video conferencing, teleconferencing, etc.)
- travel locally (and gain fitness)?” (i.e. bike, walk, use public transportation)
- conserve electricity?” (i.e. turn off all appliances when not using them… especially computers!)
- go solar or wind power?” (i.e. sign up for your utility that promotes this source of power.)
- consume less?” (i.e. less paper, stop using bottled water, no disposable bags, etc.)

And if you’re really UnReasonable, ask yourself this question: “How can I compete with the Chinese and out-greening them?”