How Your Business Can Help Save the World—and Reap the Benefits

Tim Sanders

Second, small business people can retool their businesses faster. A lot of the stuff we do is highly wasteful. In the book, I talk about this small restaurant chain in Ohio called Figlio's. For it to become sustainable and start to get attention in the press for it to grow, it had to make some changes. It had to make radical changes in how stuff was disposed of and to switch from disposable to biodegradable. But they did it, and they were able to do it much faster than the Applebee's or Chili's down the road because there it would take months to even get those kinds of conceptual changes approved.

What about in terms of going green? What advantages do small businesses have there?
Going green cannot be done by the CEO alone. Your people have to participate. Here's an example. There was a heating and electrical contracting company called Johnson Hybrid, out of Texas. They made a radical change. They created eco-profit-sharing. This is something you can do as a very small company. You say, "These are our electricity costs today, these are the conservation methods I want all our employees to participate in, and at the end of the 90 days we will calculate the savings, and we will pipe them back to the employees." By doing that you completely rewire the incentives inside the company, and you will see a lot of innovation going on.

What are some other practical steps that small businesses can take to take part in this responsibility revolution you're talking about?
One of the first things a small business can do that a larger business has a tough time doing is guaranteeing health coverage. For the small business, believe it or not, it's not any more difficult than it used to be because of the rise of the small-business association.

Businesses can also take advantage of social responsibility by creating more access to their resources to the community. For example, a small restaurant can be a community eating place, especially for nonprofits making a difference. For a big company, it's hard to justify, but for a small company, it's easy to do. A lot of small businesses were built by supporting community organizations like the United Way.

The last thing is waste elimination. Somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of your money is wasted on legacy habits that are done just because they're convenient. A small business can go after those sacred cows. One legacy habit has to do with companies that have trucks that deliver their products. They idle all day long. Every time they stop and make a delivery, they leave it on. Very small companies have realized, though, that's a legacy idea that doesn't making any sense. Almost 30 percent of gas that a truck uses is idling. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters in Vermont saved 5,000 gallons of gas in a first year after it told its drivers to turn off their trucks. That's a very small fleet of trucks in the Northeast. A Fortune 500 company can't just announce one day they're going to do that. They have to go through the labor union and layers of management. But a small-business owner can change that on a dime.