"How some organizations aim to go beyond going paperless"/ "The pros and cons of bootstrapping your company"

Apr. 20, 2018 "How some organizations aim to go beyond going paperless": Today I found this article by Guy Dixon in the Globe and Mail:

Lowly recycling bins sit next to the office cubicles. At our desks, we drink from ceramic coffee mugs. No Styrofoam except for the foam casings inside our bike helmets, used when the weather improves, as a way we try to reduce carbon use by going without a car.

It all feels like such small measures.

Sometimes, the environmental impact of our working lives can seem so outside our personal control. It’s easy to get complacent, even self-congratulatory (“we’ve gone paperless!” – even if the power and ventilation to keep those office computers running is hardly environmentally friendly).

So, with Earth Day around the corner, how can offices continue to improve sustainably? And what can employees do to make more of a improvement?

For Frances Edmonds, head of sustainability at computer maker HP Canada, it comes down to finding ways for employees to feel engaged in the process. “An engaged employee is a more profitable employee,” she said, “so the opportunity is to engage your employees on sustainability practices that they, for the most part, will love … It will also save you money in the long run.”

Of course, there are myriad things one can do: turning off all electronics, turning off all the lights, printing next to nothing, recycling, making sure that the equipment you have gets used to its fullest (or if the equipment will only serve a limited function, to rent it or buy whatever function it performs from a third party).

HP Canada has worked with the conservation group World Wildlife Fund Canada on Living Planet @ Work, an outreach initiative that catalogues environmental initiatives that employees can undertake, even ideas for outings such as shoreline cleanups that can also be a team-building exercise for co-workers. 

Employee engagement in sustainable programs is seen as key. It can actually attract the best employees in the first place.

At the WWF office in Toronto, a little friendly shaming goes on. Not turning off your computer for the night, or producing too much garbage, or not turning off the lights get noticed and commented on, as one WWF employee noted. It’s meant in fun.

“It actually comes down to trying to provide a better work environment for employees,” said David Photiadis, a director in the Toronto office of the sustainability consulting firm the Delphi Group. Amid a backdrop of concern for the planet, environmental initiatives in the office are fundamentally there “to motivate employees and increase productivity,” and “if you’re trying to be a good business leader, motivating your employees is one of the best places to go,” he added.

Yet, if environmental initiatives have so many benefits, “why aren’t more people doing it? I think it’s a lack of knowledge of the opportunities here,” Ms. Edmonds said. Most people recycle out of habit, but may not have a full grasp of larger practices, such as sustainable procurement (buying goods or services from suppliers in ways that emphasize the longevity of the product and its carbon costs).

“Actually one of the fastest ways to green your business is to purchase from a company that is already green,” Ms. Edmonds said.

“If we take the example of IT [information technology], you can choose to buy a product that was built with a low carbon impact, that can be used with a low carbon impact, and then taken, potentially recycled and put back into the same products again – decreasing the footprint of that activity,” she said.

Sustainability experts frequently talk about the circular economy, basically an effort to keep a finished good from ending up in a landfill, and the product instead being recycled, after its usefulness has run dry, into a new product.

“It drives you back to thinking about whether I buy this as a good, or do I buy it as a service? How am I going to operate this thing once it’s in my building? Those protocols of ownership need to be considered,” Ms. Edmonds said.

“The easiest way to think about this is vehicle purchasing. A lot of organizations buy vehicles, but then to operate that vehicle, the fuel consumption is a big cost of operating that vehicle. If you’re not thinking about that when you buy the vehicle, you end up having problems long term,” she said.

This is a more holistic approach to all the environmental costs. Even the smallest measures, such as buying less paper for the printer, become part of a more conscious approach to all costs and change the workplace culture – even the kind of office buildings a company chooses. It affects the priorities an office may place on waste diversion or better energy conservation.

“Certainly the larger developers are implementing sustainability as their normal course of action now,” said Tina Sutton, project manager at Green Reason, a sustainable building consultancy in Toronto. “ Some of the smaller ones are still paying lip service to it. They’re doing better than 10 or 15 years ago, but they’re still not completely embracing the whole thing.” 

“On a wider scale, commercial buildings are going need to start reporting on their energy measures, but there’s this huge gap in terms of smaller buildings,” she said. “Obviously there are lots of people [and companies] that need space, and they can’t pay that much. So, they end up locating into these buildings where the sustainability measures are extremely limited or non-existent.”

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/careers/article-how-offices-can-do-more-to-improve-sustainability/

May 28, 2018 "The pros and cons of bootstrapping your company": Today I found this article by Camilla Cornell in the Globe and Mail:

For the first five years, Alyssa Furtado ran personal-finance website Ratehub Inc. out of her home. Being able to dispense with outside office space kept costs down, but it meant at one point there were 13 people working out of her basement. The seven-year-old next door saw them all piling out for lunch one day, she recalls. “Wow, miss,” he told her. “You sure live with a lot of people.”

Ms. Furtado didn’t initially consider pursuing funding to get her website off the ground “mostly out of naiveté.” She wasn’t from a tech background and she wasn’t familiar with venture capital. “I didn’t know any better,” she says.

But although she believes self-funding her business contributed to its long-term success, as Ms. Furtado and her fellow panelists at The Globe and Mail Small Business Summit pointed out, there are pros and cons to “bootstrapping.”

The Pros

You stay lean and mean. For Ms. Furtado, perhaps the primary benefit of self-funding, at least in the early stages, is “it really forces you to lay a good foundation for your business. You have to get smart about acquiring customers and managing your expenses.”

She became accomplished at applying for government grants and loans, for example, and she used an inexpensive outsourced contractor to help her build the first website. A side benefit of using outsourced labour, she says: “You get to try out potential employees.”

Ms. Furtado also found ways to build her brand free of charge. “We tried to piggyback on media stories,” she says. “If there was a Bank of Canada rate hike, we would run calculations for journalists to break down what that meant for the average Canadians and how it would impact their payments.”

Panelist Steve Hubbard, founding partner with Lightenco, says he and his partners also self-funded their Ottawa-based, sustainable-lighting-solutions company. Although it launched in 2011, “we didn’t have a marketing budget until last year,” he says.

Instead, he and his partner employed “ninja marketing,” strategically targeting well-known local businesses and using their endorsement to help spread the word. “We looked for the ice cream shop everyone goes to and the restaurant everyone knows,” Mr. Hubbard says. “We got some brands behind us and built on referrals.”

He also used shared business space to cut down on costs and make connections, and reached out to organizations such as Futurpreneur for mentorship and advice to help Lightenco grow.

You’re indisputably in charge. When you self-fund, says Bryan Watson, partner with Toronto-based consulting and venture-services firm Flow Ventures, “you are master of your own destiny. You have the freedom to move dextrously and build the business your way.”

Ms. Furtado recalls sitting down with an adviser at one point who was pushing her to tackle e-mail marketing and Facebook, among other areas. “But we were really focused on making sure we were top ranked on Google when people searched for ‘personal finance,’ ” she says. “We were two people at the time and I thought to myself, ‘That is actually the wrong advice. All we can do is nail one thing and become the best at it.’ ”

The good news: She had no obligation to listen to that outside advice. If he had owned a good chunk of her company, she might not have had a choice. Once you persuade people to invest in your company, Mr. Watson says, “you are a steward of their money, so you don’t have as much control.”

The cons

You don’t get the benefit of mentors with skin in the game. Taking on an investor can actually be a “perk,” Mr. Watson contends. They should bring with them valuable input and connections, along with the capital you need. “But it is a relationship, so you have to look for the right fit for your company,” he says. “And you should really take your time trying to figure that out.”

You’re forced to take on added risk. “Our initial investment was basically one order of product from overseas that may or may not have shown up,” Mr. Hubbard says. “It was a bit risky.” 

Entrepreneurs who go the bootstrapping route tend to plow most of their companies’ earnings back into the business, meaning their entire financial fortune is tied up in their company. At some point, they often want to derisk − selling a stake to an outside investor can allow the founder to diversify their holdings.

You may not grow as fast. RateHub recently raised its first round of formal capital after seven years of bootstrapping. The reason? “We stumbled on insurance comparisons and we knew it could be a multimillion-dollar business,” Ms. Furtado says. “But we had zero excess capacity.”

If capital is truly restraining you from scaling up, then getting outside investment makes total sense, she says. And if you have a proven business model and “a good story to tell investors,” you’re in a better position to negotiate a deal.

“One of the benefits of waiting to raise capital is that we were able to retain a significant majority of the company,” Ms. Furtado concludes. “When you’ve been successful at building the company, your investors want you to run the company – they buy into your vision.”

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/small-business/money/article-the-pros-and-cons-of-bootstrapping-your-company/