Do it right.

I remember a story my father used to tell me when I was a child. My grandfather, whom I never met as he died 7 years before I was born, was the most famous Meyhane (Cypriot Pub with live entertainment), in Cyprus. As a young boy, his father would send him to run errands to pick things up from the market. On one occasion, my grandfather had given him some money to go and buy some glasses. Before he sent him on his way, he gave my father a few smacks to which my father cried “What For?”. My grandfather then turned round affectionately and said “Son, if you break the glasses on your way home, it would be pointless of me punishing you as there would be nothing we could do to get back the glasses. This way, it will be in your mind not to mess around on your way back and bring them home in one piece”.  It sounds a lot more philosophical and wise in Turkish but I guess the English language equivalent would be “no use in crying over spilt milk”. 

 

I always thought it was a funny story. Not because it was humorous but more because the thought of my grandfather tanning my father’s butt was amusing. As I’ve grown up and am responsible for more than 70 people, I sometimes wish I could smack their bottoms but that would be a pretty weird way for someone to run their business. I’m chuckling at the thought of it now. After the morning meeting, a line of unruly or inefficient staff line up for a spanking. 

 

Coming back to the point. This story and other proverbs repeated a million times from family members resonate in my mind on a daily basis. They affect the way I make decisions. My ethics and morals. If you’re going to do a job, do it right. I look around me and see so many things done half heartedly. People will recycle half heartedly, conserve energy half heartedly, support charitable organizations half heartedly, love their partners half heartedly. If you’re going to do something, do it right. It always comes back to bite you in the butt in the end if you don’t. If you try to cut corners, as I have done many times in the past due to financial constraints, it has always ended up costing me more in the long run because the job I tried to have done on the cheap was something that was unusable and had to be done again by a professional. Moral of the story, DO IT RIGHT! I can’t stress this enough. Please, look after your environment. Recycle all the materials that you can. Use less water. Turn off lights. Do good deeds. Volunteer. Eat less meat. Do more exercise. Have more fun. Love more. Enjoy your life. Doing things half heartedly isn’t going to get you anyway. Enjoy your time here but at the same time, make sure you leave it in good shape for others to enjoy and reap the benefits of too. Leave a legacy. Leave a memory. Do it right. 

How Much Mileage Are You Getting Out Of Your Marketing Spend?

As an eco-friendly business, I always have to look at how sustainable the company’s operating processes and procedures are. I look at consumption of products, fuel, how often tools or machinery need to replaced or repaired. I even look into the processes and procedures of my suppliers to make sure that they meet the company’s minimum requirements to become our supplier. I know this is a bit anal but, think about it. What’s the point of buying eco or organic if the product has a higher carbon footprint than buying it’s non-eco alternative produced locally? It defeats the purpose.

Recently, I decided it was time to use the same method when calculating the company’s marketing spend. We haven’t really had a set budget and have been giving away products, services and committing to financial sponsorship and advertising spends. Looking back, 90% of our marketing was in vain or maybe a better phrase would be “pissing against the wind”. Being someone of a generous nature and finding it very difficult to say no to people, I was sometimes left with commitments of supporting others with products giveaways or services worth thousands for them to give to their customer base. In return, I would get a logo or mention or sometimes, people would forget what they promised and we’d get almost no coverage for going out of our way to support them when in reality, we could barely support ourselves. In short, if I was looking at it from a sustainability perspective, it would be the biggest polluting factor in our business. This year, we have changed our marketing strategy slightly and now no longer support or sponsor willy nilly. We have decided to make some long term sponsorships of sporting events (Emirates American Football League), Product & Service giveaways for competitions in magazines over the course of the year with a clear instruction of data retention for leads as well as some of our charity & CSR initiatives which we feel very strongly about. Other than that, everything else is a bad investment with bad mileage. So, if you’re reading this and thinking of hitting me up for sponsorship, unless you have a sporting event or a youth program, save yourself the time and effort and find a larger company that can afford to throw money away. This business is green in its morals and its marketing.

What’s the point of having a rant if you’re no longer aloud to?

I’m so annoyed!!! I want to swear and kick things repeatedly until they cry or I break my toe. Doing it at home in private wont appease me either. I need to be that little shit of a child in the supermarket making a scene and embarrassing their parent. The problem is, I’m not aloud to. I can’t bloody name and shame a company that completely screwed me over and wasted a month of my time but I’m aloud to promote the ones that do good work. What about calling out the cowboys? I sound like my father now but, sorry to say, there’s no f-ing justice in this world!!! In the words of Victor Mildrew (Character in ‘One foot in the grave’), “I don’t believe it!”

Seriously, I’ve had a supplier completely let me down and leave me swinging in the wind the day before they were due to deliver. I am livid. So unprofessional. I want to call them out on it but the law in the UAE, I’m not sure about the rest of the world, does not permit me to say what I think of them as it leaves me open to law suit as defamation is a criminal offense in Dubai. I suppose it ties in with my last blog about Cultural Sensitivity When doing business but it doesn’t take away from the fact that I can’t warn others about them. I can’t sue them. I can’t do anything. It feels like I have had the freedom of asking to speak to the manager after a bad meal, taken away from me. Weird analogy. I know. Get used to them, I have many.

Anyway, rant but not rant, not name and shame over. Now I need a hug!

How Green Is Your Strategy?

I recently started thinking of how far the business has come since its inception and where it is going and realised that ‘winging it’ was no longer going to cut it. I decided that I would be a grown up about it and I needed a plan and not just one that I wrote in my notepad. I need a strategic plan. Fantastic. Only problem is, I have no idea how to do one. Being a high school drop out, I never really got taught to do one nor did I ever need to put one together for any of my other businesses. Lucky for me, I have many friends who are senior in multi-national companies who have access to these things and have probably had to do them at some point in their career. Great, I’ll just bribe one of them to hand over one of theirs and I’ll switch a few details and voila! I’d have a strategic plan all of my own. Except, it didn’t quite work out that way. I invited friends out individually and asked them questions about their plans and told them that I wanted to put one together. All were happy enough to help and give me information but none were willing to hand over their own company’s one. I wasn’t aware until I finished my own that it’s quite sensitive information. To be honest with you, I was pretty scared about doing it after I started hearing about macro data inputs and competencies and so on. I nearly fell off my chair. My first reaction was “How much is the research alone going to cost me?”. I started to wonder if I was able to perform such a task on my own and how long this exercise was going to take me. Was it worth it? Would the business benefit from it afterwards? 

My initial fears were short lived and the truth of it is, yes, it was completely worth it. The company’s message, vision and goals were clear. The goals became defined and with the use of the macro and micro data, the timeline to achieve goals and attain targets become more specific. As for the research, this is where a little bit of ingenuity paid off in bundles. I’m subscribed to a myriad of trade magazines for each division of my business. Those, coupled with a few financial publications and the economist had pretty much all the information I needed. With the monthly features on emerging markets, growth data, consensus reports, spending trends and other endless and what I thought, pointless features were so helpful, a few flicks through each recent back issue gave me some more useful data to input into my strategic plan. 

If you were to read my plan, you’d be through it in under 5 minutes. It took me almost 2 weeks to put it together. You should have seen my face once it was complete. I was like a little kid who just won a prize for science project. I was so happy with it, I had to share it. The only people I was comfortable showing that information to were the friends who gave me the advice in the first place. I had a feeling that they were going to rip it apart and find holes in it or give me much hated ‘constructive criticism’. Don’t get me wrong, I know criticism is a good way to make a few changes but it’s like going to parents evening and having some teacher tell you that your kid could do so much better if they applied themselves. You take it personally and think the teacher is having a swipe at you by tactfully saying you’re a shit parent and if you gave your child a little more attention at home, they’d be less of a little shit in the classroom. Maybe not the best analogy but you get where I’m going with it. 

Surprisingly, they thought it was brilliant. They asked me how much it cost and who I’d got to do it for me. Very funny. Then came the big shocker. They were surprised that nearly all my future growth goals were accompanied with an environmental strategy like reducing energy consumption or building new carbon neutral facilities. It made me ask the question about their own green or sustainable goals within their company’s strategic plans. Their answers were all lame, bullshit initiatives that were outdated. Organising more community clean up days or planting a few trees per department isn’t exactly a clear company initiative to make a change. After feeling so elated with my accomplishment, I felt mad that no one actually cares. Not really. It made me think about other Forbes 500 companies that had spent hundreds of thousands in the last year developing strategic plans for growth but for nothing else. 

It’s made me think long and hard about this, really, so please, if you have been part of or have had access to a strategic planning exercise in the past twelve months, would you be so kind as to let me know about your own plan? Has it got a clear sustainability strategy that is in line with your growth ambitions or is it some lame, same old, same old CSR jabber that is slotted in to make it sound like some great efforts are being made? I’d really love to know. 

 

Plastic Gangster

This blog is a little different. I’m writing it from my hotel room in Istanbul. Whilst you might be thinking that I’m on an extended holiday, I’ll have you know that I’ve not had the time to do a single bit of sightseeing or anything remotely touristy. In fact, I’ve been busy trying to save the planet again. A few months ago I met with a company that makes biodegradable garbage bags and thought it would be a great idea to be able to have them available in the Middle East at a reasonable price. You see, the problem at the moment is that you can buy them from the organic café but in all honesty, who wants to pay $10 on garbage bags? I mean, the product is already doomed. Its sole purpose is to sit in your bin and have smelly, rotting food, snotty tissues, poo filled nappies and whatever else people throw away into them. It’s like throwing away money. So, the point I’m trying to make is why would you throw away ten bucks on trash bags when normal trash bags are five? Well, if you’re seriously conscious of the environment and you can afford it, you will, however, if you’re like the rest of the 98% of the population, you won’t… Unless, you can buy the biodegradable ones for the price of regular ones, right? Right.

So, getting back to the story. This company, they make bags, bin bags, garbage bags, trash bags, refuse bags, whatever name you have for them. Here’s the cool part. They actually recycle old plastic bags to make them and then add an additive that allows them to biodegrade in under 12 months. Let me make it a little more clearer. Generally, the only plastic we can recycle is the plastic bottles we drink our water and other liquid holding vessels. Even so, the bottles generally have to be PET bottles. Cellophane, nylon and other polyester bags can not be recycled. What I witnessed in this factory was them shredding and converting the bags into pellets, then melting them down and processing them into long strands, like spaghetti, and then making them back into bags. If you’re not family with the damage that plastic bags can do to our environment and wildlife, you should check out our friend’s website http://www.plasticnotsofantasticexpedition.com . In a nutshell, plastic can take up to a thousand years to breakdown and in that time, leaches harmful chemicals into the earth contaminating our water supply and the earth in which we grow our vegetables. Another issue is if a bag has been littered and thrown out the window and the winds have blown this bag into nature. The bag is then consumed by an animal, we’ll say Bambi, that usually tugs the heartstrings, the bag is not digested in its stomach. It actually clogs up little Bambi’s stomach and kills it slowly. In my eyes, any process that reduces either one of these scenarios is great news and something I want to be involved in. So, I’m here. I came to visit the factory and see for myself and hopefully strike a deal that would allow us as ecogreen to reproduce them for the Middle East. With everything looking like its going to plan, you’ll soon be able to buy them from your local supermarket for the same cost as ordinary trash bags.

Remember, don’t be a Plastic Gangster. Be a man (or woman) about your responsibility to the environment.

Are You A Dreamer?

As I approach the last hurdle of launching my own brand of cleaning products, I get so excited from the forecasts that I make up in my mind but, at the same time, I get so overwhelmed with fear that I lose sleep over it.

When I penned the business plan for my cleaning company, I was sat in a hospital, sleepless and scared. My ex wife and I were going through a traumatic experience of a still birth, feeling helpless, I decided it was time to try and stop myself overdosing on caffeine and giving myself a black lung and write down the plan that I had so many times orchestrated in my head. I had completed the whole thing in 18 hours and just went back to it to polish the numbers and some spelling and grammatical mistakes that I had made.

In the financials and projected growth, I had the business start-up capital at $300k and a growth rate that Forbes magazine would be proud of. I might have been a little over ambitious in my calculations but hey, I’m an entrepreneur! I am the eternal optimist, the opportunist and the daydreamer. My cup is always half full, I’m always looking on the bright side and guess what, the grass on my side is emerald green. Although I had great aspirations and even though the numbers or growth rate of the business isn’t as they were projected in 2008, I have done everything that I had set out to do. I started with a healthy number of staff for the residential unit, took on commercial contracts and now launching my own products. What I didn’t think about when I thought up this business was how important the last element of this business is. Moreover, I didn’t contemplate how lucrative it is.

The cleaning product market worldwide last year was $2 billion dollars. Holy cow. I have been doing some research and green works, clorox’s Eco friendly alternative, had sales of $60 million. That’s still only 3% of the market share! I’m not looking to take over the world, but I seriously believe that my products are more attractive than theirs. I’m only looking for 0.1% of the market over the course of the next 18 months and then grow that share by the same amount year on year for the next 5 years. I know what you’re thinking now, that I’m dreaming. And maybe I am. I am a true believer that if you aim high and you fail, at least you failed high. I’m at 50% of my aimed growth rate. If I’m in the same situation a year down the line with my products,  I’m still a winner.

I always laugh because I’m just a kid (ok, maybe not so much as a kid anymore) without a formal education, I have a tainted childhood and questionable past. One thing I do have is a big heart and bigger dreams. I always encourage people around me to follow their hearts and chase their dreams. If they fall flat on their face, someone will always be there to help them up and laugh about it with them. Although I’m scared about how my business will succeed, I try to have fun everyday with the tasks that I have. The responsibilities I have to my future wife, my employees and other dependents are not what motivate me to get out of bed in the mornings. They might be the reason for me not giving up or having a lie in when I’m hungover, but no, it’s my dreams and the hope of getting one step closer to realizing those dreams that is my driving force.

Don’t be scared of dreaming. We all have nightmares now and again but they’re worth enduring if it means we get to live the dream.

Feed Me Seymour!!

 

I’m guessing not many of you will get the heading of this blog due to your age or where you were brought up but it’s a famous line from the movie ‘little shop of horrors’. It was a comedy from the eighties starring Steve Martin and was probably my 3rd favorite movie at the time. My first being ‘The Goonies’ and second was’Beverly Hills Cop’. It has nothing to do with the topic of this blog except maybe tying in gluttony but I’m not going to get all self righteous. For a few years now, I have been looking into the possibility of getting into vertical farming. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, it is using a skyscraper or tower block and its levels as green houses to grow food in rather than build offices or apartments. The idea came to me after it had been publicized a few years ago and the real estate crash of the UAE where there were an abundant of buildings half constructed all over the place. To start such a project on your own would be a huge task and an even bigger investment need but with the recent promotion of crowd funding or crowd sourcing, this project could become easier to get off the ground than I thought.

I mentioned it in passing to a friend of mine who owns such a building and was immediately interested to donate his asset to the cause. With that out of the way, the hardest part is pretty much done. Now I need to go back to the business plan and revisit the numbers to see how much would need to be invested to get the rest of it on track. There are many benefits to vertical farming. Apart from the carbon emissions aspect, as in if produce is produced locally, you don’t need to burn fuel to ship it in. The produce is fresher when it hits the supermarket shelf and it creates jobs locally. My idea was to grow things like cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers and the like and sell them in the supermarkets under a brand name but then the profits from the proceeds would then go to buying grains and building wells in third world countries. In essence, the business is a non-profit, social development scheme. As a company, we do as much as we can for charities locally but I always wonder if we’re doing enough. I’m a huge believer of charity should always start at home, which is why I support local children’s centers, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a responsibility to try and do good for others around the world who aren’t as fortunate. I feel very blessed for having what I have and I hope I continue to be blessed with such prosperity but what use is it if it’s all in vain? I guess what I’m trying to determine is, are there enough people like me out there to pledge their time, money and effort to feed a soul in Africa even though it’s a million light years from their own life or would they rather dismiss it with the view that ignorance is bliss? I hope there are more like me. I think this is why crowd sourcing is a good thing. People can pledge their time, their skills or their money. Like my friend who has pledged his building. Like another friend who comes from a agricultural background donating his knowledge, time and contacts. I wonder if I could raise enough money to get all the infrastructure in place like solar panels, water recycling systems, LED lighting. I wonder if corporations would sponsor or donate. I wonder. I wonder how many people will die of starvation, malnutrition or dehydration whilst I ponder these points. I wonder.

Quiet in the cheap seats!

Whilst in London, I needed a car to get around in for a few days during the Jubilee weekend. Being as unorganized as I usually am, I rocked up to Europcar in King’s Cross hoping to get myself a little runaround. They had nothing left except a little electric car. I went into their garage to see what it looked like and to be honest, it looked like the little fat kid that always got picked last to be on your team during play time at school. I had no choice so I said yes and waited for them to ‘spruce her up’. When I got in it, I was actually surprised by how spacious it was. I sat down, turned the ignition and, nothing. I turned the key again, took my foot off the brake. Still nothing. One of the guys came over to ask if everything was alright as he could see me getting flustered and losing my cool, to which my response was “I think I’ve broken the bloody thing already”. He laughed and told me that it was on. All I had to do is take off the handbrake and drive. You see, as it’s a full electric car, it doesn’t have an engine. If it doesn’t’ have an engine, there’s no engine noise. If anything, it’s silent. Like stealth ninja warrior silent. Not for nothing, I give the car 8 out of 10. It was small and nimble. The turning circle was amazing. I felt like I could turn it on a 50 pence piece (admit it, you’re jealous). It was exempt of congestion charge (Thank you very much) and the 80 miles I drove it didn’t cost me a bean in fuel and I never had to recharge it once. I went to see my dad with it in North London. He was so taken aback by it and by the prospect of saving on fuel and congestion charge that he’s looking into buying one. He might not buy the same model as the one I had, like I said, if it was a person, you would compliment it by saying it had a face for radio. Anyway, back to Dubai tomorrow and back to big, gas guzzling cars and trucks. With only one known petrol station that provides bio-fuel, it’s hardly making headway in the challenge to promote greener travel. Still, nonetheless, with its Hybrid taxis in operation and some car importers trying to do the promotion themselves, there’s hope for us yet.