David Gibson, Partner & GM : January 2007
In the past year, heading toward our tenth year in business, we've done a lot of soul searching. Our three person executive team has been on a quest to become more proactive in our short-term and long-term planning; to become more strategic about the services we offer and who we offer them to. In that quest, we've also asked ourselves how we can also make the work we do more meaningful for our employees and ourselves?

It was actually a presentation by Jeffrey Hollander, President and CEO of Seventh Generation (also a client of ours) that got us thinking about real long-term planning - 100 years out. It really struck a chord with us. We began to ask ourselves what such a company would look like. We came up with a set of principles that we believe a lasting company would need to reach such a point, and have since been in the process of reverse engineering those principles to provide the guidance for today.

High on that list is the old Golden Rule: Do onto others as you would have them do onto you. It's always serves as guide in my personal life, and now it serves as the basis for our evolving Corporate Responsibility philosophy. Not only are we asking ourselves how we’re impacting our employees, the community and the world as a whole, but also what are we doing to make those elements stronger?

The result of this question has been a determination that we want to help provide our resources to those companies and organizations that are working to do good in the world. The green revolution is taking hold today as companies and their investors are looking for ways to minimize waste and increase efficiency. Others are now getting the backing to pursue sustainable energy solutions. It's clear that now is a time of change, and to any entrepreneur, change equals opportunity.

Responding to this opportunity we have set our current short-term mission to providing web-based communication, branding and marketing solutions for these sustainable green companies and organizations. These companies need to sell themselves. They need credibility, and if there is one thing we're great at, its making companies look good online.

Can we walk the walk? As we found in working with Seventh Generation, for green companies to be green, their entire chain of supply and service also needs to be green. As a website development firm our carbon footprint is minimal to begin with. We run computers that run on electricity. We heat our space with gas and cool it with electricity. We carry out a trash bag of recycling and one of waste every week.

We’re asking how we can reduce it more.

Through Native Energy (another green client of ours), we’re offsetting our current emissions. We’re also working with the emerging Carbon Zero Project who provides offsetting in the form of carbon sequestration - they actually offset the carbon by planting trees in Central America, versus the current popular model of buying clean energies. Further, we’re switching to all compact florescent lighting, eliminating phantom power drains by cutting power at the source through power strips on all equipment at the end of each day, and in general taking a waste not – want not approach to everything.

If you have more ideas on how we could further reduce our footprint or see opportunities with like-minded organizations and businesses that could use our services, please contact me – David Gibson at dgibson@propelled.com

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