Going Green Isn't Just about Doing Good

Going green isn't just about doing good. It's also smart business for a lot of companies on the Inc. 5000.

Ray Mullen, founder and CEO of Idaho-based Mullen Crane and Transport, says the trick to his business is providing cranes for use in the hot industry of the day. For a decade, that hot industry had been oil refinery construction. Then, quite suddenly, Big Oil's focus shifted unexpectedly—changing Mullen's business forever.

In early 2001, when they began appearing outside California, wind farms started to replace gas fields as his big money ticket. Mullen was commissioned by a then-obscure company called Enron to build his first wind farm. "I hadn't even heard of Enron," he says. "Of course, soon everyone would know about Enron."

An Enron scandal and seven years later, 45 percent of Mullen's business is from building oil companies' wind farms. Ranked No. 1334 on the Inc. 5000 this year, the company has contracts with British Petroleum, Chevron-Texaco, and Sunoco to erect fields of about 100 windmills to generate electricity without using non-renewable resources. These fields have been spurred on by an awareness concerning sustainability and earth preservation that has colored the business world "green."

The nation has been effectively "greenwashed" as melting glaciers and astronomical fuel prices legitimize concerns about changing climate and depleting resources. Eco-awareness is no longer exclusive to the LOHAS—lifestyles of health and sustainability—market. Business owners say this is a sign that sustainable operations are no longer a matter of good corporate citizenship; instead, they are a matter of good business strategy.

How Going Green Translates into Making Green

Mullen says Big Oil's alternative energy strategy means few oil refineries are being built while windmill construction, and his business, explodes: He is breaking sales records daily, with growth expectations around 50 percent this year.

Brian Potter, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)-certified CEO of Boston-based mechanical contracting company Thomas G. Gallagher, No. 4774 on the Inc. 5000 list, has also seen the green part of his business grow as LEED becomes a standard acronym in selling a building's value. LEED, the Green Building Rating System developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), provides a suite of standards for environmentally sustainable construction.

"Over the past 18 to 24 months LEED is getting a broader audience," Potter says. "When it first started, it was end-users or owners-operators only—the institutional folks. But now it has spread into the development market, where developers are seeing their buildings are more marketable if they're built to LEED standards."

But going green is becoming more than a matter of marketability, as state legislation forces businesses to look at how their operations impact the environment. Pennsylvania, last month, passed legislation that will require businesses to track their greenhouse gas emissions, and 25 states already have in effect renewable portfolio standards (RPS) that require electricity providers to obtain a percentage of their power from renewable energy sources, like wind or solar, by a given date. The Department of Energy, in May, released a "20% Wind Energy by 2030" report, essentially an RPS for the entire nation, outlining an aggressive plan to obtain 20 percent of the United States' electricity from wind power within 22 years.

Bonnie Ram, co-manager for the DOE report and program director at Columbia, Md.-based technical and management consulting company Energetics, Inc., says green business staying power is related to renewable energy's saving power—saving both the environment from detriment and business from energy costs.

"Now you don't just have the philosophical reason, you also have the cost-benefit side, especially with wind, which is one of the only commercially available renewable power sources," she says. "Wind is gangbusters right now, and I'm not so sure it's because people want to go green It's because they see they can make money at it."

Regardless of industry, eco-aware business practices mean more than recycling; the key is product or service lifecycle: "It's a completely different way of looking at how you produce something," she says. "If you're only looking at the end of the line, then you're missing 90 percent of where you're spending your money." A cradle-to-grave analysis of how a product or service is executed will reveal areas where material consumption can be reduced, which translates directly into cost savings.

"By looking at their lifecycle effects, (companies) are going to save money and contribute to the mitigation of climate change because they'll be reducing their carbon footprint," she says. "But that isn't just a philosophical approach, it's smart business strategy. And I think in the future there's going to be requirements, so they'd better get with the program."

Read more:

Building a Greener Business

Sign-up for our Small Business Success Newsletter

Email Address: