As green business women, most of us are here to make money doing things we love-- and we help our planet at the same time.

I think this is a good thing.

I think many women in business are here to support the causes and concerns we care most about, and we are able to use our abilities, skills, shared knowledge, and pool of talent to:

1) Show up
2) Take responsibility
3) Offer better choices
4) Live our passion
5) Share our skills, products, and services with the green marketplace

Given the chance to purchase from a green provider as opposed to a "non-green" provider, most of our client base (the LOHAS customers) wants to purchase from the green provider. It's that simple.

However, in commercial endeavors, the cold and stark reality is that "69 percent of new employer
establishments born to new firms in 2000 survived at least two years, and 51 percent survived five or more years." (U. S. Small Business Administration, 2009)

Basically, the odds are 50-50 that your company will still be around five years from now.

That said, your company and my company deserve to feel strong and proud about driving the American economy. From the Small Biz Administration:

"Small firms:

• Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms.
• Employ just over half of all private sector employees.
• Pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll.
• Have generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years.
• Create more than half of the nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP).
• Made up 97.3 percent of all identified exporters and produced 30.2 percent of the known export value in FY 2007.

"

What can you do to make your business work SMARTER? The best thing is to create systems that work for you. This means something like an internal process or flow, a checklist that gets followed, a widget that you can manufacture and sell to many people for less, or a resource that you can offer over and over, without labor costs.

This means things like:
1) rent checks
2) royalty checks
3) intellectual property (patents)
4) a factory that "churns out" items with little involvement from you personally
5) there is also stock dividend income and interest income, but usually those require you to have some up-front capital invested

So. What can you do to work smarter in your business, instead of constantly trading your time for money?

Will you produce something that you create once but can sell over and over again?

Will you hire someone more qualified than you at a lower wage than the cost of the output?

Will you turn your great idea into a gadget, widget, e-book, or system?

Will you think big about your green business and move to servicing people on a state, national, or international scale?

Will you find and team up with a pool of people who are committed to your ideas, start making connections, and work together to support each other?

What I recommend is you always take time to think "about the business" instead of consistently thinking "in the business." Do the work, but also look at the big picture of how your work can be completed more efficiently, more effectively, and more prosperously.

Here's to your success!