Billing clients and consumers electronically saves time, money, and the environment. So why are you still sending paper bills?

[From E-Billing: the Most Overlooked Green Practice?]

My understanding is that billable (service for a fee) work happens when someone tells you to do something, or asks you advice about something, that benefits them (the person asking). Partnership happens when work is decided on together, perhaps performed in collaboration, and benefits both parties. It’s easy to cross the line, even in a short conversation. I’ve had experiences where I was instructing a client on a very technical procedure, which is obviously billable, and then an idea for a new project comes along. And I hate to waste the opportunity to explore while I have them on the phone. To derail creative thoughts seems counterproductive, especially the “creative” industry. How far off topic do you get before you stop the clock?

Sometimes people say “partnership” when they really mean something more like a trade (usually asking about getting work for free). Quid pro quo – I do something for you, and you do something for me. Trades are great, but there is a limited amount of trades one can do without affecting cash-flow, because there is a limited amount of time available. If I spend my available hours working on work that’s a trade, my cash flow will suffer. So I generally only am able to do one trade at a time, for my most urgent needs. The best trades seem to be equal work, measured hourly. For example trading web design work for copywriting, which are similarly priced skills that are complimentary. The hardest to quantify trades are for what I usually hear as “exposure”, perhaps a link on a website somewhere (frequently a website without any significantly measured audience) Other trades that have value are based on exchanges of equal value: if a hosting customer brings in five new accounts, I give them a free account, because based on our margins, they just brought in enough new customers to value giving away a free account. Problems happen when partners have mis-matched valuations of what each is bringing to the table. An example would be a site with low traffic and pagerank giving a link to a site with more traffic and pagerank. Usually, a link is just worth a link back, especially if it is from an interior page. A home page link, or a link on every page of your site is a different might be worth a little more.

There are certain things that I do just for “whuffie” – usually I have prior relationship, like a personal friendship, where I know that the time spent will be reciprocated, or that because of the friendship, I don’t care if it gets reciprocated or not. It’s hard to scale that to “internet friends”, unless the task times involved are very small.

What lines have you drawn in your consulting business? How do you guide your conversations with clients? What makes a social exchange successful? While we’d all love (and strive) to work in a world filled with whuffie (link to tara), we also all have bills to pay and food to put on the table. I’d love to hear about significant and sustained successes with partnering strategy, bartering, and keeping up a good amount of billable hours.

As Ivan Storck, owner of SustainableMarketing.com, put it, there is a triple bottom line: people, planet, and profit, and the people part of the equation must come first. “Sustainability means more than being eco-friendly,” he said. “Sustainability also means you’re in it for the long haul.”

Congrats also to Jerry Savage, and his new company Research-Sight – lots of great quotes from him in there. Thanks to Sandra O’Loughlin for interviewing us.

Technorati Tags: green marketing, brandweek, sustainablemarketing

Technorati Tags: ecotuesday

Ivan Storck heartily approves. The founder of Sustainable Marketing thinks ads are a waste of paper. “This is the second round of green marketing,” Storck says, citing the focus in the early 1990s on recycling and reducing waste as the first wave. “Now the new focus is energy, and what’s different this time is the pervasiveness of the internet and the possibility of getting real facts about a company. It’s so much easier to find stuff and do preliminary research.” Which means the consumer can have a relationship with a company that isn’t based on capitalism, but driven by values that are revealed with open, honest dialogue

Thanks, Amanda! I encourage everyone to read the article. What do you think advertising’s role in a sustainable marketing strategy is? Ignore it? Or use it for branding?

Technorati Tags: green marketing, sustainablemarketing

1. Ordered a full set of trash, recycling, and compost bins from our trash provider.
2. Continuing our Renewable Energy Certificate program to offset our carbon emissions. See Sustainable Wesbsites Wind Power page for more details. We are going to extend this to the whole office in addition to Sustainable Websites.
3. Our partner Ethotec has prototyped a green business basics class.
4. Created a page on the Coworking Wiki to encourage other coworking spaces to be green. Feel free to add to it!
5. When we moved into CitizenSpace Tara and Chris chose sustainable bamboo flooring and low-energy compact fluorescent light-bulbs (CFLs)
6. Checked with our landlord on whether we had a low-flow toilet (we did!)
7. Applied to the San Francisco Green Business Program.

And what’s next:

1. Figuring out a strategy to deal with phantom power – all the various chargers (“do you have wall warts?!”) for our gadgets sucking up power even when they’re not charging.
2. Encouraging other technology businesses to go green and devising innovative programs to accomplish this.

Let me know in the comments what you’ve done in your office to make it greener, I would love to find out!

Technorati Tags: coworking, officegreening, green business, greenoffice, citizenspace