I came to Inn Serendipity expecting a bed and breakfast -- I discovered something more. Lisa and John, you created your own eco-zip code here. From the organic breakfast ingredients traveling 100 feet from the garden to my plate to electricity generated from the wind turbine to passionate discussions around last night's campfire, your efforts break the status quo, cookie-cutter business model. Everything integrates under a green umbrella of having both purpose and profit, spiked with creative, innovative zest for living.
-- Elizabeth, written in the Inn Serendipity Bed & Breakfast guest book

Our job title doesn't fit on a two-by-three-inch business card. In fact, our diversified business could be its own zip code: an award-winning bed and breakfast; a creative services consulting company; book authors and freelance writers; an electricity utility, harvesting power from the wind and sun; an organic farm producing vegetables, fruit and herbs; a micro biofuels processing facility, transforming waste fryer oil into biodiesel to use in the backup heating system in the greenhouse. We're experimenting with growing tropical plants in our strawbale greenhouse and care for our son without hiring someone to help. Some enterprises generate revenue; others save on expenses, all with a mindset of wanting to make this world a better place.

Our micro business super-sizes our quality of life, not our bank account. Sitting under the starry Wisconsin sky around a campfire shared with guests, we serve up a bowl of warm apple crisp while the wind turbine blades spin atop the tower in the field. Conversations among our guests flow between peak oil to preserving pea pods, covering everything in between. Our six-year-old son, Liam, breaks in with a refrain on his kid-sized accordion.

We're the CEOs -- Chief Environmental Officers -- of our business, responsible for the "success" of our operations and its environmental and social impacts. Mostly, we eat what we grow, use what energy we generate ourselves and create the meaningful work we desire. In other words, success is relative to our worldview and based on what we value and find meaning in. Rather than make money from working at a job, we put our limited funds to work for us to serve what we call our Earth Mission, the purpose for which we're here on Earth. We define our business qualitatively, not quantitatively.

Earned income in the form of wages is over-rated. Our limited funds generate passive and portfolio income; we invest in income-producing assets, not splurging on stuff we really don't need. We try to be conservers, not consumers. As a place-based operation, only we can offer exactly what we sell, our interpretation of the B & B experience. Rather than franchising in the financial sense, we've put most of our business plan and operations on the Internet, right down to the electric diagrams of our renewable energy systems in a Home Power magazine article -- and write books about what we've done so others can achieve their own version of the good life. Rather than trying to achieve more meaning through spiritual or personal development alone, we -- like millions of others -- are turning to for-profit and non-profit businesses to make a difference.

ECOpreneuring: Putting Purpose and the Planet before Profits buries the staid notion that "doing business" and "doing good" can't blend -- as if one must come at the expense of the other. This book stems from our experiences and those of hundreds of other green entrepreneurs we've met from coast to coast at energy fairs and green conferences or roasted marshmallows with around our campfire when they came our way as B & B guests. Others we have interviewed for magazine articles or partnered with on various consulting projects and events. Some ecopreneurs have taken junk bicycle parts and turned them into unique picture frames and bottle openers. Others have opened up eBay stores in the middle of nowhere Montana, running wine tastings on the side. Each has a story to tell; many do exactly that right on their package, website or blog. Each of us, in our own ways, sidestepped the stereotype ingrained by society that the coveted end goal of business remains never-ending growth and financial riches beyond our wildest dreams.

There are millions of small business owners and more on the way when about 77 million baby boomers start "retiring," half of them starting the dream business they've always wanted. One entrepreneur, Brian Kurth, started VocationVacations to offer others an opportunity to "turn their passions into their career." Forget the gold watch when you work in a company for more than 30 years. How about losing the watch? Now that's freedom.

No one seems to know exactly how many small business owners, entrepreneurs or free agents there are. While definitions run the gamut, the vast majority of small businesses are very small businesses. Dan Pink, author of Free Agent Nation, estimates free agents account for about 1 in every 4 workers. The US Small Business Administration (sba.gov) estimates that there are 4.5 million small businesses with 9 or fewer employees. Like us, you might be among the 15 million full-time or part-time small office/home office entrepreneurs, or SOHOs. Or maybe you're among the 75 percent of all US businesses with only one person at the helm, typically self-employed with no one else on the payroll. Amazingly, the US Census Bureau doesn't even bother including these so-called personal entrepreneurs in much of their statistical analysis because they comprise less than five percent of business tax receipts. For personal entrepreneurs, you don't even need a cloaking device; you're practically invisible.

Perhaps you picked up this book yearning for something more than a paycheck or growing weary of a paycheck without a purpose. You want your work to be more about leaving a legacy than making someone else rich or working for their dream, not yours. Bored, you want to do something you feel passionate about that also gives back to our world, makes it a better place. You want more time with your family, growing tired of living with the nagging threat of your job being outsourced or company being acquired (and you being pink-slipped or transferred somewhere away from friends or family).

Or perhaps you want more than commuting to the office in a hybrid car or donating time or money to a charity. Welcome to the emerging social sector, or "citizen sector," of our economy, embodied in the not-for-profit organization that, instead of rewarding shareholders with dividends, devotes resources to solve and serve social, ecological or community issues too often neglected, if not created, by big business, big government and free market globalization. Writes David Bornstein in How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, "Social entrepreneurs are demonstrating new approaches to many social ills and new models to create wealth, promote social well-being and restore the environment." The number of non-profit organizations has skyrocketed over the last three decades, with little likelihood of diminishing.

Today our family thrives on less than what one of us made 15 years ago at the ad agency. Our quality of life has grown exponentially, despite the fact that our financial income on paper declined. There are tricks to the trade that many millionaires -- and most of our millionaire politicians -- use that allow us to make a life without having to become wage slaves. We agree; it's almost impossible to be amongst the working or middle class and get ahead. We've discovered a different way to bend the ends that never seem to meet, instead forming a circle, where assets generate income and liabilities are minimized. Working with passion and for the Earth is the core of our daily existence. Our diversified enterprises blend and cross back and forth into for-profit and non-profit sectors of the economy, as well as serving or partnering with, at times and very selectively, governmental agencies and big business.

Creativity blooms as we freely hopscotch between a buffet of projects, from running the two guest rooms at Inn Serendipity, writing and photographing for a magazine article for Mother Earth News or Natural Home, authoring books (some ending up award-winning), consulting on marketing projects for various nonprofit organizations as subcontractors, tending our organic growing fields, speaking at conferences, and home-schooling our young son, Liam. Both our lifestyle and livelihood blend and reflect our values, like eliminating our contribution to global warming, eating healthy and local, forming community and renewing the Earth.

While hanging out our shingle and becoming a small business owner is nothing new, mindfully serving the planet through what and how our business operates is. Today's "ecopreneurs" recognize that profit, while a necessity in our world of mortgages and motors, is not enough. We keep a holistic outlook on the big green picture: How can we do well, make a difference and make a living? How can we take advantage of existing small business structures and incentives to benefit both our business and the planet? Running a small business provides freedom to independently control inputs and outputs, from the projects and clients we may work for to the 100 percent post-consumer-waste recycled paper we put in our printer.

We've suffered too long from Free Market Economy Dementia: a state of suspended belief in the free market despite the existence of an alternative reality: ecological destruction, concentration of financial wealth in fewer hands and diminished happiness, community life and family cohesiveness. Free market capitalism fails to optimize societal benefit when companies provide needed products or services at prices "consumers" are prepared to pay. The free market cannot grow infinitely, because we can't find substitutions for everything when there's nothing left on Earth. It's not the economy but the ecology that matters. For lots of reasons, as discussed in this book, no economy can be sustainable in the long term without a balanced, prosperous ecological system and at least some sense of social equity.

A swelling movement of multifaceted innovators -- seeking meaning over money, satisfaction over status and preserving the planet over growing profits -- have emerged because Free Market Economy Dementia has been treated by an awareness of the reality that if we don't start solving our planetary problems soon, we will face what Keynesian economic theory calls diminishing economic returns -- with declines in our quality of life, condition of our natural environment, and, perhaps, human civilization itself. In fact, the non-profit organization Redefining Progress offers compelling evidence that, for many, hard times have already arrived.

We engage in and facilitate a lot of thinking around our campfires and breakfast tables these days. Thinking is the hardest work of all -- related to cultivating your Earth Mission -- and ecopreneurs do a lot of it. The deeply emotional and personal questions that guests pepper us with -- and we openly encourage -- reveal that we have many kindred spirits on this journey:

Question: How much sustainable living experience did you have before you made the move from Chicago corporate advertising jobs to running a diversified business as entrepreneurs?
Answer: Not much. We grew up in mainstream, white-bread, suburban, commute-to-a-job lifestyle. We found that passion and enthusiasm go a long way in discovering self-education options.

Question: Did your family get it when you kissed off paychecks?

Answer: Never have and never will. But other kindred spirits provided support and inspiration along the way, leading us to ardently believe we could both do good and craft a livelihood full of meaning and enough money to meet financial responsibilities.

Question: Can you really live on income less than $20,000 a year (mostly passive rental income)? Do you have health insurance? Do you need to keep tight records of business miles, receipts and income?

Answer: A complex yes. Understanding and taking advantage of existing small business legal structures and tax incentives so that we do things correctly, smartly and cost-effectively helps define our personal version of "the good life." We live lean and green and, more importantly, tremendously satisfied. While we do work hard for spells at a time, we strive to also work wisely, generating revenues to support our dreams, our business and the environment.

Our first joint book, Rural Renaissance: Renewing the Quest for the Good Life, narrates our personal experiences of moving from urban lifestyles to an organic farm, offering essays about sustainable living, energy conservation, green design, natural building, renewable energy and organic growing. Our narratives balanced with practical resources solve the puzzle of how we managed to prosper without destroying the planet, generate revenues without destroying natural capital or exploiting people, and create a wonderful life filled with meaningful relationships, work and experiences.

Following Rural Renaissance, our cookbook Edible Earth: Savoring the Good Life with Vegetarian Recipes from Inn Serendipity explains how important local and sustainable food systems are to our collective national security and why eating lower on the food chain is better for your health, the environment and your budget. Edible Earth explains, through recipes, how we transformed our relationship with food and eating, acknowledging the central role it plays in our life. By eating through our pantry and refrigerator, by selectively purchasing only what we can use, we can avoid wasting over $600 worth of food thrown out each year, the national average. Waste is a concept that defines the industrial era of factories, mass production, free market economy and economies of scale. But waste equals pollution. The elimination of waste redefines our ecological sensibility for the 21st century and is one of the building blocks used by ecopreneurs.

Are You an Ecopreneur?

Is this the job ad you are considering -- or perhaps you already applied for this job and got it (like we did for a few years working for an advertising agency in Chicago):

Join our team and work in a cubicle with no fresh air or a window for 35 years on projects you could care less about for one or more bosses who care more about organizational growth and the bottom line than your growth and happiness (let alone earning enough to pay the increasing bills). Put off doing what you love until, at age 65, you can retire to eke out an existence on half your earned income, attempting to try to physically do some of the things you always wanted to do. By the way, when you retire, the pensions we promised may not be available. Ditto for the healthcare coverage.

Or do you share a personal backpack of dreams like our guests around the campfire do, yearning for a way to feel like the way you spend the majority of your awake hours, energy and talent add up to more than just a paycheck to pay the bills, putting faith in institutions that many not be solvent in 30 years. Stock options are worthless if the company that issued them files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Perhaps you share a vision like the following:

"My passion is to start a bookstore and coffeehouse, a welcoming local spot that builds community and connections."

"I'd love to work for myself, live in the mountains, do freelance writing and teach yoga."

"I want to do something that involves my family and helps teach my kids that there's more to life than money, like making a difference and leaving a legacy."

"I want to help people, be independent and make a difference in this world, I just don't know where to start, and I'm scared of leaving a company paycheck behind."

Everyone can follow their dreams. Everyone has them. No more specialized training is needed than what you've already experienced up to now. A change of perspective, a new approach to money and wealth and the necessary hard-thinking work of pruning your passions and forming your Earth Mission, your life purpose and business plan are the necessary ingredients.

Adapting to a World of Increased Variability and Instability

We live in an abundant yet fragile world, with regular waves of wounding natural events such as the Southeast Asian tsunami in 2004 or Hurricane Katrina's devastation of 2005. Hundred-year and 500-year events are happening within decades of each other. Every year, new record highs or lows are being set across the globe. Downpours swell to floods. Droughts lead to massive wildfires. Oceans are becoming scarce of fish, or filled with vast dead zones of pollution.

Despite our gains in productivity and innovation, the fuel mileage of the average car in the United States today is the same as Henry Ford's Model T, about 25 miles per gallon. We have so much food that we're getting sick and growing obese eating it. Competitive eating contests have emerged as a new sport. We're wired, but lonely. Some have great wealth, but are starved for time. This book will delve into this Paradox of Progress from the perspective that technology alone will not solve the ecological and social problems that now face humanity.

Human impacts on a global level have led us to arrive at the period of geological time on Earth called the Anthropocene, coined in 2000 by scientist Paul Crutzen, winner of the Nobel Prize. The Anthropocene reflects how pervasive our impacts have been on climate and ecosystems from both carbon dioxide emissions and other pollutants and poor land-use practices like deforestation or urban sprawl that's engulfing some of our best agricultural lands.

Added to ecological instability are additional human impacts, in what we present in chapter 2 as the Four Horsemen of Opportunity -- climate change, ecological collapse, peak oil and our indebted nation -- representing business problem-solving opportunities, not signs of the Apocalypse. The dangers that our technological innovations may present to us and the rest of Earth's ecosystems are symbolized and painfully felt by citizens and ecosystems around the world near the Bhopal chemical plant explosion (1984), Three Mile Island nuclear accident (1979), Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown in Russia (1986), Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska (1989) and the September 11 terrorist attacks (2001), just to name a few of the growing number of human-caused disasters or tragedies. Such events remind us of the frailty of both our lives and our world. ECOpreneuring promotes the idea of using small business as a powerful, positive tool for social and ecological change. By transforming our lives from one of reliance on others for paychecks and meaning to crafting our own livelihood and legacy by doing our part to better this world, empowerment erupts and change occurs. Think of "ecopreneur" as a subset of "entrepreneur," a business with a mission- driven mindset using creative tactics under the green umbrella to protect the planet.

While ECOpreneuring will touch on many of the key facets of operating a business, this is not another cookie-cutter business book. Running a business and doing good can and should go hand in hand. Traditional business concepts such as improving productivity, reducing costs, minimizing waste (or putting other's waste to use in your business), attracting and retaining empowered employees or subcontracting to other like-minded companies or free agents eager to help meet your needs, marketing your business and securing access to affordable capital can all be approached from the perspective of sustainability. Reflecting that innovation and creativity are all but linear processes, the very concept of sustainability is fluid, evolving with new perspectives and breakthroughs. The only constant is change. As a growing number of books, experts, governments and scientists warn, change will become more variable, intense and extreme. Ecopreneurs are at the forefront of this wave and can better adapt quickly to adversity and opportunity.

How This Book Is Organized

ECOpreneuring aims to change the way you perceive money, the role of business in solving some of today's most pressing problems, and the responsibility we must seize to reclaim the commons of commerce and cooperatively restore our planet in peril. ECOpreneuring starts off with general trends and perspectives and progressively becomes more detailed and practical, so that by the end of the book, you'll be able to write your own business plan and reimagine a more ecologically sound and socially responsible life, living your dream and leaving a legacy. Think of this book as a guide, a resource, a "greenprint" for generating your own livelihood that provides passion and satisfaction in leaving our world a better place. It's a guidebook for a GBA -- Green Business Administration degree.

Three main sections of the book will guide your journey:

• climate for change
  
• green business administration (GBA)
  
• web of relationships
  

Woven into the fiber of this book, in between the tips on business structure and mileage deductions, are profiles and short examples of small business ecopreneurs and social ecopreneurs working in the non-profit sector who prioritize purpose over profits and community over building market share. We drew these case studies as a cross-section sample from our discussions and interviews with hundreds of ecopreneurs across the country over the past decade. Sidebars provide the practical details and resources for you to create your dream business.

This book is not about making lots of money, though some ecopreneurs will achieve (some already have) significant financial returns because the ideas they implement and businesses they create find a ripe market today. Ecopreneuring helps you craft a livelihood to support your values, quality of life and your pursuit of happiness. Money is but a tool to those ends, not the end goal. And ecopreneurial businesses are the types of enterprises that will emerge as the culturally defining institutions in the 21st century: small, human scaled, ecologically and socially responsible, and local.

We envision a nation of ecopreneurs, much like Thomas Jefferson may have believed in a prosperous nation of yeoman farmers, harnessing the freedom of the free market and pioneering spirit but tempered by the local, social and ecological economies that have long made America great. We can change the world, one business at a time.

Advance Book Order Information Order your advance copy of ECOpreneuring today at a 22% discount off list price (a PDF file order form). The book will be shipped when available, most likely in May, 2008.

Foreword | Introduction | Table of Contents | Advance Praise About the Authors | Speaking | Media Room | ECOpreneuring Homepage

ECOpreneuring P.O. Box 811 Monroe WI 53566 E-mail: info@innserendipity.com www.ecopreneuring.biz