Home Businesses – Green and Growing

These days, for just about every product on the market, there’s an eco-friendly version, from dry-cleaning to T-shirts to baby food. This green side of the consumer market offers not only more options for buying, but also more options for entrepreneurship. And many home-business owners in this year’s contest have tapped that growing market.

But not just anyone can launch and successfully run a green home business. The winners behind the 2009 Greenest home businesses prove that it takes a true passion for the environment and your business.

“You have to have tons of passion and the willingness to take the leap of faith into owning a business,” says Mike Turcotte, founder of Turn Cycle Solutions, this year’s winner of the Greenest category in our StartupNation Home-Based 100. His passion for the environment stems back to his childhood as a his mother started a recycling program in the city he lives in. But the real culture shock was when he moved back from California to New Hampshire for college, to see few people were making strides for a greener lifestyle.

So he started his eco-auditing and consulting firm this year to help home- and business owners run the greenest households and companies possible, ultimately helping the environment and their bottom lines.

Brian Denton, founder of Project Earth H2O, a Top Ten Greenest, started his green home business four years ago after realizing how much money he was spending on and waste he was creating from bottled water. A little research turned up some startling facts: Every day, more than 70 million single-use water bottles are sold in the U.S., and 9 out of 10 of those end up in the trash. At that moment, “I found something [to] get passionate about,” says Denton. His home business in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, sells reusable, stainless-steel bottles.

TOUGH CROWD

As one of our greenest home businesses, we obviously think Project Earth’s bottles are great, but how do you sell an $18 metal bottle to a plastic bottle-obsessed audience? “Overcoming ‘learned behavior’ is always a challenge,” Denton admits, “but we feel we’ve been really successful reaching consumers. Every time someone buys a reusable bottle, we’ve overcome a great obstacle.”

Addressing habitual consumer behavior is something Turcotte deals with, too. “We show our clientele innovative ways to live that don’t change a huge part of their lives,” he explains. “And if it makes financial sense, the [individual] is more apt to do it.” His home business’ motto is based on this very premise: “Go Green, Save Green.”

Nellie Sowash and her reusable diaper company, Nell’s Natural Baby, another Top Ten Greenest in the Home-Based 100, have a similar challenge in changing consumers’ views. She’s taking the old-fashioned concept of cloth diapers and pushing it on a consumer base that’s grown accustomed to the convenience of plastic Pampers. Why in the world would they want to go back?

“People want to save money, live healthier and be greener,” Sowash explains. “Cloth diapering covers each of those factors and more. And modern cloth diapering is far from the old-fashioned, folding and pins, poopy mess most people think of.” Just last year, she was one of those new parents, wanting to save money and reduce household waste. And because each baby contributes nearly 6,000 diapers to landfills, she says, “I realized there was a real market for these products.” Brighton, Michigan-based Nell’s Natural Baby sells a variety of cloth diapers and other related accessories.

FOR THE GREATER GOOD

Although the founders of The Green Year, Lynn Colwell and her daughter Corey Colwell-Lipson, don’t have as tough markets as Denton and Sowash, their idea is equally difficult to “sell.” That’s mainly because it isn’t actually tangible and it’s constantly evolving. “We’re not a normal company in that ‘Here’s our product and here’s our business,’” Colwell explains. “[We] are the brand, and we’re building it as a way to make positive change.”

The mother-daughter team simply wanted healthy, eco-conscious options for celebrating Halloween. They started by encouraging their community, including a local Whole Foods, to use natural candies and treats. Just as most ideas do in the green sector, it caught on. Their idea turned into a community of followers, an LLC and a book, Celebrate Green. The pair now travels the country, speaking on how to celebrate “Green Halloween” and other annual holidays with the environment in mind.

It’s obvious that Renton, Washington-based The Green Year is truly built from passion when Colwell admits the 1.5-year-old home business is not profitable yet. “I’m OK with saying that,” she says. “We have a passion to make a difference that feels right for us.”

And that passion is what it’s all about with our winners of the Greenest home businesses. They’ve taken a passion from deep inside, and balanced it between their desire to help the environment and their desire to run a successful business. “There’s a hunger out there to do the kind of thing we’re doing,” Colwell says. “Marry your passion and business to create something that is valuable to both.”