Getting Green to Go Green

UNO's Nebraska Business Development Center helps companies cash in by greening out, but making money is no guarantee Green. It seems, is the busiest buzzword around these days. But can businesses really get some green, or save some green, by going green? The short answer: Yes.

Whether through increased efficiency, incentives offered by the government or power companies, or increased business driven by green marketing, it can pay to go green.

But getting there isn’t as simple as rolling out a slogan or slapping a logo onto a website, say business owners, academics and power experts. Getting green to go green often requires a large upfront investment in capital, thorough and sometimes exhaustive research, and commitment.

“We actually got more involved in the design than we wanted to,” says Signs & Shapes International co-owner Scott Bowen of his company’s implementation of energy-saving features.

For two years now, UNO’s Nebraska Business Development Center has been putting special emphasis on helping businesses go green by assisting them with energy and sustainability initiatives. A center of the College of Business Administration, NBDC can help clients obtain green-related grants, financing, employee training and more.

NBDC executives say they’re seeing a definite rise in green business demands and an increase in hiring for environmental/energy jobs. There are enough sustainability managers in Omaha, they say, that they hope to gather them for a conference at UNO this fall.

Blowing up Business
Among NBDC clients is Signs & Shapes International, an Omaha company that makes inflatable mascots for college and pro teams (like UNO’s inflatable Durango and UNL’s Lil’ Red). NBDC has helped the company, which boasts customers in 63 countries, adopt sophisticated software packages, train its personnel and provide employment for adults with autism.

The company had leased plant and office space for 18 years. In 2009 it completed construction of its own building, doing so with a major commitment to energy efficiency. Features include skylights, revolutionary “sandwich” wall panels for enhanced insulation, and a geothermal well that draws heat from the Earth’s core.

The results have been incredible. Getting there, however, was not stress-free, simple or quick.

Signs & Shapes didn’t go green just to get a gold-star rating or insignificant tax break. It wanted its changes to have a meaningful, bottom-line impact on its energy use — and expenses.

That proved difficult. Bowen says most information and infrastructure available is geared toward getting those ratings and breaks, rather than toward what his company was trying to achieve. He grew frustrated by a lack of available expertise and chafed at government restrictions. It wasn’t his plan to do so, but Owen found himself becoming an expert on this stuff.

The company dug into research, consulting with experts from across the country. Owen and others interviewed people at 40 to 50 different green buildings to talk about what they were doing and how it was working. Sometimes, they’d talk to the janitors to get the real story.

Their findings?

“The majority of people who are doing geothermal are doing a poor job and don’t understand the technology they’re working with,” Bowen says. They’d gotten the incentives and tax breaks — but sometimes the janitor said it didn’t really work. Signs & Shapes set out to find what did work. Trouble was, what the company was trying to do —with geothermal and skylighting — didn’t always jive with government code. Eventually, Signs & Shapes got the City of Omaha to grant the necessary exemptions.

That paved the way to real results. Payback on the energy-efficient investments was to have been six to seven years. That’s been accelerated. “Our utility bills have so far been a third of what (had been) estimated,” Bowen says.

Cleaning Up
Another NBDC client, ServiceMaster PBM of Lincoln, also has seen mixed results in its green initiatives.

Jon and Angela Paolini bought ServiceMaster in 2009 after Jon spent 15 years as its general manager. NBDC helped them secure the purchasing loan.

One of the Paolinis’ goals was to continue ServiceMaster’s commitment to green practices. Today the full-service janitorial and commercial cleaning business is the only company in Nebraska certified by Green Seal under its GS-42 certification. Getting that distinction, Angela Paolini says, was “a rigorous process.”

Understandably so. ServiceMaster’s green cleaning system is crucial for buildings that are LEED-certified (such as UNO’s Mammel Hall) or on the road toward LEED certification. LEED — Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design — is the U.S. Green Building Council’s certification program and the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high-performance green buildings.

The Green Seal-certified cleaning service is a great marketing tool, Paolini says, and offered to customers for the same price as its standard service. Granted, ServiceMaster has not yet seen a marked increase in business as a result, but with LEED certification and the green movement becoming more important, a bump in business is expected. ServiceMaster has seen, however, an improvement in its bottom line. Its green service uses less water and uses a more efficient microfiber broom, speeding the cleaning process.

“In (cleaning) a bigger facility, we have seen a cost reduction,” Paolini says.

Marketing the Move
ServiceMaster’s approach fits the model that most likely will appeal to companies, says UNO marketing Professor Phani Tej Adidam. If something makes sound business sense, if it can be delivered at a comparable cost, without too much extra effort, companies will be happy to go green. Otherwise, slapping a “green” label on something isn’t enough to attract customers.

“That might sway 1 or 2 percent of the population,” Adidam says.

Adidam also is director of CBA’s International Initiatives and is on the faculty at the Helsinki School of Economics in Finland. There, he and one of his students once decided to study “green marketing,” picking sales of hybrid vehicles as a test subject. Yet even in the Nordic region, quasi-world headquarters of the green movement, they could not find enough people who had bought hybrid cars to do a proper study.

“After that,” Adidam says, “I’ve been taking (green marketing) with a big pinch of salt.”

He’s also unsure as to the sustainability of the green market. The government is doing what it can to drive the market in that + = direction — and that’s one reason Adidam is leery. If going green is so great, why are incentives needed?

He admits such thinking goes against the grain, but adds, “That’s the advantage of being an academic.”

Others sound more optimistic of where things are headed.

“This is where new jobs will come from,” says Rick Yoder, CBA’s sustainability coordinator and director of NBDC’s Pollution Prevention Regional Information Center. “This is where the economy will thrive.”

For an economy bleeding so much red, green like that sounds promising.

See more of what NBDC offers and how it can help your company at http://nbdc.unomaha.edu/energy