As we've been talking to friends, colleagues and potential investors over the last few weeks, a few people have been asking me "ok but what's this REALLY all about?" In response, I think seeing the mockup is always a great way to understand a business. So, here's an extract from our investors' Powerpoint, to give you some idea. Design will be an important element - the store is intended to look cool - as will in-store campaigns on eco-issues. Note the two big video screens in the front, which will be an important part of these campaigns, engaging with customers, to attract them into the store, and explaining products.
While most people's eyes are focused on Copenhagen, the world's businesspeople will quite possibly be paying more attention to this summit that's going on in Washington...
This underlines that what bgreen is aiming to do is just part of a global industry which is about to be very big indeed.
Debate on the whether is over, it's time to think about the how.
Less than a week to go to Copenhagen: to what might, when we look back in twenty or thirty years, turn out to have been the most important inflection point of our lifetimes between two possible futures: that of truly putting us on the road to resolving climate change, or not. In the UK, it is also quite likely to be the last important action of the Labour administration which started in 1997, and the country therefore has a short window of opportunity in which to act (frankly, it's incredibly unlikely, despite Cameron's protestations to the contrary, that a Tory administration would act in this area aggressively).
Our political systems, however, so adept in acting in the event of immediate threats such as military attack, seem hopelessly inadequate to act in the event of a slow-moving crisis. In the event of failure, even such measured and sensible people as Al Gore are advocating that "civil disobedience has its role to play" and, despite myself, he may just have a point.
I should also add that while the blog's been a bit quiet, we did our first investor pitch. The investor is a big name Business Angel who has founded one of the most popular websites in Spain, which is a market leader at the European level. He really liked the idea, and we're working on some changes he suggested to the business plan. We'll keep you updated...
Well I've just seen 36 clicks in 3 hours for our "last chance to see" of our video on The Good Entrepreneur, as I assume they'll take it down soon after the grand finale tonight. So thank you all for your support, it'll take us a bit longer given that we didn't win the competition, but we're still very much going and talking to investors. We're also scouring the national and international markets for any grants we might get (also helps us get equity investment as well, of course).
Anyway, for those of you who haven't seen our 1-minute Good Entrepreneur video (you must have been living on the moon for all my posts to have missed you), here's the link.
Yes, those spots on my face are real (thanks Mark for pointing that out).
Ok, I know, I know. A blog is a discipline that you have to do regularly. But it's been a mad month. Now, here's a thought from Trendwatching, an excellent site for predicting what's going to be big, and guess what they said about sustainability in their top 10 issues for 2010? That we've got to make it easy for people to be green. At the moment it's all too complicated and that's turning off consumers.
Now I don't want to make a big deal of it, but that's what we've been saying for the last two years. In fact, it's the basis of our business model. Anyway check out the article for yourself here.
Went last night to see The Age Of Stupid, actually a very well-made and powerful film. Biggest simultaneous screening of any film ever, etc. etc. Very impressive what they've done with practically no money, strong beliefs and good organisation - chapeau.
It's probably an important film, as was An Inconvenient Truth, and it will probably stir people to action to do something in advance of the Copenhagen summit - good. In fact, 90% of what it says is pretty much correct, it's just a shame it can't resist the temptation, Michael Moore-style, to sound off about whatever other perceived injustices (like the war in Iraq) are against Franny Armstrong's personal beliefs.
If one part particularly rang true for me, it was the comment by an environmental scientist that humans had never before had to deal with a slow-moving iceberg of a problem like climate change, we were evolutionarily equipped to deal with wild animals, warring tribes, etc. - immediate threats. We had no experience of dealing with something like this. The unspoken corrollary is that we tend to vacillate, panic and achieve very little, as we can show over the last 10 years or so.
Anyway, it certainly shows that the issue of Climate Change is by no means far from people's minds, indeed if anything it's resurging. Good - and not just for Barcelona Green.
As a coda to The Good Entrepreneur competition, we now have a paragraph on their site from TGE's Steve Sedgwick (he's one of CNBC's main presenters, I think) about our entry:
"Rob Marchant - Climate Change Retail
Well put together. Combining the need to educate and push the roll-out of proven green, energy saving products. I think the idea will be a great success but my concern surrounds the basic concept of a retail format. Having physical retail stores rather than perhaps a dedicated online offering as a standalone still requires a physical footfall and hence increased energy consumption from store set up to transport to and from the store."
Well that's quite complimentary, really. I'm delighted.
Responding to Steve's concern, the obvious answer is that we would LOVE to do an online-only shop, if ONLY people would buy from it. But there are already plenty, and they don't.
It's a shame, while I understand entirely that your carbon footprint is higher in retail, you have to deal with the way people are now, not the way you would like them to be. Educate first, move them to online purchase later. The key thing is to change their domestic habits, whatever it takes to get there.
Well, the Good Entrepreneur competition gained us over 1400 pitch video views (the most of all entries in the competition), pretty much constantly in the top 10 pitches, and a great deal of profile-raising, so we're delighted. Now the real business of getting funded starts in earnest - going well so far, we already have pitch meetings booked. Watch this space...
Am now back fully online, after all sorts of problems with computers when I came back from holiday. Thanks, HP, for selling me a computer which takes me 3 days to recover from a hard disk crash...
And how have things been going in the meantime? Well, it seems that the site has settled down a bit, entrants are no longer accusing each other of dastardly deeds and they are rightly focusing on the competition and discussing real issues rather than complaining about the rules, CNBC and each other's entries.
We're a respectable no.5 as I write and still the most viewed video on The Good Entrepreneur. But there are still 9 days to go for shortlisting and the competition is pretty hot, there is now an incredible number of entries (now stabilised at 194). No-one I'm sure expected that many (ok Luis you predicted a last-minute rush, I know, I know).
Anyway, think we have marketed the entry pretty well - apart from friends and family, it's all over LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
Preparations for finishing touches to business plans in motion as we head for the 21st August deadline...
Then I guess we'll know if we're in or out. But whatever, we're still in a good position for getting funding I reckon. By the way, boy what a bunch of strange people we've got posting their conspiracy theories on our entry right now. According to our research they seem to share common connections (like country of origin) even though they think we don't know this. Weird.
Wow, what an incredible number of entries came in at the last minute yesterday (entries are now closed). A staggering 137 entries, assuming there are no more waiting to be put up on the site. We expected a lot less because things were so slow at first (see below posts, we reckoned 50!) But hey, we're ready for the challenge! We are also still doing ok on the popularity board, mostly but not always somewhere in the top 3, which is great. A bunch of entries seem to have just stopped posting, especially those which have been up for a while, which is strange - I would have expected everyone to be active.
Anyway the shortlist will now be announced 21 August, so there are 3 more weeks left on the discussion boards before we can stop looking at them every day to see what's been posted.
Well, we shan't waste this extra time - to work!
Oh yes, and somebody accused me yesterday in a post on our entry of wanting to have a monopoly of the market for these goods and "If you really want to see where your idea is heading, go to North Korea or watch/read George Orwell’s 1984". Incredible but true. Actually I was delighted she seemed to think we would be so successful...
Yup, we got there this morning. And we are no.2 in the charts. That's fine, the key thing now is to prepare for the next few weeks to make sure our plans are watertight.
I'm in London this week, and have just seen some energy-efficiency products being sold in a large, out-of-town hardware store (B&Q), which got my attention (see dodgy picture taken on mobile, left).
However, they're being sold just like Home Depot do in the States, i.e. not all in one place and just a fraction of what the store stocks. How do they expect people to engage with these products when they're sold like that? There's still no-one doing what we're suggesting, even in the UK which is ahead of Spain on these things.
Good.
Oh yes, and the competition dates have slipped a bit, now not announcing finalists till September. I guess this gives us more time to polish everything...
...have to say I'm a bit disappointed with some of the candidates getting their friends and supporters to do critical posts on the other entries to try and make them look bad. It's happened to us twice now, once from Ireland and once from Germany. Don't tell me these posts were just coincidence - they weren't, in each case the posters live a few miles from another entrant.
In each case I've just given polite answers. I've also noticed it happening on other entries (one poster from Holland posting on a German entry if I'm not mistaken).
I'm not going to play that game and post back on their entries, it doesn't make anyone look good.
...I liked it better when there were just 10 entrepreneurs going for 10 places on the shortlist. But we now have 750+ views of the pitch video, which can't be bad. 9 days left for people to get in their entries.
Ok I know on the competition site we probably can't do political stuff, but on my own blog I can do what I like! So for anyone in the UK, here's a link to a campaign for getting a climate change deal in Copenhagen.
Please sign! Yes, yes it's for the Labour Party, but after all they do run the country. For the moment.
Just to note that as of today, 18 July, we've been no.1 on The Good Entrepreneur's Most Popular Entries for almost all of the last 9 days, with a couple of short breaks - not bad. We're also the most viewed video. However there are some other very good entries, and there are still 13 days till the entry phase closes.
Besides, it doesn't really mean anything with regard to the competition, so we really need to be focusing on the idea itself (which we are). We are now starting to prepare the ground for any grillings we might get on the business idea at any point over the next few weeks...Luis and I will have lunch on Tuesday to brainstorm this.
The competition is definitely hotting up, there are now 31 entries. So we could be talking about a total of 50.
Well I know we shouldn't read too much into these things - the popularity ratings on The Good Entrepreneur are not obligatory reading for the judges, after all, and it's hardly a random sample of people - but this is obviously pleasing. We went to no. 1 later on the first day of launch, then spent a little time as no. 2 and no. 3, but we have now been no. 1 since Friday and have pulled slightly ahead of the other entries (average rating 4 vs. 3.5 for the entries in 2nd and 3rd positions).
There are now 15 entries, and I'd guess at this rate we will be talking about a maximum of 30 entries, although there could be a last-minute surge. I'm delighted, although it would be quite ambitious to expect that we will be able to keep this up for the next 3 weeks as new entries come in.
Also nice was the fact that the comments have been almost overwhelmingly positive (not that we're against a little healthy debate). But there's still a long, long way to go, we need to impress the judges, not just the visitors to the website, encouraging though it might be to see these figures.
What a day - I now have told everyone I know and have ever known in my whole life. The video is up on the site (although slightly mangled in the aspect ratio, which I'm trying to get CNBC to fix).
By the way, there's a reason for not posting it here (or in YouTube for that matter) - if people don't view it on The Good Entrepreneur site, then it doesn't increase the "number of views" (and they may not remember to rate it either).
Here, by the way, is a river from the valley to the south of Marrakech, in the foothills of the amazing Atlas mountains. If global warming is not curtailed, this river probably won't be here in my lifetime, is my guess, or at least certainly not in the lifetime of my little girl. And that would be a damn shame.
Ok, it's almost there. Have had a short break during the last month to Marrakech with the family and now it's down to work for this competition. The video will be ready this week - possibly even tonight - and then it'll be time to ensure as many people as possible see it and rate it (hopefully highly!) It's been through a couple of iterations and have got comments from as many people as possible. If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well...
So far there are just 10 other entries. This is good!
Back in Barcelona, today Luis and I will meet so he can give me feedback on the script of the pitch video. Luis, by the way, is my friend, colleague from IESE Business School and general partner-in-crime. Looking forward to getting this completed and posted so we can move on to the next stage of the competition.
Hey! I'm Rob Marchant, an entrepreneur from the UK, living in Barcelona. This website is to track progress on our proposed business, The Barcelona Green Company (or Barcelona Green, or simply bGreen) through the final stages of business plan and looking for investment. The trigger for closing what's been a fairly slow, one-year process just now is our entry into The Good Entrepreneur, a competition initiated by CNBC and Allianz.
Last week I saw the presentation from CNBC down at IESE Business School, Barcelona. This week I'm trying to find time during a trip to London to get the whole thing off the ground, the registration has just gone in. Excited about the competition, but realise it's a marathon, not a sprint. We need to get everything right.
bgreen is a project for a chain of retail stores selling products which fight climate change. It's currently in funding phase and in late 2009 won an honourable mention in The Good Entrepreneur, a Europe-wide competition run by TV network CNBC. This is our blog, full of random thoughts about the company, ethical business and climate change.
