For over two decades, Shel Horowitz, The Transformpreneur, has shown businesses how to thrive by doing the right thing. Shel shows how to go green and market green affordably and effectively–AND how to thrive by transforming society: turning hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance.
Shel is an international speaker and TEDx Talker, transformational business consultant, and the multiple-award-winning, bestselling author of ten books, most recently Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (his second Guerrilla book with Guerrilla Marketing founder Jay Conrad Levinson). Visit him at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com
Thank you for joining us here at The Corporate Escapists. Please introduce yourself to our reader. They love to know about you, your passion, and how you came to find and follow your passion.
I’m a lifelong marketer AND activist. In 1999-2000, I led a movement that saved a mountain that used everything I knew about both. After we won, I thought about what I could bring from activism back to the business world. And I felt a calling to do this work.
Bob Proctor once quoted ‘To believe in the things you can see and touch is no belief at all. But to believe in the unseen is both a triumph and a blessing”. How important is it to you to have the belief within one’s self?
Mindset is essential. I’m totally convinced that we won Save the Mountain while the “experts” were moaning “this project is terrible but there’s nothing we can do” because we believed we would win. But even I thought it would take 5 years–and we did it in just over a year.
Tell us what the word “Trust” means to you?
Things will work out. You do your best, you may or may not achieve the results you want, but even if you don’t, good things will come out of the experience.
What has been one of the biggest business ideas you have had and how did you have the trust and hope within yourself to implement it?
That *I* could help change the way the business world thinks, even as a solopreneur working out of an old farmhouse. This is still a journey, but I believe I’m helping to change the culture a bit at a time. Ideas I advocated 20 years ago have become mainstream.
Running your own business can be scary. Success requires moments of trust and hope to push through to the next level. Tell us one of the moments you have had to push through to take your business to the next level?
Several times, I moved into a new focus, and later the original area became obsolete. I started as a typing service. After computerizing in 1984, resume writing became my main focus. Then, marketing copy for small businesses. Finally, the transformational work (still evolving). Each was a risk.
What is your favourite quote about trust and hope?
“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.” (Muhammad Ali)
What advice would you give to anyone wanting to start their own business?
Start small Avoid running up big expenses for a fancy office or staffing you don’t need yet. But don’t try to do everything yourself. Outsource to freelancers the tasks you don’t do well. Above all, follow your heart and make a difference in the world.
