On Friday, I spoke with Dave Lavinsky, co-founder and President of Growthink. If you don’t know Dave, he is a major “guru” when it comes to raising capital.

(Dave and his company Growthink have helped over 2,000 clients raise over $1 Billion over the past decade, and he has also taught over 250,000 other entrepreneurs how to raise funding).

So, anyway…in August, Dave is organizing a virtual Capital Raising Bootcamp to help entrepreneurs like you raise money to grow your businesses. And, as part of this program, he put together a really cool report called “The 12 Insider Secrets to Raising Capital.”

Here’s the neat part – I asked Dave, and he said I could share this report with my readers for FREE. So here it is:  12 Insider Secrets to Raising Capital – Download Now.

Being an “insider”, I already got my copy and was really impressed at how much good, useful info Dave was willing to give away for free.  So, I figured you’d like a chance to see it too.

I think you know how this stuff works.  The free report is great – really valuable stuff you can use right away.  If you get the report, Dave will also send you a few more emails inviting you to take the capital raising course, too. My recommendation is, if you want to raise capital for your company, take the course.

Yours Truly,
Mark

P.S. A month ago, I took another course from Growthink called “Dave’s Ultimate System for Raising Venture Capital”.  That was an amazing course.  Look, there are a lot of capital raising “gurus” out there, and I always take the time and expense to test drive anything that might give you a leg up when it comes to capitalizing your company.  I am 100% satisfied with the course I took.  Dave told me this new “Bootcamp” course includes all of information I got and a whole lot more, especially in the area of super-early stage capital, which is the hardest to raise. So, definitely check out the free report. I got a lot of great new ideas just from the free report.  Here’s the link again – 12 Insider Secrets to Raising Capital – Download Now

P.P.S.  I know business capital raising can be really challenging.  I’ve been studying it and doing it myself for nearly a decade now.  So, I just wanted to throw in another special offer – if you end up taking Dave’s course, I’ll also give you 3 half-hour personal capital coaching sessions myself, on top of all the good info and personal attention you’ll get from Dave.  Just let me know.

In April 2009, I submitted my formal comment to the process which you can read about in my last post on this subject. I figured that would be the end of it, but a few days ago, I got a call from a researcher from the Bureau of Labor Statistics who was charged with the task of following up and researching the merits of my proposal.  We had a nice talk, she asked me if I could provide additional names that would be able back up my wishes with some hard facts on the scope and scale of the green economy.

I suggested she contact Dr. Robert Costanza, founder of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont, Storm Cunningham, author of The Restoration Economy, and Lester Brown, author of Eco-Economy.  I also pointed her to the EcoSector Bookstore for more experts & authors on the green economy.

If you have the names of any other experts in the macro and practical size and scope of the green economy, please post them here and I’ll make sure the researcher gets the info you provide.

Mark

• What are the social benefits?
• What are the environmental benefits?
• What is the financial Return on Investment (ROI)?

The first Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) funds avoided companies that made cigarettes, supplied the military, or did business in South Africa. This new approach was called “negative screening”. Later on, SRI investment companies started including environmental screens.

The next logical step beyond negative screens is to assess the proactive “good” being accomplished by the company in which one is investing. What result is the company being responsible for?

Some green investors suggest selecting companies that will “make a lot of money” against the backdrop of climate change or other major issues. While this is a first step, something more is needed. I propose a new approach called the “Ecology Benefit Index”.

What makes an investment ecological? The starting point is to focus on ecosystems. To me, the biosphere as a holistic living unit, comprised of subsystems like air, water, land, and energy. For each subsystem, I want to know:

1. What are the indicators of health for that system?
2. What are the specific challenges facing that system?
3. And what are the clear and measurable goals that we would want to attain to assure the health of that system?

Science has advanced to the point where today, an investment can be rated according to such an “Ecology Benefit Index”. This index can then be used to help investors select companies that can most directly and effectively help protect, restore, and enhance the vitality of people and the biosphere.

Originally posted at GreenOptions.com

Discovering hotbeds of the Eco Sector is always exiting to me. One of my goals in building the EcoSector Portal is to help convey the depth of this shift in the economy to the general public, especially people who are discovering it for the first time. It’s been a great month for the Portal, with one new Profile added every other day, including one each from China and India. The number of green economic leaders collected by SGM’s founder Mary Anne Bowie gives a strong indication of just how huge the global Eco Sector is already.

A new YouTube window on the home page lets you watch a “playlist” of videos produced by Portal members.

I’d love to hear your comments on the changes…

I founded Ecostructure Financial in 2001 to organize the “Ecosystems Economic Sector” around a set of clear measurable goals. This November, I changed the name to EcoSector, and posted the new, improved Portal at www.EcoSector.com.

A key part of EcoSector’s strategy is to match profitable green business solutions to specific eco-challenges and then finance the roll-out of these solutions at a meaningful rate and scale.

Over the past two years, I’ve had conversations with staff and associates of Al Gore’s London-based investment company, Generation Investment, urging them to move in this direction. They didn’t do this for the simple reason that Generation only deals with publicly traded stocks and therefore couldn’t pursue “private equity” which is where the real action is in the green investment world today.

So, while “great minds think alike”, I was not surprised to learn from this month’s Fortune Magazine that Gore has become a Partner at Kleiner Perkins, the famous Silicon Valley private equity investment company, and is now promoting the very concept I have been working on and talking about since 2001.

In the article, Gore says:

“We want to give a big shout out…to every inventor and entrepreneur and idea generator at the micro, macro, systems-integration and global-thinker level to create with this alliance a clearinghouse for the identification and selection of the most promising ideas on the planet for quickly solving this climate crisis.”

Replace the word “climate crisis” with “ecological challenges” and you have the same basic language and concept I have been sharing with you and anyone else who will listen for all these years.

Now that Gore is carrying this ball, he will need a team to implement the project, and I want EcoSector to be involved. There’s a good reason for K-P to work with EcoSector: While Kleiner Perkins seems to see Gore’s initiative as mere research & development for their investment “pipeline”, my own business experience over these past several years suggests that the very act of organizing green entrepreneurs as Gore describes can be a profitable business in itself, and at the same time provide important benefits to all environmental leaders, eco-entrepreneurs, and green investors.

When KP started moving in the green direction many months ago, EcoSector began a steady effort to get a meeting for me with John Doerr, the KP partner leading their green initiative, or anyone else there who might have a decision making role, to make this point. No meetings or phone calls resulted from this effort. Herein lies the very purpose for which I founded EcoSector…

In 25 years in the environmental field, I’ve seen again and again that when a business leader “crosses over” to the green message, when a green entrepreneur becomes a recognized success, or even when a politician goes green, there is an instant “overwhelm” of desire and contacts from people who want to make a difference seeking guidance, assistance, and funding. I remember back in the 1990’s, a wealthy fellow said he wanted to start giving money to forest protection non-profit groups. A huge number of people wrote proposals and called his phone. Within a month, he had disconnected his phone and disappeared.

I feel a lot of empathy for someone like that – imagine you wake up one day and decide you want to do some good, and the first thing you discover is that even if you give away all the money you collected by being a success in the “old” non-ecological economy, it’s just a drop in the bucket? For newcomers, there can be a lot of fear and sadness. I say from my own experience that all this fear and sadness – including the new wave of negative emotions coming from the rising awareness of climate change – can disappear when the situation is viewed in the proper light. I’m not saying the problems themselves can just disappear like that, but the sadness and fear, if not resolved into productive action will only exacerbate our environmental challenges – you might say our environmental problems themselves result from unresolved fear that is latent in human beings.

“Overwhelm” in the environmental field not productive. It gives people the impression that there is not enough quality green advice and money to satisfy the desires of people wanting to participate in this field. In my opinion, these shortages do not exist, they are just thoughts. Instead, the overwhelm problem is the result of poor organization and service infrastructure underneath the newly-hatched leaders. EcoSector’s business purpose is to provide that organization and service infrastructure to eco-sector leaders, newly-hatched or oldly-hatched, so that they can effectively play their leadership roles.

So, it was no surprise to me when I renewed my effort to make contact with KP last week that the front desk there is saying they are “overwhelmed”. And is important to me that this overwhelm get resolved promptly. I don’t want John Doerr to pull back from his newly found green feelings like the well-intentioned fellow I mentioned above.

How do you break through the mental fog called “overwhelm” to pitch the solution to “overwhelm”? One approach is to simply increase the volume until we show up on KP’s radar. Here’s where you can help — If what I’ve said makes sense to you, please contact the Kleiner Perkins “greentech” team and give them your recommendation for EcoSector.

Mark Winstein
Founder

The portal is a new take on my previous Ecopreneur Portal that launched in spring 2006. That portal was too complicated and expensive for users, and I closed it spring 2007.  EcoSector is simple and free, and exposes the Ecosystems Sector to a much broader audience.