Sustainable enterprise start-up

Hello, new member here and thanks so much for all the effort in putting up this great site. It looks like there are many useful resources and tools here and I'm still trying to figure out where everything is and how it works, but so far it appears to be the equivalent of the Harvard Business School graduate course for entrepreneurs. It also appears that much of the effort here is understandably focused on the internet, but I'm hoping that there are advisors here that are inclined to assist in the expansion of other sustainable businesses as well.

My background is construction for ten years and I was a construction manager for a high-end production home builder in the Bay Area for another six years. I have been researching social enterprise and green building for about the last ten years and I'm currently attempting to start up an affordable green housing development company to produce low-energy, resource-efficient homes in Northern California. I'm located about half-way between the Bay Area, where there are numerous practitioners and demand for green building still exceeds the supply, and the Truckee-Tahoe area, where green building has been common, and unbelievably expensive, for more than twenty years. However, to date, there are very few applications of these advanced and innovative building technologies in the intermediate areas, but there soon will be. I am directly in the path of the expansion of these advanced and sustainable building technologies. What I'm hoping to accomplish is to create a viable business entity to facilitate the the transfer of these technologies to end users in these intermediate areas and into the rest of Northern California.

Green building is a model of sustainability that offers substantial economic, environmental, and social value. Considering only the enormous energy and environmental costs of conventional housing, green building, by utilizing systems engineering and life-cycle analysis, represents a major step in our conversion to more sustainable economy. There are numerous well-respected public and private organizations and universities that have researched and developed advanced building technologies to the point where they can now be incorporated into conventional homes at little or no additional cost and can actually often be paid for through reductions in energy costs. Before our greenhouse gas, global warming, foreign oil issues are behind us, every home in America will have to be built or rebuilt to these standards.

I live in a state that represents a large percentage of the GNP yet, according to the affordability index compliled by the California Association of Realtors and based on the median home price, 75% of the working households do not have sufficient income to qualify for a home loan. That represents a staggeringly large number of families. Can I reach all of them? Certainly not. As the basis for all my social enterprise efforts, I am certain that by striving to make these technologies as affordable as possible, I can reach some of them and hopefully also enhance the ability of every American, individual or family, to have access to these technologies, thereby adding value to the social bottom line.

The biggest, and so far insurmountable, challenge I have encountered is obtaining sufficient advice on business and organizational planning as to how to accomplish all this basically starting from zero and how to quickly and efficiently create a viable entity for implementing my plan. Also, as Andrew states in his "Some Good Advice" interview, "Speed is critical when starting a business because every day without revenue is a day closer to failure". I'm certain there is a market because it already exists in pockets all over the country. Just not here, not yet, but it is emminent.

My long term goal is to be a non-profit affordable green housing provider. My immediate objective is to start moving my customers into their new resource-efficient homes and I'm only one ad away from having at least one customer, so I would like to jump-start it to get it going and build the rest as I go. My business model is not at all complicated and although new construction is typically highly leveraged, the terms are relatively short, and profitbility is easily calculated, it looks like the next challenge will be access seed funding for business development, feasiblity, acquistion and pre-development, and operating expenses and then to credit for land and construction loans. I'm hoping that someone here has done something like this before and might be willing to shed some light on the process.

In the meantime, it also appears that one of the first orders of business is the creation of a pitch. At this point, I don't even know what a pitch is, much less how to make one, so I'm hoping someone can offer suggestions on how to turn this overview above into an effective pitch.

Thanks again for all the effort, and any assistance is appreciated.

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Dan
Social Entreprenuer
Advisor Garage Member