After all, we, like many ecopreneurs we’ve interviewed or met, don’t live to work. Instead, we find our livelihood and the businesses we navigate deeply satisfying as we make the world a better place through the green businesses — for profit and non-profit alike — that we own or direct.

The key to our approach to ecopreneurship is looking to nature for inspiration. Our green business is both diversified in enterprises as well as the products and services we offer, filling economic niches in much the same way as plants, animals and fungi fill ecological niches that create sustainable, interdependent and healthy ecological systems. For example, there are thousands of bed & breakfasts in the U.S., but only a few that specialize in serving vegetarian (or vegan) organic breakfasts with ingredients mostly harvested a hundred feet from their back door, like we do. That the Inn is completely powered by the wind and sun and welcomes children as guests, serves as additional niche experiences we offer our guests who we generally refer to in our ECOpreneuring book as “conserving customers,” not consumers — but more on this in a future blog.

In any given year, our green business receives mini-paychecks from about 50 businesses including publishers and non-profit organizations, plus thousands of dollars from individuals who stay at Inn Serendipity, order products from our website or buy books at our speaking events. What we work on changes or adapts to new opportunities, interests, passions and our evolving Earth Mission.

Our Diversified Income-producing Portfolio of Work can be summarized as follows:

(a) Inn Serendipity Bed & Breakfast (29%): We manage all facets of this two
bedroom bed and breakfast, sharing cleaning, breakfast preparations and hosting guests.

(b) Consulting (18%): Because of our varied backgrounds and educational experiences, we’ve consulted on projects including database management, public relations, advertising and marketing endeavors.

(c) Freelance writing and photography (14%): Among our passions is the need
to express in words or photographs how we interpret the world. John’s photography and writing clients are varied and international, with a focus on tourism, environmental issues and sustainable development.

(d) Special projects (12%): Sometimes one-time opportunities offer the ability to generate our electricity or work on specially funded projects. This is the most serendipitous aspect of our income.

(e) Inn Serendipity Woods cabin rental (9%): We manage cabin rental contracts, website marketing and guest relations, while also maintaining the cabin and property. Much of our work on this 30-acre property is devoted to sustainable forestry (silviculture) and reforestation and organic agriculture (we rent a few acres to an Amish neighbor to grow corn organically, tilling, of course, with a horse team). Because we have no quarterly sales goals we must meet (or profits-focused shareholders), we can invest in the future abundance of the land and practice stewardship.

(f) Workshop facilitation and speaking (8%): Conferences and fairs allow us
to share our perspectives while learning about the many inspiring ways others
have embarked on similar journeys. From the renewable energy and sustainable living fairs to the Green Festival, our presentations or workshops hopefully jumpstart others into action and reinvigorate our commitment.

(g) Cottage retail store and book sales (8%): We sell our books, photography prints and handmade mugs to B & B guests.

(h) Authoring books (3%): Much more involved than writing for magazines or newspapers, authoring books provides an avenue to address in a comprehensive and artistic way those issues closest to our hearts. Income varies greatly from nothing in one year to several thousand dollars in another.

(i) Farm-direct agricultural products (1%): We sell super-energy-efficient LED lights for greenhouses, surplus flowers, vegetables, fruits and herbs grown on the farm, and eventually, unique, niche agricultural crops grown in the strawbale greenhouse.

We search for synergistic business activities that cross over from one project to the next, or help lead to new opportunities. While hired to complete a business and marketing plan for one non-profit organization, for example, we prepared a sample three-page feature article for a major statewide magazine and submitted it on spec (non-assigned) as a part of the public relations plan. It was accepted, helping position the organization as a conservation leader in the state. We synergistically cultivated both our PR skills and writing abilities to produce a better result for the client and possibly lead to future freelance writing projects for a statewide magazine. As knowledge workers with varied skill sets, we seek a natural balance of interrelated projects that challenge us while also helping us achieve our overarching Earth Mission.

A green business needs some money to make money. For ecopreneurs, money is a tool to serve their Earth Mission. Many have discovered how little they need, balanced by how creative they are in their approach to financing start-up. In today’s world of outsourcing and subcontracting, you really don’t need to own the factory any more. Profits can be plowed back into the business to grow and enhance the enterprise or be reduced by expenses associated with off setting carbon emissions, restoring the land or compensating vendors or employees beyond the “free market price” established for their services or products.

How have you created a diversified portfolio of work for your green business? More importantly, how have you used the profits of your business to reinvest in making the world — or your community — a better place? Within the next week, please consider sharing your own ecopreneur profile on our ECOpreneuring book website for others to be inspired by — or perhaps help you secure needed funds for your enterprise.

Back then, my connection to my work ended at the end of my 3.5 inch business card. No purpose, no passion, no desire to do anything other than fill a job description someone else gave me and pay my mounting credit card bills.

Flash forward to today, as I say hello from my 5.5 acre organic Wisconsin farmstead and bed & breakfast Inn Serendipity. Passion for the diversified entrepreneurial “hats” I now wear long ago replaced my former grindstone approach to a job. I truly love what I do, from writing to innkeeping to consulting on various green projects, and that passion keeps me fueled into the night, long after my am caffeine buzz wears thin.

For me, finding purpose in my work paralleled finding a sense of place. Living and working where I can see stars and silos, I found my creativity started to bloom. As I planted zucchini and found 100 post-consumer waste paper options, I realized we can create businesses that enhance — rather than exploit — the earth. As I left that staid job description that fit on a business card and entered the world of self-employment, I discovered I actually possessed an entrepreneurial soul — despite my former cookie-cutter corporate career path. And as I juggle a daily schedule of writing deadlines, B&B guests, farm duties, homeschooling our young son and an array of other fulfilling endeavors, I realized you can have it all and do good for the planet — if you call your own shots.

As my husband, John Ivanko, and I write about in our book Rural Renaissance and our forthcoming book ECOpreneuring: Putting Purpose and the Planet Before Profits, find the joy in the journey of continually learning, innovating, evolving and creating. Ideas bloom, doors open mentors appear if you follow your heart. I look forward to sharing my ecopreneuring experiences with you on this Ecopreneurist site. Where are you on your journey right now? Still needing to escape on a Friday night — or working with purpose?

Rather than spend most of my life in a carpeted cubicle, earning-and-spending and, in my case, pimping for the culture of consumption at a large advertising agency in Chicago, my wife, Lisa Kivirist, and I exited corporate America. We resettled on a 5.5 acre small farm in southwestern Wisconsin, endeavoring to learn how to grow our own food, generate our own electricity and in various other ways reclaim the ability to meet our own needs without depending on Corporate America to provide all that we need, for a price. That goes for providing a job as well. The business school I attended as an undergrad primed me for a “successful career” earning income from a Corporation, paying taxes to the government and owing much to the banks that would one day own my home, car and credit worthiness.

By exiting the fast track overflowing with Lattes and legions of consumables (remember, you have the look the part of an Advertising Executive), I’ve settled into my own skin, weeding our bountiful gardens, harvesting more solar and wind energy than Lisa and I can use on our farm, and raising our son with the Earth in mind. Our business, Inn Serendipity Bed & Breakfast, when paired with our other enterprises like writing, speaking and “green marketing consulting”, provides a lifestyle and workstyle that’s sustaining to us and the ecological community in which we’re inexorably linked. Our journey is reflected in the pages of our book, Rural Renaissance: Renewing the Quest for the Good Life. What we now do about our nourishment is captured in Edible Earth. And how we live well, on less and without the need to grow bigger and bigger, is found in the pages of Ecopreneuring: Putting Purpose and the Planet Before Profits. Our business and our life is devoted not to growth, but making things better: for our community, the environment and future for our son (and the Seventh Generation). These issues guide our daily experience and practical resources I’m eager to share through my contributions to Ecopreneurist (they won’t be taught at most business schools or found in the pages of the Wall Street Journal).

In a nutshell, ecopreneuring, as Lisa and I have come to define it, will change the way you perceive money, the role of business in solving some of today’s most pressing problems and the responsibility we must seize to reclaim the commons of commerce and cooperatively — not competitively — restore our planet in peril. For many ecopreneurs, it’s a return to family scaled, local, nature-based enterprises where quality of life is the barometer of “success”, not size of bank account or year-after-year growth in net income. We have a ROE (return on environment) not just a ROI (return on investment).

I welcome your ideas, your enthusiasm and your commitment to making the world a better place, be it through organizations you start or work for, profit-based enterprises you launch, or in a lifestyle you’ve created that helps sustain all the inhabitants of the planet.

If you already operate an ecopreneurial business in either the for-profit or non-profit sector and would like to share your story on the ecopreneuring.biz website we’re developing with inspiring and practical success stories, I’d welcome hearing from you. This website created around our Ecopreneuring book will provide support and resources for finding purpose, living well, and restoring the Earth through your business. While the politicians are talking about making the world a better place, millions of ecopreneurs already are. Are you one?