The lure of Real Goods became so strong that I eventually accepted an offer to become the company’s Chief Operating Office. It was a decision fraught with uncertainty, as it meant relocating the Morris family from West Brookfield, Vermont to Ukiah, California. It meant tearing the boys from their friends, their teams, their rock ‘n roll band, and their familiar to start anew and afresh.
It meant a new job, a new home, and new relationships. On the professional level there were opportunities and risks. Real Goods had conducted two successful sales of its stock to the public via a Direct Public Offering. I found myself sitting on stock options that were potentially very valuable. The company was suddenly cash-rich, and in a position to take advantage of a range of business opportunities. On the other hand, the company’s recent growth which was fueled by a renewed public interest in environmental products, was proving both fragile and fickle. A major competitor, Vermont company Seventh Generation was involved in a major retrenchment due to slowing demand.
There were other risks, as well. Although John Schaeffer and I got along very well professionally, Real Goods was a critical juncture where it required a level of professional management rather than being pulled behind the energy of a diehard entrepreneur. Schaeffer, like many entrepreneurs before him and since, was struggling to see the difference between a company that belonged to its stakeholders, and the company that he founded and had guided to its current heights.
There were some personal agendas at play, as well. My business success to date, had been largely based on my ability to help other entrepreneurs realize success. Now, I was seeking a platform where I could see my own ideas and practices enacted. I thought, naively perhaps, that John would see that and step back to let it happen. I grossly underestimated his willingness or ability to do that. Real Goods was always his baby and his sandbox.
On a personal level there was a secondary agenda on my part, as well. Laura and I, in my perception, had a great partnership. As a family unit, housemates, and financial partners we were doing just fine. On a personal level, we were on automatic pilot, and not in a good way.
I continued to embrace a lifestyle path that was set when I was in my 12th floor dorm room in my senior year at Yale, when my future course was guided by The Whole Earth Catalog. I embraced renewable energy and conservation, treating my food as medicine, and working to keep myself in good physical shape by regular exercise.
I dedicated myself both to family and to my professional career. I rarely missed a Little League game or theatrical performance. Laura and I rarely disagreed on issues of parenting or finance. And we communicated well, so long as the issue was family -related. On the personal level, however, feelings were being swept under the rug, and it happened so gradually I’m not sure either of us were entirely conscious of it.
My hope was that the move to California— new home, new environment, new social circle— would give Laura and I a fresh start as a couple. That did not happen, however, and the same patterns only became more entrenched.
I had several business successes during my consulting period. One was with Chelsea Green, a small book publishing company that was founded overlooking the town green in Chelsea, Vermont by Ian and Margo Baldwin.
In a business dominated by Manhattan-based behemoths, Chelsea Green had scored some remarkable successes, most notably with a new edition of Jean Giono’s classic “The Man Who Planted Trees.” I was attending a convention at the Javitz Center in NYC when I checked my office phone and found a desperate-sounding message from Margo. “We need help … now!”
The Baldwins and I did not know each other well, but Vermont is a small place, and so they knew me both from the business success of Vermont Castings and my reputation as a published writer. I took a crash course in the publishing business and learned a.) It’s a business where all the cards are stacked against the little company, and b.) The Baldwins published good books, they just had difficulty living under the same roof, a common affliction in husband/wife entrepreneurial business ventures.
I didn’t have to advise them to separate the business and personal lives. Margo beat me to the punch by announcing summarily that she “never, ever” wanted anything to do with Chelsea Green again. This left me with only piece of advice, to pick one category of book publishing and to devote 100% of the company’s resources to the category. I helped Ian identify the company’s current categories, which included nature, humor, photography. “Choose one, ” I said.
Ian was resistant. He didn’t want to be pinned down. I sympathized, but held firm to the recommendation. “You only get one category, put it all on double-zero.” Ian squirmed and tried to wriggle free. I’m sure there were discussions with Margo to which I wasn’t privileged. In the end, Ian chose the category of “sustainable living.” It was not an establishrd bookstore category, but it fulfilled the assignment admirably. Sustainable Living was now the single arrow in the Chelsea Green quiver.
I tried hard not to influence this choice, but I highly approved. There were plenty of other specialty publishers doing good jobs with photography, nature, gardening and traditional categories. Ian (and Margo, I’m sure) picked the category that they could define and dominate. Over the next of decade, that’s what happened.
With both Chelsea Green and Real Goods I felt like I was living my personal values in a way that I envisioned while browsing through my “Whole Earth Catalogue” back in 1970. My classmates had long since put their tie-dyed tee shirts in the bureau drawer and become doctors, lawyers, and business professions. I, alone, had maintained my back-to-the-land values and persisted in my quest to educate the masses to the need to adopt different practices of living.
I was half a hero and half an idiot. This essay, written in 2007 and subsequently revised several times, describes the situation:
“The Caldron”
Al Gore accepts the Nobel Prize for raising consciousness about global warming. The New Oxford English Dictionary declares “locavore” its Word of the Year. Community groups nationwide meet to discuss strategies for coping with Peak Oil. Wal-Mart announces plans to expand their efforts to “green” their operation.
Paradigm shifts? Sea changes? Overnight sensations? Not really.
New ideas go through stages on the path to acceptance. First, they are ignored, then ridiculed, then resisted, then finally accepted as obvious. The gestation period for innovative ideas can be many decades. We’re now officially thirty years into the idea of Real Goods, but the roots go back even further. British scientist James Lovelock, upon seeing the first photos from outer space of the blue/green orb known as earth, said “It’s alive.” For many years neither he, nor anyone else knew quite what he meant by that statement, but gradually the notion coalesced into the Gaia Theory by which we recognize, even if we can’t fully articulate it, the interconnectedness of everything on the planet.
That same image of earth from space found its way onto the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and a freewheeling bunch of intellectual crazies in Berkeley, California in the late 1960s. Their goal was to provide “access to tools” to a generation of kids raised in the splendid isolation of suburban America.
One of those kids was John Schaeffer. He was a Berkeley student who smoked dope, howled about the Vietnam War, even found time for some studying (in his case anthropology). He celebrated the first Earth Day, survived the draft lottery, hitchhiked around Mexico, worked odd jobs, and escaped whenever he could to the redwoods to the north.
Berkeley was a caldron of new ideas at the time, and John Schaeffer was one of the folks stirring it actively with a paddle. Across the country was a similar caldron. In Maine the Nearings were teaching people how to live “The Good Life.” On Cape Cod the New Alchemists were developing the prototypes of a “living machine,” and some brash scientists at MIT, Dana and Dennis Meadows and Jorgen Randers, were using their access to the new tool called the computer to create models that predicted that we would deplete certain natural resources such as oil in a finite time.
After his arms grew a bit tired from stirring the frothing caldron, John Schaeffer headed north to join the Rainbow Commune in Mendocino County where he unlearned his suburban past. Food comes from the ground, not the store. Shelter comes to those who build it. The entitlements taken for granted growing up in LA now had to be planted, earned, or harvested. Always entrepreneurial, Schaeffer began contemplating a business that would provide the materials essential to an independent life. As he drove the hills of Mendocino in a Volkswagen Bug that had a redwood stump for a front seat, he came up with the name of the products he would sell … the “real goods.”
Meanwhile in the solar biz … well, there was no solar biz. In addition to the photo of earth, the NASA space program had developed a variety of products that were finding commercial niches. Who can forget Tang, the instant breakfast drink? Other outputs were freeze-dried foods and solar panels. Even a dozen years after the moon landing there was no commercial availability of panels, because … who would want them? Electricity comes from the flip of a switch, not the sun.
While you can take the boy out of the suburbs, but you can’t completely take the suburbs out of the boy. As much as Schaeffer embraced commune life, he did not subscribe to the ethic that modern amenities had to be sacrificed. He found a source for appliances that could be operated with direct, as opposed to alternating, current. He could connect these to the battery from his VW Bug, and … voila … instant Saturday Night Live!
It was a decidedly inelegant solution, but it worked. Not only was in inconvenient, but it relied on the consumption of oil, part of the environmental problem, not the solution.
History has not recorded the first person who married a solar panel to a storage battery, but that’s the person who rightly deserves the Nobel Prize. Now electricity could be created sustainably, without noise, fossil fuel, or connection to the power grid. And the implications were astounding.
The first Real Goods store opened in Willits, California in 1978. Several months later the company sold its first solar system. There were no stores or industry associations or installers. The only customers were people who had no other option.
The business grew, but haltingly. By 1982 there were 3 stores, but by 1985 there were none. In 1986 Schaeffer reformulated Real Goods as a mail order business, operating out of his garage. Solar energy, the idea, was firmly ensconced in its “ridicule” stage, the prevailing image that a single lightbulb dangling from an exposed wire. Hadn’t one of Ronald Reagan’s first official acts been to take down the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had installed?
The 20th anniversary of Earth Day provided a boost, as did–ironically–the First Gulf War when the Real Goods catalog depicted a split image of troops entering the bay of a C3 cargo transport and a picture of a beautiful solar home. But the biggest factor fueling Real Goods’s growth, now synonymous with that of the fledgling solar industry, was its own ability to shout the solar gospel. In 1990 the company declared war on global warming with its “Billion Pound Goal” to eliminate a billion pounds of CO2 production. The next year the company declared a National Off-the-Grid Day, a cheeky promotion that evolved into the National Solar Tour, an annual event that today demonstrates the elegance of green building to tens of thousands each October under the auspices of the American Solar Energy Society.
Now growth was more sustained. Accolades came in the 1990s–the Inc. Top 100, the SBA “Person of the Year,” and the Rodale Award three years in a row. The company made several successful direct public offerings of its stock and used the funds to build a “place in the sun,” the Solar Living Center. At last there was a place where people could see the ideas of Real Goods integrated–green building materials, ecological landscaping, renewable energy. Lovelock would say “It’s alive.”
That a comfortable, non-polluting lifestyle … let’s call it “the good life” … is possible is no longer in question. What comes next is that this lifestyle will become inevitable. People will eventually get the message. The future will see will be real world solutions to life’s inconvenient truths.
Had John Schaeffer followed the proven path he would have gone to law school, earned a pile of money, run for public office, and perhaps have been John Kerry’s running mate in the 2004 election.
And the Nobel Prize goes to … Al Gore? How about Lovelock or the Nearings, or Stewart Brand, or the Meadowses, or Baldwin or Schaeffer.
John Schaeffer
Or, for that matter, Morris. If I can just remember to “Accept With the Left!”
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A friend asked me when I realized the move to California had been a mistake. “Around Buffalo,” I answered.
Perhaps it was a foregone conclusion that my tenure at Real Goods would be brief, perhaps it was my perception, perhaps it was clarity of vision on my part. It didn’t take long for me to conclude that the Real Goods world that I entered at Chief Operating Officer was vastly different from the one I had experienced in the previous three years as visiting guru. Some of it was personal: the same people who had welcomed me warmly, now acted as if I was a threat to the beloved founding father. Some were openly hostile and defiant. But there was a business disconnect, as well.
One incident summarizes the situation: The company was displaying at an event called the EcoExpo in Los Angeles. Real Goods, riding the coattails of its successful public offering was the belle of the ball. We had a modest contingent working at the booth, a display that included a six-foot tall wind generator, placed front and center.
As the new kid on the block, I was in learning mode. I watched as technical expert Doug Pratt, nicknamed “Doctor Doug,” was surrounded by a cluster of people peppering him with questions and requesting technical information. It was very reminiscent of early days with Vermont Castings when the demand for information wood heat devices exploded. A member of the Real Goods Board of Directors, Michael Potts, was also among the company contingent at the show. Michael lived off the grid and was known for his technical savvy. Marveling at the non-stop crowd surrounding Dr. Doug I asked Michael “About what percentage of these onlookers will eventually convert to actual sales?” I’ll never forget Michael’s response:
“Rounded to the nearest whole number, I would say zero.” The problem, he explained, was while the concept of small-scale wind energy was appealing to a homeowner, the technical requirements were prohibitive. A lot of Doctor Doug’s time was spent educating homeowners to that reality.
Not long after that, a project was footballed onto my desk (meaning that no one else at Real Goods wanted to deal with it.) It was a very professional manuscript for a book called “Wind Power for Home and Business” by Paul Gipe. I asked Doctor Doug if such a book would be helpful and received a double thumbs-up as an answer. I contacted Ian Baldwin at Chelsea Green and was told that the subject was so narrow in scope that the book couldn’t be produced cost-effectively.
“What if Real Goods purchased a large quantity in advance?” I asked … Bingo! Selling information became a major source of revenue, both for Real Goods and Chelsea Green, eventually extending beyond renewable energy products to lifestyle subjects such as organic gardening and natural building. Information turned out to be a better vehicle to sell the dream of an energy-efficient, organic, and sustainable lifestyle than actual merchandise.
This was, in my opinion, the tragic flaw of Real Goods. There was no roster of products to support a retail business. Catalog sales were increasingly dependent of solar novelties such as solar mosquito guards, Poopets (dried manure representations of political figures), and laundry balls that were proven to not work. Solar panels, on the other end of the spectrum, were extremely low margin and required local servicing. An experiment in local retailing, with prototypes in Eugene, Oregon; Amherst, Wisconsin; and Hopland, California failed, and yet the company was fueled by visions of retail success in malls across America, in the mode of Banana Republic, The Gap, and Patagonia.
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Meanwhile, back in Vermont, Ian Baldwin had wearied of the publishing business and was devoting his creative energies to other pursuits, such as oil painting. He confided in me that he was recruiting for a new publisher to replace him. I threw my hat into the ring.
Before long the Morris family was moving back to Vermont. The “year abroad” was over.