The chances of an entrepreneurial start-up succeeding today are slight.  Passion, energy, and limited dollars usually bump into the reality of competition, lack of differentiation, and underestimating the financial requirements needed to be successful.  Yet enough start-up's are successful to keep the flame alive for those with the entrepreneurial desire to go for broke.
The opportunity for established companies is to think and act more like a start-up, or at least bring new start-up thinking to that which they already excel.  When was the last time you got into a room with several of your key leaders and brainstormed opportunities for your division or your company? Focus on what you are best at and then ask the start-up questions.  The "what if" questions.

The same week Apple eclipsed Microsoft as the largest tech company (measured by market capitalization), Microsoft rolled out some new whiz bang features on its Microsoft Hohm energy efficiency beta site (www.microsoft-hohm.com).
The site now assigns a Hohm score "to most houses in the U.S., so people can compare their home to their neighbors' or scout one they're thinking of buying," according to a brief story in last week's Los Angeles Times (http://bit.ly/aGy9Rt). Hohm also links to users's utility accounts, though only in parts of Washington, California and the Midwest.

The days of easy growth are over.  The days of easy anything are over.  Humpty Dumpty can not be put back together!
On the one hand you know this, and on the other hand you don’t really want to get into all that this means.  Advertising is not dead, influencing is the new advertising.  Advertising was the linear approach to solving your problem; you had your message and you knew that if you could get it out there enough times and with consistency, you could get results.  But no longer can we push messages out effectively and efficiently.  Today we need to be engaging customers where they are able to receive our messages – our influence.

I wrote in an earlier post about our efforts to button up our leaky 118-year-old Vermont farmhouse (http://bit.ly/dqor0x).
The work is done and contractor Chuck Reiss has returned to conduct a second blower door test, a test-out, he called it. The first test indicated that our home was pretty leaky, about ten times as leaky as a newly-constructed house, said Chuck.

The U.S. House is beginning to debate President Obama's $6 billion Homestar program that will incentivize Americans to replace windows, add insulation and caulk, and replace old appliances, according to this AP brief (http://bit.ly/bwrDAj).
Vermont's lone representative, Peter Welch, one of the bill's early sponsors, is out on the trail building grassroots support for the bill, according to this story from the CBS affiliate in Burlington, VT (http://bit.ly/caawrv). Welch's sound bite is about the potential jobs the so-called Cash for Caulkers bill will generate.

"The beginning of energy efficiency."
That's how Johnson Controls headlines a full-page ad in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, in which it celebrates "125 years of making buildings more energy-efficient for our customers."

A cool half a billion dollars is what electric utilities across New England plan to spend in the coming years upgrading the region's electric grid to a so-called smart grid, according to this AP post at boston.com (http://bit.ly/dcDgIo ).
The best quote in the story comes from Michael Sachse at OPower in Arlington, Va. “Just giving people a lot of data is not going to be particularly useful because the truth is that while no one wants to waste electricity and no one wants to pay higher electric and gas bills, people have busy lives and don’t have time to analyze electric bills,’’ he said.

Business success is all about relationship success.  The age-old argument continues.  Are business results the outcome of rational or emotional decisions?  It does not take a doctoral degree in economics to know this answer, just watch kids by the candy counter and even we can figure this out.  Or check your emotional and rational self against these categories:
- Banking

Our economy is in great shift.  We have very quickly gone from a consumer-based economic growth era to a government-funded economic leveling era.  How crazy is that? And as businesses caught in the middle of this great economic swirl, what should our plans be?
Clearly the future lies with innovation.  Innovation in every industry we have.  And innovation that is all about ideas needs to be based in the best understanding of where we think we are heading.  A marriage of intuition and knowledge.

Is there something energy efficiency marketers can learn from tobacco counter marketers?
I've been mulling this question and I think there is. Our company has been employing social marketing techniques to discourage young people from smoking and to encourage smokers to quit for the better part of a decade. With considerable success.