Lessons From a CE-YO
I had the opportunity to have breakfast this morning with the CE-YO (title of CEO for a yogurt company) of Stonyfield Farm, Gary Hirshberg. Gary is the author of the recent best-seller Stirring it Up: How to Make Money and Save the World and Chief Executive Officer for the multi-million dollar yogurt and organic food manufacturer. Although, I do not share common political beliefs with Gary, he had a lot of great wisdom to share that applies to everyone regardless of your political or religious views.
Here is an environmental activist putting his money where his values are. I asked him a question about the premise of my upcoming book, The Faith-Based Millionaire: “Gary, you and I share a common opinion that people vote every day with the choices they make: where they work, where they spend their money and where they donate money. Yet, most people do not hold these same principles when they invest. Do you agree investing with values is important and what is your take?”
His response was that he personally only invests in companies that share his values. He has a process in place to make sure his investment dollars support companies in alignment with his beliefs. He also echoed my opinion that if investors, like you and me want to change this world, more and more change will happen in corporate board rooms. I couldn’t agree more with Gary. When you invest every day, you vote for something. Do you know what you are voting for? Do your investments reflect your morals, beliefs, and values?
Other lessons reflected: In order to succeed in business and your financial life, you need drive, motivation, and to stick to your principles. He also recommended being more involved politically and always asking, “why not?” Rather than accepting things as they are, Gary believes we should find ways to overcome all of our obstacles. He believes that we limit our success when we stop after facing difficulties. He is a big fan of social responsible investments and saving the environment. All of the choices he makes each day, he tries to vote with his belief system in mind.
Though I disagree with a lot of Gary’s personal political beliefs, his lessons and philosophies ring true with me. The Faith-Based Millionaire is about how you can change the world, change your finances, and bring glory to God. If we all took the same approach with moral responsible investing as Gary takes with social responsible investing, what a difference we could make!
1 Comment
You need to pick a better example than Gary Hirshberg and Stonyfield Farm to make your points. They’re both major league hypocrites if you examine the whole yogurt production and distribution picture.
Read up on live-culture yogurt to learn how the last couple ounces of a batch of either homemade or store-bought can be used to easily make the next new batch in your own kitchen — ad infinitum.
If Hirshberg lived up to the same eco-friendly standard he expects the whole rest of the world to live up to, Stonyfield Farm would only be selling 2-oz. sizes of their yogurt to be used by the consumer as a starter culture for homemade yogurt, using your own locally-supplied milk, along with instructions on how to make your own yogurt.
Now think about that. How eco-friendly is shipping a 32 oz. container of Stonyfield yogurt say 350-400 miles to a location where you ALREADY have milk locally available, instead of a 2-oz. container? You not only have the transportation energy costs associated with that extra 30 oz. of ready-made yogurt, bear in mind you also have refrigeration costs all along the way in that 350-400 mile trek.
It’s not like dairy cows only live within a 50-mile radius of a Stonyfield yogurt plant. But that’s the non-eco-friendly model Hirshberg and Stonyfield implicitly promote. And to make a profit, Hirshberg and Stonyfield HAVE to beat down the price of their starting milk as much as possible, to the detriment of the dairy farmers that supply the milk. And just like any other for-profit business, Hirshberg and Stonyfield want to make, sell, and distribute as much yogurt as possible to all far-flung compass points.
The biggest eco-friendly change needed in any food production and distribution scenario is to produce and ship only that which is NEEDED from point A to point B. If that hasn’t dawned on you yet, well, you heard it here first.