He’s called the “Transformpreneur℠” and he’s here to make your business and endeavors thrive. With Going Beyond Sustainability, having a business or project be both profitable and good for the planet—in ways you’ve never considered—is the goal.
Shel Horowitz, the “Transformpreneur℠” himself, grew up an activist, not a businessman. Yet, with no relevant experience and almost no capital, he started his own business at age 24.
His mom volunteered for the Urban League, an advocacy group working for Black Americans and other underserved urban residents to secure economic self-reliance, parity, power and civil rights. The political landscape was a familiar one to Horowitz. He went to his first political rally in 1969, for peace in Vietnam, when he was just shy of 13 and listened to activists speak, altering the course of his life.
“My first awareness of the power of consumers to affect business was the United Farm Workers grape boycott in the late 1960s, early ‘70s.”
Horowitz’s professional life settled in marketing, but he remained an activist over the years, until, after founding a successful movement to protect a local mountain that used all his marketing skills as well as his activist background, the idea came to him to combine the two.
He realized the potential impact businesses could have on progress and change in the world, from the climate crisis to poverty and beyond.
“This is good for business. Business does well when it builds on ethical support systems,” Horowitz explains.
Going Beyond Sustainability is a one-stop shop, offering services beyond marketing and consulting, from speaking engagements to trainings on topics like employee engagement in social change and business organization.
One of the core tenets of his business as a marketing consultant is that best practices change—just because businesses have operated one way regarding sustainability and ethics doesn’t mean it’s the best way to operate.
A technique he practices with clients adheres to this way of thinking: guerrilla marketing.
The author Jay Conrad Levinson coined the team in 1984 with his book Guerrilla Marketing. This approach to marketing borrows from its namesake of “guerrilla” warfare to communicate with audiences through the element of surprise.
A famed example of guerrilla marketing was 1967 when activist Abbie Hoffman led a group into the New York Stock Exchange and threw dollar bills from the visitors’ gallery onto the floor, interrupting trading and garnering numerous headlines.
Horowitz practices guerrilla marketing in his consulting and even co-wrote two books with Levinson, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World and its predecessor, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.
“Heal-the-world guerrilla marketing sharpens the focus to look at how a business can profit as it actually improves our physical and social environment—and how to tell your green/social equity story so effectively that the world begins to seek you out,” Horowitz writes on his website.
That’s the goal, a cyclical process benefitting both businesses and consumers. And the stats don’t lie—a 2023 survey showed up to two-thirds of consumers will pay more for sustainability. By giving consumers what they want, i.e., products and services that benefit the planet, businesses engender loyalty and profitability.
Horowitz knows this work can be hard, frustrating, and oftentimes demoralizing—something as great as bettering the world will always have setbacks, but the important thing is that we try.
Sometimes the needle will only move a fraction, but if it doesn’t move at all, or moves backwards, progress will always remain out of reach. And by showing business how building environmental and social justice into core products, services, and company mindsets can be profitable, Horowitz has created a platform to influence the business community to move the needle faster and farther.
Horowitz has several freebies available to Green America readers. And for Green America members, instead of the 15-minute freebie consultation on how your particular business can combine profitability with environmental and social good, Horowitz will offer a full half-hour at no charge.
