I want to welcome you all to Clif Bar & Company headquarters. I know that many of you came across the bridge east bound tonight. So we really appreciate you making that journey. And we are also very pleased to be the host of Good Business Network’s first East Bay event I believe. So without further ado I am going to invite Pat Reilly to come up here. She is the moderator for tonight’s program and also she is going to be introducing our panelists. Pat is the co-founder of the Good Business Network. She is also the President of PR & Company which is a marketing firm that specializes in strategic communications, integrated events and CSR for businesses and non-profits. So without further ado here is Pat. Thank you so much Kate and thank you to Zu Herrn also for hosting us tonight, and thank you to Clif Bar. This is a wonderful event. And I am particularly excited to be here in the East Bay because I live about three miles away. So it’s really exciting to have so many of you people come. It’s very rewarding to see the crowd that we have here. We started the Good Business Network two years ago with the idea of bringing together like minded people from the for-profit community, the non-profit community, academics and civic minded people, with the goal of building the movement for corporate social responsibility. And the thinking behind it was just as at dot-com economy was really fuelled by getting a lot of people in a room with some cocktails and some good conversation, we felt that there really wasn’t an organization that was – was like that. So we started GBN and this is probably – I guess it’s a better six event and this is particularly exciting because it’s with companies that are – are medium sized companies, compared to this alliance that we hosted with eBay and with Hewlett Packard and others. And I think so many – so much of the work and interesting learning that can happen and that are particularly reflected in the crowd that’s here tonight are really from those small to medium size business. I want to also acknowledge the co-founders of the Good Business Network, Elaine Tajima from Tajima Created, and Brad Hennig, they are in the audience today. They do creative designs for non-profits as well as for-profits and PR & Company as Kate mentions focuses on creating interesting communications platforms for both our non-profit and for profit clients. GBN is becoming increasingly successful in large part because we are drawing such a terrific crowd of people. In the audience tonight we have Peat’s Coffee, we have Method, and Scientific Certification Systems, Numi Tea, Forest Ethics and a great crowd from Haas School of Business. So thank you very much for coming. Before we get started talking about the panel I wanted to talk a little bit about a recent McKenzie Consulting Group survey that just came out, which I think really frames the issues and how much the world has changed. So they did a survey of consumers that showed that a corporation’s performance addressing climate change and the environment affects how much consumers, not only trust a company but whether they would buy a company’s product. The survey also found that consumers said corporation should not only support their bottom line but the public good by providing healthier and safer products, retirement and healthcare benefits for employees and other socially minded focus. The survey concluded that every business, whether large or small, should integrate the role of the environment in order to stay competitive in today’s economy. I think what’s striking about that is the folks behind me were thinking about doing that 20 years ago. So in many ways we are sitting here with the people who really nurtured what’s now called Corporate Social Responsibility. And they have shown business leaders everywhere that environmentally and socially responsible companies can be profitable too. So without further ado I would like to introduce Gary Erickson and Kit Crawford, who are the co- owners of Clif Bar & Company the nation’s leading maker of all-natural, organic energy and nutrition foods and drinks. A husband and wife team who have forged a successful partnership in business and in marriage. Hats off. Clif Bar & Company has not only achieved success in business – with a 10 year compounded annual growth rate of 23 percent – it has also garnered national acclaim for its commitment to the environment, and support for important causes such as the fight against breast cancer, and nurturing employees. Among its many awards Clif Bar & Company was recently awarded The Granola Award for sustainability for its continued and comprehensive approach toward sustainable business practices and was honored by Outside Magazine as the “Best place to work among mid-sized companies.†A few years ago Kit and Gary 80 acres of farmland in Napa, California and began work on a new venture, the Clif Bar Family Winery & Farm, and we have been enjoying their wine tonight. Yeah, it’s very good. Gary is also the author of Raising the Bar: Integrity and Passion in Life and Business: The Story of Clif Bar, Inc: A Journey Toward Sustaining Your Business, Brand, People, Community, and the Planet, in which he shares Clif Bar’s unique approach to business. Next we have Gary Hirshberg, who serves as Chairman, President and CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farm Yogurt. The husband of writer Meg Hirshberg, and the father of three teenage yogurt-eaters, Gary Hirshberg has overseen the growth of the organic yogurt company, Stonyfield Farm, from its infancy as a seven-cow organic farming school in 1983 to a $300 million-per-year business. Stonyfield achieved this growth using innovative marketing techniques that often combine the social, environmental, and financial missions of the company. One of the company's five missions is "to serve as a model that environmentally and socially responsible businesses can also be profitable" and Gary has realized this vision in every aspect of the company. Gary has won numerous awards for corporate environmental leadership and is the author of recently published “Stirring It Up: How to Make Money and Save the Worldâ€. His book and Gary are available for sale tonight. And copies are available after the program; we are going to have some signing later. So thank you very much. So to get started tonight, Clif Bar & Company and Stonyfield Farm are highly successful models of how to build thriving values based businesses. Why and how were you able to achieve commercial success and still maintain your commitment to corporate social responsibility, what ingredients would account for your success? I will start with Gary – this Gary. This Gary? You know Clif Bar didn’t – I didn’t – in fact I asked Pat earlier what CSR meant. Clif Bar started in – the original idea came to me in 1990, and I wasn’t thinking corporate responsibility and nor was I thinking of saving the world or anything. I just wanted to make a better tasty energy bar. And I think a lot of businesses – you have to have a vision around a product that make sense on the market, and at that time fortunately we – the only other product on the market was one that in my opinion didn’t taste very good. So it was pretty easy to out-do that. And as time went on I thought about running the business the way I travel or the way I climb a mountain or the way I ride my bike through the Alps, you know I don’t litter and I like being with the people I am with and it’s a journey and its an adventure and – you know we are sensitive to the community around us if we are traveling Nepal for example, or – I mean I came across some climbers that were incredibly rude to the locals, because their whole mission was get to the top of the mountain. And it wasn’t about understanding and being self- aware of where they are at. Likewise a lot of these expeditions dump literally tons of garbage at the base and throughout the mountain that they climb, and don’t think twice about it because their goal is to get to the top. Well, when we made our first Clif Bars in 1992, I wanted the same philosophy for Clif Bar, you know, the same kind of idea of – you know, keep the litter down, be sensitive to the locals, enjoy who you are traveling with and make a great product. I want to ask him some more questions with – well, you know it’s a very similar story. I think, for the entrepreneurs here, your product has to be superior to what's out there or you are not even going to get on to the game board you know, you are not even going to be playing and we – I will tell you a quick story. We had – we started our organic yoghurt company with the seven-cow organic farming school back in 1983, back when organic used to mean that you have to chew extra a few, you know what I mean and – and we thought that our – our vision was we could definitely do better than what was out there. And the confirmation of that – if you might remember some of you the early eighties was the – right after the Iranian hostage crisis and in those days our equivalent of Osama Bin Laden was Ayatollah Khomeini who was on the front pages of every newspaper. He was the great evil that – that folks riled against and an Iranian American refugee had – an Iranian woman have come and resettled in Southern New Hampshire where we were and when she discovered our yoghurt, we were just selling it in seven local stores around – we were actually trying to fund our farming school. And she drove up to the farm one day and she said, ‘I haven’t tasted yoghurt this good since I left the old country, I have a piece of marketing advice for you, you should call it the taste of Iran, which – which we actually did not use that piece of advice. But – but you know there has been – along the way from ‘83 till – we didn’t make money till ‘91, we were eight years, we were completely – very – we were absolutely focused on trying to make a statement about how business ought to operate, a lot of the principles that Gary talked about, and we were very uncompromising. That had its pluses and its minuses. The pluses were we made incredible yoghurt that was better than anything else, the minus was that we had no idea what a gross margin was or how to make money and it took us a long time to get it right. But there were endless – as we started to understand about gross margins and profitability and that this wasn’t just a school, this was a business and we started being responsible, needing to be responsible to our investors, we had endless, countless opportunities to compromise to – to cheat, to shortcut and we never took them. And I can tell you that’s like virtuous, like we knew what we were doing, it was just we – we knew what we wanted to eat and we knew what we wanted to put out there. And – and that’s – that’s the reason we got through it. I mean I am convinced that the authenticity of the product and that authenticity of the people who are behind it was what drove our demand. We – I can tell you this, it was certainly not the money that we had because we had no money. We – I have to – I have to tell you this – may be this way, I was in Florida about a year and a half ago, I was holding up a Yo Play cup, I was reading an ingredient that I still can’t pronounce actually to this day; and a little lady came up and tug me on the elbow and said, ‘Young man, someone your age really should be eating the Stonyfield. It was – it was like a religious experience you know, it was like seeing god, it was great. And I – I asked her, why? You know, she had no idea who I was and she said well, do you know they were the first manufacturer in America to offset a hundred percent of their CO2 from their manufacturing and they give ten percent of their profits to environmental causes and they have six live and active cultures and – you know, she was going on with all the stuff, I said well how do you know the stuff? And she – she told me the story. She said – you know –. Well I – I said, that’s my line, I said thanks mom. But we – we have to practice this game together. But – but I asked her, so you know, how do you know this stuff? She said, well my husband died, we have grandchildren and the girls and I, she was talking about her bridge club, we want to stick around to see our grandchildren come of age. So we check out the companies, we go to the websites and – and you know, we follow this stuff. And – and again it – it isn’t our marketing, our advertising, it isn’t sort of the talk you know, the – the bullshit factor, which is – I call the talk-do ratio that sort of drives a lot of consumer products marketing, it was always a really superior product that had real superior benefits with people behind it really did care about what we were doing and – and I am convinced to this day with all of the stuff that we have threaded, it’s those commitments to authenticity that really got us through. Community involvement has really been so much of the core of both of your companies. What are some of the ways that – Clif Bar to start – has been giving back to the community, Kit, and how has that impacted not only your culture but your bottom-line? Well I think our – our community service program is – is absolutely wonderful and doing large part the people that created it which we give a lot of – a lot of leeway here at Clif Bar for people to create not only great products but also create ways to get back. And one of the – one of the ways, one of our community service programs is called the 2080 program which Talfam created; she is here tonight, Hi Tal. Yeah, yeah a lot of other people have been part of that too. And this is a program where we decided to do 2080 hours, which is equal to one year of work for an employee – and we ask the company to give back that much time, during working hours, so we would actually pay their – you know pay them to go out during working hours and – and try to reach a goal of 2080 hours. And this is when we had you know probably around a hundred people may be –. So you had to get permission from your manager, hey I want to go out and you know – go out and help with meals on wheels or they could – they could pick a charity of their choice to go and volunteer out. So it was volunteer hours during working hours, which was a little different than some of the other companies that were – you know, saying – you know go off on your own time, figure it out and then tell us what you did so we can say that our employees do this or may be they have a special service project. So it’s a – it’s a very creative way to get people involved and that – that has since blossomed and has gone into really – we do a national program now with Hurricane Katrina, we had 13 volunteers that went last year for a week – we paid for a week for 13 people to go and work in New Orleans, and we are going to do that again this year. And we have done international things in Romania, Poland and the other one –. India – yeah. So we sent three people over for – you know, a week, 10 days. It’s just – it’s just really a – a blossoming, fun, creative way – not like you got to go out there and volunteer. It’s more like – okay what are some fun ways that we can all do this together and so we have goals and – and it’s just – we have a core team now that – that follows, that tracks the programs and – and goes online and says hey, we are going to all go out and plan a garden for the community garden down here, does anybody want to volunteer 2080 hours you know, and you will get 15 people – you know may be for the day even and you know, do a community garden, get it all set up. And that the links to the community is – it’s just amazing and the benefit that we get from doing that together, does it impact our bottom line? I – you know, I don’t know if we think about that as much, you know tangibly, we don’t do it for that, I think its just part of who we are. Okay. One way of looking at that is the low turnover rate, or being rated as the best place to work. How does that relate to – or how does that compliment the work of the foundation which you recently launched? The foundation is – we give back in – you know through products, we give a lot of products at work just purely for a voluntary reasons or you know, without a monetary or – or marketing bent on it. We do a lot of sponsorships too through work. But then we also do cash donations and we used to just – all the departments just used to give cash to this and cash to that and – and it got really wild and we said, hey well why don’t we do a foundation so we can track the cash and also it – it holds us accountable for – where are we giving our money and it’s to grassroots organizations and you can go online and see who we give to and you can apply for a grant and – its been – that’s been also a very fine and creative way to look at giving back monetarily. Well, we have something called Profits For the Planet, PFP, 10 percent of our prior year’s profits are essentially recycled out into the community and we are – we are pretty focused, it’s – it’s environmental giving. But something I want to say is, you know I came into business from having run non-profits. I ran environmental non-profits – in fact I ran something called New Alchemy Institute on Cape Cod which – whose sister organization and Gill was connected to it – it was right here on this neighborhood, it was Fairylands at the Urban Institute and there was one out in Occidental. But I was – what happened for me was Reagan came in and slashed funding for everything that I was doing, renewable energy, organics etc, and that’s why I mentioned before that we started, we had this little seven-cow organic farming school and we started selling the yoghurt to actually fund the school. But I learned something from the years of being on the non-profit side which I have applied to our Profits For the Planet Program and – and we do the same thing making – we are making up different stages where the employees – everybody has a quota of days per year that they can donate to things and so on. But I – I learned that – the analogy I use is think of the oak tree, if – if we are growing tree and we go out and cut off our limbs and hand them over, then we are not really doing anything to grow our oxygen producing ability or soil nourishing ability or shade ability. And so in our partnerships with non-profits we are not in – in any way embarrassed or above requesting something in return when we make a donation. A friend of mine has created this notion of the new-profit, its not a non-profit or a for-profit, it’s a – it’s a an entity that is seeking to be giving to a world that’s obviously desperately in need of companies to give back. So for example it – it could be as simple as supporting Living on Earth, National Public Radio’s environmental news journal and getting a – in return for a grant we will get mentions on air or it might be using programs where we will – we will get signage up or we will get employees from the non-profits will receive our products and – and distribute them in their communities. And I think it’s very important that we not think in this black and white term, that there is charity and then there is business because that’s I think one of the myths out there. I mean all of us come to work, all of us go through our lives everyday, we don’t check our values at any door, you know, we – we bring that stuff to the fore. And the best example I could give of this just to drive this home is we have this program called Bid With Your Lid, and I am – I am telling you these analogies because I am assuming there is a lot of – I am assuming there is a bunch of emerging or start up ventures here you know, steal these ideas, in fact both of our books are loaded with them. But with Bid With Your Lid, what we do is we identify three environmental organizations and we say – we are going to give as a portion – our total giving last year was $2.8 million, for example. And what we will do is we will take a $100,000 or $200,000 and we will say to three non-profits, we are going to give you these moneys and everybody will get a minimum of $10,000 no matter what – but the rest is going to go out proportional to the votes that come in for your charity and so you could – you can vote online for your charity or you could sent in 10 yogurt tops and you will get – I think two votes for – for – ten votes or something, anyway you get some big number. Anyway the point is what it does is it creates a partnership, a symbiotic relationship. The – the nonprofit is benefiting because they can drive their revenues, the for-profit, the company is benefiting because the nonprofit is out there marketing away. You know we learned this trick years ago. Al Gore went off to sign the Kyoto, we hope to sign the Kyoto global warming accord and at that time I have been spending some time with him and I knew that he was under big pressure with Detroit Big Auto to not sign. And so we were worried that the pressures on the Clinton administration might actually cause Al to not sign. So we actually published his email address on our yogurt tops and we –we put out about nine million yogurt tops and we – now he got something like 450,000 emails. I sent 440,000 myself, but few other people joined me. But – but seriously we learned early on the power of communicating in this way and the incredible grassroots movements we are able to leverage with our – with our marketing, with our packaging. So anyhow – charity – it can be done in many, many ways. If you are at the early stages – and like Kit was saying – long before we had money we gave our product and we still give out massive amounts of products, but – but time is you give in – in two ways but – but you said and I just want to underscore, this – what they are talking about absolutely helps build employee pride and reduced attrition, and that’s one of the most expensive cost any business can have. You get that soul, that spirit, that intelligence and then you lose that person, that’s – that’s – it even takes a year minimum to replace that kind of energy, so. There are many small to medium size businesses that are struggling in this economy, whether we want to call it a recession or – or what – what advice would you give to a small to medium size business that is trying to stay viable, raise capital, in this kind of an environment and still want to stay focused on being a values based business? It’s your turn. Yes. Those are – a couple of questions here mixed together, raising capital was one and staying viable. Well if you don’t have something unique, I mean if you are a consumer package product or a service company, you – you still have to have something unique that people want and need. And people need to eat, so we are pretty lucky for both of our companies in this case. I am not very – I don’t know where else to go with that question, raising capital is another part of the question. We have – we have had, you know years ago we were in a pinch to raise a lot of capital and give credit here that Kit said you know, because we needed to purchase out a partner – buy out a partner and recap the company. And she said whatever we do we need to maintain control and not be ever in this position where we would have to sell the company again, and that’s a – that’s a very small – the eye of the needle is very small, because there is probably 10 choices out there for raising capital and it’s probably 0.1 of those is a way to kind of keep control and we found it, and it cost a lot, but we tried everything. We tried venture capital, we tried – we talked to big companies that wanted to come in and purchase 20 - 30 percent of the company and we knew that that would eventually be a full buy-out of the company, mezzanine level landing, and so you know we – as our Attorney said, we dealt for dollars all over the country and we ended up finding a very expensive bank loan and – and a complicated deal that I do explain in my book if –if you want to read about it. And it’s just tough – its tough – anybody – we have gone through it – most incredible you know, long term debt deal to keep our company private, we now own the company a hundred percent and we are very happy about that. So I think you just have to keep asking the hard questions, you have to know what you want as an owner before you can make the decision of what kind of capital you are going to raise. If you want – if this is about exiting the company in the near future or 10 or 20 years from now, that’s one type of raising capital. If you want to keep the company in the family and pass it down that’s another kind of raising capital. And so as long as you know that – as I said to you earlier you know, everybody has an exit strategy, ours happens to be death. And I – I stole that line from one of the owners of Semifreddi's down the street; I don’t take credit for that line. But if – if your exit is you know, we want to do this for a while, make some money, set up the values and then pass it on, that’s another type of capital that – it gives you another option, it’s probably a little – the windows are a little bit bigger for that. Well, I have raised millions and I am not proud of it. I had to do it you know, for survival. In 1987 on the weekend of the crash of ‘87 we had exceeded the capacity of our local – the farm and – and so we had to find a dairy that could make our yogurt. We found a dairy but because we were naive in trusting and not terribly sophisticated – in fact we weren’t at all sophisticated – we did no due diligence, and to make a long story short this guy went into chapter seven about a month after we got there and we were given a choice by his bank to buy it out, we were given about twenty four hours, we had no capital to do that. We had to come up with a $100,000 – we were one doing $1.4 million of sales annually at that time. We had to come up with a $100,000 that night to get my cups lids fruit out of the yogurt plant and then we had to come up with $300,000 to restart our old plant and then we proceeded to hemorrhage $25,000 every week. And we did that for 50 straight weeks. And if you do the math you will figure out I lost $1.4 million and sales of $1.4 million, it was quite a bad year. And the way I describe it is that I was always raising money, anybody with a necktie was fair game, so I was – I was always out. But – but we – you know our mission was that we didn’t want to just survive this, we really continued to believe we could you know, save the world. We were – actually the only thing we were modeling was how to die young from burn out at this point. But we stuck with it and I – and I learned a couple of lessons and I just quickly impart them as answers to your question, because I think – I think the times today are similar. One is you got to really believe in yourself, you got to – you got to just absolutely look in the mirror and say you know, I am great and I am going to do this because you understand the – the goal and the role of most investors is to decrease your self worth, because that’s the way that they decrease – they get a better evaluation, because your – your evaluation of your business and your self worth are sort of proportional. And so you need to really just say believe in yourself. The second is if you don’t ask you don’t get. I – Gary and – and I have had the conversation on an off for years. We both talk about it in our books that – we chose a different path. I wound up with 297 shareholders by the end of the 90’s. Now 100 of those were employees, but I had to get them out, I needed to provide an exit for them. I wound up doing a deal with the company that bought 80 percent of Stonyfield but left me with 60 percent control. And you might say well, that’s completely impossible, that’s anti- physics or you know, anti-capitalistic or whatever. It’s probably all of those things, but nevertheless it’s what happened. And – and I am now in the seventh year of it. It’s been going incredibly. But it happened because I asked. I demanded it. I said that was the deal. And the third thing I learned is that you can’t ever be in a position where you only have one choice. You have got to always have several alternatives you know, as you – as you guys did, because if you ever find yourself down at the end of a tunnel with only one choice, it’s over. That is essentially giving up ownership, it’s giving up control and that’s not so easily done. But it means that you have got to keep you know, juggling, keep irons, bunch of irons in the fire. But in the long run and I agree – agree with Gary’s summary completely, it depends on what your goal is trying – your goal is – if you have the opportunity to control it, but if you don’t have the opportunity to control it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to give up things that others tell you have to give up, because in the end what the investors – for entrepreneurs what the investors are buying is not the bar or the wine or the yogurt, they – they are investing in you, in us. And – and that is powerful leverage for somebody who wants in on what you have got. And so again looking in the mirror and saying you know what, I am not going to give up, I am not going to cave in, I am – I am going to be sticking to my values and that’s the deal. It’s – it’s a way that you can still retain control even when you give up significant chunks of ownership. Gary and Gary, you each – after years in business, you each decided to write a book. Why did you decide to write your book when you did and what lessons –? What lessons consumers, business leaders and advocates learn from it? And what did you learn in the process? You referred about what you have learned in growing your business, but it’s a different process. There are probably several reasons why I wrote the book. After – you know we had this big event that happened in the year 2000 and some of you here probably know the story. But you know it was – there was one epiphany of creating the – the original product and then there was another epiphany or a moment where you know, really the – the day I said you know, I will be back tonight and we won’t own our company tonight, but I will see you later. And I came back that night and said, ‘we are not out of the game, we are not’ you know, it was the date I was going to sign the – sign the company away. That was – that was just huge. That was the – opened the awakening for – for both of us on what we really wanted from this company. And so as the years went – also then instead of walking away with $60 million we – we went into over $60 million of debt, like within the next few months after our partner decided that this is it. So we had to decide you know, do we take on a partner. So all this thing happened – this all started happening and it became a very intriguing story, because we had so many things going on at once. We were trying to grow this business, pay off this debt, build these brands and then we decided at the same time to start looking at the sustainability of the business. So you would think that’s contrary to conventional wisdom would be, why would you look at something that’s so expensive while you have got $60 million to $70 million dollars of debt, you have got to – you have got to pay that off, you are growing these brands, we have had a couple of hard years. Clif Bar was going flat, LUNAbar was coming on and – and then now we are going to go organic and spend another $1.5 million to $2 million because those ingredients cost more. And we did it. And then we started community service program. And then we started – we built theatres and we had music events and we did all these wild stuff and I never thought about that debt, but to do all of that and then actually start paying this thing down it just became like millions, so people said you know, then I had to over and over, well you should write a book. And I thought about for a while and –. We didn’t want to forget it. So then after you will say yeah, you should write a book. Then a dear friend of ours – both of ours, who is a professor at USF said, I would love to help you do this. So she co-wrote with me. And – and then I realized that this was more than just – it was a way to kind of consolidate the whole story, a lot of the story into – you know I have heard people have read it on a plane ride from West Coast to East Coast. I couldn’t do that but some people have. So you know they can get kind of a whole picture. Employees – I think one of the big reasons is – are now looking back, it gives new employees who didn’t get to live through that and several people, employees, staff and other employees, these are our Clif people – - who are here tonight, actually have been with us a very long time. Casey who reminded me that our ninth employee is here. Taylor lived through this, people lived through this, they have got to live through it and kind of watch it. But a lot of new employees come in, they don’t get – they didn’t live the story. So this is a chance for them to kind of come in with almost like getting a taste of the history. So when they walk in the door they have got some foundation of where this company has come from and its founding and the whole story. And I think for other businesses to read it, I have gotten some great letters from other businesses saying thank you and I have got a lot of the – I didn’t sell my company because of your book, and that was pretty – those are the heavy – those are the heavy letters. And then I have gotten a lot of really nice emails from people who have read the book, people who purchase our product and professors and teachers that said you know, this book inspired me, so I am very happy I did it and you all need to come buy one right after this. You know what I love about Gary’s book I have to say is – you know when you are an entrepreneur, let alone a couple doing it, you are – there is really no gap between your work and your life. It’s – it’s the same and – and this is just an elegant, beautiful sandwich that you have – you guys have crafted here. I really and I –I give you a lot of credit. But I think the book speaks very honestly, very plainly, it doesn’t – it’s a not a lot of bullshit, it’s just – it’s the experience of balancing life and work, and I think that’s – you know for me it’s a must – his book is a must to read for entrepreneurs. But – but I will just say mine is a different story. I – actually I wanted to write the book of how we – like got through all these dark days, all the – you know venture capitalists who were clipping their fingernails when I was talking to them and all that kind of stuff. I – I wanted to tell all the stories of you know, wild insane things. And an agent was in my audience one time when I was speaking and – and she came up to me after, she said well you know that was a great speech, do you want – do you have a book in you? And I said well yeah, this is the book I want to write. She said, don’t write that one, write this one, what I talked about. And what mine is about is, it’s called “Stirring It Up: How to Make Money and Save the World†and its – it comes from my deep belief that unfortunately you know, the cul-de-sac that we have gotten into in humanity – I don’t call it a dead end, because I do think we can come around and come back out of it. But it’s a place that is the net result of a bunch of mythologies that we have had, that the earth is here for our human exploitation, that the earth is a subsidiary of our economy, that there is a place called away that we can send our waste, I mean that – you can just go through the list of mythologies and – and my own experience in challenging those mythologies and finding out that it’s actually profitable to be sustainable. In fact I wrote the book, I finished the book when oil was $92 a barrel. This was only in November, it’s a $121 this morning, by the way it was $26 when George W. Bush took office and $8.50 when I started my company. So it does not take a genius to figure out where it’s going. We are going to a $150 or $200 a barrel. And when that happens everything is different. Things that made no sense under $100 a barrel will make sense and things that made sense or we at least have the illusion that they made sense back then will make no sense. And so what I write about in the book and yeah, I profiled Clif and – and Patagonia and All Foods and lots of other interesting companies as well as our own as I – I challenged the myth that environment and economy are somehow in conflict. And – and I will tell you that our company has made – you know I talked about how we got going at the beginning, but how we really endured and excelled is – is first of all we mind our P&L by – by extracting waste from our system and cutting our carbon footprint and measuring religiously what we do. We have 10 teams in our company that focus on the 10 largest parts of our carbon footprint. And when they reduce their – when they reduce their active – the CO2 output of their activities, its money in our banks. So one half of the book is about that. The other half is about how the whole authenticity, loyalty thing has really resulted in us having to spend little to no advertising. We have grown faster than our category by four or five fold. We – our profits are the same as leading competitors and yeah, our gross margins are way behind theirs. And so the book really talks about this as an approach that – I hope will be adopted not only by all of us, but – but large business as well. In fact I am sure it will be adopted – these practices, because you know 21st – ecology really is long term economics and 21st century economy; we have no preparation for it, based on anything that’s gone on the past. We have an entirely different world. So this is more of a kind of a hopeful journal of how by embracing sustainability can be a competitive advantage. Thank you. We are going to open it up to questions.
