Equity Partnerships in Sustainable Reforestation at "Hilltop", a Series #06

Money Matters

Making Money Comes First

Have you heard these:  “Do you have a business plan?”  “What is the capital investment?”  “When is the return on investment?” “How much is the ROI?”  “Who is the competition?”  “Have you ever done this before?”  “Why hasn't it been done before?”  The questions seem to go on and on no matter who the prospective funder might be.  They continue until the little guy with the winner of an idea gets stumped and can no longer answer, except his gut tells him that it will work and even after being turned down he presses on to success.

Investors want a sure thing that is proven by the marketplace.  Tweak the existing, twist it and repackage it and it will get the funding for a hefty fee that goes to the funder along with control of your idea, company and control, as any funder thinks it should receive.  But who needs all of that other than the truly desperate who wants to continue with the existing paradigm?

Your Winning Idea

Do not compromise on your winning idea, but do make certain that you measure the market, determine what it is, how much and for what price you need to sell in order to make your cost and profit, and your ultimate goal.  Then scale down and down and fund it yourself through cash flow.  Once you have cash flow, however slight, positive or negative, you have a business.  Tweak it so that the flow becomes positive and then manage it so that the flow becomes stronger.

International Market Place

If the market is so many billion people located around the world then scale back to a few people living locally or in the first village, municipality, city and create that cash flow.  Make the formula for success workable, doable and profitable.  Scaling up, if planned, is a piece of cake.

Profit Sharing

Divide your income into 20% shares.  1) The landowner partner
gets a share.  2) The project gets two shares (40%).  3)  Expansion gets a share, and 4) you get a share.  If you cannot pay yourself the share that you have earned then your formula for success is off track and requires immediate tweaking.

The New Paradigm

Choose a winner, not a looser. Remember Albert Einstein’s definition of stupidity: “Repeatedly doing the same thing while expecting different results.”  Choose the next paradigm, not the traditional one which is being challenged regularly and its technological changes are pressuring society.   Why place your idea onto a platform that is already a dinosaur?  The common denominator for a new paradigm is to create as close to a neutral carbon footprint as possible.  Stick with this premise and what you build will last for generations to come while many of the “big boy” industries will fall around you.  Technology disruption is like never before, every two years or less…choose carbon neutral and succeed in the long run, generally speaking.

Negative vs. Reality

“There is no more land.”  
“The world’s population is growing too much.”  
“We cannot or will not be able to feed the world’s population.”  
“There is not enough fresh water anymore.”  
“What happens when a comet strikes the earth and there is a catastrophic event?”  
“Climate change, climate change, OMG climate change, what do we do?”

Throughout Much of the Third World

We have more land than you can shake a stick at.  We have more freshwater than you can reasonably use.  We have as much sunlight as is necessary and more.  We have fresh warm air, really fresh.  We are secluded but accessible both physically and through cyberspace.  Our carbon footprint is nearly neutral.  The community sings songs on holidays, dances in the streets and during the work days the workers remain within the community.  Our production is sold electronically, produced locally, packaged locally, transported efficiently to the nearby airport and shipped directly to the consumer, wherever.  Cash flow matters.  Another farm, another one, again and again.  How can this be?

Global Warming or Climate Change

The United Nations set a goal of decreasing the rate of increase in Global Warming to less than 2 degrees centigrade by 2020.  Whether the goal will be met or not, very likely not, is not the following point.  It is that the scientific community that understands what all of it means represents a few thousand souls out of more than seven billion people, making the scientists, as a learned body, is statistically insignificant, although arguing otherwise. The scientists do not have consensus and are arguing amongst themselves to the extent that the UN has changed its emphasize away from Global Warming to Climate Change.

No doubt that the scientists are well intended and able to take complex subjects and make phenomenal results, however, mitigating climate change is bigger, much bigger than a statistically insignificant percentage of the population can be expected to achieve when to the rest of the world it matters little, if not at all.  

However, look at a statistically significant group, the farmers of the tropical Third World.  They actually have nearly no understanding whatsoever of the United Nation’s goal but show them how to make money and watch the results.  Even if out of that huge, gigantic and biggest ever demographic population only a few thousand accept how to make money using a near-carbon-neutral process what a significance that would be.  It might even lead to replication by more people who want to join the new paradigm, and the combined results might be significant as well.

Reforestation for Money

If the example for making money is reforestation by using carbon neutral methodology, funded by cash flow, the resultant growth of the trees may even mitigate climate change.

AGROFORESTRY, REFORESTATION AND AFFORESTATION AND DEFORESTATION  

The United Nations supports several programs that have to do with AGROFORESTRY, REFORESTATION AND AFFORESTATION AND DEFORESTATION.  

YET TO COME

The UN understands its own concepts, perhaps, but for certain the general population of the world's farmers does not.  An objective teaching approach may educate across demographic lines. See what appears in the next of this series:  

           "The Future is here, what is it?" which explains that "The Learning Institute for Growing and Selling Food" using the new paradigm may be a solution to clarifying environmental confusion.