Now that you have set your goals and decided what to incorporate into your green plan, the final step is to establish some rules for evaluating the initiatives that you put in place.
On the one hand, you want to give your new plan enough time to work before judging its success or failure; on the other hand, you don't want to let a failing plan go on too long before making adjustments. Probably the best approach is to wait one year, even if you've developed a two-year plan. At the end of one year, you can commit to evaluating your plan for the purpose of tweaking it, rather than evaluating it for the purpose of deciding whether to keep or abandon it.
In making your evaluation, and deciding whether to tweak your plan, there are several factors to consider. The most important, of course, is whether the plan has met your stated goal, which, for our purposes, was a reduction in electric costs and a reduction in office supply costs. For more on the specific plan to which this refers, see Building a Plan.
Another factor to consider is the expected timeframe for achieving your goal. For example, let's focus on the change from incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescent bulbs. We said that we wanted to achieve a 10 percent reduction in electric costs in the first year. If you change to fluorescent bulbs, you should be able to achieve that reduction in combination with your other changes, but let's suppose that you see a more modest reduction in your electric costs than you had hoped. One advantage of the compact fluorescent bulbs is that they last much longer than the traditional incandescent bulbs. Getting rid of them after one year because they delivered smaller savings than you had hoped would be shortsighted because you never took advantage of the fluorescent bulbs' longer life. You need to keep in mind that, although one year is good time to re-evaluate, all of the information you need to make an informed decision may not yet be available to you.
Another factor to consider, which doesn't get discussed much in talking about green plans, is the amount of effort and energy you have to spend to make the green plan happen. For example, let's suppose that you decide to refill your printer ink cartridges rather buy new ones. If you happen to work near a place that refills your ink cartridges, you're new green plan may work just great. But if you happen to live and work somewhere requiring a great deal of effort to get to the refill place, or a great deal of effort is expended in sending the refill through the mail, you will have to evaluate whether the cost savings outweigh the effort you expend to generate the cost savings. The point is that your time has value, and only you can determine whether the effort you expend is worth the cost savings.
Taking all these factors into consideration, you will decide whether to tweak your green plan at the end of the first year. Unless the plan wildly fails to meet your goal and falls far short of delivering the cost savings, patience and caution is the best course. Give your plan some more time to develop. In the end, you'll be glad you did.
If your plan falls far short, you will need to decide your next steps by evaluating why the plan failed. In some cases, you may not be ready to exercise the discipline necessary to implementing a green plan. If that's true for you, consider scaling your plan back and setting more modest goals until you can get yourself in the habit of following through on your plan. If you've done everything you can, and still didn't get the savings you had hoped for, consider implementing other initiatives mentioned throughout this discussion instead of the ones you used, which may work better for your business.
If your plan succeeds after the two-year period, you may be ready to take on new initiatives. Consider taking on two new initiatives in year three, and then layering in new initiatives in each of the following years until you develop a full-fledged green program for your small business. Always evaluate at the end of each year. Keep those that work. Tweak those that need modification. Jettison those that fail. Eventually you'll end up with a green plan that is ideal for your small business.