Profile: Renee Spears, Rose City Mortgage
Building a sustainable business with a smile
Renee Spears, founder of Rose City Mortage, knows a thing or two about building excellence from scratch. Within a decade, she shaped her company into one of Oregon’s 100 Best Small Companies to Work For and one of 100 Best Green Companies. How exciting then to engage in forming a strategic partnership, the first fruit of which was last week’s sustainability unconference Beyond 2020. More than anything, though, Renee likes to share her experience with building a sustainable business.
All decisions Rose City makes filter through a single question: “Whom does this benefit?†Everything is sourced locally with the environment in mind. As a mortgage broker, the company relies heavily on electronic documents, with a single electronic signature serving all the materials traditional lenders compile into inch-thick stacks of paper. Rose City only works with banks and other partners who have made a transition into paperless transactions. Similarly, a prospect who requires paper copies of all documentation won’t become a client.
Here are a few additional sustainable practices Renee has shared over time.
- Generate no garbage. Everything the company uses is washable, reusable, or recyclable. The office is paperless; loan files are handled electronically. Whatever paper does get used is made from 100% recycled content and then shredded and recycled, and only soy-based ink is used for printing. Food waste is deposited in a worm bin, and employees can use the compost for their gardens. The company has a Green Team that continuously works on reducing the company’s environmental footprint.
- Buy nothing. Except for the limited paper supply, all office supplies are swag. Vendors shower Rose City with promotional items, such as pens or sticky notes, which the company politely declines. Instead, they ask their corporate clients who are green companies for needed items, which in turn tend to be green.
- Maximize the use of online tools. Rose City has a tiny head office, and employees telecommute. Email, Google Talk, Skype, and Twitter are some of the favorite tools used within the company both for internal and external (client, vendor) communication.
- Limit face to face meetings. If they do have to meet, employees maximize the use of public transportation, bikes, or car sharing. Everyone uses tools like MeetWays.com to find third places or other meeting points half-way between their home office and the client’s location.
- Produce no print collateral. Rose City has a single half-page flyer touting its sustainability initiatives. All marketing is done through referrals, word-of-mouth, publicity, and cheap advertising.
- Use last-minute ad buys. Rose City only buys ad space when another advertiser pulls out, which means advertising at a heavy discount. This assumes targeting the right publications, cultivating relationships with their sales departments, and having ads of different sizes ready to go.
- Work with green businesses. Rose City works with a green escrow company, appraiser, and realtors as well as a green paper supply company, community bank, and other local vendors.
- Be involved in the community. All employees volunteer in their community. The company donates thousands of dollars to select nonprofits ($100 per transaction), or clients can choose a beneficiary nonprofit themselves. Community involvement helps the company’s social performance and generates free word-of-mouth and publicity.
- Recruit on qualifications and community involvement. Triple-bottom line is part of the recruitment process. As a result, the company has no formal sustainability policy or procedures manual; it’s what the people there do.
The culture of sustainability permeates all internal and external communication at Rose City Mortgage.
- Company and employee volunteer events and donated amounts/items are discussed at each company meeting, announced and coordinated via email or the Facebook page, and recognized through month-end recognition meetings. The company participates in regular annual events so they became a part of its culture.
- Employees are asked to volunteer or be on the board for something they believe in – with unlimited time off for volunteer activities. They then become the ambassadors to the non-profit and events and help spread the word.
- Every other company meeting entails discussing “ways we can do business better and save the world”.
- The company website includes pages with pictures of employees volunteering and a list of places where employees volunteered and donated the previous year. Each employee’s bio includes includes what/who they support.
- Rose City holiday cards, ads, email newsletter, speaking engagements, and employment postings always incorporate the culture of community engagement, be it through lists of beneficiary organizations, mentions of community programs, or stories of employee volunteers.
It’s no coincidence that it all started with people. Equipped with banking expertise, Renee helped a close family member get financing despite discrimination by lenders. The path to helping other disadvantaged members of her community opened naturally. Over time, Renee shaped the business into a company she’d always wanted to work for: a place where employees enjoy working, a place offering a solid work-life balance, a place that is fun.
(September 2009)
