About Shel

“In the more than two decades I’ve known Shel Horowitz, I’ve always been impressed not just by his holistic perspective but by his ability to discover opportunities and solutions where others only see crises. I love the way he shows the business world how they can thrive by creating and marketing solutions to things like hunger, racism, and even climate change and war. And I love the way he encourages business people, activists, nonprofits, and government agencies to come out of their silos and work together. ”  
-Joanne Comerford State Senator,  
Hampshire, Franklin, Worcester District of Massachusetts 

Just as Going Green Raises Revenues and Lowers Costs—

Changing the World Can Also Help YOUR Bottom Line

Are YOU ready to profit as you help turn…

In this exciting new world, business success revolves around helping people and planet. But to thrive, you need affordable expert guidance.

Do you need a “Social Transformation Sherpa” who can help you combine profitability with deep social and environmental transformation? Shel Horowitz, Transformpreneur℠ and founder of Going Beyond Sustainability, can help you build both of those values deep into the core of your business, starting with the business mission, values, and culture.

He’ll help you create and market products and services that accomplish both of these critical goals.  With decades of experience in both business and activism—and helping companies braid them together profitably since 2002—Shel helps you identify, implement, and market profitable products and services that:

    • Harness your organization’s existing strengths and interests

    • Make a difference in environment/carbon footprint and social justice

    • Produce new revenue and/or cut costs—in other words, increase your profit

    • Build customer and employee loyalty and engagement

The best-selling and multiple-award-winning author of 10 books including Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green (34 months on Amazon.com’s category bestseller lists) and its more recent replacement Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, Shel is skilled at finding the unique, specific environmental and social equity profitability opportunities for your organization. He’s also an IPA-certified international speaker whose “Impossible is a Dare” and “Making Green Sexy” talks show how companies from corporate giants like Unilever and General Motors down to solopreneurs can be part of this business revolution.

Shel Horowitz outside In formal jacket, 2013
Shel Horowitz, “the Transformpreneur℠”: your Social Transformation Sherpa

“For organizations that want to combine making a difference and making a profit, I’m your Success Sherpa, your ‘Transformpreneur’. I find opportunities for you to make money doing good in the world, and walk you through the steps to make it real.” —Shel Horowitz

Quick Bio

7 of Shel's 10 books have won one or more awards and/or been translated and republished by publishers in other countries (his US publishers include Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons)

TEDx Talker and International Platform Association-Certified Speaker, Shel has given talks like “Impossible is a Dare” and “Making Green Sexy” as far east as Istanbul and as far west as Honolulu

Both a marketer and an activist since he was in high school, Shel's consulting offers a unique perspective on how to successfully combine business success with social and environmental betterment—not through guilt and shame, but using enlightened self-interest

Frequently interviewed in major media, Shel has been covered repeatedly in Forbes, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Entrepreneur, ABC News, Christian Science Monitor, BBC News, and others. He’s written articles and blog posts for Fast Company, the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Triple Pundit, GreenBiz.com, and many others.

Full Bio

Braiding together more than 40 years each in business profitability/marketing and organizing for social change, Shel Horowitz—known as “The Transformpreneur” —shows the business community how to succeed through green and social justice values and actions.

Beginning with a one-toddler action against smoking at his parents’ party at about age three, Shel has been involved in environmental and social change movements his whole life. At age 15, he was involved in a community group that opposed a nuclear power plant proposed for two miles north of New York City (a proposal the utility company quickly withdrew).

On the marketing side, Shel was still a teenager when he started doing publicity and marketing for grass-roots community organizations with zero promotional budget. These groups had no funds to buy stamps, so he used to hand-deliver press releases on a three-speed bicycle. When he turned his attention to business, he brought a fresh approach steeped in his activism.

Training as a journalist in college, Shel was active in several campus and community groups. He first became aware of the power of the news media when the local newspaper refused to print meeting notices he wrote for a controversial group—but gave extensive news coverage to its refusal. Now, for over twenty years, he’s helped businesses, nonprofits, and community groups get their message out to the public affordably and effectively.

After finishing Antioch College at age 19, Shel had to come to terms with his own work history: career paths not only in writing and marketing/PR, but also in radio, teaching, arts, food service, office systems, community organizing, and environmental issues. Putting together his own first résumés led to a new career direction: résumé writing and career services. Shel quickly realized he had the ability to discover a job candidate’s best strengths and highlight them while downplaying weaknesses. In short, he turned résumé writing into a marketing function.

A native of New York City, he returned there to work at two literary agencies as a manuscript reader, and then worked for a year and a half as a VISTA Volunteer community organizer with the Gray Panthers. Shel’s first book, written when he was only 22, was about why nuclear power makes no sense. He’s also done eight books on marketing and one on having fun cheaply.

Pursuing poetry on the side, he became very active in the New York open poetry scene, and met Dina Friedman at a reading in Greenwich Village. The two left New York in 1980, spending an academic year in Philadelphia at a training program for community organizers before settling in Western Massachusetts in 1981 and starting a writing and teaching business. They married two years later. Their first child, Alana, was born in 1987 and younger child Rafael followed in 1992.

Drawing on the marketing he’d practiced in and after college, Shel began marketing his own business locally, and grew it to the largest of its kind in a three-county service area. Gradually, he expanded his practice beyond résumés to marketing for other businesses and nonprofits, and then to consulting on incorporating social and environmental change at a profit. He began using e-mail as a marketing tool in 1994, set up his first website in 1996, and quickly developed a reputation internationally as a skilled marketing strategist and copywriter who knows how to stretch a marketing dollar. He’s helped clients and mentees in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and North America; his books (eight on marketing, ten total) have sold to dozens of countries, and have been republished in South Korea, Japan, India, Mexico, Italy, and Turkey.

As a life-long activist and marketer, Shel brought marketing savvy to many environmental and social justice change organizations. In 1999, he founded Save the Mountain, which mobilized thousands of people (in a town of 5000) and rapidly beat back an “unstoppable” poorly-planned development on a mountain abutting a state park.

Following the success of this campaign, Shel began to look at a bigger canvas: How to convince bottom-line-driven business that building in social and environmental change could be profitable. After bringing marketing into this environmental campaign, he started looking at what lessons he could bring into business from the activist world.

The deeper Shel dived into it, the more he saw the connections between these two worlds. His research kept showing that businesses with a higher purpose and strong ethics could do very well in the marketplace. And his consulting kept unearthing big opportunities for companies willing to uphold those values.

He discovered that more and more consumers insist on environmental responsibility—otherwise, no sale! Not only that, they want businesses to go beyond just being green. They want to do business with companies that are doing something about issues like hunger…poverty…racism…war…catastrophic climate change…

His 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (his second co-authorship with the late “Father of Guerrilla Marketing,” Jay Conrad Levinson), was published by Morgan James, and hit two different category best-seller lists in its first two weeks.

In the book, Horowitz and Levinson provide dozens of examples of companies large and small that have succeeded by putting people and planet first: from Fortune 100 firms like Southwest Airlines and Procter & Gamble to smaller but well-known companies like Patagonia, Stonyfield, and Marcal, down to small local businesses and even solopreneurs.

Here’s some info about the power of social entrepreneurship

Consider this:

01.

Fortune 100 companies including Unilever, GE, Toyota, and Walmart have made and/or saved billions by lowering the carbon footprint of their own companies, their markets, their suppliers—and their products.

02.

One of the country’s top gourmet bakers (you’ve probably had their brownie bits in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream or at top hotels and restaurants) has slashed HR costs by hiring and training “unemployable” ex-addicts, ex-cons, and ex-mental patients.

03.

A whole movement of architects and designers are reducing costs and environmental footprint—AND making their clients happier—by modeling the amazing engineering accomplishments of the natural world.

Here’s some more info about Shel—and about the power of social entrepreneurship

Shel is...

A certified International Platform Association Accredited Speaker and TEDx Talker who has presented programs like “Impossible is a Dare” and “Making Green Sexy” to audiences from Davos (Switzerland) to Istanbul to Honolulu

Shel is...

A frequent media interviewee, with repeat appearances in the New York Times, Inc, Christian Science Monitor, Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, ABC News, and elsewhere

Shel is...

A green and social entrepreneurship profitability and marketing consultant businesses who can see both the forest and the trees, synthesize multiple fields to bring fresh ideas, and help you create profitable new opportunities to “do well by doing good”

Shel is...

A 2011 Inductee into the National Environmental Hall of Fame, and the owner of the first business ever to be certified as a Gold-Level Green Business by Green America—which also scored Above Average in 15 out of 22 categories in B Lab's Impact Assessment

Shel is...

A lifelong activist who founded a successful campaign that saved a threatened mountain, participated in the direct action that birthed the US safe energy movement, built a chapter of a national elders' rights organization, co-managed several successful electoral campaigns, founded an LGBT center that still existed at least ten years after his departure, and has been involved in many environmental, peace, social justice, and cultural awareness causes.

Shel is...

The recipient of several awards for his books, among them Content Marketing Institute #3 Top Content Marketing Book of the Year (Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World), Independent Publisher Magazine Groundbreaking Indie Book (Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green), Apex Award for Best Book in the PR Industry (Principled Profit), and Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Finalist (Grassroots Marketing)—and six of his books have been translated and republished abroad

BOOKS AND RESOURCES

Discuss your goals with Shel

Shel Horowitz: Your Sherpa for profitable green and social change business reinvention

Click here for freebies and other resources

Powerful resources to help you run a better, more socially conscious, and more profitable business.

Explore a do-it-yourself resource: Shel’s double-award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

(Endorsed by futurist Seth Godin, Chicken Soup for the Soul co-creator Jack Canfield, and 20 other business and environmental thought leaders)

Articles and posts by Shel

Articles and posts by Shel on social change/environmental business success, effective and affordable marketing, mindset, and other business topics, by category.
“Shel brings a natural grace and deep acumen to the topic of profitability and social change. One can see, hear, and feel the depth of his commitment to making the world a better place while designing real business-based solutions that ensure companies stay relevant and profitable in the new marketplace. Shel is that one-of-a-kind expert who can help existing traditional businesses begin the steps to become ‘green’ and assist new businesses to start smart by tapping into the market of social change and green business. Thanks for all you do in service to humanity, Shel. We’re lucky to have you!”
—Kymm Nelsen
CEO of Institute for Conscious Leadership, and host of the Conscious Leadership Weekly podcast

CONTACT US

Please use this contact form to reach out to Shel with your questions about building a profitable business that helps turn hunger and poverty into abundance, war into peace, or catastrophic climate change into planetary balance…to have Shel give a presentation…to improve your marketing…or for any other reason.

Picture of Shel Horowitz in a collared shirt

GOING BEYOND SUSTAINABILITY

Shel HorowitzOwner

+1-413-586-2388

(8 a.m. to 10 p.m. US Eastern Time)

Meeting Scheduler: https://calendly.com/meet-shel

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Let's work together

Shel is Ready to Help You!

Get your monthly Clean and Green Club Newsletter at no cost—and cool bonuses, too!

Seven Weeks to a Greener Business – Once a week for seven weeks, you’ll receive an action-oriented article with tips for greener printing, energy saving, waste reduction, water conservation, transportation, going deep-green, and concluding with green marketing. You’ll also get a subscription to Shel’s award-winning monthly Clean and Green Club Newsletter, one of the longest-running marketing newsletters online, published under various names since 1997.
FREE BONUS GIFT: We’ll also send you Shel’s “Seven Tips to Gain Marketing Traction as a Green Guerrilla”