Jason: (00:05)
Hey everyone. Welcome to the renewable confidence podcast. My name is. Jason Owens. This is a show that helps you build confidence in yourself and in your business. Every day. A couple of months ago I was thinking about how I could push my company to do something it had never done before. It was a period of some pretty deep soul searching for me and I found myself in the middle of a structured process where I audited the environmental impact of every aspect of my business. It was pretty eyeopening. What this report card showed is that my company had some room for improvement with regard to our an environmental impact. So this led me to a company named Terrapass. That’s T E R R. A. P. a. S. S. now this organization, these guys are really at the forefront of helping companies reduce their carbon footprint. So here’s how it works. You go over to their site and you calculate your carbon footprint.

Jason: (01:02)
Now [inaudible] it’s pretty, they do a great job of balancing being very detailed, but yet not being too time consuming. So for me, this ended up taking about five minutes to walk through my company. Now you can do this just for you personally or in my case I did it for the company. Now once you calculate your carbon footprint, what you do is you go over and you purchase a carbon offset and your money goes to invest in renewable energy projects across the country. Alright, so things like wind energy, methane recapture, that kind of thing. Now I found this to be really fascinating. I had heard about carbon offsets, but really I didn’t know that me right here. I didn’t know that this was something that I could buy. And it, it never even occurred to me that this was something that you can calculate for yourself.

Jason: (01:53)
I’ve, I’ve always heard this on maybe NPR or on, you know, some big news outlet where people are talking about carbon offsets and you go buy them for some big company. And I just, I don’t know why, but I never really felt like this was something that I had access to. Right. For, for the small people, right? The smaller businesses. I always thought it was a like some big fortune 500 kind of thing. But no, you right now you can go and you can purchase not only offsets for your business, but you can also run through a very similar calculation and, and do offsets for just you. Like you can find your family’s carbon footprint and as a family if you want to, you can go offset your carbon footprint, uh, as a family. So anyway, it’s pretty cool. So, um, one thing that I, I didn’t realize is that you don’t have to do this all at once, right?

Jason: (02:42)
Some businesses will look at this and say, okay, so as an executive team, what we’re going to do here is let’s just have a goal right now of now that we’ve calculated it and we at least have our, our eyes on what the number is for this year. Let’s do a 25% offset, right? So yes, eventually the goal a hundred percent offset, but let’s just do 25 this year. Maybe next year we can do 50. Right? So over time you can build up over to a hundred. So you don’t have to offset everything all at once. All right? So what’s really convenient is that you can actually do this on a subscription plan, right? So that’s what I did for my business. I went ahead and looked at the carbon footprint. You know, how much of the total number was for, for annual. And I ended up, of course, going over, they’ve got a little store section in there and I entered in my number.

Jason: (03:31)
This is what my carbon footprint is. Okay, boom. They divided that for me. And I looked at that and said, well, that’s doable. I mean, that costs for me to spend that money out of the business that is completely 100% doable on a subscription plan. Now, what’s really cool is that each month I know my money is going to make this world a better place, right? So now you’re probably asking yourself, this is a podcast about building confidence. So what is the connection between carbon offsets and building confidence? Okay, so here’s the connection. Now, a few weeks ago, I received some very Sage advice from somebody who was a, a distant mentor of mine. He said that as you set very big goals for your business, you will start to live into it. So you’re going to start having a bigger way of thinking. You’re going to start taking actions that the bigger, more successful company would take.

Jason: (04:27)
So again, my whole, my whole perception on carbon offsets is that, yeah, that’s something for huge companies, big companies, obviously people who are producing something, people who are, who have tons of employees. Right. Uh, and, and then I realized just through, again going through this process and, and just doing a little bit of research, Holy cow, I can do this too. I can finally have a, from my company standpoint, I can take a positive step doing something more than having the recycling bin out there. Right? I mean, the recycling bin is good, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve always just felt like there’s gotta be something more than I can do. Okay. Um, so it was, it was really, really good and it feels great. So as I took this step of responsibility, right? So Jay literally putting up getting a number, what is my number, what is my footprint?

Jason: (05:18)
And then doing something about it, right? So I hadn’t even haven’t even given this much thought, um, up to this point, right? I didn’t know that I could do something about this, but it just made me feel like, yeah, this, this is right. Yeah, this is, this is a good thing to do. So something inside me just said, yes. Okay. And I was really, really happy with having taken this step and I am, I’m going to encourage you to do this same thing. Being able to go at least put a number on it, figure out what truly is your carbon footprint over a given year. What’s, what’s your number? Okay. Go out there, run the calculation, go over to Terrapass.com run the and just see what your number is and then just make that decision, even if it’s just on a monthly basis. All right? Take your number, divide it by 12 go over to the store.

Jason: (06:07)
You will be surprised at just how affordable and reasonable it is to begin contributing. Two, offsetting your carbon footprint, putting money into projects like renewable energies, clean energy, right? What can we do, what can you do personally to start making this world a better place with regards to the environment? And they just make it incredibly, incredibly easy. So over on the show notes for this episode, just go over to renewable confidence.com you’re gonna see show notes for this episode and I’m going to have that link there that talks about explaining carbon offsets, right? So you can check that out or just go straight over to Terrapass.com. Get your own carbon footprint report card and get those offsets rolling today. So listen, thanks so much for joining me here. Just want to just want to remind you that this podcast can be found not only on Apple podcasts, but also Google play music. Tune in Stitcher, FM, Spotify, and on overcast. So whatever podcast player you use, chances are pretty good that you can find the renewable confidence podcast. I am thrilled to be here with you. Thanks so much everyone. You take care and I’ll talk with you soon on the next episode of the renewable confidence podcast. Bye bye everyone.