Mr. Surace, a noted speaker and writer on climate change and the built environment, is on a mission to drive energy efficiency in the built environment, and bring green jobs and manufacturing back to the US. He will be speaking to us about how an engineer built what Inc Magazine calls a “great company” by doing things differently, and recognizing the power of green. His talk will focus on this Mission, and how he built up a business to acheive these goals.
His company, which makes building materials and windows, is one of a new breed of "clean tech" firms appearing in California's Silicon Valley. They recently won a contract to replace all the windows in the Empire State Building in New York. You can learn much more about his company by going to www.seriousmaterials.com .
In a BBC article (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10322508), he gives this Key advice:
["After you've launched your business, while you are still privately-owned, "what you have to do is grow very fast, so that some day when you have to really drop a lot of dollars to the bottom line, you've laid in a base that can still grow at maybe 10% or 20% a year.
"Five years into being a public company, you can never do that again."]
Come and hear how a local entreupanuer turned his dream into a reality.
