Eric Corey Freed is an award-winning architect, author, and global speaker. For two decades, he was founding principal of, Organic Architect, a visionary design leader in biophilic and regenerative design.
Eric is the author of 12 books, including “Green Building & Remodeling for Dummies.” In 2012, he was named one of the 25 “Best Green Architecture Firms” in the US, and one of the “Top 10 Most Influential Green Architects.”
Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with Eric Corey Freed about teaching people to build green with a book.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
- How a circular economy can improve your business and the earth.
- How writing a book instantly changes people’s perception of you.
- How you can use a book to position yourself where you want to be.
- Why your book should have information that people need to know.
- Why the goal shouldn’t be making money off the book, but off what it brings you.
Connect with Eric:
Links Mentioned:
renewalworkshop.com
ericcoreyfreed.com
circulareconomyfordummies.com
organicarchitect.com
Guest Contact Info:
Twitter
@ericcoreyfreed
Facebook
facebook.co/organicarchitect
LinkedIn
Linkedin.com/in/organicarchitect
Rob Kosberg:
Welcome everybody. Rob Kosberg here with another episode of our Publish, Promote, Profit podcast. As usual, I have a great guest, somebody that is quite an expert, and after authoring 12 books has a lot to say about the power of books and using them to grow your authority, grow your business, and really get your message out there. Eric Corey Freed is an award-winning architect, author, and global speaker for the last 20 years plus. He’s been the founding principle of Organic Architect, a visionary design leader in biophilic and regenerative design. Eric is the author of 12 books, as I mentioned. Green Building & Remodeling for Dummies, and his most recent book, Circular Economy for Dummies. We’re going to talk a little bit about that today as well. In 2012, he was named one of the 25 best green architecture firms in the US, and one of the top 10 most influential green architects. Eric, great to have you on the show. Excited to have you here today.
Eric Corey Freed:
Oh, thank you for having me. This is a very exciting topic that no one ever asks me about, so I’m excited to be here.
Rob Kosberg:
Some of what we want to talk about is what you’re probably asked all the time about, but absolutely I’m interested in how you’re using your books and that kind of thing. You’ve gone from, I guess, focusing your previous books, on regenerative architecture and creating zero carbon footprints and that sort of thing. Your most recent book is broader in its scope because it’s about a circular economy for dummies. Can you maybe talk a little bit about that? Explain a little about what that means for our layman here listening.
Eric Corey Freed:
The circular economy is a framework that’s been around for decades really in some form or another, but really, it’s an alternative approach to how we make things. If you think about the way we normally make anything, a toilet brush, or a trashcan, or an iPhone, really what we’re doing is we’re extracting valuable resources out of the earth, we’re making them into something which takes a lot of effort and creates a lot of waste, and then we use it, and then at some point, we throw it away. So, if you really kind of distill that down, what we’ve done is we’ve taken every valuable natural resource on earth and we’ve turned it into landfill in the dumbest way possible. That’s really what we’ve done. The circular economy seeks to change that by looking at how instead of you can do this take, make, waste approach, instead, do a harvest, make and remake approach to create these kinds of infinite loops. If you do it correctly, not only will it improve the quality of your product, but also it could save your company a lot of money because we normally pay to throw things away.
Rob Kosberg:
Give me an example of what that might look like in anything, whether it’s architecture and building, or like you said, making toilet brushes.
Eric Corey Freed:
I’ll give you two that are very, very different. First, let’s talk about architecture. I’m an architect. We have a whole chapter in the book just on the architecture. Imagine a building that was designed to be disassembled. If you’re building a house, when you want to expand it, you can disassemble part of it and add onto it much more easily. If you want to renovate a kitchen, it’s designed to be disassembled, so those materials can be put back into reuse for somebody else, but you can update your kitchen. Imagine really where all the components are thought through in this way so that way they could be really designed for infinite reuse. If you were to do that, wouldn’t that also then address things like, well, what kind of toxic chemicals are we putting into the building, or can we avoid from putting in the building? Wouldn’t it also address how much energy does it take to produce these initial materials in the first place? It’s just a much broader, much more holistic lens of consideration beyond just what does it look like and what does it cost. The second example is very, very different. There’s a little shoe company called Adidas you may have heard of. They realized that shoes are a huge waste problem, and the raw materials are getting harder and harder to get, so they’ve started developing a line of circular economy shoes, and it’s made from plastic that’s been harvested from the ocean. There’s a big island of plastic trash in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that’s twice the size of Texas, and they thought, “Well, what if we took some of that, what could we make it out of?” They made basically a shoe, made it entirely out of ocean plastic, and the best part is, is that when you’re done with it, you can send it back to Adidas and then they’ll remake it into another shoe. So, it’s infinitely recyclable. It doesn’t become waste again. It just stays in the material usefulness category, so you can just keep reusing it. Two very, very different examples, but it really shows how, just by looking through this circular lens, you can start to redesign everything.
Rob Kosberg:
That is very cool. I didn’t know Adidas was doing anything like that. Obviously, it makes sense, and this is something that’s not biodegradable. First thing probably a lot of people think of is, okay, you want it to be able to go back to the earth in a way that is gentle on the earth, but we’re actually talking about materials that aren’t biodegradable, but you’re sending them back and they’re reusing them in a way that makes it totally efficient. That’s super cool.
Eric Corey Freed:
We also talk in the circular economy about how could you design out waste from the start, so really rethinking all of your products that way, whatever normally would create waste, you could approach it in a new way, whether it’s your makeup company and you’re looking at the packaging of your lipstick, and instead of throwing that away in the landfill, could that lipstick package once you’re finished with the tube, right, you send it back to the manufacturer and they could remake it into another tube of lipstick that’s fresh and clean and healthy? Or looking at the product itself, where did it come from? Is it oil based? If so, that creates a lot of pollution and effort, and the cost of oil keeps going up. Could you use another chemistry like soy or corn that could be grown? It’s much more natural, and would that potentially make the product better? There are all these little examples and the book covers this entire framework of how you can look at each stage of your supply chain to rethink and redesign out waste.
Rob Kosberg:
I’ve always heard about this massive island of garbage in the Pacific. By the way, I had no idea that it had grown to the size of the state of Texas. You’re talking about 1,000 miles across, is that accurate?
Eric Corey Freed:
Yeah, but it’s not like a mound of trash that looks like a smelly iceberg. It’s all photo degraded in the water and it’s just kind of all gooey and liquified. When you stick your hand in it, you pull out just this oozing muck. It’s not like it’s just a bunch of bottles. It’s bottles that, through sunlight and saltwater, have just kind of broken down. It’s this big soup, so that makes it even harder to recycle.
Rob Kosberg:
That is horrible. Are there efforts, and this may be outside your scope, but it doesn’t sound like it, are there efforts, significant efforts, going on to clean that up, to reuse the materials in there like you just talked about?
Eric Corey Freed:
Significant? Well, the size of the problem is so big the question becomes, what could you do with that plastic? What could you make it out of? How would you prevent it from ending up back in what’s called the Pacific geyser. Because of the coastal flows, of the weather patterns across the whole world, it’s basically like a toilet bowl that doesn’t flush. All the trash in the ocean eventually will end up in this Pacific geyser just because of the loops.
Rob Kosberg:
So, there’s nothing real significant that’s going on right now. In one sense, it’s kind of interesting because those were all valuable resources at one time. Money was spent to pull those things out of the earth and use them in such a way. You would think that maybe you could look at that with the eyes of, that there’s actual value in here if we could just harvest that. Am I just thinking totally wrong?
Eric Corey Freed:
No. You’re spot on. You’re one of the first people to actually get this idea. You bought this thing, this whatever, and you spent good hard-earned money for it, and then at some point, its value just went away. The truth is, its value didn’t go away, you just didn’t realize that the value is still inherently contained and embodied within it. If you look at it in terms of just recycling, yeah, you can harvest some of the materials out, but if we start to redesign the products that we regularly use, you cannot only see the intrinsic value when you bought it, but see the intrinsic value that remains embodied in it all the way through and kind of recapture some of that before you throw it away.
Rob Kosberg:
I guess there’s a couple of issues. You’ve been thinking about this a lot longer than I have, but there’s the issue of actually how to create the product in such a way that it is reusable, or interchangeable, or something, as you mentioned about kitchens or that sort of thing, but there’s also consumer behavior. Like with the Adidas shoes, do they incentivize people to send the shoes back? There has to be something, a way to change the consumer behavior of just taking those old shoes and donating them to a goodwill or throwing them away or whatever, to get them back to the factory in the first place.
Eric Corey Freed:
There’s a number of different business models that we map out in the book. There are two in particular that I love that are just worth mentioning, because I tell everybody about them. The first one is a company called, The Renewal Workshop, and they do a couple things. They partner with large retailers and brands to take their discarded clothes, they go out of fashion or whatever, and they catalog them and then resell them. If they need to be fixed or cleaned, they do that too, but there’s a whole backend economy to this of where they’re creating jobs, they’re keeping materials in use, they’re keeping clothing in use, and they’re diverting it from the landfill. You can just go to renewalworkshop.com, I think is the address. The second one is much more of a sharing economy, circular economy play, and it’s called Borobabi, B-O-R-O-B-A-B-I, and the founders are really kind of remarkable. They realized if you’ve ever had kids, they outgrow their darn clothes every minute. Baby clothes are usually in great shape because they don’t wear them that long and they outgrow them. What do you do with them? They’ve found a way that you can essentially look at baby clothes as a service, where they deliver you a batch of clothing, you use it, and then you send it back to them, and then they clean it up, and then keep it in use and keep it in service. Parents have been loving this whole idea because it’s solving a problem for them. It’s cheaper than buying clothes and then throwing them away, and of course there has all the environmental benefit as well.
Rob Kosberg:
Very cool, very smart. You’re going to have some really smart people that do some interesting things around all of this. They’ll both reap the rewards from a financial perspective, but they’ll make the kind of impact on the world that I imagine incentivize them to do it in the first place. Congratulations on writing that book. I love the idea; I love the concept. I’m definitely going to pick it up.
Rob Kosberg:
Let’s maybe switch gears for a minute. You wrote 12 books. It’s hard to write a book. I know that because we’ve helped over 1,000 authors write books. It is hard to do. You didn’t do it to earn a bunch of money in royalties. You did it for other reasons. Talk to me about that. Talk to me about that from your very first book till this last one, and I imagine it’s not the last one you’re going to write, you’ll probably continue to write. What has that journey been like for you both from the standpoint of how you started it, why you started it, and how has that progressed? How have you seen great things happen from the books you’ve written?
Eric Corey Freed:
First of all, every time I finish a book, I’m like, “Oh, I’m never going to write again.” Then my wife is like, “Okay. Are we done,” because there is no magic to this. I don’t take off for six months and go sit in a cabin in Maine and write on an old typewriter. I don’t know where people get that idea. I am working full time and living my life, and then I’m writing evenings and weekends, and it just sucks, for lack of a better word. It’s just a lot of work. Every time it’s like, “That’s it.” The first book was Green Building for Dummies, and it came about because I was already writing a column, a monthly column on green building.
The Wiley folks, the dummies company, approached me and said, “Hey, you’re an architect who can write. Do you want to write this book, Green Building for Dummies?” I’m like, “Yes.” I didn’t think about it more than that. I thought, frankly, “Oh, this is great. I’ve got all these monthly columns. It’ll be easy to write the book.” Well, the monthly columns basically became just 30% of the outline, and then I had to rewrite all of it. It’s a ton of work, but an amazing thing happened. It changed people’s perception of me after the book came out. I was still the same person. I still had the same desires and visions for buildings, but just having the book out, my speaking fees went up. I didn’t ask them to, they just did. People invited me to stuff. It was like a light bulb went off and I’m like, holy crap, a book can really transform your public perception, and this was news to me because I’m an idiot. To people listening, they’re like, “Yeah. Obviously.” I started thinking about how I could really lean into this and use this in a meaningful way to get the kind of work that I want. The green building book was great, but it got me more of what I was already doing, doing green houses for people. In the next book, I started thinking about what I wanted to do next. I wanted to start working on green schools, and I tried in vain to work on green schools. Everybody said, “Well, you don’t have experience working on schools.” I tried partnering with other firms that do have school experience and I thought, “Well, I’ll be the sustainability person and you’ll be the school person, and we’ll go after this stuff,” and we had trouble getting hired. I went to Wiley, my publisher, and I go, “Look, I have an idea for a book on green schools and I want to write it.” They said, “Well, why you,” which is a great question. I said, “Well, I’m a nationally known sustainability expert. Of course, it’s me.” They said, “Yes, but you haven’t done schools either. Why you?” I said, “Oh, no problem. I’ll have a co-author who has school experience.” I reached out to my friend, Lisa, and I said, “Hey, you’ve got school experience. I’ve got green experience. Let’s write this book that needs to be written.” I went from nobody even wanting to talk to me or hire me to designing a school a year later, the book comes out and I’m the keynote speaker at the Green Schools Conference that year, got a ton of consulting going on, consulting on green schools. How does that transformation happen in a year? I didn’t change as a person. The transformation was the book gave you credibility, and then we leveraged that credibility. Every time we’d finished a chapter, I would kind of annotate it and put it out as an article. At the bottom of the article, it would say, “From the forthcoming book, Sustainable School Architecture.” That’s when I really started to fire on all cylinders. You can really use this to position yourself where you want to be and give yourself instant credibility, and the process of writing the book changes you. It does do that.
Rob Kosberg:
I love that. I have a hard time helping people to really grasp and understand with what we do, for the most part, people are coming to me and they’re asking us to help them ghost write a book. We solve that problem, if you will, of having to write on weekends and after hours, because we help to do it for them with their content and their voice, of course. Oftentimes, people will want to refer us clients, and we have a lot of great partners, if you will, and they always think, well, I’m only going to refer somebody that is an expert on a particular niche and that’s been working in it for a long time, and that’s the person that really needs to write a book. I say, “Well, that’s true, that person should write a book, but also, you should write a book in regard to where you want to go with your business.” I wrote my first book for a financial services company 14 plus years ago, and my financial services company was brand new at the time. That built me a multi-million-dollar business during a terrible recession that led into the financial collapse. You’ve expressed that in a really interesting way. I wonder if you have any other examples. You gave the school example, which is incredible. You also wrote 10 other books. Where else have you gone with those books?
Eric Corey Freed:
I think in an ideal world, I told myself a book a year kind of feels right even though it’s not sane. What I’ll do is, I’ll get a lot of ideas for books. I’ll also have a publisher to reach out and say, “Do you want to do this book?” My first reaction is always yes, and I have to stop myself and go, “wait a minute. Am I the person to write it? Again, I look at it through this lens of, “Is it going to get me to where I want to go? Where do I want to go? How would I leverage this to get there?” I find that the more egoless I can be about it, the better. It’s not what I want to write. There’s a voice in my head telling me, “Nobody gives a crap what you want to write.” That’s basically always in my head, it’s more what needs to be written. The Circular Economy book is a good example of that. The Circular Economy is a small community. I know all the experts in the community. They could all just as easily write this book, but I wanted to write it because this is more of the consulting that we wanted to do with clients. We were already talking to them about developing zero waste strategies and designing out waste. The book is a way to kind of build that credibility, but it’s not about what I want to write. What I want to write about circular economy may not necessarily. What I’d want to write about would be like, I don’t know, dogs and going on bike rides and stuff, but nobody wants to hear that. I have friends that do this all the time. They’ll call and say, “I have a great idea for a book that I want to write.” My first thing is, “Nobody gives a crap what you want to write. What needs to be written, and that’s the hardest piece, right, is to do that. What I’ll do is, and I imagine you do this with your clients, I’ll tell them, “You need to write up a book proposal, just mock up a book proposal and go through that process and ask yourself those hard questions about who are the competitors in this space, what books would share this shelf with this book? How is this book different than those? Why does this book need to be written now? Why are you the one to write it?” If you just go through those questions, it’ll give you so much clarity on this very question. But I probably didn’t answer your question. I think more to the point, I was talking to a friend of mine who’s also an architect, Dave is his name, and this is 10, 11 years ago. Dave had this idea, and he said, “Hey, you’ve written books. We should write a series of books for architects that are studying for their license exams.” I was like, “Oh, that sounds like a lot of work.” That was my first reaction. They’re very technical books. They’re very dry. He said, “Well, that’s the thing. You’re funny. We can write them and make them interesting. We can design them beautifully.” He had a vision and he sold me on the vision. Basically, the vision was what if we created the study guides that we wish we had when we were studying for our license exams? It was a very clear vision, and to this day, it’s still our vision. We put out this series of books and it took years to do them, but that’s where the, book a year, came from. At the time, there were seven licensing exams for architects, so we had to put out a series of seven books. They were very technical. We had to create the diagrams, but we did it as a self-publishing strategy rather than going to a publisher, because we knew the audience, we knew how to reach them. That became a whole other kind of discipline of, do we self-publish, or do we traditionally publish? How does that work? For us, self-publishing made sense, so we became a publishing company essentially, and for the last 10 years, we’ve been doing that, and it’s changed my life. I’ve gotten to talk to thousands of young people who’ve gotten their architects license and it’s been incredibly rewarding.
Rob Kosberg:
I love that. I love that. Talk to me a little bit about that from a financial perspective. We tell our clients, “Look, if this is about selling books, then getting a return on investment is going to be hard to do, because they’re writing us a check to get a result, a book, a book launched, book sales, that kind of thing. For us, it’s all about the questions that you asked that are pertinent and important. We ask questions besides those, “Where do you want to go with this book? How are you going to use it to really make an income, to get bigger checks, speaking engagements, media and PR, lead generation for your business?” Those are the kinds of things that we want our authors to think about when creating their book. What does all that look like from the perspective of serving this community of architects that are yet to take their test?
Eric Corey Freed:
It is very different. I speak at 50 events a year on sustainability. It’s a very clear, obvious, direct connection. My day-to-day job is working on giant sustainability plans for universities and hospitals. There’s a very clear direction. Then suddenly, here comes along, well, you’re going to write a series of seven books for young people who don’t have any money who are taking their licensing exams, hoping to have money, I guess, and having them pass. The financial model there is a little different. That I didn’t do for the speaking, but there were some interesting things that came out of it. Because we’re self-publishing, we are upending that traditional model. The traditional model is the book sells for $25. The publisher keeps 85%, you get 15%, and by the way, everyone, it’s 15% off of wholesale price. You’re not going to make money off the book. You make money off what the book brings you. That’s the real lesson. For me, one speaking gig makes it worth it, one consulting gig makes it worth it. That’s kind of the beauty of it. With the self-publishing, it’s a little different. We’re now keeping 100% of the profits, but we’re running it as a company, so the marketing and the PR and the website is all up to us. It’s a very different model, but a whole series of kind of skills and things that we needed to learn. I think because we’re both architects and we both have this mindset of coming from a place of we’re trying to help people, we’re not trying to get it perfect, so we don’t beat ourselves up too much. The first website we had for the books was awful and I hated it. Then it got better. Then the initial design we had for the books was okay, and then it got better. Then the content, we improve it every year and it just gets better. I think we take this very iterative approach, and we track and measure these things. We have direct book sales; we have of course coaching that comes out of that and that’s what we really leverage. We have consulting for firms because all these people work in architecture firms all over the country. That’s really been it. We still have other revenue streams to look at that we haven’t even touched yet, including in book advertising because it’s a very, very targeted audience, and then of course, curated content where let’s say we’re co-branding a webinar or something with a manufacturer who makes windows or something. There are all those revenue streams that we haven’t even gotten to yet. Again, we’re taking this very kind of incremental approach because at the end of the day, it was just, can we make a study guide that’s better than the ones that we had, the study guide that we wish we had. The revenue is substantial, that’s the best part, but it’s again, a lot of work.
Rob Kosberg:
Well, you obviously have more hours in your week than most people, because it sounds like you’ve got about four or five jobs.
Eric Corey Freed:
I think that’s, to your point, Rob, that’s the thing is that I’m getting this going. It’s not like I’m writing a book about brain surgery, and then acting as an architect of strip malls during the day, and then dreaming about sustainability at night. Everything that I do is tied to architecture and building and specifically green building, so I’m getting a lot of this. I’m working on those projects, consulting on it, writing about it, teaching about it, speaking about it, all the same thing. What I don’t get are the people that I’m going to give lectures about health, I’m going to write books about materials. You got to get this kind of synergy going.
Rob Kosberg:
You’re an inch wide and a mile deep in architecture and renewables, and that’s spectacular. I mean, what I really love, I love everything that you’ve done with your books. Thank you for all the examples, because if they don’t motivate people, I don’t know what will. Even what you’ve done with your test prep business in essence, test prep for architects, is brilliant because you’ve gone a mile deep on that. I mean, coaching, consulting, this is what I tell my clients. I’m like, “Look, you’re an expert on this space. There are other people that want to access your expertise. The people that can write you a big check are the people that are going to read this book and they’re going to say, ‘you know what, we have to get him or her into our firm,’ or ‘we have to get him or her into our lives, into our business, and we’re willing to write a big check for access.” The cool thing is you’re making an impact on thousands of architecture students, but then you have a much narrower end of the funnel. You have architecture firms and others that are writing you much bigger checks to get more proximity to you and your partner so you can help them to do what you’ve done in your own business. That is brilliant. I love that.
Eric Corey Freed:
It’s also strange because at the same time, I’m still doing a traditional publishing route with this latest book. The speaking, the consulting is the back end, but it’s very different. I mean, here’s the numbers, there are 14,000 people that take their architectural license exam every year. If I went to a traditional publisher and I said, we’re going to sell 14,000 copies of the book at best,” they would say, “Get out of my office.” In a sense, we had to self-publish. Here’s the thing. We’re capturing probably, I don’t know, 80% of that market, and they then tell their friends. The growth has been organic and consistent throughout the years. We’re leveraging it into the coaching and the consulting and firm-wide stuff. But at the same time, that half of my brain is in, “I’m a publisher,” and the other half is, “Oh yeah, I’m kind of remaining in this traditional publishing world and channels too.” It’s very strange and I have trouble keeping track myself sometimes.
Rob Kosberg:
Well, you do what you do, right? You’re creating content. You’re working in your business. You obviously love what you do. You love the impact that you’re making. All you’re doing, in one sense, is documenting that and creating an opportunity for other people to learn from it. I think it’s brilliant. You deserve all the rewards that you’re getting for it, because it is hard work. It’s not easy to write one book, let alone 12 books. I love what you’ve done. What’s next? Although, like you said, your wife’s like, “This is the last one.” It probably is until about three months from now, but you must have something in your mind as to what’s next.
Eric Corey Freed:
10 years ago, probably more than 10 years ago, I spoke at a conference with Dan Pink, who’s a great author. He’s a great guy. Very nice. We had coffee, and he won’t remember this at all, but it really had an impact on me. I said, “What have you learned? What’s become clear to you since starting this whole process?” Because I thought, I want to be where he is. He said, “I think about, as a mental exercise, what could sell eight million copies?” In the publishing world, eight million copies is kind of a magic number. That’s like Dale Carnegie tipping point, Gladwell type of numbers, Chicken Soup for the Soul type number. He basically said, “What could you write that could sell eight million copies?” Not what do you want to write, but what if there was a gun to your head and said, “Write a book that sells eight million copies,” what would it be? That sticks with me forever. Over the last 10 years, I’ve been haunted by this and working and working and working on it, and I’ve had four different generations of thought into what could I, little old me, what could I write that could possibly sell eight million copies? The truth is, I think everybody has something in them that could sell eight million copies if they just thought it through. It’s a beautiful mental exercise, and in doing that, certain avenues pop up that really remove the sense of ego and self from it in terms of what could have the greatest impact? What would have the greatest buzz? What would spread, biggest word of mouth? If you do this, the answer might surprise you.
Rob Kosberg:
Great way to end. Really enjoyed the conversation. Where can we send people to learn a little bit more about you, learn about your firm itself, get your books, etc?
Eric Corey Freed:
You can find me on social media, of course, but ericcoreyfreed.com is kind of my speaker and author website. There’s also circulareconomyfordummies.com, if you can type all those words out. It’s a lot. That will take you to the latest book. Then organic architect is also kind of a general place to just find my business practice and what I do with architecture.
Rob Kosberg:
Love it. Love it. Eric, thanks. Thanks for being on the podcast.
Eric Corey Freed:
Oh, my pleasure.
