MAKING A DIFFERENCE--AND MONEY, TOO
Kermit the Frog was wrong: it is easy being green. Steven M. Rothstein, MBA'84, founded an environmental consulting firm, Environmental Futures, on Earth Day 1990 and quickly built it into a profitable concern with an impressive list of clients. "I get enormous satisfaction out of working in a field where I can make a difference while at the same time making money," says Rothstein, now the company president.
Environmental Futures, headquartered in downtown Boston, focuses mostly on companies in the energy and electric utility industries, applying its management consulting and communications skills to help clients with their sales and marketing, financial planning, mergers and acquisitions, and regulatory compliance. Clients range from small firms to some of the largest electric utilities in the country. What they all share, Rothstein says, is the belief that a healthy bottom line can coexist with a healthy environment. Environmental Futures itself was profitable from its first year. Now with twenty-five employees, the privately held company grosses a few million in annual revenues, he says. Ten percent of profits goes to environmental causes.
Rothstein became convinced that altruism could pay well in 1979, when he cofounded (with thenprivate citizen Joseph P. Kennedy II) Citizens Energy Corporation, a nonprofit oil company that bought and sold heating oil and used the profits to lower the heating bills of the poor and elderly in Massachusetts. When Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1986, Rothstein headed for state government. At age thirty-one, he served as assistant commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Mental Retardation, supervising 10,600 employees and overseeing a $300 million operating budget. "I went to Governor [Michael] Dukakis and said I wanted the hardest HR [human resources] challenge he had," Rothstein says.
Now forty years old, Rothstein credits his Northeastern MBA as much as his state government experience with preparing him to run Environmental Futures. "I use what I learned in the classroom every day," he says. "I wouldn't be doing what I do now without it." He completed the night program in three years rather than the usual four. He took his first accounting course ever at N.U.-"it was very scary," he says-and now teaches accounting seminars to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency employees in Boston. Teaching greens about another kind of green; it comes naturally to a guy convinced that "doing good and doing well are not mutually exclusive."
