« Inspiring MLK Quote | Main | Big Impact from Seemingly Small Changes: How Multinationals Are Getting Started on the Sustainability Journey »
Interview with Xavier Helgesen, Co-Founder of Better World Books
Buying Books with Heart and Soul
Next time you’re buying a book online – you may be able to help people around the world learn to read.
Better World Books is an online bookstore that supports nonprofit organizations with literacy programs such as Room To Read and Books For Africa ($3.1 million contributed so far) by donating a percentage of its revenues. In the process, Better World Books has saved 8,170 tons of books (millions of books) from landfills.
Co-Founder Xavier Helgesen explains how a business started by college students has thrived in the online marketplace ($21 million in revenue in 2007) while staying true to its triple bottom line mission of creating positive social and environmental impact in addition to financial value.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- Why Better World Books targets the mainstream audience, not just the “green” consumer
- How to decide whether your mission-led venture should be a for-profit or nonprofit
- An innovative strategy for offering books on numerous e-commerce web sites at the same time
- How Better World Books overcomes the challenges of a rapidly growing business
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
AMIE VACCARO, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: This is Amie Vaccaro with Green Business Innovators. My guest today is Xavier Helgesen, co-founder of Better World Books. Glad you could be here, welcome.
XAVIER HELGESEN: Great to be here, Amie.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: I was looking through some of your marketing materials, and I see that you describe your business as a self-sustaining, triple bottom line company that creates social, economic and environmental value for its stakeholders. And as far as I am concerned that is kind of the ultimate company, and I would love to hear you kind of explain that and explain your business model in that context.
XAVIER HELGESEN: Well, we are a stakeholder driven company; we are part of B-corporation actually, which is the network of about a 130 companies where management is obliged, not just to the shareholders to maximize profit but to the stakeholders to create social, environmental and economic value. So we focus on our triple bottom lines.
Our social mission, in particular, is to channel the book buying power of all of us out there. People will buy about $20 billion worth of books in the US alone this year. And if we can channel just part of that money to funding literacy programs, we can make a huge dent in the fact that 1 out of 7 people in the world cannot read, 1 out of 7 adults, and not to mention the next generation coming up.
Environmentally, we are a company based upon reuse, so our fundamental idea is that if possible, a product should be reused through an effective mechanism. And the Internet is a great place to find new homes for old products, in our case, books. So we do sell new books but our business model is really based around collecting books that someone does not want and finding someone who does want them, using the profit generated through that to help fund literacy programs. And economically we are a for-profit company. We finished our past year with about $21 million in revenue, and we are still growing fast.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And so how did you decide to be a for-profit rather than a non-profit?
XAVIER HELGESEN: Ultimately, we wanted to be able to have our employees share ownership in the enterprise, and also we realized that we were always going to be 100% earned income, so we were never going to go out there and apply for grants or try to get people that donate money to us or hold big fundraisers. That was never our idea. We thought we need to sing for our supper, so the way we need to do that is by getting books and selling them and competing on a level playing field with anyone else out there who is selling books. So we, from the early days, decided that we were a company but we knew we were a different kind of company so it has been great that the B-corporation has come along and we have become a founding member of that, so that we can codify it a little more of what we are.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So give me a more of a sense of how the business operates and kind of big picture of what you do?
XAVIER HELGESEN: Absolutely. What we do is we organize book drives on college campuses and we work with libraries and communities to collect books. So the books that you try to sell back to your bookstore and they would not pay you anything for, maybe they would pay you a few dollars, we will work with a student group to collect those books and send them back to Indiana where our warehouse is. And we will inventory those books and we will also track them; we will track those books as to what cause they were benefiting.
So if it is a book for Africa Book Drive, we will track those books all the way through until the point that they are sold to a customer. And when they are sold to a customer, we then channel part of the sale price back to Books for Africa or whatever the organization was that we collected the books for in the first place. So in that way, the non-profits and libraries we work with; they are not just recipients of our good will, they are actually part of our supply chain. They are a critical piece in us getting quality used books that people will buy. And so because of that we are able to channel much higher amount of money to them than if we were just a normal bookstore that was giving away part of its profits or something like that.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And so will you tell me a little bit about these causes. Are there a whole bunch of causes that different book drives benefit, and what percentage of the money goes back to those causes?
XAVIER HELGESEN: That is a great question. So we have 5 major literacy partners, and by major literacy partners we basically mean we thoroughly vetted these organizations; we generally go visit them on-site. We work in very close partnership with them to run nationwide book drive campaigns on their behalf. And so those are Books for Africa, Room To Read, which funds girl’s scholarships in Vietnam and Cambodia among many other programs; Invisible Children, which is a movement that has over a half a million fans on Facebook, an incredible youth movement to end the war in Northern Uganda. World Fund, which works in Central and South America and the National Center For Family Literacy, which works here in the US in low income communities.
So there is those 5, then there is a whole bunch of libraries and smaller literacy groups that are funded primarily through our library discounts innovations program. So if a library has extra books, they buy a new book and take an old book off the shelf or someone gives them some books, we take those books on their behalf, sell them online; part of the money goes back to the library and then part goes to a literacy cause that they get to pick. The rates that they get paid depend on how much the programs cost us to run and how much the shipping costs because we do not charge the literacy programs or the libraries anything for the program so it averages about 7% of our revenue, so that is not 7% of our profit, that is actually 7% of our revenues go directly back to that.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So does that go to the causes including the libraries?
XAVIER HELGESEN: Yes. Exactly.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Okay. Great. And before I get too far into the meat of things, I am curious how this all started and where you had the idea for the benefits of Better World Books.
XAVIER HELGESEN: Absolutely. The concept started in 2002, the co-founder and I tried to sell books back to the bookstore after college and had not really gotten any money for them, so we took those books back and our friends had all left their textbooks as well, so we probably had a good hundred books and we decided to post them on the internet to see what would happen, and we could not believe that these books were just flying off the shelves. They were selling for $50, the same book that the college bookstore would not pay you a dollar for. So there was a big disconnect, clearly between the Internet market for textbooks and the physical buy back market for textbooks.
And we wondered if there was a way you could take advantage of that and the idea we came up with was that you could organize book drives for causes because we thought people would give their books if the cause was compelling and if we were transparent about how much of the money was shared back to the cause when we sold the books. So we ran a book drive at Notre Dame.
We got about 2,000 books and we spent the summer cataloguing them. We worked with a community center in South Bend that had some room in their back so that we were able to store the books, and then we sold them in the fall for about $20,000 and essentially split that money with the community center and we were off. So we figured well, that was one campus and there are about 4,000 colleges and universities in the US and that is even before you get to other markets so we figured that was a lot of room to expand.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So I saw also that before Better World Books you founded a company in college called Preview Studios?
XAVIER HELGESEN: Yes.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Want to give us just a quick little bit about that?
XAVIER HELGESEN: Sure; I like to say that we were Facebook long before Facebook was a good idea. So when they go in the annals of history before someone got it right and came up with Facebook, they will find our website, which was quite a thriving, a user generated content site in 1998, 1999 called MBToday.com. It is actually still up and running and it combined news with user generated content; teacher evaluations were probably the biggest killer app.
So people would evaluate the teachers on the system, and then everybody else could look at that, and when you were picking classes it was pretty invaluable to see what your peers thought of different teachers. So, we branched that out to also have sites at Yale and University of Michigan and Purdue, and then we were able to sell that company for a little bit of money after college.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So again, looking through some of the materials, it sounds like you guys have raised $4.5 million for your partners, donated more than 5,000 tons of books and created 200 full time jobs?
XAVIER HELGESEN: Yes.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: That is fantastic. I would love to hear a little more details around that and physically, how many books is 5,000 tons of books?
XAVIER HELGESEN: Oh boy, millions, millions. Everyday we take in about 30-40,000 books a day. These come from all over the country, in fact, come from Canada and now even the UK, so we just started a warehouse in the UK. We take in all these books and basically find buyers for as many as we can. The ones we cannot find buyers for we offer to our literacy partners so if it is a good textbook, it will be sent to Africa with Books For Africa. If it is a children’s book, it might be distributed in the US with National Center For Family Literacy.
And there are some books that we cannot sell and we cannot give away, and those we have to recycle. Those get turned into generally post consumer products made out of recycled paper.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And so how do you sell – I mean, I have sold on Amazon.com; is it like that, you list each one on your website?
XAVIER HELGESEN: Yes, it is a bit more automated than the way you probably do it.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: I hope so.
XAVIER HELGESEN: It is. It is all driven by barcodes and software and so we wrote all of our own software for the business and that has been a critical driver of our success. In addition to BetterWorld.com, which is our only commerce site, we sell books on about eighteen different marketplaces. The big ones you may know are Half.com and eBay and Amazon but then there is a number of book specific marketplaces, international marketplaces. Other partnerships we can do that will find more buyers for these books, so we have a very broad global business. We ship thousands of books a day internationally and that helps bring in a lot more customers for the books.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So if I were to donate a book, would it be listed on all 18 sites, as well as your own site?
XAVIER HELGESEN: It would. That is part of the software, it actually can list one book on all these different channels and so if it sells on BetterWorld.com then it is immediately taken off of Amazon so someone there does not buy it.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Yes, I would imagine that would be a lot faster.
XAVIER HELGESEN: Yes, and that allows again to have more customers looking at more of our books.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So I am curious in terms of your operations, I know a part of your kind of mission is environmental. How have you tried to keep your operations “green”?
XAVIER HELGESEN: We do a lot of little things and big things. We have a sustainability coordinator now. We were actually able to make a full time position for that and her name is Kelly, she is very deep Green. Among the things that Kelly has led up; we have actually created an employee garden so we have an organic garden going off the side of the warehouse in Indiana and people go garden on their lunch hour and then anybody who pitches in is welcome to share in the bounty.
We are about to start a shuttle program because a lot of our employees pretty much have to drive to work in Indiana. South Bend has very bad public transportation so unlike here in San Francisco where I think there is only one person in the office who even owns a car so everybody else either bikes or walks to work or takes the bus, that is not the case in Indiana, so we want to cut down on the number of single person, single vehicle trips, that have to be taken and also save our employees some money.
If we can pickup people in one van that holds 15 people, not only do they save money on gas and on car repair, but we have hopefully a happier workforce and a lot less environmental impact from our business. We unfortunately do not own our warehouse, which prevents us from doing some of the green retrofits that one would like to do. It is an old packaging plant so it was formerly a packaging plant that was just sitting there dormant so we revitalized it and we have created a lot of jobs, but there are definitely a lot of things that we would like to do with it that we would not be able to do until we (a) have some more capital to put in and (b) own the place.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So it sounds like all the books you collect in the US end up in Indiana. How about the transport of books; have you done any thinking around the impact of that?
XAVIER HELGESEN: We have done a lot of thinking around the impact of transporting books because there is dual benefits; we can reduce the carbon intensity of transporting books in. Generally, it means we also reduce our costs. UPS shipping a single box is going to cost a lot more than a full truckload and a full truckload costs more than a full railcar and each of those have decreasing carbon intensity.
So what we try to do we now have over 20 consolidation points around the country where we consolidate lots of small groups of books into larger groups of books that can be shipped at least in a truckload, and if you ship books in a truckload the environmental impact is a lot less. Now furthermore, if you can take that and you can put it on the rails that is even greater cost savings and even greater carbon savings because a freight train is actually a very efficient way to transport things. And the rail industry is growing dramatically with the increasing costs of oil.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So since you have installed these consolidation places, have you seen the cost of shipping decline?
XAVIER HELGESEN: Absolutely. Our 2 biggest costs in the business are inbound shipping and outbound shipping, so we pay a lot of attention to those. On our outbound shipping we work with local postal services rather than a UPS or a FedEx because there is a lot less intensity to it and a lower cost. If it is a postal worker walking door to door everyday as opposed to a UPS truck double parking outside the place and running in, dropping off a package and then driving to the next location.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Right.
XAVIER HELGESEN: So the great thing about local postal service is that they do have very low intensity and they allow us to provide cheap shipping to customers. So that is how we can ship for free on BetterWorld.com in the US and how we can ship for $4 anywhere in the world.
We consider that as kind of a combination of passing cost savings onto our customers and marketing. We feel like people do not want to pay, they do not want to get hit with a hidden shipping charge at the end of shopping. They want to look at things on the website and say okay that is what that costs. That book is $5, and that is all I am going to pay for it.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Yes, actually, I really like that; I saw that. So stepping back a little bit, as a business, something I am really interested in, the impact, the social-environmental impact; how do you know that you are having an impact and do you measure that?
XAVIER HELGESEN: It is a great question. I think most social enterprises wish they could do more distinct measurement than they do. A lot of what we rely upon is our partners, especially as far as making sure the funding goes to good work. We have to choose an organization like Room To Read really carefully because we know that they can take a small amount of resources and deploy them very effectively and to further their mission.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Do you hold them accountable for kind of results?
We also have a really interesting program where we have allocated stock options for our literacy partners and so they are actually going to begin starting this year to receive an equity stake in the company and that means that they have a bigger and bigger stake in our future so not only are they getting checks from us in the short term based on funds raised, but in the long term, they will actually own a part of the company and that is also based on impact; not only their impact in working with us but also their impact as a whole on literacy.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So in a typical business model there is sort of the addressable market and I think kind of parallel to that here is the addressable impact. What do you characterize as your addressable impact that you are trying to address?
XAVIER HELGESEN: Wow, good question. The addressable impact is massive, because not only when you have got 1/7 people in the world who are not literate and that is just your starting ground, and then you have huge areas of the world where there is not nearly the access to books or the access to education that you find in the US. And that, we have been so lucky to have growing up, so when you look at the amount of work that needs to be done, I mean, look at the 750 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, and what is the average access to books? Well, it is not great, it is not great. And Books For Africa has shipped 20 million books, which is astounding, but it is only a drop in the bucket.
Well, we have all the resources we need to address these issues. We have all the organizations and all the systems; basically, they need money. So what we think is that this is a market-based mechanism that we can get that money to them and just by people making a conscious choice, “Hey I am going to shop at BetterWorld.com rather than go to Barnes and Noble or rather than go to Amazon.” They know that they are part of that movement and if enough people do it, it is going to be a larger and larger and larger chunk of funding going to these programs, which is going to let them scale.
And when you look at addressable market, again there is that $20 billion being spent in the US on books every year, you go worldwide it is probably $50 billion or more and by channeling some of that, that is huge power far beyond what we could ever do just by asking people to give money to literacy. Literacy can be a very abstract thing. It can actually be somewhat hard to raise money around but it is the foundation of anything else; it is foundation of self-sufficiency, it is the foundation of entrepreneurship, it is the foundation of education, so that is why we focus on it and it makes a lot of sense too that a book company that would fund literacy.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So I am hearing that illiteracy is kind of a big piece of the impact that you are addressing or most of it, but I also notice that there is kind of intertwining environmental and social goals within Better World Books. Can you talk a little bit about how those two work together or do you feel like they are totally separate…?
XAVIER HELGESEN: That is a great question. Well, so much of what we can do to stop environment degradation is to educate people and for people to really understand why something might be a good idea in the short term but not a good idea in the long term. And so I do see a lot of it tied to it.
And I also see that in our business model that by reusing this product, books, we have the ability to kind of kill two birds with one stone there, that we can not only keep a book out of the landfill but we can also raise some money by doing so. So that may be a unique feature of our business model but it is something that was intentionally designed that way and so a lot of our business is intentionally designed to achieve these multiple benefits.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: I think that is great. I am curious whether you have been raising capital from outside sources, and also if you are doing so (I am assuming you are) what have you learned about the different kind of information that investors are looking for regarding kind of your impact?
XAVIER HELGESEN: It is a great question. It depends on the investor. We were very, very fortunate to have mission-aligned investors. Our first 5 years we did not take any investment. We were what is called “bootstrapped,” which basically just means the money you can raise or the money you can personally lend to the company. And we definitely got to a stage where we needed to either slow down our growth a lot or bring in some outside capital to keep it going, because the numbers just bigger and you could not just put things on your personal credit card anymore when you have a company this size.
So we had been talking to Good Capital for about a year before we actually closed an investment with them. But they are explicitly mission driven investing and so they are looking to prove that you can invest your money, see a big social impact and get it back with a return. So their first 2 investments are Better World Books and also a company called Adena, which is essentially selling a fair trade frappuccino if you will, so they are trying to be the first mainstream fair trade product and really hopefully we will see this at every convenience store in the country in 2 or 3 years which would be exciting to see a fair trade product get that far.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: How do you promote yourself and attract customers?
XAVIER HELGESEN: It is an ongoing struggle to get the word out. We are fortunate that our best promoters and marketers are our existing customers, and so we work very hard to make sure they are very satisfied. We take customer satisfaction surveys and we get about 100 of them a day, so those give us a real time monitor of are we making people really, really happy and we are fortunate because the vast majority of people say absolutely 10/10 I would recommend you to a friend, and a lot of people even tell us they already have, so that is a big part of giving the Better World message out.
When people understand that they can do something good for the world and not only will it not cost them more, it will actually probably save them money, that seems to be a really compelling combination and I do not feel like in tough economic times you can always ask people to spend double on the same product but we are not doing that; they are probably saving 80% on the cost of a book plus getting free shipping and used books are one of the used products that is actually considered by many people to be preferable to a new product, whereas you get a used car and you are wondering, “Hey! Do I have lemon? What is going on here?”
Used books - almost universally people say used books are great, they have a history to them. They still work just fine, I can still read the book, I can pass it on to someone else or I can send it back to Better World Books and someone else can get it.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So it sounds like you rely on word of mouth and kind of pleasing customers more than marketing dollars?
XAVIER HELGESEN: Yes, I think (a) we do not have the budget to do it anyway to run national TV campaigns or anything like that or (b) that kind of marketing it is not dead, it is dying. You can only beat people over the head so much when you have a– you know, as crowded of media environment as we have.
So it is a lot more authentic if your friend tells you about a product or service than if you just get marketed to and they are able to tell you a little more complete story because you never heard of Better World Books before, it might take you a few times before you realize, oh I see, okay it is an online bookstore that has everything you can find in any of those other bookstores but a huge added value for the society and the environment.
So, that is really who we are trying to reach. We love the 10% of the population that is deep Green or strongly Green that will proactively seek out products and services that fit their values - but we really want to reach the other 90%. And if all you care about is the cheap book, hey, we will probably be there for you too. Hopefully you think that it is great, that you get cheap books and then on top of that it is like icing on the cake that you have the social and environmental piece.
And I think you see the most successful social enterprises of green businesses targeting the whole population and not just ceding that other 90% and saying no, I am not going to worry about them because they do not get it, because it’s really not true.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Right.
XAVIER HELGESEN: They may not be as deeply educated about sustainability, but it does not mean they do not want to help people out.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And so do you find that having a social mission is attractive to your customers, and can you tell me just a little bit about who your customers are, how many they are …?
XAVIER HELGESEN: We have millions of customers; they are red states, they are blue states; they are from 180 countries around the world. One of our best customers is the middle of Malawi. He is the dean of a Catholic university in the middle of Malawi, and he orders tons of books from us for his school.
We have people who just love to read; just love paperbacks; they may pick up 10 books from us for $50, shipping included, and for them that lets them support their reading habit on a more affordable basis than if they were going to Barnes and Noble and trying to do it. We also have a good deal of students who come to us looking for cheap textbooks, and often we have a great deal for them and we have new books too. So, people who like our mission can and sometimes a book will be too new to really have many used copies out there. So, hey, no big deal; our new books are discounted too and you can pick them up just like anybody else would.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Will you tell me what have been some of the biggest challenges that you faced along the road?
XAVIER HELGESEN: Well, first of all, you have just growth and growth is – when you are growing at 100% a year or the more everything changes so quickly, it is just like you are trying to build the car as it is hurdling down the road at a 100 miles an hour, and you are still trying to bolt on the steering wheel. You do not have the whole engine built, but you are already moving and moving so quickly that if you do something wrong, it could just go careening off the road. And so we have really had to stay very focused on attracting great people and giving them a lot of responsibility and we have been lucky that as a company a lot of people are drawn to work for an enterprise like ours. And when we put a job out there and a lot of times we will get 50 applicants. So it has been great for us to be able to choose really the cream of the crop and make them part of the team and then let them take parts of the business and run with it.
Another challenge we had was we, like many businesses, needed to establish a line of credit because books take a long time to sell and so if you put all of the money in to ship books into your warehouse and you have 2 million books sitting there you have already pretty much paid a lot of money up front to have all of those books there. You need to finance that in some way and we really had to work hard to find a bank that was willing to loan against used books. Because no bank wants to be stuck with two million used books, and so we really had to build relationships there. We have a pretty good relationship that luckily has not been affected by this crazy credit crisis. We give a shout out to Bank of America for being a very good bank.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: What are current strategic focuses, and does it include expanding book sales; if so, how?
XAVIER HELGESEN: That is a great question. Our current strategy is really to grow the BetterWorld.com brand and to make it a household name. We would love for everyone to actively make a choice when they buy books online and say, “Hey, am I going to buy it from BetterWorld.com, or am I going to buy it from Amazon.com?” If we can get to that point, I am confident that a lot of people will chose Better World, and as we get to that scale, we can continue to make sure that we are a better deal as well as a better cause.
There is plenty of room built into the price of books even from a site like Amazon, which does discount. That we discount as well and still channel money to literacy. Also, we are rapidly expanding our book collection programs. With Invisible Children this fall, we launched a campaign in high schools all over the country. So any high school can launch what is called School For Schools with Invisible Children and the top book drives win a trip to northern Uganda – one person from that book drive will win a trip to Northern Uganda to visit it the Invisible Children Program and actually meet the kids. And this is driving a huge amount of energy, a huge amount of competition among these different schools, and so we have already seen a hundred and fifty book drives spring up in the past month since Invisible Children hit the road and started showing their fall movie.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Is there something you have learned from your customers along the way that has changed how you to operate?
XAVIER HELGESEN: Yes: Do not send them the wrong book! [laughter]. We have learned from our customers that they love us, but they are not willing to accept an inferior level of service and so we have worked very, very hard on putting the systems in place and having the right people in place so that people get their books very promptly, at least as promptly as we can with given the postal service. Once we hand it to the postal service it is kind of in their hands, but what we can do is get it in their hands as quickly as possible.
And we have also learned from our customers that we have to keep offering them a great value and we cannot just raise the prices on them without really having justification for it and without still giving them just a really good value. Because they have come to look for that from us. So if we do not meet that, then it is inconsistent with our brand, which is good value for a great cause.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Do you have a very loyal customer base would you say?
XAVIER HELGESEN: We do; we have some fanatics. If you go to our Facebook page we have about 4,500 friends or fans, as it were, and it is cool. We can do competitions with them; we just did one where if you put a picture of yourself next to your bookshelf, we will send you a free tee shirt if you put that up on Facebook.
So we have had a bunch of people do that and from all over the world; so it is pretty cool to see who these people are and most of them we have never met in person. It is just found us through the web and now they look to us a place to buy books.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Do you think, are a lot of these loyal fans there because of your mission or because of your service?
XAVIER HELGESEN: I think it has to be a combination. I mean, as much you might love what we do if you do not buy books online, you are probably just not going to be that huge of a fan or an evangelist.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Right.
XAVIER HELGESEN: So, you have to be someone who loves books and we looked at Amazon a little bit, like it is becoming the Wal-Mart of the Internet. It would just assume to tell you a flat screen TV and a blender as it would a book, and we are not really like that. We are really focused on books and being a great book store and trying to invoke some of the things you love about your independent used book store with the advantages of on-line which is low cost, ease of shopping and huge selection.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So what keeps you up at night?
XAVIER HELGESEN: Well, the economy could be better.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Yes. I guess it could.
XAVIER HELGESEN: So we are concerned as to whether people will really rein back in their spending, and if they do, how that will affect us and I am hoping people might see the wisdom in not gassing up the SUV and driving 20 miles to a Barnes and Noble from the suburbs and instead shopping on-line, and so that would save them money. As more people shift from new to used; again, that would be in our favor and so that could help us make it through a recession stronger than ever. And it could even limit what some of the competitors who are more expensive and who are more brick and mortar base can do.
Borders Books is already in a lot of trouble because really they have a tough business model. They have a huge retail space they have to keep up. The books are expensive. They are way more expensive than you would buy them for on-line and people have to drive to get there and so all of those are working against them. And it is always a challenge; we are still trying to figure out how to get the word out about Better World Books in new and creative ways and to get it out to a really large audience because that is what necessary to drive traffic to the site. These days we have thousands of people coming to the web site everyday and so we are definitely doing something right, but there is so many more people who would buy from us if they just knew about the mission and knew about the value, so I am just going to have to keep communicating that as much as we can.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And what is your favorite part of the job?
XAVIER HELGESEN: Ooh, favorite part… visiting the literacy programs. I have gotten the privilege to take 2 trips to Africa; so I got to go to Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia; just came back from Brazil in August. So I got to visit some amazing programs in Brazil and that has really been the joy of the project because that is when you actually see the result of all of this work. It can seem very distant and removed when you are worrying about marketing strategies and you are not actually with literacy programs. So when you actually get back to it and you see that you are making a real impact it is definitely exciting.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And lastly; where do you see yourself in Better World Books in the next couple of years and then, even longer term?
XAVIER HELGESEN: Well, I see myself as continuing to play whatever role is best suited for me in the company. I used to be a lot more heavily involved in our technology but as we have gotten great technology people in the door, I have been able to step back from that and let people who are much better at that job take it over. I am a bit of a generalist anyway so I know a little bit about a lot of things and I know just enough to know to that other people know a lot more about these things and are a lot better at them than I am.
So my job really is to just make sure that we stay innovative and we stay fresh and we come up with good ideas. So we take advantage of new technologies quickly. I think one good example is Facebook, which one of colleagues in the office, Jack Hamlin, has been very active on. We have had almost as many as fans on Facebook as Amazon does because they do not care and we do. And our Facebook page is certainly a lot more fun theirs. So we can continue to try to do stuff like that to make sure that our personality shines through. We also have a really funny order confirmation email if you ever order from us. So we try to make people laugh a little bit.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Okay, well thank you so much.
XAVIER HELGESEN: Yes, absolutely.
XAVIER HELGESEN: We do, we do. And that is, not only in terms of what programs we push, because we go out and we actively market these book drive programs, and so if a non-profit is more effective and it is doing a better job, they will see more money come in from us because we will be able to push the programs better and students will be more receptive to them.
February 16th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
[...] Listen to full interview and/or read the transcript at Green Business Innovators. [...]
February 23rd, 2009 at 6:08 pm
[...] Listen to the full interview on Green Business Innovators. [...]
March 23rd, 2009 at 3:14 pm
[...] Listen to the full interview on Green Business Innovators. [...]
June 14th, 2009 at 11:38 am
[...] principales del trabajo de Xavier y el resto del equipo, tal como afirma en una entrevista para Green Business Innovators. La gente en EE.UU. gastará 20 billones de dólares en libros en 2009. Si podemos canalizar una [...]