Learning from BIG mistakes
April 4th, 2011
It was 1986. I just had to scratch the entrepreneurial itch again. I had helped start a parent-cooperative elementary school, The Schoolhouse, ten years earlier, and wanted to start something in my ‘new’ field, energy conservation / energy management, which I entered back in ’79 after six years as an educator. Bernie Sanders 
had been elected Mayor of Burlington by a 10 vote margin five years earlier and Burlington was just beginning to be a hotbed for progressive politics, food and business, my real passions.
I answered an ad in the Burlington Free Press titled “Wanted: General Manager/Entrepreneur” to start-up and head-up an employee-owned and managed energy services company, that was to be the for-profit part of Vermont Energy Investment Corp’s (VEIC) double business plan.
Talk about a tough job load! Yes, I know how hard many of our CEO’s have it, especially the women CEO’s and executives who not only have to juggle the demands of employees, customers, their Board, the Street and whatever current key stakeholder has their hooks into them at any given moment. But for a minute consider Moses… when God handed him the Ten Commandments and told him he had to both lead his people out of servitude, into the desert AND institute an whole new set of policies and procedures.