[ Image: Jim Fader | © Startup Daily]
I’ll start this post with a declaration.
Jim Fader is a personal friend of mine and has been since I emigrated to Australia just over 13 years ago.
This fact shouldn’t detract from what he’s striving to achieve however, which, I must confess, will be both inspiring and extraordinary when it comes to fruition. Which, knowing him as well as I do, I have no doubt it will.
Jim has been CEO of Ecoreps for just over 2 years now, during which time it’s fair to say he’s been on quite a personal and professional journey. He’s restructured the company, re-imagined the possibilities for it’s future and taken on just about every type of business challenge you can be faced with. It’s involved legal wrangles, investment challenges and technical barriers. It’s even seen him get involved with increasing the growth rates and yield of various crops for the agricultural sector with the biochar he produces as one of his by-products - but more about super-sized plants in another post I think!
All this has been in dogged pursuit of building one small part of a more mindful, interconnected and sustainable future. A future that more and more people need to start getting their hands dirty for.
Watching his stubborn refusal to let any obstacle prevent him from creating the business he wants to run has reminded me of many truths about the Cleantech revolution we are currently living through.
To outline just a few of them…
Firstly, it requires astounding levels of stubbornness, self-belief and plain old hard work to create the future. By its very nature innovation requires countless little solutions to be found before it is successful. And, more often than not, some pretty big solutions too.
Secondly, if we are to successfully transition away from our high-carbon economy, we’ll do it through the ingenuity and determination of people like Jim. People who are prepared to follow through on their convictions and do the hard yards to make a potential zero-carbon world a reality for all of us. People who also tend to risk a significant amount of capital on the way too.
Thirdly, despite the seemingly endless shenanigans around climate policy (in Australia in particular), ultimately the transition is going to be a technical and engineering based one. We actually need to build the new ways we want our world to be and we’ll need to do it despite our politicians’ lack of substantive progress on the policy front. They’ll catch up with the transition eventually.
And finally, we need to do all we can to make sure people like Jim succeed. Him and the hundreds of thousands of other Cleantech (R)evolutionaries we’re going to need in the decades of change ahead.
Ecoreps is an Australian-based Cleantech company with, amongst other things, a unique, virtually closed-loop waste to energy technology. They are in the final stages of successful commercialisation, but are always in need of additional investment, so please contact me if you want to invest in a tangible part of a cleaner, smarter world.
This post is the 1st in a planned (sporadic) series on some of the unsung heroes working to help us achieve 'One Planet Living'.
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