Better Business Challenge: Midtown Music
Our team selected to work with Mid-Town Music (MTM), a newly opened small business located at 300 West Main Street, Charlottesville, VA. MTM sells, repairs, and diagnoses both new and vintage instruments of all kinds. The sustainability issues the business faced revolved primarily around transportation, energy, and leadership. Categories within the Better Business Challenge criteria that if worked on granted the owner, Mr. Coleman, an opportunity to earn points via the challenge’s scorecard. Our teams proposed solutions incorporated switching out Mr. Coleman’s incandescent light bulbs in the store with more sustainable LED ones and rearranging his instrument display to benefit from natural light. MTM’s transportation issue was tackled by advertising alternative parking near or the store and implementing a non-idling policy for deliveries. Lastly, we attempted to advocate leadership roles, by speaking to staff members about their levels of sustainability beginning at home.
Better Business Challenge, Midtown Music, sustainable business, transportation, energy, Mark Jacobs and Becky Fonichas
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Better Business Challenge: Midtown Music

MidtownMusic (click PDF)

Fall 2011

Team members: Mark Jacobs and Becky Fonichas

During September in 2011, our Global Sustainability team was introduced to the Better World Betty (BWB) Better Business Challenge. The challenge is a community based initiative geared to assist and promote sustainability among local Charlottesville businesses. Our role as students was to serve as concierges (consultants) to provide assistance to one of the participating business partners by helping with research and innovative solutions they could help steer their businesses towards their sustainability goals.

Our team selected to work with Mid-Town Music (MTM), a newly opened small business located at 300 West Main Street, Charlottesville, VA. MTM sells, repairs, and diagnoses both new and vintage instruments of all kinds. The sustainability issues the business faced revolved primarily around transportation, energy, and leadership. Categories within the Better Business Challenge criteria that if worked on granted the owner, Mr. Coleman, an opportunity to earn points via the challenge’s scorecard. Our teams proposed solutions incorporated switching out Mr. Coleman’s incandescent light bulbs in the store with more sustainable LED ones and rearranging his instrument display to benefit from natural light. MTM’s transportation issue was tackled by advertising alternative parking near or the store and implementing a non-idling policy for deliveries. Lastly, we attempted to advocate leadership roles, by speaking to staff members about their levels of sustainability beginning at home.

The relationship with MTM’s owner and the implementation of our proposed solutions began extremely well. We managed to make immediate progress in the leadership category. However, soon after we were introduced to the harsh realities of working with a newly opened sole proprietorship on a project of this nature. Mr. Coleman quickly became overwhelmed with other business issues which in turn made it almost impossible for us to coordinate and continue with our initial plans. Overall, the project was a valuable learning experience; one that we hope adds value to the BWB organization on its future projects.

midtown music