Q: I am a self-employed independent contractor who works in various locations. I am concerned about the environment and try to do the right thing: I ride my bike or take BART to job sites whenever possible; I print on both sides of sheets of paper and then recycle the twice-used paper; and I handle most paperwork such as bills through e-mail rather than snail mail. Are there other things that small-business owners like me can do to be green?

Berkeley businesswoman

A: Your question is an opportunity for me to share a bit of bad news and good news. The bad news is that at the end of this month, we’ll be discontinuing this column. The good news is that, instead, I’ll be writing news and features about business and the environment - something that is on the minds of many Bay Area residents like you.

I look forward to suggestions from Chronicle readers for stories on my new beat - whatever you’d like to read about in the areas of “green” business or how business interacts with the environment. Please e-mail me your ideas at idebare@sfchronicle.com.

Meanwhile, I’m still here answering questions. So let’s find you some answers.

When it comes to the environment, big corporations have the money to hire consultants, appoint chief sustainability officers and renovate entire buildings for energy efficiency. Small businesses like yours typically don’t have that luxury.

“Small firms tend not to own their space, so they can’t retrofit the lights or insulate or put solar panels on the roof,” said Joel Makower, executive editor of GreenBiz.com, an Oakland Web publisher focused on the environment and business. “And unlike bigger companies that can set up entire departments to handle this, it’s usually somebody on staff with other responsibilities who is kind of moonlighting as ‘the greenie.’ ”

We’re fortunate, though, to live in a region with a lot of free resources on this topic for small businesses. Every Bay Area county has a green business program that can give you a checklist of steps to decrease your company’s impact on the environment - and will certify you as a green business if you take enough of those steps.

About 1,100 businesses - from auto repair shops and restaurants to solo consultants - have achieved that certification so far.

Check out «www.greenbiz.ca.gov» to find the county program serving your area. That site, a project of the Association of Bay Area Governments, also includes checklists of environmental steps for specific industries such as hotels, landscapers and remodelers.

For businesses in Alameda County, go to links.sfgate.com/ZBVI for tips on buying greener office supplies and recycling waste material. In San Francisco, go to links.sfgate.com/ZBVJ for more than 100 ideas for office and retail businesses. Some examples:

– Decrease paper waste by using two-sided copying and keeping a stack of used paper by the printer for rough drafts. Reduce the size of printed documents so that, for instance, two pages of typing can fit on one page of paper.

– Design marketing materials that don’t require an envelope and can simply be folded and mailed.

– For shipping, use shredded paper rather than Styrofoam pellets or bubble wrap.

– Factor the environment into your purchasing of office supplies. Choose Energy Star appliances and electronics, paper with 35 to 100 percent post-consumer recycled content, recycled toner cartridges, rechargeable batteries and lower-energy lightbulbs such as compact fluorescents. Look for vendors that are certified green businesses.

– If you’re a business with employees, provide environmental incentives such as transit passes or lockers so it’s easier for them to bike to work. Offer opportunities for telecommuting.

– Cut your energy use. Local utilities such as PG&E often provide free advice to businesses on energy efficiency. You may even be eligible for rebates or financial help. See «www.sfenergywatch.org» in San Francisco, «www.smartlights.org» in the East Bay or «www.sbeaonline.com» in the North Bay.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to greening your business. Keep in mind that many of these changes can benefit not just your conscience but your bottom line - by making your business more efficient and by giving customers one more reason to choose your firm.

Want more info? GreenBiz.com offers an overview of environmental measures for small business at links.sfgate.com/ZBVK.

“The most important thing that companies of any size can do is understand their individual impact on the environment,” Makower said. “Sometimes it’s as simple as looking at your checkbook. What are your biggest costs - energy? paper? Then focus on making improvements in that area.”

Q: Two years ago I helped a friend set up a bicycle shop. We set it up as an S corporation, with the two of us as the only shareholders. The long-term plan is for him to buy out my shares someday. When we reach that point, how should we determine the value of the company? Are there rules of thumb based on a multiplier of sales or profits or some other financial indicator?

San Francisco cyclist

A: The business brokerage industry does have standard formulas for valuing most kinds of companies. The Business Reference Guide - an annual publication by Tom West, available at «www.businessbookpress.com» - provides such formulas or “rules of thumb” for more than 550 different kinds of businesses.

Bike shops on average are valued at 20 percent of annual sales plus inventory, or 1.5 times available cash flow plus inventory, according to the 2007 edition of the guide.

But - and this is a very big “but” - such formulas are only a very gross generalization. They may not apply to your particular shop.

“The problem with rules of thumb is that they are generic or average, and nobody is average,” said Russell Brown, publisher of the Business Reference Guide. “I’m not a big fan of them even though I compile this book on rules of thumb.”

The actual value of any business depends on specifics that may not easily boil down into a simple multiplier: How long has it been in operation? Does it have name recognition and a loyal customer base? How profitable is it, once you account for all the free labor that the owner may have been putting in? Does it have skilled workers who will stick around if the business is sold? If it’s a retail store, is it in a prime location with lots of pedestrian traffic?

In the case of a bike shop, the value also depends on whether the shop does repairs along with sales. And it depends on the kind of bikes sold by the shop. Does it have a unique niche or is it competing with Target and Wal-Mart?

“The thing that hangs over any retail business is that the barriers to entry are often quite low,” said Brown. “Almost anybody with some knowledge of bikes and repairs can open a shop. So if I were doing an appraisal, I’d ask whether they were selling high-end bikes or bikes that could be bought anywhere.”

When you’re closer to exiting this business, you and your friend should obtain an independent analysis of its value. One approach is to hire an appraiser, business broker or accountant with business valuation experience. You can find such folks through the National Association of Certified Valuation Analysts at «www.nacva.com» or the Institute of Business Appraisers at «www.go-iba.org».

There are also do-it-yourself software programs for business valuation, including one called BizPricer produced by Brown’s firm.

The two of you should agree in advance to abide by the valuation - because it’s likely that one of you may be disappointed by what it says.

“Every seller probably values the business at twice what it’s worth, since we all want more money,” Brown said. “I’ve had guys come to me who are at each other’s throats or in lawsuits over what constitutes the value of the business. There can also be fights over what’s in and what’s out. Say the company car is a Mercedes: Is it part of the business or does it belong to the partner who’s been using it?”

I suspect that, as a bike shop, you don’t have a company Mercedes. But the point is the same. No matter how valuable this shop is, it’s not worth ruining your friendship.

Want to learn more about business valuation? BizBuySell.com, which lists businesses for sale, offers tips on valuation at links.sfgate.com/ZBVL. Or see links.sfgate.com/ZBVM.

E-mail Ilana DeBare at idebare@sfchronicle.com.

Over the past few weeks, two major Wall Street firms announced huge losses and in a matter of days, their CEOs were shown the door.

General Motors («www.businessweek.com») announced an even larger net loss of almost $40 billion on Nov. 7, but don’t expect «investing.businessweek.com» to follow Merrill Lynch’s («www.businessweek.com») Stanley O’Neal and Citigroup’s («www.businessweek.com») Charles Prince on the next private jet out of town just yet.

Wagoner, who for several years has been attempting to turn around GM, has had some notable successes in 2007. He was able to off-load billions of dollars in liabilities to an independent retiree health-care trust as part of the new contract with the United Auto Workers. He introduced popular new models such as the «www.businessweek.com» (BusinessWeek.com, 8/24/07) and «www.businessweek.com» (BusinessWeek.com, 10/4/06), and he stemmed market share declines over the last few months. But given such dismal earnings news and the fact that both Prince and O’Neal were so quickly bounced, it’s remarkable how muted the initial reaction was to Wagoner’s latest announcement. Accrued Loyalty

“While we continue to advise taking any profits in the shares, I think the truth is that [GM] management is doing their best to play the hand they’ve been dealt,” said Peter Nesvold, auto industry analyst for Bear, Stearns («www.businessweek.com») in New York.

Wagoner is fortunate in that he commands the loyalty of many of his employees as well as that of his board of directors. Remember, it was only last year that he successfully beat back billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian’s proxy fight to force a link-up with «investing.businessweek.com» and Renault-Nissan («www.businessweek.com»).

The biggest part of GM’s nearly $40 billion loss came from writing off the value of $38.6 billion worth of deferred tax assets. Year-to-date after nine months, GM suffered a net loss of $38 billion, vs. a net loss of $2.9 billion in the year-ago period. The company also had a less spectacular, but still disappointing, loss of $1.6 billion from third-quarter continuing operations. That compares with a year-ago quarterly profit of about $500 million. A Gamble Gone Wrong

Through October, GM’s U.S. sales were down 5.7%, to about 3.2 million units, even though its U.S. market share improved over the year-ago month for the fourth month in a row. “While we’re pleased with our [market] share performance during recent months, the economic pace and the market are certainly below our expectations, and certainly something we need to be cognizant of,” said «investing.businessweek.com», GM vice-chairman and chief financial officer.

The nearly $39 billion in deferred tax assets was meant to serve as losses for tax purposes, to be used to offset profits that GM now says are unlikely to materialize. In short: GM bet wrong. Without the expected profits, the stockpiled deferred tax assets were worthless. If GM’s profit picture turns around, some of the deferred tax assets could be brought back into play.

In addition to the automotive losses, the subprime mortgage meltdown hurt GM’s minority stake in «investing.businessweek.com» worse than GM expected, Henderson said. GM’s 49% share of GMAC represented a net loss of $757 million for the quarter vs. a profit of $522 million a year earlier.

The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries
edited by Alastair Campbell and Richard Stott
794pp, Hutchinson, 25

When years ago Richard Eyre showed me the manuscript of his painfully unedited diaries and asked me my opinion on whether he should publish them, I advised him vainly against. Richard was rightly admired as one of the strongest theatrical producers this country had ever known. Under his leadership the National Theatre had experienced a glorious period of vitality during which one actor, director and playwright after another had done their best work. Why on earth would he now wish to inform the world that his genuine distinction had been achieved against a relentless background of depression and self-questioning?

Well, now Tony Blair’s consigliere, Alastair Campbell, has stepped forward, after editing down more than two million words into a still-formidable volume, to tell us that in all those years when the author was firing off abusive letters to television stations, tearing a strip off inadequate journalists and threatening elected members of the Labour party with the termination of their halting careers, he was secretly suffering agonies of self-doubt, wondering whether the price he and his family were paying was far too high, and despairing daily of how he might ever again lead what he calls a normal life. At a Celia Johnson-ish moment in their second election campaign, he and Tony Blair stop in a Dorset cafй by the sea. “Don’t you sometimes wish,” says Blair, apparently scripted by Noлl Coward, “we had a normal life like the people who live over there?”

It’s hard, of course, to keep an altogether straight face while reading such an apologia, and anyone who has ever bumped into the man whom Charles Moore memorably described as “the most pointlessly combative person in human history” is going to pick this book up with an outsize pair of tongs, wondering at exactly what level of honesty it is meant to be operating. Campbell does self-doubt in the same way that Nixon did repentance and Clinton contrition. Campbell himself has damaged his own claims to authenticity by admitting to excising from publication anything that might either advance the cause of the Conservative party or damage the standing of the new prime minister. The account of the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq is so gappy as to be historically valueless. So it’s bewildering to account for how the remaining scraps, which essentially detail the minutiae of life inside what the diarist calls “Peyton fucking Place”, manage to be unrevealing and fascinating at the same time.

Campbell’s official job from 1994 to 2003 was to manage the press, even though in his own estimate he became a rather more important figure: “When it came to taking the strain and pressure, I was second in line.” One of the formative misfortunes of his life had been to watch his great friend Neil Kinnock brought low by people who were, to put it mildly, far less intelligent, far less inspiring and far less articulate than Kinnock. So by the time Tony Blair appointed Campbell, first in opposition, then in office, he had already formed a rebarbatively negative view of what he called “the babble industry”. The paradox was that the new Labour government, supposedly expert in communication, had a press secretary who thought of dealing with the press as “swimming in shit”.

You could fairly say of Campbell’s period of tenure that it only accelerated a dance of death between media and government that had been going on in Britain since Suez. And yet the attitudes that dance has fostered - pathological arrogance on the part of the press, neurotic secretiveness from government - have done little to advance the democratic process. The Blair Years is essentially the account of an administration that, imagining it could control the domestic agenda, found instead that events from abroad could overwhelm it. The virtues of pride, aggression and solidarity forged in the heat of New Labour’s difficult evolution proved pitifully inadequate to contain a neoconservative ally far more ruthless than itself. Facing the challenging question of how the west - and more importantly, the world - should deal with the murderous regime in Iraq, it was no longer enough to be on-message. Sadly for the lives of so many, it turns out you had to be right as well.

Flaubert warned us that by dint of railing at idiots, one risks becoming idiotic oneself. But Campbell has never been shy of taking that risk. Throughout the book he employs the same manly phrases to praise the few people he likes: Glenn Hoddle is “a decent bloke”, Prince Charles “a fairly decent bloke”, Robert Janvin, the Queen’s secretary, “a thoroughly decent bloke”. Geoff Hoon is not only “pretty much a total Blairite” but also “a decent bloke”. The MP Bruce Grocott is “always so supportive of me,” and, by chance, “such a lovely bloke”. But most people Campbell meets come in for some pretty vigorous towel-snapping. Mo Mowlam is “unbelievably up herself”. Martin Sixsmith is “a twat”. Adam Boulton is at one moment “total scum”, then later born again as “a total cunt”. Clare Short turns his stomach. Worse, she cannot “recalibrate to circumstances”. Bernard Ingham is “a silly old fucker”, Roy Hattersley “a fat pompous bugger”, Matthew Parris “a little shit”, Simon Jenkins “a total wanker”, while George Robertson has “a real problem on the blather front”.

Plainly, nobody ever had a payday gambling on Campbell’s goodwill. He bursts forth like the classic dry drunk - the person who has transferred his anger with himself into a reflex generalised anger against others, most of whom insist on sporting clothes he dislikes, expressions he loathes and views he detests. The Thersites of Downing Street, Campbell offers bags of self-love - he tells us, straight-faced, that Diana, Princess of Wales, fancied him rotten - implicitly bags of self-loathing, but at no time self-examination. He is full of contempt for people who have no integrity; but about those who do have integrity, he is ambivalent at best. He calls Robin Cook, an unambiguous Labour hero of the Iraq venture, “creepy”.

Most of what Campbell writes serves only to confirm what you already know. His opinions are largely as a parodist would imagine them to be. No student of clichй will be surprised to learn that George Bush is “much wittier than people would imagine”, “far more impressive close up” and “has far more charm and nous than the caricature”. In spite of a couple of properly written later passages where he does finally dig deep - the most vivid recounting a Christmas lunch and shopping trip on which he and Peter Mandelson face the eerie likelihood that they will spend their whole lives inextricably bound together - the ex-journalist has almost no psychological curiosity. He has few anecdotes that cast unexpected light on well-known leaders. Tony Blair reading the Mail stark naked is about as counter-intuitive as things get. And yet for some reason - perhaps because the narrative itself is so strong, perhaps because the circumstances of New Labour’s descent into foreign policy catastrophe are so shocking - you still find yourself completely gripped by the relentless, rhythmic retelling of this terrible story.

The cruelty of politics, said Alan Clark, is its attraction. There will be those who believe that Campbell alone has the courage and honesty to let out feelings that less brazen public figures repress. But for this reader, at least, there is a bias to his judgments which is ultimately ugly. A bad man like Dick Cheney (”He was not one to speak too much for the sake of it”) escapes Campbell’s scorn, while far less sinister souls attract it. By the end of the book, you can’t help noticing, it is always the powerful who are admired; the powerless despised.

David Hare’s collection of lectures, Obedience, Struggle and Revolt, is published by Faber. His new play, The Vertical Hour, will be seen in London next year