April 9, 1998 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Tom Soto didn’t mind spending his early 20s as a penniless environmental activist.
The charismatic leader was president of the Coalition for Clean Air in California, a board member of the California League of Conservation Voters, and board secretary of the Mono Lake Committee, which he helped organize to preserve the California lake.
For his work, Mr. Soto estimates that he earned on average $25,000 a year. “You can’t live in L.A. on $25,000 a year,” he says.
In 1989, at the age of 25, he was ready for a new job, but rather than send his resume off to other non-profit environmental groups. Mr. Soto decided to create a job for himself and try to become a successful, well-paid businessman.
In 1989, Mr. Soto started PS Enterprise, a for-profit public-relations firm that has offices in Santa Monica and San Francisco.
PS Enterprises — the “P.S.” are the initials of Mr. Soto’s father — provides public-relations assistance, with a specialty in environmental issues, to businesses and government agencies that are trying to comply with new environmental laws. Organizations hire Mr. Soto’s firm to figure out how they can best abide by new regulations and then inform the public about their efforts to protect the environment.
For example, in 1994 American Airlines hired PS Enterprises to help it comply with the federal Clean Air Act. Mr. Soto helped American find ways to reduce its emissions, such as switching to baggage-delivery cars that run on alternative fuels, and then helped them publicize their progress.
For the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works, the firm developed a public-information campaign to help the county get the word out to businesses, industrial sites, and people that they needed to take steps to increase recycling and reduce garbage. The county faced tough new state limits on the amount of its overall waste, and it needed to act swiftly.
Among other things, PS Enterprises helped the agency come up with a catchy name for its project — “Generation Earth” — and develop brochures with lively graphics and suggestions for how people and businesses could reduce waste. The brochure, and a World-Wide Web site it advertised, encouraged people to think about what items they needed to buy and what things they could re-use or do without to reduce consumption of products that are created in ways that damage the environment.
PS Enterprises, which has 20 employees, earned about $2.5-million last year. As president, Mr. Soto has been unabashedly enjoying a comfortable way of life.
“I have a nice half-million-dollar home in Santa Monica Canyon, right off the beach,” he says. “I live in a good neighborhood. Tony Curtis and Meg Ryan are my neighbors. I’m extremely happy. I enjoy my life and dig it.”
But he says he would not be happy with the high life if he was not also making a difference for the environment or other people.
“Activism is in my blood,” he says. “In high school, I fought for equal funding at our public school, where we had no air conditioning. I organized boycotts of classes.”
By helping big businesses comply with federal and state environmental regulations, he believes that he is fulfilling his activist side. In fact, he says, he is making more of a difference than he did in the charity world.
“I’m much more effective as an entrepreneur and businessman in advocating environmental ethics and social responsibility than I would be as a head of a non-profit,” he says.
He adds, “But when you look at a business like mine and a non-profit, they have the same core values.”
