Top executives of Sterling Financial Corp., which is back from the brink after completing one of the largest recapitalization plans ever for a Northwest bank, begin this week to put in place the strategy that will grow what in essence is a whole new bank. They’re not out to restore the bank that was, but to build a new Sterling.

Ever since the October day when Sterling CEO J. Gregory (Greg) Seibly was thrust into the top role as the Fed issued a cease and desist order and forced the board to oust Chairman Harold Gilky and CEO Heidi Stanley, he has operated under the burden of control by the Fed and the relentless demand for recapitalization.

Completion of a $730 million recap effort last week that included investments from Warburg Pincus LLC and Thomas Lee Partners for a $342 million combined stake and about 45 percent ownership lifted the cloud and assured an independent future for Sterling Financial, parent of Sterling Savings Bank.

In addition, a group of about 30 investors committed $388 million, including about $100 million from international investors. And the U.S. Treasury has a 9.3 percent stake in the form of common stock.

Throughout 2010, the assumption of many was that being acquired was the only future for Sterling, which had grown from its launch in Spokane in 1983 into a multi-state bank with 178 branches before it was hammered by the housing downturn and a portfolio filled with mortgage loans. It had $1.8 billion of construction loans on its books.

Now it’s likely that Sterling, with $9.7 billion in assets and with a five-state footprint, will become an acquirer, picking from the array of troubled banks that remain in Washington State and beyond.

Seibly and new chairman Les Biller, along with a reconstituted board, can now pursue what all agree will be an agenda of first restoring profitability, then seeking to expand, with Biller emphasizing: “But we’ll do growth in a sane and smart way, focusing only on deals that make sense.”

Seibly, when asked about Sterling’s future growth, said “the goal is to stay in states we are in (Idaho, Montana, California and Oregon, in addition to Washington).” But he suggested he sees particular opportunities for growth in the Puget Sound Area, Portland and the Bay Area.

An unusual professional relationship will mark the joint effort of Seibly and Biller, who presides over his first board meeting this week, to restore health and pursue growth. They’re supported by an executive team that includes Chief Operating Officer Ezra Eckhardt and a new board Seibly describes as “possibly without peer among $10 billion banks.”

Biller was vice chairman of Wells Fargo from the  mid-90s through 2002 as Seibly, then in his early 30s, moved quickly up the executive ladder to become executive vice president and division manager for Los Angeles/Nevada commercial banking.

They then went in different directions as Biller retired in 2002 at the age of 54 and Seibly, who is now 47, moved on to U.S. Bank, eventually arriving at Sterling in 2007.

It was a serendipitous series of events that reunited the two, starting with an invitation from Biller, part-time transplant to Seattle, for Seibly to visit at Les and Sheri Biller’s new Seattle home early this year to “get reconnected.”

As Biller recalled when the chairman announcement was first made in June: “After we started talking, I got more interested in Sterling and they in me.”  That eventually led to Biller agreeing to take the chairman’s job, subject to Fed approval. That approval came with completion of the recapitalization.

Seibly credits Biller’s decision to return to the banking world as Sterling chair as one of the key reasons the bank was able to put together the $730 million recapitalization, with investors impressed with the credentials Biller brought to the bank.

Both suggest the coach and mentor role that Biller played at Wells will continue at Sterling.

“He will be both coach and mentor,” Seibly said. “He has a great wealth of knowledge and a key contribution will be to get his prospective on what we do strategically.”

Asked about the negative image banks are facing amid accusations of credit unavailability, Seibly said: “A couple of years ago, it was the best of times in terms and price. What we’re seeing now is people can’t get credit on the terms and prices they like.

“Credit is available, it’s just more costly, and with tighter constraints than borrowers were used to,” he added.

“Banks are looking to make quality loans,” Biller said, addressing the same question. “But the days of easy money and cheap pricing are gone. The pendulum definitely had swung too far in terms of easy money and price. Now it may be swinging a little too far the other way.”

But to emphasize that the initial focus will be on a return to profitability, Biller said: “I want to stress that we’re not going to be pushing the peddle to the metal on growth until we’re profitable.”

David Allen, executive vice president of McKinstry, a Seattle company that has arguably become the nation’s most visible energy-services firm, says conservation needs to be seen by lawmakers and policymakers as equally important to innovation in reducing the nation’s carbon footprint.

The thing that concerns Allen is that “all the good things coming, like large-scale wind and solar energy, electric cars and all the benefits they’ll deliver won’t happen in our generation. There needs to be a better focus on what we can do now.”

In fact, Allen likens the pursuit of investing in renewable energy and clean-tech ideas as “a little like the dot-com era when money was spent on every possible tech concept, whereas only a few proved worth the investments.”

It was the message about treating conservation as equal to innovation in the quest for energy savings that Allen delivered late last month at a White House Clean Energy Forum at which he served on one of three panels.

“My role on the panel was to focus on how things like scale, financing and innovation are being deployed in practice, as well as looking at the challenges and opportunities.” Allen said. “The primary challenge is getting conservation treated as a renewable energy source, which would give it equal footing in things like investment tax credit and production tax credits.”

Allen, his brother Dean (McKinstry’s CEO) and their executive team have helped guide the company their father founded 50 years ago as a mechanical engineering business into a national leadership role in designing, building and managing energy-efficient facilities.

McKinstry has grown into a business with about $450 million in annual revenues, with 1,600 employees in 17 cities, including new offices most recently in San Antonio, TX, and Orange County, CA.

The Allens find themselves in the interesting position of, on the one hand, being cautiously critical of the race to find clean-technology innovations while spending their own resources to incubate and accelerate companies involved with promising new-technology concepts.

In explaining that seeming inconsistency with their unique accelerator facility for promising companies, David Allen says: “We’re more focused on companies that are in and around energy efficiency and clean energy, what we call NOW technologies, things that are ready to be implemented now.”

While he’s careful to come across as cautionary rather than critical, In a sense, the mantra of the McKinstry folks is that advocates of a greener, cleaner society are lured by thoughts of what might be while overlooking the opportunity to help bring about what can be.

None of his cautious criticism of spending on clean-energy concepts should be seen as McKinstry trying to generate more activity for its conservation business. Allen, in fact, sums up McKinstry’s business as “right now our shadow is bigger than our body.”

Allen, in explaining that comment, said: “We think the opportunity for energy-saving with conservation is such a huge one that there would be 100 McKinstrys, or we could be 100 times bigger, to meet the demand.”

Ash Awad, McKinstry’s vice president of Energy and Facility Solutions, who sat in on the interview with David Allen, noted that “70 percent of all power is used in buildings and half of that energy is wasted. Imagine if we could bring half the energy back to America.”

The McKinstry effort is two-fold:  to have energy conservation costs treated equally with alternative-energy technology and to create financial incentives for utilities to reduce their kilowatt hours.

“States are making rules about the percentage of renewable energy utilities must produce without realizing that there aren’t enough ways for the utilities to meet those requirements,” Allen said.

“Conservation needs to be treated like other renewable energy sources so that conservation initiatives could be eligible for all the grants and funding that are available for renewables,” he added.

“We’re convinced that one of the changes that has to happen is that utilities be allowed to make a profit from reducing their energy use rather than just requiring them to invest in new technology,” Allen suggested.

Microsoft, once the “Beast From Redmond” that loomed over any venture-capital deal discussion in Silicon Valley, “isn’t even a part of the conversation these days,” says Jon Staenberg, onetime Microsoftie and a venture capitalist with involvement in both Seattle and Bay Area venture communities.

The Seattle entrepreneurial and investment communities need to think about that as they discuss the state of innovation in the Puget Sound region, suggests Staenberg, whose involvement in both region’s venture activity extends back well over a decade. “Otherwise, we might be in trouble in the future.”

Ironically, Staenberg’s comments came in an interview about a week before a Kauffman Foundation report on entrepreneurism that ranked Seattle last in entrepreneurial activity among 15 metropolitan areas and launched a round of hand-wringing and defensive conversation in the local entrepreneurial and venture communities.

“The Bay Area has recognized, though it’s a process still in progress, that there needs to be change and transformation, to reconsider what it takes to be a successful venture community,” says Staenberg, a partner in California-based Rustic Canyon Partners and has his own Seattle-based Staenberg Venture Partners. He’s viewed as one of the more experienced venture capitalists in the Northwest.

“The Bay Area is undergoing that necessary transformation and as that happens, Seattle is less a part of discussions there,” he adds.

With respect to his comments about Microsoft, Staenberg recalled a recent presentation in the Bay Area on behalf of a company that focused on an application of Microsoft Sharepoint, the content-management system with integrated search functionality that’s being touted by Microsoft.

“Before we could begin to explain the investment-value of the company, we had to first educate every v.c. there about Sharepoint. It was an example of the fact Microsoft just isn’t part of conversations there now,” he said.

“The reason Microsoft isn’t part of discussions in Silicon Valley anymore is the same reason that IBM isn’t part of the discussions,” Staenberg said. “Enterprise software isn’t what entrepreneurs are doing. Google is the new Microsoft.

“Cloud computing has allowed start-ups to create innovative products very inexpensively and with incredible efficiency,” he added.

Staenberg summarizes the difference between Silicon Valley and Seattle as the difference between “maniacal entrepreneurism” and a focus on lifestyle.

‘It’s simply in the blood there,” he says. “When I go there I find as many as half a dozen networking events I could go to every single night.”

“The unfortunate thing,” he says, “is that we’re a natural second market for Bay Area venture folks. Seattle should be a major part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem because there’s such a natural affiliation. We have good v.c.’s here but there just aren’t very many of them.”

Staenberg is also complimentary about the manner in which those who have had financial success in their ventures in the Seattle area are seeking to put back into entrepreneurial undertakings.

“Some of the best investing work being done locally is being done by angels, many of whom are alums of Microsoft, Amazon and Avenue A,” he says, adding “this is a critical part of the venture eco-system and it gives me hope that we can ride out this storm and be a relevant and strong start-up community.”

And he also hopes for greater focus on cooperation between the markets as a key to staying entrepreneurially competitive.

“I have always felt that bridging the two communities, taking the strengths of each, would create a sum greater than the parts,” Staenberg said.

As Les Biller settled into his new home in Seattle as a part-time transplant from Los Angeles, the retired vice chairman and chief operating officer of Wells Fargo Bank invited a former colleague from those Wells days for a visit. That set in motion a series of events in recent months that now has Biller poised to assume the role of chairman of troubled Sterling Financial Corp.

The former colleague was J. Gregory (Greg) Seibly, who had served under Biller at the bank’s co-headquarters in Los Angeles and who been elevated to be Sterling’s acting president and chief executive officer last October, two weeks after an FDIC cease and desist order ousted long-time top management.

Biller, in a telephone interview this week, said he had called Seibly, who was his executive vice president and division manager for Los Angeles/Nevada commercial banking before Biller’s retirement in 2002 at the age of 54, “just to reconnect.”

“After we started talking, I got more interested in Sterling and they in me,” Biller recalled. That ultimately led to the decision, announced in a news release Monday, that he would be the chairman, though the appointment is subject both to approval of regulators and to the successful completion of Sterling’s recapitalization plan.

Sterling, which is the holding company for Spokane-based Sterling Savings Bank, a commercial bank, and Seattle-based Golf Savings Bank, a thrift, must raise at least $720 million to meet the regulatory capital requirements.

It has raised about a quarter of that amount, primarily from Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P. and announced early this month that it intends to offer about $555 million of securities to institutional accredited investors in a private placement transaction.

It seems likely that Biller’s selection, pending regulators’ approval, could help invigorate the recapitalization effort.

His credentials include overseeing the growth of Minneapolis-based Norwest Bank as its president and COO and engineering its merger into Wells Fargo in 1998, after which he joined Wells as the bank’s COO and vice chairman of Wells Fargo & Co.

His retirement from Wells was to permit him to oversee his personal investments and to provide time for his philanthropy commitments through the Sheri and Les Biller Family Foundation. Both he and his wife, who is the incoming first female chair of the national comprehensive cancer center City of Hope, have been hands-on philanthropists.

Seibly was only 43 when he joined Sterling in 2007 as executive vice president and chief production officer, having already guided U.S. Bank’s California commercial banking division as executive vice president, lured from Wells after Biller’s retirement.

I described Biller as a “part-time transplant” because while he and his wife have retained their Los Angeles-area home and both their foundation and his private investment company Greenwood Capital LLC remain headquartered there, they decided last summer to make Seattle a second city for their personal involvement and philanthropy focus.

They have split their time between the two cities since then and Biller quipped in an e-mail to me, when the news release came out, “Looks like we’ll be spending more time in Washington State.”

Biller, as non-executive chairman, would have the role of coaching a management team dramatically different than the one that grew Sterling over a quarter century from a start up to, briefly (after the failure of Washington Mutual in fall of 2008), the largest financial institution based in Washington State.

Harold Gilkey co-founded Sterling in 1983, guided its growth to a $12.7 billion institution with 175 branches in five states and was the 70-year-old chairman and chief executive at the time of the FDIC order and his ouster last fall.

Heidi Stanley joined the bank in 1985 and rose through the ranks as Sterling grew and was CEO of Sterling Savings Bank at the time of her departure.

Over the past couple of years, the ambitious growth Gilkey and Stanley guided turned into an alarming level of operating losses, troubled loan portfolio and plummeting stock price.

The faces of leadership that have succeeded them include Seibly, broad in banking-leadership experience for his age, and Ezra Eckhardt, a 39-year-old West Pointer who brought experience in management and operations at both Microsoft and Honeywell when he joined Sterling in 2004. Eckhardt, described as “a rock star” by one banking blogger, was appointed executive vice president and acting COO of Sterling Savings in January.

Looking ahead, in a vision that will first require his own okay from regulators and completion of the recapitalization plan, Biller sees his role as “a focus on growth in a sane and smart way,” guiding strategy on how to grow “and looking at where acquisitions might be part of the strategy.”

Wall Street, Walmart and WAMU notwithstanding, the public’s view of business is improving. Those who measure such things say that’s largely because of the way businesses of all sizes have struggled to continue their support of non-profit and community causes despite the bleakest of financial times.

Walmart, which now faces a massive lawsuit for alleged sex discrimination, joins the above trio, which obviously could include many others, after being burned by what may well come to be known as the Tiger Woods Rule: If your marketing folks create an inflated you, then you’ll be pilloried when the real and deflated you emerges.

The fact that the public’s attitude toward business is creeping up has been highlighted several times in recent months, most visibly early in the year with the release of the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer.

The survey by the international public relations firm, which made presentations on the survey around the country, showed what it called “a modest rise in trust for business” after the trust-index level the previous year had shrunk to historic lows.

The growing trend among corporations to engage stakeholders, rather than just focus on shareholders, and to take roles in solving major social challenges were cited as reasons for that blip up in public regard.

The most recent indication of that improving view of business by the public came at the 2010 International Corporate Citizenship Conference in Boston earlier this month.

The 10^th annual conference, put on by the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship, got little visibility beyond Boston despite the importance of the topic and the audience it attracts.

Tim Wilson, who is with the Center, told me “corporate America is bouncing back faster than some other sectors in how they are viewed by the public. That’s a big change from merely lobbying against what might hurt us.”

One of the interesting findings at the conference was that “more CEOs are saying they need to be involved in public policy issues,” Wilson said. “The point is the feeling of CEOs that no one prospers in a bad neighborhood and that this world is a big neighborhood and corporations need to be involved in finding solutions.

If concern about “the neighborhood” represent a big change for major corporations, many would suggest such concerns have long been the stuff that helps drive smaller, local businesses.

Rich Simmonds, co-founder of Seattle wealth management firm Laird Norton-Tyee and, since his retirement, entrepreneur in residence at the family business center at Seattle University, says “research shows that family owned businesses spend more on community and non-profit causes than other businesses. And they’re less likely to turn off the spigot in tough times because they’re more likely to think long term.”

Stanley W. McNaughton, CEO of Pemco Insurance, puts it this way: “Because we’re a local company, our philanthropy is local.” He adds that while the company has maintained its commitment to corporate citizenship through the downturn, it has “made us more selective in what we support, but more committed to our traditional causes.”

Carol Lewis, CEO of Seattle-based Philanthropy Northwest, agrees the image of business is improving as more and more companies understand how community involvement contributes to success. “Corporate citizenship is on a steady increase,” she says.

She says the declines in corporate giving that have taken place in a bad economy “aren’t permanent. In fact, there’s not only evidence of a rebound but an ever-expanding number of businesses engaged in philanthropy.”

As that expansion occurs, a key part of the evolution of corporate citizenship is going to be ever-increasing focus on the convergence of corporate citizenship and corporate strategic goals.

Part of the “convergence” inevitably will relate to image impact, a factor that has come to top the list of reasons for how companies choose their involvements. And visibility is the key of reward for corporate citizenship recognition events, like the Business Journal’s Corporate Citizenship Awards Luncheon next month.

“It’s increasingly true that aligning your charitable efforts with your business goals advances both,” says Steve Mullin, president of the Washington Roundtable, the 27-year-old nonprofit public policy organization comprised of chief executives representing the state’s major private-sector employers.

One of the compelling moments at the International Corporate Citizenship conference in Boston apparently was an observation by closing keynoter Kathryn Brown, Verizon’s senior vice president for public policy & corporate responsibility.

Brown noted that despite Wall Street’s disastrous mismanagement of consumers’ money, the most recent Edelman corporate trust barometer is going up and optimism seems to abound and wondered aloud how that could be.

 “I think it’s because we all faced the abyss and then we walked back from it and rediscovered our core shared values – as a society, as a political body and as corporate citizens,” she told the audience.

It was the twin focus of building successful business ventures and helping small countries “leap into the 21^st Century” that brought the owners of Bellevue-based Trilogy International Partners to Haiti a decade ago and thus immersed the company in the current earthquake recovery efforts.

The corporate citizenship part was more understood than stated at the time John Stanton, in 1999, added Haiti to the list of emerging countries that his Western Wireless Inc. publicly traded cellular company was serving.

But that citizenship philosophy had become ingrained with the executive team when Stanton and his wife, Theresa Gillespie, after selling Western Wireless to AllTel, headed an investor group that paid $110 million in 2005 to take over the wireless business in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation.

Over the years, Trilogy’s Viola-brand cell phone service had become the largest U.S. investor in Haiti and created jobs, supported education and provided thousands of student scholarships. The company was honored in December with a coveted national Award for Corporate Excellence.

Then Trilogy was thrust less than a month later into the challenge amid tragedy of helping lift Haiti out of the horror of the devastating January 12 earthquake.

After a decade helping build Haiti, what’s happened since the earthquake “has taken our hearts,” Trilogy International Partners’ CEO and investor Brad Horwitz told a business audience in Seattle this week.

Horwitz noted that what the company had done in Haiti over 10 years “was a lot. But after the earthquake, our involvement has been 10 times greater.”

Under Stanton’s leadership, Western Wireless grew through the 1990s focused on building service to rural U.S. areas and emerging foreign countries, and also created the hugely successful VoiceStream Wireless that eventually was acquired by Deutche Telekom.

Stanton’s focus on international markets had brought the company a portfolio that included, in addition to developed countries Ireland, Australia and Iceland, developing nations like Latvia, Croatia, Georgia, Slovenia, Ghana and the Ivory Coast.

“We went into Croatia when the paint was still fresh on the signs changing the name of the country,” Stanton said with a laugh.

By the time Western Wireless was sold to Little Rock-based AllTel, it had built the most extensive foreign operations of any U.S. cellular company.

AllTel didn’t want the international operations, Stanton recalled. So he and his wife sold most of them off as part of the sale, but decided to buy Haiti and Bolivia for themselves through their then-newly formed Trilogy International Partners. The couple owns more than three-fourths of that entity, and a similar amount of the related Trilogy Equity Partners.

Trilogy International Partners now also operates wireless networks in the Dominican Republican, which was key to helping provide some assistance in the Haitian relief, and New Zealand.

So the business model for Trilogy International Partners going forward is finding “very small countries with lots of economic growth potential, but no more than two competitors,” Stanton explained, acknowledging that those are “harder and harder to find.”

But the other half of the equation for John, Theresa and their partners is aiding emerging markets by creating jobs and enhancing access to telephone and wireless computing.

When the award for Corporate Excellence was presented to Stanton in Washington, D.C., by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he told a Seattle Times reporter that the company isn’t merely into great business growth opportunities. “For us it (the telecom business) is really a great enabler of freedom – democracy, if you will.”

Thereby hangs the tale of the unwavering commitment to Haiti and its people.

Through the ‘90s and first half of this decade, Stanton presided over the growth and development of three of the nation’s major wireless companies. With his wife and a handful of other executives, like Horwitz and Western Wireless president and current Trilogy partner Mikal Thomsen, Stanton built a leadership team that collectively became the face of the industry nationally and made Seattle the Mecca for wireless technology.

I asked Stanton if, with that rich history in the industry, he was sorry to be out of the wireless chase domestically.

“Five competitors in the U.S. is basically a broken model,” he replied. “The industry model, including compensation, reward, incentives, was all built around growth. The industry got addicted to growth and it’s now taken on more the face of a utility.

“For the first time, in the fourth quarter of 2009, the industry grew at a slower rate than the economy,” he added, making it clear he’s satisfied to have turned his cellular companies over to Deutche Telekom and AllTel, leaving his Trilogy companies to pursue international opportunities. The next of those is likely to be in the Pacific, he indicated.

And he says domestic opportunities pursued by Trilogy Equity Partners that relate to the evolution of wireless and the growth of smart phones have gone as anticipated. “We wanted to provide companies with the tools to handle the dramatic growth of the wireless industry and that’s what’s happened.”

As for Haiti, Horwitz said “there’s a chance that the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere could emerge from this to become the first nation in the world to have a telecom infrastructure without a single strand of copper wire.”

Consider that about 500 of China’s who’s who gathered last weekend at a place called Sun Mountain Yabuli Resort, north of Beijing near the Russian border for the 10^th annual CEF, with a focus was on the global economic challenges and China’s role in the emergence of positive economic growth in the world. They were joined by only about 20 attendees from elsewhere in the world, including a handful from Wall Street.

As business leaders in the Seattle area learn more about CEF and its relations to making business connections in China, they may map a strategy for putting this region at the forefront of visibility at forthcoming events. CEF for the past five years has held a “summer summit” in addition to the annual forum.

Wyatt, founder of The Wyatt Group, says the range of China opportunities relates particularly to clean-technology companies, since China has, by some estimates, become the main recipient of venture-capital money in clean technology.

For those who may retain the sense that Chinese entrepreneurship is an oxymoron, Wyatt points out that the flow of venture capital is only one indication that China has become a hotbed of innovation.

“To the extent that China is talking about being a leader for clean energy, since our focus is being a center for clean technology, then we have good reason to build focused relationships particularly in that area,” said Bob Drewel, executive director of the four-county Puget Sound Regional Council.

David Allen, executive vice president of Seattle’s McKinstry & Co., which is just opening its innovation center where clean-tech and energy-related start-ups will be incubated and accelerated, says “absolutely” some of the companies McKinstry is working with will be seeking to sell to China.

Wyatt points out that there are two sides to the doing-business-with-China equation. One is attracting investment from China into U.S. companies and the other is creating opportunities to build supplier or customer relations there. And strategic partnerships are the key to seizing those opportunities, he adds. “And building trust is the key to both halves.”

“As for green technology, as new emerging trends are identified, the ability to form strategic partnerships and financing from China is increased,” he says.  “It will be necessary to identify what type of green technology garners the most interest and how different approaches to those types of technology are compatible with the Chinese systems and can be readily adopted.” 

One China expert recently wrote that the Chinese government is trying to address soaring healthcare costs by reducing pollution and is thus actively encouraging foreign investment, including spending $9 billion a month on clean-energy research.

Wyatt says a goal he has is to create some long-term investment relationships between venture capital firms in the Northwest and counterparts in China.

"The strategy would be to bring Chinese v.c. investments to U.S. companies,” Wyatt said. “It would add a level of interest for the Chinese companies if local v.c. firms were co-investing in the deals.”

With respect to clean tech, Wyatt explained that the Chinese “need to be able to implement environmental standards in an efficient way that doesn’t detract from their ability to continue their level of labor employment.”

 Wyatt said that since continued availability of laborer jobs for the vast population from the provinces is vital to China’s stability, partners will need to understand that China has no interest in efficiencies that eliminate those jobs.

I found that the most complete information on this conference, for which neither Google nor an online search of the New York Times turned up anything, was in a news release from Melco China Resorts Holdings, owner of the resort.

In addition to providing a rundown on the names and titles of many of the prominent attendees as well as the speakers, the release trumpeted a new agreement under whose terms “all future annual forums ‘on a permanent basis’ would be held at the Sun Mountain Yabuli Resort.”

The Melco news release offered evidence that the Chinese have learned a bit from the U.S. about marketing and promotion.

“Both Parties also agreed to establish a ‘CEF Founders Club’ that actively promotes Sun Mountain Yabuli's resort vacation homes for purchase by CEF members,” the release read, “ And CEF will work with its 5,000 member companies to select Yabuli as the site for their corporate meetings and retreats.”

Four Seasons, Hilton or Starwood couldn’t have done it better.

The annual China Entrepreneurs Forum (CEF) attracts hundreds of that nation's most influential entrepreneurs and business leaders, along with key government figures, but apparently has attracted little interest or direct involvement from the West, even from a China-focused area like Seattle. 

 Susan Preston, one of the founders of the nation’s first women’s angel-investor group in Seattle a dozen years ago, recalls “an amazing response” to the idea of forming a group to help women become part of the “deal flow” that was happening at the height of the dot-com rush.

Preston, then a partner in a major Seattle law firm, was “doing a lot of deals, all of which included only male angels. I started talking to friends about whether or not it bothered them that women didn’t seem to be getting the same chance to be in early on these deals. It did.”

More than 150 women attended a first meeting in 1998 to explore the idea of creating an angel group for women. With major support from women executives at the family-owned Laird Norton Co., Seraph Capital Forum was formed with a dozen women as launch members and more than 50 joining during the first year.

Janis Machala, another in the Seraph founders group, had launched Paladin Partners in 1996 and served as advisor and mentor to start-up companies, often as interim CEO, COO or board member. She says she “saw firsthand the need to grow our angel population.”

“There was a lot of wealth in this region at the time and some of it was coming to women,” Machala recalls. “We wanted to help season that, help provide advisory roles and board memberships for women and increase the support for women entrepreneurs.”

Support and opportunity did come about for women who were either members of the Seraph group in the years since then, or who were entrepreneurs seeking funding and expertise for their start-up ventures.

Seraph founders and current leadership still see a need for a women-only angel-investor group while others in the angel community aren’t so sure. But there seems to be general agreement that women represent a special brand of angel investor.

Preston says she “absolutely” thinks the need for a women’s group remains. And Machala agrees.

Preston, now based in San Francisco and the general partner of CalCEF Angel Fund, a first-of-its-kind angel fund for seed and start-up stage clean energy companies, says a study she worked on for the Kauffman Foundation “found women invest differently than men. And unfortunately, many feel a bit intimidated about asking questions in a room full of men.”

Villette Nolon, who is current president and chair of the all-volunteer Seraph organization, that currently has 25 members, feels the need still exists because “the profile of women who invest as angels is still very different than the profile of men who invest.”

Nolon, founder and CEO of the home-remodeling site HomeSavvi, feels that women “still aren’t in the places where deals are put together. There’s still an old boys club in deals and women who join formal groups thereby get access to those deals.”

Nolon (on whose HomeSavvi advisory board I sit) says “angel investing is still a mystery to a lot of women. So a number of women are co-investing with their husbands.”

In fact, couples investing may be the trend, as Liz Marchi, fund coordinator for the  Frontier Angel Fund in Whitefish, MT., and coordinator of the Montana Angel Network, suggests.

“We encourage couples to be involved together in the process and have found that creates a good culture of inquisitiveness,” notes Marchi., though she touts the talent individual women bring to her group.

“Smart women are truly astounding thinkers in terms of relationships, markets and strategy,” she says. “I can’t imagine our fund without women.”

“I’m a graduate of a women’s college so focusing on women investors and entrepreneurs is in my DNA,” Marchi adds. “I find women keenly interested in being angel investors.”

“Couples,” in fact, is one of the selling points for Zino Society, a for-profit angel organization created five years ago by Cathi Hatch, long active in the Seattle area’s philanthropic and non-profit communities. Hatch, who is also a Seraph member, has sought to create “camaraderie” for members with a mix of business, wine and investing.

Mary Holmes, Zino’s vice president for business development, says the organization’s goal of bringing entrepreneurs, investors and entrepreneurs together “in a relaxed and supportive environment” has spurred husband-wife membership participation in the 230-member organization, which includes 79 women.

M. Todd Dean, president of Keiretsu Forum Northwest, the other for-profit angel organization, estimates that about 20 percent of members in his four groups in Seattle, Bellevue, Portland and Boise are women.

“But the number of women is more like 35 percent when you include spouses, since we have a lot of husbands and wives in the group,” Dean adds.

Among those who doesn’t think it matters whether the angel investor is male or female is Michael Elconin, a leader of the San Diego chapter of the Tech Coast Angels (TCA) group, the major angel organization in Southern California.

“We have relatively few women in TCA, maybe 5 percent of total membership,” Elconin said. “Frankly I don’t see any difference between our women members and male members, either in term of participation with due diligence or investing.”

Sherry Zins, a Keiretsu member who was business development vice president for the organization before joining the staff of Washington Technology Industry Association, says she dislikes women-only groups. “I prefer the mix because it’s more healthy.

Dan Rosen, who chairs Seattle’s Alliance of Angels (AoA), says the organization has “10 to 15 women among the 60-plus who regularly attend” luncheon meetings of the angel group that is Seattle’s oldest.

Rosen, who four years ago left the venture firm he had helped found in order to form Dan Rosen & Associates to focus on early-stage companies, says he doesn’t think gender is so much the issue as is the evolution of angel investing.

“It’s gone from part-time activity, where angel investing was a hobby, to professional angels, where investing is their day job,” he says.

And given the positions now held by Preston at  CelCEF, Marchi with the Montana angel groups, Hatch with her for-profit Zino venture and Machala, who just finished a stint as number two at UW’s tech-transfer operation, it’s clear that some of the “day job” roles have been assumed by those who learned the investor game  as women angels.

For those seeking snatches of light amidst the economic gloom, here’s an upbeat update on three of the businesses we wrote about in the year now ending as each of them heads into a new year with initiatives that will bring new opportunity to the businesses and individuals they touch.

Northwest companies needing turnaround assistance, new and emerging clean-energy companies in need of guidance for growth, and global beneficiaries of a new micro-giving site will see enhanced economic opportunity in 2010 from two Seattle-based firms and a newly minted non-profit.

Principals in the quiet turnaround group Revitalization Partners LLC have formed a $50 million Distressed Opportunities Fund. They are likely to gain much higher visibility as distressed or capital-constrained businesses learn about the pool of dollars ready to be invested. Alan Davis, a partner in the firm, was the subject of an October column (Google Flynn’s Harp: Davis chose turnaround challenges).

At McKinstry, which was described as “the nation’s green-tech central” in a March profile (Google Flynn’s Harp: Seattle firm nation’s “green tech” central), a new Innovation Center is being completed and readied for its first young green-energy technology company. The first occupant will be selected soon, according to Elsa Croonquist, the facility’s project manager.

And SeeYourImpact.org, created by former Microsoft executives Scott Oki and Digvijay Chauhen, is now operating in what Chauhen describes as a “friends and family” preview mode in India, the first country in which the site will be fully operational by the second half of 2010.

Revitalization Partners is already getting inquiries from firms interested in being considered for investment from what Davis describes as “an initial $50 million pledge of capital to be invested in distressed or capital-constrained middle market companies in the Northwest and British Columbia.”

Davis, who has become what might be called a “turnaround expert” over the past decade or more, explained in the original column his interest in taking companies that are on shaky financial ground and bringing them back. “Once you do one turnaround, you want to do others.”

Davis and partner Bill Lawrence will each likely have direct involvement with companies that they decide are candidates for part of the fund, which Davis estimates will be between four and 10 companies at the outset. But he says their funding partners can provide further funds if the initial amount proves there are opportunities awaiting.

Croonquist, McKinstry’s Incubator Project Manager, says the 24,000-square-foot addition to McKinstry’s headquarters will be ready to accept its first small company in April and could house up to five by the end of the year.

When he first announced the center at a Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce gathering in October, McKinstry Executive Vice President David Allen said the Center will act as a commercialization accelerator to bring new and emerging companies together to foster advancement of energy technologies.

In the original interview, Allen noted that then-president hopeful Barack Obama visited McKinstry in the late winter of 2008 to use the company’s offices as a backdrop for a press conference on environmental change and that, as president Obama has repeatedly mentioned the firm as a green-initiatives leader.

The firm’s growth in the past couple of years has been phenomenal with 45 offices now spread across the country, creating what David (whose brother, Dean, is CEO of the firm) describes as a company whose “shadow is longer than our body” because of its impact on clean and green businesses. McKinstry may actually be the Seattle area’s most successful company right now.

The young firms housed in the incubator/accelerator facility may eventually number as many as 20, according to Croonquist. It may be that similar facilities will emerge in other McKinstry locations, particularly Spokane and Portland, though Croonquist isn’t ready to discuss that yet.

And as the column on the Oki-Chauhen micro-giving site, the vision is of eventually thousands of messengers delivering small gifts or donated items to millions of the world’s needy, each delivery recorded via cell-phone photo and sent back to the giver (Google Flynn’s Harp: Oki vision: micro-philanthropy on global scale).

As with the Kiva micro-lending site after which SeeYourImpact.org is modeled, tips (averaging $2 to $3) from those making gifts on the site will be a source of revenue and Chauhen says about 80 percent of those currently trying the site are actually providing tips.

He notes that the push to begin actually driving traffic to the site will begin in the fourth quarter, after ramping up the number of NGOs providing delivery of the gifts. Then it will be expansion into Africa.

To get a sense of the kinds of giving already going on with this innovative non-profit, it’s worth visiting theSeeYourImpact.org website. The business will deserve dramatically more visibility in the months ahead as its full impact begins to unfold.

Other people and businesses that were subjects of Flynn’s Harp during the past 12 months, including Spokane’s Condon brothers and their unique bio-industrial park, are also going to be heard from in the coming year in upbeat news, proving there are bright spots in a continuing troubled economy.

 Larry and Ted Condon, capitalizing on past entrepreneurial successes and buoyed by a supporting cast that most entrepreneurs could only dream of, are about to launch a first-of-its-kind bio-industrial park designed to resolve most of Eastern Washington’s organic-waste challenges while generating renewable energy.

When they first began exploring the idea for the facility two years ago, the question they asked themselves was “if we build it, who will come?” The answer to that ranged from municipalities seeking to dispose of their waste to Washington State University, and partners in need of green-generated energy.

Thus emerged the $14 million Barr Regional Bio-Industrial Park, a unique organic waste processing facility located on 40 acres adjacent to interstate 90 in sparsely populated Lincoln County, about 22 miles west of Spokane. Its first phase, a composting facility, is to be operational by January with renewable energy generation to come by August.

At that point the facility will be generating 2-3 megawatts of continuous renewable energy, according to Larry Condon, who is managing partner in the venture. And the company they formed, Barr-Tech LLC, will be “operating in the black by the end of the first year,” he added. “Then we’ll be looking for other sites to replicate this.”

“We actually already been approached by other communities beyond Washington State who want to have us do this,” Larry said. “But we want to get this done first and not lose our focus. Then we’ll look to find other sites.”

The majority of the “feed stock” for the bio-industrial park is expected to be drawn from metropolitan Spokane, which still must award a couple of contracts next month and those are important components of the first-year outlook for Barr-Tech.

Spokane-based Sirti, a state economic development agency that serves as incubator and accelerator for innovative technology-based companies in the Inland Northwest, has taken the fledgling company under its wing to provide office space and help with business plans, brand development and market launch.

Meanwhile, Barr-Tech and the tiny Odessa Public Development Authority, which holds the property under an arrangement by which it is leased back to the company, are partnering to recruit other sustainable businesses to the Barr Regional Bio-Industrial Park. That would basically make the facility an incubator for compatible businesses.

The partnership has already attracted attention from governmental entities that helped provide funding, including a Governor’s Best Practices Award at a state Workforce and Economic Development Conference last month.

The supporting cast alluded to above includes Sen. Scott Barr, a 92-year-old former legislator who owned the land, a Spokane business man with long experience in waste management and hauling as lead investor, a tiny public-development entity as partner, and state and federal agencies that provided funding.

Larry, 38, and Ted, 42, had both been successful entrepreneurs before teaming up with local businessman Jack Gillingham two years ago to create Barr-Tech and put together the pieces of the puzzle that became the waste processing facility.

Gillingham, who had long experience in the refuse hauling business, had the money to support launch of the project and told the Condons: “We’re not going to cut corners on this. We’re building the future and we’re going to spend the money to build the best.”

The project got no small boost from the federal stimulus dollars available for projects described as “shovel ready.” “Heck, with work already under way on the site, we were already ‘shovel dirty’ when we applied for the funds,” Larry joked.

The project has gotten $8 million in funding from state and federal agencies, with “the energy-generating greenness of the project a big boost for funding,” according to Larry Condon.

The Condons are in the final stages of putting together an arrangement to sell the power to an Oregon-based co-op to help fulfill a State of Oregon requirement for utilities to buy a certain amount of their power from “green-generation.”

The Condon brothers are part of an entrepreneurial Spokane family whose businesses operate under the Condon Brothers Inc., banner. Those businesses have ranged from Christmas Trees (which all the brothers helped sell from teen-age years), to heavy construction, and even became part of a 21-company rollup in the late 90s that became the public-company Railworks.

Larry took his own entrepreneurial path when he went to Boston to join another brother in creating the seven-kiosk chain of coffee spots called Coffee Brothers, which eventually was sold to a competitor of Dunkin’ Donuts. Then he came back to Seattle to launch Hearth Bread Bake House, a bread company that he grew to a 75-employee firm before selling to Sara Lee three years ago.

Ted stayed in Spokane to play a key role with Railworks after the rollup and with the family-owned American On-Site Services, a firm that provides portable restrooms, fences, and storage containers, and roll-off dumpsters to customers in Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho.

“Every business we’ve ever built was done on a shoestring, except this one,” said Larry Condon. “Gillingham didn’t know the creativity he released when he said ;’build the best. While we all have skin in the game, for the lead investor to say that is an entrepreneur’s dream.”