Tim is the owner and CEO of Bennett Compost, a Philadelphia-based company that provides weekly pickup of food scraps and household waste, and then turns those scraps into compost. That freshly made compost is then available for delivery within the region. Having started and operated this company by himself, Tim now leads a large team of employees in collection and delivery driving, composting operations, and customer service. Tim tells students with a similar entrepreneurial spirit that the ones who succeed are the ones who show up everyday with a positive attitude, a willingness to learn, and a hunger to “get after it.”
Transcript
My name is Tim Bennett. I am the founder and owner of Bennett Compost. We collect food scraps from over 2,000 households and businesses in Philadelphia and we make it into compost and other soil products. So, compost is kind of like a natural soil amendment, so we sell it to people who are growing gardens or flowers, that kind of stuff. We also make, use it to make soil products, like a potting soil that you might buy if you were planting a flower box or, you know, a potted plant in your backyard. Right, so what we do is that everyday we have two or three trucks and a bicycle with a trailer that go out throughout the city and collect all of this material, some of it from businesses, a lot of it from different households throughout the city. They have set routes where they might be picking up, you know, each route might be 150 to 200 stops per day, if they're a residential route. If it's a commercial route, it might be more like 15 or 20 stops per day. They're going out. They're collecting all this material. They're bringing it back to our yard. At that site, we are are then unloading all that material. We're blending it with wood chips and leaves. We're using what's called an aerated static pile system to make the compost, so we get it into these piles and then we're working it through the process that we have set up there. When I started, it was just me. I was doing it part-time while I had a full-time job, so I did everything. I did the pickups. I did the collections. I answered the emails. I answered the phone. I sent the bills. I went out and tried to get business. I kind of did it all. I still get my hands dirty and do a decent amount of work working with the material on site, so managing the process in terms of making the product, but I don't do really any of the collections, except for sometimes I'll fill in for someone like that, so a lot of my other time is spent dealing with our employees and making sure they have what they need and that they understand what we're doing to kind of getting everyone going in the same direction. It's figuring out, kind of, how do we continue to move the business forward. It's learning how to, kind of like, delegate and trust other people to do certain things. You know, it can be a little disconcerting at first when you're the person who, you know, if there's a phone call, answer the phones, so you know that like you're not missing anything important information. You're the one responding to an email, so you know that like, what the issues are, we can take care of it right away and you're the one who's doing the pickups, so you kind of just have this like very intuitive, not intuitive, but like really hands on sense of everything. Put systems in place and trust people to do their job is both rewarding, a little scary at first, probably the whole gambit of anyone who's gone from being like a solo entrepreneur to having a place.
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