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Interview with John and Katy Weiss of Chickity Doo Doo
Chickity Doo Doo first caught our interest due to its attention-grabbing brand name. But behind the name is a company that has transformed something you might think most people wouldn’t want (chicken doo doo) into a mass market product - an organic fertilizer made from 100% chicken manure, that’s being used as a replacement for synthetic chemical fertilizers in farms and sold in retail stores.
In this interview, John and Katy Weiss reveal the inner workings of their business and share the story of where the product idea came from. Who knew doo doo could be so interesting?
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
- How a waste material was turned into a useful product
- Creating a branding strategy for products sold at big box stores vs independent retailers
- Why higher oil prices means better business for Chickity Doo Doo
- How education plays a key role in Chickity Doo Doo’s marketing efforts
- How Chickity Doo Doo attains certifications in order to back up its product claims
LISTEN NOW (press play below)
TRANSCRIPT
JUDY LAWRENCE, GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Hello. This is Judy Lawrence from www.GreenBusinessInnovators.com, and I am here speaking with John Weiss and Katy Weiss from Chickity Doo Doo, located near Madison, Wisconsin.
Chickity Doo Doo is an organic fertilizer made from well, chicken doo doo, 100% organic chicken manure. I actually heard about your unique company while I was back in Wisconsin visiting some family and friends, and Katy, your mother-in-law told me about this young start-up company, and I was intrigued by the idea that the novelty of it, the practicality and the recycling aspect of this business. As you begin, I’d love you both to share the story of how Chickity Doo Doo was conceived, your backgrounds. I believe you grew up on a chicken farm, which seems like a natural fit, and then how the company is succeeding in growing. Welcome John and Katy.
JOHN WEISS: Well, thanks very much for having us. I can kind of give you a start, and Katy can jump in too with her thoughts on where we got to this point. My father specifically has been in the poultry industry for about 40 years. His name is Ray. And he and my mom owned a chicken farm together. We technically didn’t live on that farm, it was actually away from where we grew up, but we knew about the farm growing up and the farm they purchased back in 1975. My father and I, in 1999, decided to form a partnership and buy my mom out in order to refinance and do some other things on the farm, and that’s when I got involved. My background is actually in teaching and coaching basketball, and I decided in 1999 that this might be a little nice side investment, and it’s actually been running my life ever since then, thankfully happily.
One of the things that we noticed, well I noticed, that with the chicken farm, they had spread land-spread manure on adjacent 500 to 700 acres basically since the 1950s. We did some soil testing on those 10 adjacent fields, farm fields and what we test for in that soil test is basically nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium that has built up in the soils over time. And I remember our state Department of Natural Resources official telling me that if we had 100 parts per million of phosphorus or above that I should be nervous and I’d be okay if we were under that. And 9 of the 10 tests came back at over 200 parts per million. So we knew that we were going to have to find some alternatives to land application of manure and the associated problems with runoff. We were going to have to find something different to do with our manure.
We did a lot of work over a couple of years looking at different technologies and really saw a growing trend for anywhere from organic farming all the way to golf courses and retailers, retail consumers that had a desire to get away from using chemical fertilizers as a part of their fertilization program. And we looked at and really dove into what the market was looking for and started developing our own product and then we ran into an additional farm here in Wisconsin that was really doing similar things and actually had a patented process to develop an organic fertilizer. Between our work that we had done and this process, we were able to take the manure coming off of the chicken farm at our facility and now at this facility here in Lake Mills, which is just outside of Madison, and process the manure without having to add any fillers or carbon or outside sources. And get to the point where we could compost that and then granulate it, pelletizing, granulate it and really make it the same shape and same type of component that a synthetic would have.
And we’ve just had a tremendous amount of interest, initially from the ag sector, and then we decided we were going to develop the retail side and came up with the name and logo and it has been a bit of a whirlwind in the last 18 months since that’s happened. But, really gratifying and, and really fulfilling from the standpoint of what we thought and heard in terms of demand for the product has really come through.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: So you’re really into the sweet spot right now with organic and environmental awareness and all of those things. You really hit the timing well with this.
JOHN WEISS: We have from a couple of different perspectives. There’s been a lot of regulation, proposed and already in place regulation and legislation coming into the poultry industry because of the problems associated with land application of manure. The runoff, concerns about pathogens and oh I forget what it was last year, the runoff concerns and problems that caused the spinach scare, more recently in Mexico with the jalapeno pepper scare. Both of those were blamed on runoff from raw manure being either applied on land or off of pastures. And we looked at as from an industry side was we can provide an outlet and a technology for the farms, the large poultry farms. And when I say large, I’m talking about, for example, at our farm here in Lake Mills we’re talking about 20,000 tons of manure on an annual basis.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: That was my question. I wanted to get a sense of scale like when we say 20,000 tons a year, how many chickens are we talking about? And how much fertilizer is created in a week time or a months’ time? Give me some sense of that.
JOHN WEISS: Sure, sure. At the farm here in Lake Mills, there’s 1.2 million layers, the chickens that actually lay eggs. And there’s an additional 300,000 of what they call pullets, which are basically replacement layers. And out of all the manure that they create, the manure is collected on belts and then brought out to the back of the barn and then brought to our drying barn is just about depending on the total that they have during a year is just about 20,000 tons of raw manure that we have to process. And we process that, we take some of the moisture out. It’s part of the patented process that we have. We take some of the moisture out, slightly dehydrate it, but then we also compost it so we get the temperatures we need to, anywhere from 160 to 180 degrees Fahrenheit, to kill the harmful bacteria and pathogens, and then we get it to the right moisture level where we can pelletize then eventually granulate.
But, just as a matter of scale, this farm is, like I said, about a million and a half birds total. That puts it, I believe, 65th largest in the United States. There are 330 million laying chickens in the United States. We’re just processing a million and a half of those 330. We have right now conversations with 10 different farms located around the United States to come and process their manure to meet the demand that we have on the retail side, on the ag side, even the international demand. Right now, there’s a severe shortage of fertilizer around the world. And so we have conversations with people going on in Brazil, China. This is more on the ag side, but you can see, we’re at a million and a half birds with 330 plus million out there. We have plenty of opportunities to go to other places and expand.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Absolutely. Right now, what is the size of your company in terms of how many employees do you have, and how are you looking in terms of scaling to match this demand? How is that all working out for you right now?
JOHN WEISS: Right now, we’re still we’re moving away from the start-up phase and that’s a little bit of a challenge for us because we’ve been a family business, and we’ve always had the control under one roof and we all kind of, between Katy and myself and my brother-in-law John and my dad, we kind of wear all of the hats and kind of interchange the hats as we need to. We have numerous employees in actually working in the drying barns and creating the actual product. We have other employees that are doing the bagging and that part of the operation more on the retail side. But, we’ve really built this from the ground up and put our own work into it. Now we’ve gotten large enough and enough demand, especially taking on additional farms where we have to put in a little more structure to our management team and really start to delegate. We’ve brought on a local business development company called Virchow Krause, which is in Madison that has really helped us with some of these issues.
It started getting to the point where we started looking at each other and saying, what we thought might come true actually is, and we need to make sure that we do this right when we structure the business. We’re very excited. The nice thing about our process is that it’s really fairly simple. And it’s easily replicated from site to site. When we go to, for example, we’re talking with Tampa farms down in Florida. And our ability to bring the same type of system to that site it’s not weather dependent, so we can do it in any climate. It’s really exciting because from the standpoint of the type of equipment and technology, there’s not a lot to hold us up other than making sure we have it financed and running correctly, which are no small hurdles for us, but ones we think we can overcome. The ability to replicate this as many sites as the demand will allow us will allow us to grow actually rather quickly. So it’s an exciting time.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Oh absolutely. Now I’m curious with such a demand like this, there certainly must be other companies out there that are using chicken manure. What is it that differentiates your company from those other companies?
JOHN WEISS: What we were able to do with our work and then with the addition of this patent is we were able to hold and retain a higher percentage of the nutrients coming out of the chickens, but still able to compost and create a safe product. And there are competitors out there that have created a product, especially with trying to compost manure from meat birds. These are actually, what we do is from the egg laying birds, and they are two different types of breeds.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And are there two different kinds of fertilizers then, or not?
JOHN WEISS: The manure is actually fairly similar. It’s more in the process of how we do things. We don’t have to, because the birds are not using any kind of litter like the meat birds are with shavings or wood chips. But the meat birds do, we’re able to process 100% manure. We don’t have any concern about any kind of shavings or anything that as a part of this. For example we have 5% nitrogen and nitrogen is kind of the backbone, as far as a major nutrient. The 3 majors being nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. We’re able to hold on. The chickens eat a lot of feed but they’re fairly inefficient at processing that feed. A lot of the nutrients are passed through in the manure and they also have the right organisms, bacteria in their intestinal system that’s also passed through it. So it’s why chicken manure is kind of been a time-honored fertilizer. It’s the right mix of what you need to make plants grow, and we’re able to hold on to the majority of those nutrients, and that increases the value of the fertilizer.
We feel we’ve done a lot of testing and we’ve done a lot of research, and in terms of comparing it to other organic fertilizers, whether they’re from chicken fertilizers or others. For the value certainly, but ours comes out on top, but also in terms of that high nutrient level because they’re layer chickens, they’re fed a very high calcium diet. So our product also has a high 9% guaranteed calcium, which is really just a function of the feed that they get as opposed to meat birds, which aren’t laying eggs. We really are able to take advantage of the right situation or the right manure and create what we consider is a really nice fertilizer.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Great. Now Katy, I understand you are kind of the computer and the marketing wiz in the business, and it doesn’t sound like you need a whole lot of marketing with this demand and the timing everything. But have you discovered any specific marketing efforts that have been paying off the best for you? What seems to be working well?
KATY WEISS: Yeah. I think the website, our website www.chickitydoodoo.com that we started over a year ago… That, we’ve seen as being huge for us, as far as the response. And I think we really, because we have been kind of in a start-up mode until kind of recently, we’ve kind of been exploring testing different marketing to see what’s getting responses. But the trade shows, where we take our retail product to different distributor trade shows across the country, that’s been mainly what we spent our time and money as far as marketing. But, we continue to explore that, and looking to expand, but we’ve done advertising here and there in magazines just to kind of test those out. But the trade shows and the website have been the biggest what we’ve spent our time and money.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: I would think that trade shows really were a great avenue to get you introduced to a number of people who didn’t know you even existed.
KATY WEISS: Exactly. Yes, and that was just part of that building, beginning phase where we just, especially after we got over that year threshold, that was when we really started to notice the difference where we were going to for the second time to these trade shows where really people recognized us and that we were building on some past experience, which was huge, yeah.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: How is it the product actually sold? Now, on your website you show that you have a variety of different sizes and bags and pellets. And I understand that golf courses are another great market for you. Are you in stores like Target or are you in mostly nurseries, or what type of markets are you in at this time?
JOHN WEISS: We are…The backbone of our business is still the organic farmer. We sell that in bulk. We have been moving quickly into what we call “institutional market,” which is the golf course market, the municipalities, school districts, things of that nature. But, on the retail side, we have gone more towards the independent lawn and garden centers. That’s really the backbone of the trade shows. The different lawn and garden distributors around the United States. Service the independent or the family-owned lawn and garden centers.
And that’s been a very strong, especially like Katy said, the second year, the re-orders, the interest has grown in the second year dramatically. We are also in, for example, different ACE Hardware shows, the Do-It Best shows have accepted us. We have held off until this point, on the mass merchants like Target. We’ve been in the Targets, the Home Depots. We’ve been in discussions with them. That kind of conflicts with the independent lawn and garden centers. Those buyers who we have started to develop some loyalty to aren’t particularly excited about going to some of the larger mass merchants, which can undersell and really take away those sales from a unique product like ours.
What we’re looking at doing is actually potentially branding the same product in a different way with the mass merchants. That is much more acceptable to the ones that are buying it now because with the name, the logo and the coloring, people develop a following and want to buy it at a certain place that they go to. We’re hoping to hit both. There’s certainly a tremendous amount of interest on the side of the mass merchants for us to come in. One of the benefits we have with our product is that we, as I described before, we’re a really nice fertilizer, but we’re actually, because of our simple process, able to make it quite inexpensively. Normally, the mass merchants when they hear about carrying organic fertilizer or organic anything for that matter, it is with an understanding that’s you’re going to be paying 40 to 50 to 100% more than just the regular branding.
And with our product, we’re actually able to be very competitive and because the price of synthetic fertilizers has risen so dramatically. Synthetic fertilizers being almost entirely petroleum-based have risen with the cost of petroleum. We’ve become very competitive, and we’ve gotten the attention because we are competitively-priced and we have the ability to scale up and regionalize in terms of distribution. And we’ve gotten a lot of interest from some of the mass merchants that in the past have been very skeptical about competing with a Scott’s synthetic fertilizer, for example. It’s going to be interesting. It’s a story that’s still being written.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: It sounds like it. Now, it sounds like you’re getting a great reaction. Are you having any unique stories from consumers or the businesses that they are sharing with you how your product seems to do something a little differently than all the other products they’ve ever used?
JOHN WEISS: We are. That’s really part of the, when it comes down to it, it’s fun to see the product sales and see the growth in the company and so forth. But, when we go to trade shows, and we have someone who’s used it the previous year and come back and bring vegetables into your booth. We had a gentleman in Michigan, who just wanted to try it out for himself. Didn’t carry it in his store the first year. Wanted to see how it worked and said to us, if he’d that he was going to come back with such large vegetables, he would’ve planted 3 rows instead of 6. And he brought in onions and spinach, all kinds of things for us to take home. That’s the real, just the real joy of it. We use the product ourselves. I changed my yard over to an organic lawn, and just the to be able to see it being used and people getting excited about it, is really that’s the real payoff.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: That must be the gratifying part, to know that you’re making a difference, and you’re in the heartland of this country and doing something now that’s very natural and going back to the basics again and having these people come in and give you these great testimonials. All that can do is just increase your awareness and your success in the right markets.
KATY WEISS: Yeah, it is. And it’s really exciting knowing, I believe in 2009 is our goal, this Creekwood Farm in Lake Mills will be the first farm in Wisconsin, correct? That will actually not land apply any of their manure, and so that’s really exciting to be part of a first like that. You know that’s contributing to….
JOHN WEISS: Yeah, there are about 2400, what they call CAFOs, confined animal feeding operations, large and then defined by the Federal Government, as well as the state government, and we will be the first one of those in the state of Wisconsin, I imagine nationwide potentially, but certainly, we’ve been informed that we’ll be the first one in the history of the state of Wisconsin of that size, with that designation that will have zero application of any raw manure on any land. And that’s certainly been a goal of ours, it has been driven by the demand, and it’s been driven by a little bit of ingenuity on a lot of our part to get to the right products so we can get away from that.
And we really look at it and see a lot of the regulation and legislation with concerns about pathogens, with concerns about odor, ammonia emissions, particulate matter. Both being driven by the EPA, USDA on a national level and then on the state by state level, we’re out ahead of the game in terms of some of the things they’re looking for. So it’s very interesting time to be involved in this type of industry, and it’s even more fun for us to get out ahead of the game and be, we want to be the example that people look to, and certainly that will allow us credibility to go other regional farms, and say we’ve already done this at this farm. We can do it at others as well.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Yes, and it sounds like you’re really the pioneer out there, and you’re really leading the way, which is great. Now, I understand that your company is approved in all 50 states, and what exactly is the approval related to?
KATY WEISS: That is mostly to be, basically our license or register to sell our retail products in each state. So each state has a different process that we have to go through and keep up on a yearly basis so that we can sell our retail product there. And we have to report the tonnage of our product that’s sold in each state per year, and that’s what we have to keep up on. So that’s basically more of a licensing and registration process.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: That’s just another side of running a business, knowing that these are all the aspects involved with the business to make sure someone’s on top of all of that, handling all of that paperwork, doing it all in a timely manner, I would imagine.
JOHN WEISS: Well, we’ve heard from a competitor of ours that is a much larger business than we are, I should say wants to be a much larger, probably about the same size now. But, they actually have set aside one full-time employee just for certification purposes because the certification, like Katy said is on a state by state basis. How much you pay for the license, what’s required as far as reporting is literally from one state to the next, different, and that is in our, so far for us has been about 10% of Katy’s job. So you can imagine how busy she’s been, but yeah that’s literally a daily, well we call it a battle, but at some point I think it’ll kind of level off. But it’s definitely part of the deal. They want to make sure that the state governments, federal government wants to know where fertilizer is going, how much is being used, what kind it is, whether or not it’s safe, and so that’s part of the process of the business we’re in.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Absolutely. Now, on your website it shows that you have that OMRI listed seal. What does that actually mean and is that difficult to get?
JOHN WEISS: OMRI stands for Organics Material Review Institute. It is a certifying agency, I believe it’s in Portland, Oregon, and they’ve done a phenomenal job in terms of, especially when in early part of the organics industry was coming out there was a lot of confusion about what actually was organic, what was made from organic material and the U.S.D.A. went ahead and put together a National Organic Program and allowed different companies to become certifiers. And OMRI has just taken the lead, in terms of their ability to process, analyze and really, thoroughly look at what different products could come on the market and what will be considered and organic within the U.S.D.A. standards and what is not.
And it’s a thorough process. It’s something we had to certainly document and they have inspections in terms of how the product is created, making sure that the profits and product itself are what we say it is, and it’s really become in the last 2 or 3 years they don’t necessarily promote themselves this way, but the industry looks at the OMRI Seal as a really a seal of approval, that you’ve gone through that process and are considered what they call an OMRI listed product, it’s not necessarily an OMRI certified, and OMRI listed product as a true organic. And for us, with buyers and with distributors and retail customers, that goes a long way that we’re not some fly by night operation that’s just trying to pass a long-dehydrated chicken manure as fertilizer that we actually do go through a composting process, and that process is certified. It’s an annual certification that we get. So it’s really a credibility seal that we were very gratified to be able to get and continue to have.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: That must open a lot of doors for you. And I would imagine that’s a pretty challenging process to go through. So that’s a major success on your part to have even managed that, I would think.
JOHN WEISS: It was. It was definitely a great day for us from the standpoint of - you go through the process and you have what you think is all the correct processes in place. But, part of their ability to gain the credibility is they’ve been very tough, and they have actually had products that have been on the list that have been removed from the list for one reason or another. Now all of the sudden we gain credibility with people who have been listed as an organic for years. All of the sudden, we’re in the same listing. We were on, basically what they call probation for a year, we were under a restricted status, and then through that year continued to communicate with them, and now we are unrestricted processed manure list, which gains us even more credibility. It’s definitely and continues to be part of the process, but it’s I think going to be a situation where it’s more and more valuable going forward as well.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Oh absolutely. It sure sounds like it. Now, do you have plans for new products? You did mention having a consumer product that you can go into some of those retail stores, but do you have plans for other kinds of directions or products that you are working on right now?
JOHN WEISS: Yeah. There are a couple of things. We have a vision, we’ve talked about this vision a lot, and that is we have all of this manure coming off these large farms. We’re talking about millions of tons of manure that right now is being disposed of in really the most inexpensive way from a farmer’s point of view or from the owner’s point of view and that’s land application. And like I mentioned before, I think these, because animals themselves have become so concentrated the manure has also become so concentrated. We were on a farm last week that has 6 million chickens on one site and produces 160,000 tons of-I’m sorry 120,000 tons of manure on an annual basis. And that manure has to go somewhere, and right now most of it is going on land application and the concerns that go along with that.
And what we looked at and said is we are creating all of this, generally speaking on the retail level, all of this fertilizer from natural gas and from petroleum products, which, as we’ve found out in the last 2 years, have a volatility in terms of price, but certainly at some point we’re going to run out of. We have this excess amount of manure that we’re applying in an environmentally insensitive way and to one extent or the other. We have the manure here. We have the technology to be able to make something that’s as good or better fertilizer, why would we not take advantage of that across the board?
And I think over the next 5 to 10 years we’re going to see that, especially in terms of price, for example ours, we’re able to make fairly inexpensively, can pass that savings along. I think that’s really some of the direction, main direction, that we’re going to go. And I think as people find out about that our product is less expensive as some of the synthetics, why would you not do that? And so it really seems like a solution, all the way around.
I think in terms of new products, one of things we’re going to, we actually have started our own organic egg laying facility where the birds are fed 100% organic feed. We almost look at that as a premium manure, as funny as that may sound, that’s what we’ve heard. There’s some niches out there, customers that want the manure to come from 100% organically fed birds. We’ve always thrown around the idea of Chickity Doo Doo Gold as another product. All the things that you kind of think of, when you meet about opportunities… But, certainly the opportunity is most in the area of taking the product we have, potentially re-branding it with some of the mass merchants and really, instead of being a niche, really becoming a mainstream fertilizer.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And for myself, I love the recycling aspect of it. If there is so much excess here why not use it and there’s no reason to be using synthetic it seems anymore. If there’s so much of this available to be converted and made available to all the different markets.
JOHN WEISS: Yes. It’s been interesting. When we started this several years ago within the agricultural community. We had farmers that had used chicken manure for awhile and new it was a good product. But the large conventional farmers, when I say large I say farmers that are, have crops on some 2, 3, 5, 10 thousand acres of land. It just was not practical for them according to their outlook when it came to price to use an organic fertilizer like ours. And what’s happened, with the fact that the synthetic fertilizers have doubled and tripled and in some cases gone up 5 times from what they were 2 or 3 years ago, we got our foot in the door with some of the large operators that, of these crops these multiple thousand acre farms, and they tried our product out and what we were able to show them is that we are basically at or below that price and we are a far, far superior in terms of fertilizer, in terms of drought resistance and soil retention and rebuilding soil and all the great things that go along with an organic fertilizer.
And we’ve talked a lot about our vision that if we can go to these additional farms, and as many as that will take us on, we look at it and say on an egg basis we import, the United States imports 50% of its fertilizer, and that just makes no sense, and most of it from the Middle East because that’s where most of the petroleum is and where most of the synthetic fertilizers are made. And we looked at it and said, that makes no sense. We have all of this excess manure here that we’re using, what I think in an incorrect way, we can do better than this.
And I think now, we have the technology. We have an understanding of how these organic fertilizers work, how much more efficient they make the soil in terms of using nitrogen, so you can put less down. We’ve got the attention of the guys who certainly blew us off even 2 or 3 years ago. So you’re whole notion of recycling and becoming more efficient and using our resources more efficiently is gaining a foothold and unfortunately sometimes, it takes the price of something to go so out of whack for people to recognize that, but that’s happened and I think it’s going to be a real benefit for us.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: John and Katy, as we finish here… It sounds like you’re wearing a lot of different hats, and you’re doing a lot of great things and your timing is impeccable here. It sounds like what you have to offer is so important and I’m excited to hear that. But I am curious with all of these aspects that you cover and hats that you wear, what would you say is the favorite part for each of you of the business? What part do you love the most that you each do?
JOHN WEISS: I can tell mine first. I think it is, and this might sound kind of, I don’t know, kind of corny, but we’ve all had a hand this idea and this vision that we created, and it’s really been working with Katy and my brother-in-law, my dad and on a daily basis getting, had a lot of struggles along the way and complications and things that that we thought were going to work did not. And it’s really just trying to enjoy that part of the journey has been, has really been the fun part of it. The fact that we’re growing, and I think we’re going to do well as a business is certainly exciting, but the fun part is telling the stories about, you remember this day, when we got this phone call, and we thought oh this is it, we’re going in this direction or it’s not going to work. And then we were able to struggle through that. That’s the best part for me.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: That’s great. Katy, how about you?
KATY WEISS: Yeah. I think something that stands as being fun is just the exciting, like you spoke about the timing, just being part of something like this, that’s exciting and new and really catching on, part of something that’s a good thing for the environment. And like John said earlier, with the ag side being at the forefront being like a first in something like this in our state is really fun. And I really enjoy, we’ve been really finding that organic is kind of an education for people, and I like teaching people. A lot of people don’t understand what applying chemicals to their lawn actually does to the environment or the dangers of that. And so kind of being a part of helping educate people on what moving to an organic lawn and lawn care and that sort of thing, the benefits of that. And it’s that part of education that is fun too.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Well, and were you a teacher, Katy?
KATY WEISS: Nope, I wasn’t. I was always a computer analyst actually, in health care.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Oh yes, we can see total relationship here to this…
KATY WEISS: Exactly.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: And John, you were a teacher
JOHN WEISS: Yes, and my brother-in-law John Nortman was also a teacher. And yeah that’s, it’s actually been very helpful because really and we go to trade shows or we present, really is like Katy said, a matter of educating people about how organics work differently than synthetics and why they are successful as fertilizers and about the product. Once people get educated about it, they’re able to make good decisions and that’s really, really anybody who’s involved in this line of organic fertilizers and the whole idea of switching away from synthetics that’s, whether it’s on the ag side or on the retail side, that’s really what it’s about.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Great. Do you have any suggestions for someone, now that you’ve kind of been through this journey and continuing through the journey. But someone who’s out there, excited with the new vision and they want to get started. Do you have any advice or encouragement or words of wisdom for someone who is just starting this journey, with an idea maybe say in the agricultural business or any green type of business?
JOHN WEISS: If someone would have given this advice to me 2 or 3 years ago, I think it would’ve been good advice, and that is if you think you have a good idea and it makes sense to you, don’t necessarily get caught up with the people who say that’s a crazy idea, it’s never going to work. You definitely want to get the right feedback, but if you really believe in it, to stay with it and know that there’s going to be setback in it, and sometimes those setbacks can be a little bit scary, and a little bit unnerving, but within this space there’s more and more people that are coming to understand that this isn’t just a fad, and isn’t just a short-term movement. That you are going to find the right person who is going to believe in it, and there’s a lot of people out there that are willing to invest money in it, if they believe it’s the right idea. It’s an amazing from what all the investigating we’ve done. The amount of people that are really excited about investing and being a part of this whole process.
But it requires a lot of patience and just toughness to get through those times, but if you really believe in that idea, like we have, it’s definitely worthwhile.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: It sounds like just like you said just totally holding that vision and not letting anything get in the way of that. And Katy, anything you want to add to that, as far as advice you would give?
KATY WEISS: Yeah, I think something that’s been so useful to us. We’ve actually worked with, I believe they’re a grant organization. They’re called FPPC, it’s Farm Pilot Project Incorporated out of Tampa, Florida. And so I guess another piece of advice, they’ve been so helpful as far as, kind of being aligned with our vision, and they are a grant organization that works with mostly government funding. They help organizations such as ours obtain government grants, and so getting involved with other funding sources and other people that have the same vision as you and understand it and kind of aligning yourself with those people as well. I think of that as really a huge thing in this kind of business that we’re in and just being visionaries, and that sort of thing is just, it’s been really important for us.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: Excellent. Well, John and Katy, I really want to thank you for this interview and for sharing all your business experiences, your insights and especially your inspirational comments. Thank you so much.
KATY WEISS: Oh, thank you.
JOHN WEISS: Thanks so much for having us.
GREEN BUSINESS INNOVATORS: We’ll be watching for this Chickity Doo Doo out there expanding across the world.
JOHN WEISS: Sounds great.
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