Tim Bennett is most assuredly a planner. He schedules our interview for late in the day, knowing he will be driving all the previous night, he warns me when we first meet that at some point he will have to pause our conversation to retrieve the coffee he has ordered, and he even has the foresight to apologize in advance for the increased possibility of rambling his lack of sleep will cause in his answers. So when Tim tells me how he began his new business, Bennett Compost, it does not surprise me that the steps he describes were calculated and well thought out from the start.
After listening to a friend talk at length about Philadelphia’s lack of a city composting service, Tim got the idea to fill that gap. Once he had the idea, Tim says, “I started to wonder if I could test it out without spending a lot of money.” So Tim developed a plan: “I learned more about composting, did my research, talked to some community gardens I was working with, and I put aside a hundred bucks and said, ‘Let me see what I can do with this.’”
Bennett Compost, is a composting service that charges customers to have their food waste picked up from their households and businesses in Philadelphia. After collecting the waste, Bennett Compost then delivers it to local gardens that use composting to change animal- and plant-based materials (like meat, fruit, and vegetables) into a soil additive. Composting has an enormously positive effect on the environment, because it prevents food waste from being thrown out. When food waste isn’t composted it enters a landfill and breaks down anaerobically to create harmful methane gas.
On Tim’s initial tight budget, he hung up fliers to advertise his service in places, “Where I thought people who would want to do this would be.” After 2 months Tim had about 10 customers. With that income, he decided to take a bigger step. “I setup a booth at GreenFest for about $300. I just made a sign, printed out some business cards myself, and went for it.” This proved to be a successful plan—almost 100 people gave Tim their information and in addition, Bennett Compost caught the attention of the publisher of Grid magazine. “He was intrigued by the idea and they did an article about it and more people started contacting me and so I thought, ‘Wow, this is actually kind of working.’” So Tim continued to make changes to continue the progress. “The next thing I did was offer people discounts if they signed up for a year in advance, and that put some cash in the bank that allowed us to do some more expensive stuff.”
After 10 months, Tim knew that with Bennett Compost taking off, he had to choose between his new business venture and his job at Temple University. “I talked to my wife about it and asked if this composting service was something we could do. I explained that I would take somewhat of a pay cut to do it, and she was OK with it, so I went for it.”
Tim began his experiment in April of 2009 and by June of 2010 he went fulltime with Bennett Compost, doing most of the driving and pickups himself. Bennett Compost now has over 200 households and over 15 businesses as customers and continues to grow. Tim says, “We handled 20,000 pounds in September and we’ll smash through that this month.”
Tim says that the biggest challenge his business faces is education. “‘What is composting? Why is it important?’ It’s new for a lot of people, the idea of separating food wastes. You have to know how to get in front of the right people and be at the right events. We can save a business money on their waste handling cost because it’s cheaper to compost than it is to send food to a landfill, but you have to get in front of the right person who can make that decision and get them to see that it makes sense and is worth the extra effort.” In effect, Tim’s aim is to share his forward thinking with potential customers to show them why they should compost.
For the future, Tim will continue to grow Bennett Compost with his same practical approach. “I’d like to expand our capacity to handle more of the material ourselves so that we can produce more compost and sell it to have multiple revenue streams. I’d also like to be able to hire someone to work fulltime for us because the less time I spend working in the business the more time I can spend on the business to find new customers and think of new ways to expand and grow.”
