-: 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.