John McGuinness was working in landscaping when he realised there were no good facilities to get rid of garden waste and similarly no place to get good compost either in Ireland or Britain.
What sets your business apart from the competition? Mulch is a green waste recycling and compost depot – or the McDonald's drive-through of gardening, as we like to call it. You drive your garden waste to our centre – you can unload it or we can do it for you – and the more you bring the cheaper it is.
Then you head out the back door without ever having to leave your car. We then recycle this waste and produce a range of products for gardeners and landscapers, including compost and bark.
We’ve put a friendlier, cleaner spin on the whole waste industry. I want the guy in the cleanest suit to arrive in our depot, drop off his green waste and not be any dirtier than he was before when he goes out the back door.
We have built the company from the customer’s perspective so it’s based on what they want.
For example, we offer free coffee to our customers, and the thousands of euro that it costs to run every year is worth it, because it adds value to our service overall.
What has been your greatest success to date? It's great to hear customers compliment your truck drivers on how friendly they are, and when companies are coming to you having been recommended by another, you know you're doing something right. It's all the little things that are a constant reassurance.
Who do you admire in business and why? Steve Jobs is someone I really admire because he made his products as simple and as clean as possible. It's all about eliminating the initial confusion of the customer. That's why we have one name on the bag – Mulch – and if they want to know more, they're just one click away.
What's the best piece of advice you have received? A friend of mine once gave me a piece of paper with three circles and asked me to fill them in with the percentage of time spent working, time spent on relationships and time I spend alone. I filled it in as 80 per cent work, 15 per cent relationships, and 5 per cent myself.
He showed me a second piece of paper with 33 per cent in each circle and said: “That’s how the most successful business owners allocate their time.” Not really a quote, but it had an effect on me.
What's the biggest mistake you've made in business? When you start a business, you want to do everything yourself because you want to make sure it's done as perfectly and as efficiently as you would do it. I find it so hard to let go of certain tasks and let other people handle them. It's just me being precious, I guess, but it's just harder than you think. Sometimes you just have to step back and trust in people's abilities.
What's the biggest challenge you have had to face? It took us nearly a year to open the depot because of planning permission and waste permits. When we applied to Dublin City Council, we were the first waste permit that they'd ever had for a private company, because most companies are way outside the city. There was a huge amount of paperwork because they had never done one before.
What advice would you give to the Government to help stimulate the economy? We had no mentors to turn to for advice on how to run the business. The city council had no one to offer us help and, when we went to the Dublin City Enterprise Board, they had no waste or recycling mentors.
They also really need to look at reducing some of the barriers that we had to face. We were lucky that we had enough money behind us to rent out that space while we sat and waited for them to process our application.
Are the banks open for business? When you're a start-up, they aren't and you've got to show the bank that you can make money.
Right now, we’ve got a great relationship with the banks; we’ve bought trucks and equipment in the past few years and it’s never doubtful that they will lend to us.
The last time I saw my bank manager he made me tea and gave me a biscuit. I don’t know many bank managers who would do that.
What does the future hold for your business? Expansion. I co-founded this company in 2011 because there was nothing like us around then and there still isn't.
We’re looking to open a centre in south Dublin soon, and maybe in Cork and Galway as well, but it’s a less urban area there, so it loses its value.
The UK still hasn’t got anything like this, so we’ll look to jump over there too.
How much is your business worth and would you sell it? I would sell it, but I would rather stay involved and sell part of it. I'm not really a corporate type of a guy; I'm more proud of building a facility people want to use – that means more to me than a figure on a piece of paper.
In conversation with Gráinne Ní Aodha
