Drop by drop

Stacy Anderson,
Earth Wizards Inc.:
763.784.3833
st***@**********ds.com
www.earthwizards.com

How a passion for water drives
Earth Wizards’ growth
by Beth Ewen

Earth Wizards Inc. is one of two winners of this year’s Upsize Growth Challenge, and founder Stacy Anderson’s tactics to build her $3-million company are detailed in the story that follows this interview. Upsize Editor Beth Ewen sat down with Anderson in October to learn more about her all-consuming passion: the quality of water and what her company is doing to improve it. Along the way Anderson revealed vast technical knowledge, a Zen-like business philosophy, and a surprising hankering for the sweet smell of blacktop.

Upsize: Describe your company as it stands today.

Stacy Anderson: We are a design and installation company focused on water specifically. We do traditional pavements, alternative pavements that allow water to go through the surface, rain gardens, bumper strips and shoreline restorations. Water is our passion, and we really aim to educate our customers with things they can do on their property to retain stormwater runoff on their site, rather than discharging it to storm sewers which then pipe it into our ephemeral streams and lakes and rivers. That takes a lot of pollutants; that has a detrimental effect on water quality.

Upsize: You started out on a paving crew in your family business. How did you get from there to here?

Anderson: Oddly enough I still have a passion for blacktop. I don’t know what it is; it gets into your blood. The smell of blacktop: I still love it every spring! People talk about flowers; to me it’s blacktop that says spring is here and I get excited about it. So I thought, what can we do within our culture? Because people still need driveways and roadways, we still need those things, but is there a better way of doing it? When I became involved with MECA, the Minnesota Erosion Control Association, I learned first about erosion because it was an issue to be concerned about. But then I soon learned about stormwater and said, Well, I’m contributing to that problem. I wondered if there was something we could do as a company to mitigate that problem. We happen to be really at the forefront of this movement here in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, of what can we do. We are all concerned about our lake health and quality, and how we can improve it. I quickly started to implement things internally with our own designs and installations.

Upsize: Today what is the split in your business, between traditional blacktop and rainwater mitigation?

Anderson: In 2004, the ecological side was 10 percent and the pavement was 90 percent. In 2009 we achieved a 50-50 split.

Upsize: What drives your passion for the ecological side of the business?

Anderson: I think just growing up in Minnesota and knowing what the metro area was like, and then seeing all the development. You go off to college and come back 10 years later, and you notice, and for me it was the little suburb I was from, how much development had occurred there. Then I came back into my family’s business and really started to think, this isn’t using my creative skills. If you’re going to run a business you have to absolutely love what you do and believe in it, because as a small-business owner you go through too much to not have that passion as the basis.
Water has just been essential. Wetlands are being eradicated, streams are being blown over. Such as Brookdale Mall, they just paved over Shingle Creek, right? We changed the hydrology of the landscape, and it’s affecting us. We’re just getting a little taste of it now, and what’s going to happen in 10 years? We need to change it.

Upsize: Describe a project that you’ve done that paints the picture about what kind of impact your work has.

Anderson: One of our favorite projects is with a church in Minneapolis, which has a flat roof where the center drain was going directly into the sanitary sewer. The city requires that there’s a disconnect done on those buildings that have that. So now the church had to take that pipe and bring it to the outside of the building. The church decided to do something a little bit different. We put together a design and then installed a concrete structure that would dissipate the velocity of water that would come off the roof.
So when you’ve got a roof and then it comes down to a three-inch pipe, especially when rain events are as intense as they are today, that means more velocity. There needs to be a dissipater. We did a more elegant design with it. It’s a concrete cistern that then starts spinning around in circles, which slows the water a little bit. Then it comes over a three-tiered cascade, and then over a decorative grate. The idea is if you’re walking over it when it’s raining, you start asking, where is this water going? It goes into a first rain garden, a second rain garden and then a third rain garden. So it captures what we’re terming a 10-year storm event, which is a 2.4-inch rain. That is handled through these rain gardens.

Upsize: If this project weren’t there, what would happen with this water? Would there be a big flood?

Anderson: With each watershed the water is essentially going to a certain place. Within the metro area we have different watersheds. That water would come to the lawn, eventually hit some sort of pipe that goes down into the ground into the city’s network underground and eventually to the river. So what happens is that water carries pollutants. Not only is there the excess volume causing flooding and erosion, but it also carries heat with it, which can be damaging, pollutants like tar from the shingles, which can be damaging. Certainly with the roadways, lawns that have been treated, pet feces, there’s just a lot of bad stuff that’s sitting on the ground. And once that raindrop hits that it carries it away. We’re trying to catch that rain. If we can hold that first pollutant water on that site, so it will go through the ground and get treated as it goes through the soil, which actually acts as a filter, and then hits our aquifers which we drink, that’s great.

Upsize: You have such an interesting combination of knowledge, on the one hand a lot of technical knowledge about water and soil and construction, and then on the other you talk about decorative grates, rain gardens, saving the earth. How did you develop this dichotomy?

Anderson: Certainly growing up in a family business where I worked on the crew, I got to experience that side of it. What is it like to dig in clay soils? How about sandy soils? What happens if you do this? You start learning what works and what doesn’t work just by being involved. You start to learn that those skid loaders we have now make things a lot easier. It’s been an evolution, and a unique one. Once I went to college I thought I could be a college student the rest of my life. But I’ve kind of gotten that in different ways, from being involved in different organizations, trade associations, MECA. Minnesota is at the forefront, and it’s a proud thing, and I think we need to get further. Another thing, it’s just constantly asking the questions and getting the answers from all over the place. I learn so much from other business owners, going to classes and conferences. I was just able to listen to Marv Levy at a college I attended and I gleaned some quotes from him that have helped me get through.

Upsize: He’s the former Buffalo Bills coach. What was one of those quotes that made an impression on you?

Anderson: As a business owner you feel you constantly need to get somewhere other than where you’re at. You need to improve, to grow, you need different equipment, different staff. For me one of the biggest realizations was, the business is exactly what it needs to be. So his quote is: Where else would you rather be than right here, right now?

Upsize: That’s something business owners don’t often stop to consider, you’re right.

Anderson: In business there’s survival of the fittest. You see your competition go by the wayside or you see new competition come in. So it becomes this ever-evolving race. Sometimes it’s good to be able to stop and say, I’m OK, we’re unmatched. I can get better, but it can be internal change. I can improve my processes. I can ask my customers more, but I don’t have to keep up the chase.

Upsize: When you think about where your business is today, and you started it 10 years ago, what makes you proud?

Anderson: Our customers are just really amazing customers, and once they’ve worked with us they don’t seem to look anywhere else. They come right back to us just like we’re part of their family. I have to say that’s what I’m most proud of.

Upsize: Can you talk about a time with your company that was a turning point for the good, when things started going much better?

Anderson: When I had first decided to bring some of the design element into the company such as permeable pavement and rain gardens, I felt I didn’t have enough of that knowledge. I had connected with a couple of people, and had taken a big risk at the time. Who was this person? What was their knowledge? Is this even going to be a viable business? And it was taking a leap of faith, bringing that person in, and growing that side of the business.

Upsize: What do you think caused you to take that risk? What gave you the courage to take the leap of faith?

Anderson: Again, the quality of water has always been one of my great passions. When I first started the business in 2000, I lived near a lake in which the water quality is just awful. I made some calls and asked, how can we get rid of this crud? And figuring out that it’s more upstream that we need to treat, and oh my gosh I’m part of the problem-I started to think, what can we be doing differently? That was the moment I felt we needed to do this.

I was going to make it work. Unfortunately we were much earlier than the rest, for anybody to pay for it at least. You know, their mind is for it but they say, wait a minute, so it’s going to cost us more to do it this way? We all have to make choices with our property. So what we became good at was figuring out rather than doing a whole permeable driveway, can we divert the water another way? That’s how we became creative.

Upsize: What about the flip side: What’s a dark time for your company? What happened and how did you get through?

Anderson: One of my most trying episodes was a project in Minneapolis this last year. I had been in contact with the city staff there for several months, making sure we had all the permits in place. I was told of two permits and when I went to get those permits, they said, Well wait a minute, this needs to go through this review, and this review could take 10 months. I had blocked off six weeks of my crew’s time on my schedule and now I had to stop. Well, that would be fine and good if I had enough projects in my pipeline. And I didn’t have things scheduled. It was pretty stressful. It came through just fine, but I had to change quickly. At the same time I was making amends with the client. We had cut trees down. It wasn’t a pretty site to look at. They had weddings going on there, they had their congregation seeing this construction every week. We tried to beautify the site in a sad way, planting some bushes to try to hide it. You really can’t hide orange construction tape. It’s all behind us now.

Upsize: What did you take away from that experience?

Anderson: Never feel with a city that you’re always on the right foot. Always ask those questions.

Upsize: I have three questions that I ask all entrepreneurs, for this interview. In your opinion, which is more important, talent or experience?

Anderson: For me with the team of individuals that we have, it’s experience. It’s allowed us to be uniquely positioned in our business. Our guys aren’t 20 years old. Our guys are in their 40s, some in their 50s. They have a diverse amount of experiences. They have a multitude of different things that through their 20, 30 years of being out in the labor force they bring into the company for us.

Upsize: Which do you think is more important, money or ideas?

Anderson: Since I never have had a lot of money, I have to say I’ve lived pretty well off of ideas. Ideas for me are passionate, are creative. It’s what thrills me. It’s what makes me excited. Money would be nice laughs but I do thrive on ideas.

Upsize: What’s one thing you wish they would have told you, about being an entrepreneur?

Anderson: Get ready to sacrifice. It’s just like a new parent, and you want to be able to tell them, ‘Get ready for this. You have no idea. Let me just tell you.’ And you can’t tell them enough about how their whole existence will change. That’s how owning a business is.

Upsize: That really is something no one can tell you, isn’t it?

Anderson: It is definitely something you have to endure, experience, sacrifice. But it’s thrilling all the same.