Vol. XVI No. 5
September / October 2022
Serving Soil, Mulch, Compost & Wood Pellet Producers www.SoilandMulchProducerNews.com
NEWS
Ohio Mulch main facility, Columbus, OH Photo / Ohio Mulch
Ohio Mulch Success Strategy: Changing With The Times
Kathy & Jim Weber
By P.J. Heller
J
im Weber has come a long way since he was a 19-year-old running a lawn service business out of the garage at his parents’ home. Today, some 38 years later, Weber is owner and president of Ohio Mulch, one of the largest mulch manufacturing companies in Ohio. The company, headquartered on a 56-acre site in Columbus, has 20 locations in Ohio, Georgia and Kentucky, some 350 employees at the height of the mulch season, and produces some 1 million cubic yards of mulch annually. That’s a far cry from when the teen-age Weber had to drive around to numerous locations trying to find bags of mulch for his lawn service business. “I was doing a lot of landscaping and one of the things I needed back then was mulch,” he recalls. “It was very difficult to get 40 years ago. Hardly anyone used mulch. The typical garden center back then didn’t exist. They probably went through one or two semi loads a year and not every store carried it. I would assume that the margins were significantly greater back then than they are today, but the volume was significantly less.” Weber eventually got the names of some mulch manufacturers off the bottom of the bags and realized he could purchase semi-trailer loads to meet his needs.
“At the time, I knew I couldn’t have semi loads of mulch delivered to my parents’ home,” he says. “So, I had to find a place to store the product.” He found a facility to rent where he could store equipment and the bagged mulch. He set up a little storefront where he could sell mulch and began promoting and advertising the business. He also quickly realized that he could sell some of the mulch to other landscapers and retailers. “Back then, the home and garden section in newspapers came out on Sunday. The first day I opened for business was Sunday, April 1, 1984. That first day I did $1,500,” he remembers. “Wow. It was better than I thought.” In his first year in business, he sold 99 semi-trailer loads of mulch. He ended up selling his lawn service business to concentrate on the mulch business. By his third year in business, he says he was having difficulty getting enough product, including from local sawmills. Consistency was also an issue. That prompted him to purchase a grinder “to make my own premium bulk product,” Weber says. By 1990, however, the grinder couldn’t keep up with the volume of material. So Weber modified the grinder, replacing lightweight and troubleContinued on page 3