25A – What’s Next?

Existing Market. 

Step 1: My product is a semi-commodity that has been a market staple for generations. PS is a market leader in the Mulch Industry and has been growing in popularity since other alternatives have been known to leak colorings and chemicals into the soil. 

Step 2: All of my interviews resulted in the very common assumption that PS is an unmoving market. I believe this has a lot to do with PS being a safe, long term financial investment and landowners and owners wanting to see what they hope for any investment: Consistent, stable growth.

Step 3: The most sense for my venture grew out of my existing market is to consolidate local landowners and suppliers to capture market share. PS is, with few exceptions, very commodities like with few initial costs, and anyone being able to grow/bale PS. This is only limited by the number of trees you own, and the number of people you have raking. 

New Market.

Step 1: This targeting will be focused on the B2B portion of my venture. My venture focuses on selling/negotiating land contracts with large, affluent, older landowners with much land that will make the investment more consistent with what the industry has been traditionally. However, more commonly are the children on these landowners moving away, or not deciding to manage the business of their parents. This could be exploited to create a real estate investment trust that could plant, manage, rake and sell bales from these lands without much input from the far away landowners. These long term investments are common for large companies. 

Step 2: REITs already use Pine trees as the backbone of their investments because of its consistent, biologically backed returns on their growth, literally. 

Step 3: The interviews that i spoke to are managers of Reits that invest millions of dollars in Wallstreet money in rural pine trees in north Florida. These trees are planted and then most often, not maintained, and cut down 18-24 years later. These trees are the possible new market for our venture. 

Step 4: I was very surprised by the amount of class A financial banks that invest in pine trees that are planted in rural southeast. This was a stunning realization of the financial potential of the industry as a blue-chip "stock" on global markets.