Karen Schuett Struck Entrepreneurial Gold in the Most Unlikely of Places – Canadian Business – How to Do Business Better

The journey from concept to IPO is a tough one. In this five-part sequence, we take a look at how founders scaled their startups and reached new milestones.

It began with pigs. Or, extra precisely, the “manure lagoon” they created on an Alberta hog farm. In search of assist for this soccer subject–sized downside, the native farmer reached out to Karen Schuett, who was operating a water remedy business centered on groundwater that had been contaminated with hydrocarbons—natural chemical substances present in oil, pure gasoline and coal.

This wasn’t the primary time somebody had contacted her with a longshot ask; Schuett recurrently labored on water decontamination tasks at gasoline stations, airports and rail yards all over the world. It was the primary time, nonetheless, {that a} chilly inquiry led to a pivot within the business itself.

“It seemed like a simple move from diesel and hydrocarbon contamination over to manure waste,” says Schuett. “But we quickly found out it wasn’t—there was just nothing on the market to help with manure waste.”

Within months, she and her companions had launched a brand new firm, Livestock Water Recycling (LWR), and had been on the trail to sustained, international progress—however it could take a decade of arduous work to get there. “As far as just scaling a business in Canada, there’s a lot of barriers,” Schuett says.

Building a business case

Water remedy is about filtration. The objective is to separate natural particles from clear water—usually by utilizing chemical substances that trigger these impurities to both float or sink—the place they are often eliminated. Here’s the place it will get difficult: coping with varied kinds of waste requires vastly completely different chemical remedies and bodily processes, and there wasn’t a protocol to take care of manure. (The excessive nutrient load in manure makes it significantly difficult to take care of.) The LWR group started experimenting with their present gear and strategies. As quickly as they noticed some success, Schuett knew they’d a powerful business case for making a simpler strategy and she or he set about studying the whole lot she might about manure. 

It’s that resourcefulness that almost all impressed Michael Madsen, an govt in residence at MaRS, an innovation hub in Toronto. As considered one of Schuett’s mentors in MaRS Momentum, a program that helps high-potential ventures, he’s working to assist LWR scale globally.

“To grow a company, you need to articulate the customer’s problem, and then represent yourself as a subject matter expert who can solve it,” Madsen says. “Karen is so good at that. She is extremely focused and creative, and she has intellectual curiosity about the problems facing beef and pork producers. She really, really understands their business.”

Finding the worth proposition

Establishing the business case was the simple half. Even creating the know-how wasn’t that tough. Learning the ins and outs of an unfamiliar trade and convincing farmers to strive one thing new, although? That was a a lot larger problem. 

“It’s hard to bring a new way of doing things into a very old, well-established market. Some farming families have been on their land for 100 years—they know what they’re doing,” Schuett says. “This wasn’t an inefficient system that we were trying to fix; they were being very efficient about it and being as economical as possible.”

Through conversations with tons of of farmers, she realized the corporate’s worth proposition wasn’t nearly cleansing up manure. It was of their skill to create new income streams for his or her clients. As each yard gardener is aware of, manure is a good fertilizer. Once LWR filters the waste out of the lagoon, farmers can promote the processed manure as two distinct fertilizer merchandise. Some of the corporate’s shoppers are additionally promoting their manure as feedstock for biogas, an alternate vitality supply that’s produced by fermenting natural matter. Farmers even reported fringe advantages, equivalent to more healthy herds, elevated being pregnant charges and lowered antibiotic use.

LWR additionally helps farms change into extra environmentally sustainable. According to a research in Global Change Biology, “livestock manure management accounts for almost 10 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture globally,” most of that from manure lagoons. LWR’s know-how can minimize these emissions by 50 to 82 per cent, Schuett says. What’s extra, solely 4 per cent of the world’s water provide is at the moment reused. LWR is aiming to recycle a trillion gallons of manure into reusable water and bio-fertilizers by 2030.

Looking to scale

Businesses in capital-heavy markets like water remedy take some time to get off the bottom. Even with all of its advantages—and the worldwide enlargement of livestock farming in response to rising demand for meat—it took years for LWR to see actual traction. Then, proper earlier than the pandemic, a wide range of market forces mixed to supercharge the corporate’s progress. Just about each nation on this planet turned fascinated with renewable gas sources; the U.S., particularly, started pushing biogas. Fertilizer costs additionally soared, which made the opportunity of promoting their manure much more attractive to farmers.

It was round this time Schuett determined to hunt assist from MaRS and its Momentum program. At first, Schuett’s focus was merely on having access to new networks and changing into extra established as a participant within the cleantech trade. 

“There’s a real access-to-capital and access-to-market issue in Canada,” she says. “We wanted to grow assertively, which meant raising capital, but we didn’t have a network of investors.”

Momentum matched Schuett with skilled entrepreneurs who specialise in the whole lot from advertising to funding to human sources. This curated group supplies her with heat introductions to their networks and gives concrete recommendation about scaling an organization internationally.

“Having a resource where people can tell you what worked for them makes you feel supported and much less alone on your journey,” Schuett says. “You’re not floundering around looking at an opaque future, but really making a clear path forward.”

With elevated international demand, the corporate has tripled its income and nearly doubled its variety of workers. Schuett says Momentum’s assist has been invaluable as LWR seems to be to its subsequent part, which focuses on Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Her mentors have been serving to her put together for a $20-million fairness spherical, which will probably be used for creating these new markets and launching new merchandise. The firm tasks this can permit it to double income every year for the subsequent three years to attain 30 per cent market penetration.

LWR has began constructing a income mannequin that would remodel the dairy trade. There are even predictions that manure might change into extra precious to farmers than milk. “This new profit dynamic has the potential to make the industry more economically and environmentally robust,” says Schuett. It’s an surprising twist, however Schuett is discovering a method to spin manure into gold.

MaRS Momentum program works with high-growth Canadian firms to speed up their path to hitting $100 million in income. Is your business Canada’s subsequent anchor firm? Find out extra and apply to affix the program.