1. Kindly give us a brief description of yourself (it should include your brief educational or entrepreneurial background and list some of your major achievements).
Answer: I’m Wesley Jeffcote, born in Fayetteville, Georgia. I moved to South Carolina when I was three years old. I grew up with a lot of siblings and was homeschooled. I went to college at the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina. I graduated with a bachelor’s in supply chain management. I started my career in the concrete industry, working at Thomas Concrete of South Carolina in Greenville. I wanted to get out of the office, get into sales, get to know the customer a little bit more, and have a more lively job. So I took a sales job at Blackjack Paving in Fairburn, Georgia. From there, I transitioned from sales to a startup division they had called Blackjack Concrete. I did that for about a year and a half and decided to work for myself. So I started a stump grinding company in Senoia, Georgia. From there, I saw that there was a need for pine straw, because basically what I was doing was going into someone’s yard, tearing up their yard, and not giving them a solution to put their yard back together.
2. What inspired you to (start a new business venture) or (make significant changes in an existing business)? How did the idea for your business come about?
Answer: I realized I was going into everyone’s yard and already working on their house, and my stump grinder is extremely damaging. I excavate any ground around it. And you would do a good job, but you would leave the customer’s house, and it would look awful. There would be chips and dirt everywhere, and I had no way to repair the yard. Pine straw is one of the quickest solutions to make your yard look tidy. That kind of led me to have a conversation with David about how he laid out the need for it and the strong demand for it in this part of the state. We started talking about how pine straw, as an industry, is known for dishonesty.
3. What three pieces of advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs?
Answer: I would say be able to adapt. Your situation’s going to always be changing. Be able to multitask and handle really fast decisions, and they don’t have to be the right decision. You just have to make the right decision after you make them. Treat all your customers well. That’s kind of cheesy and a cliché, but word of mouth spreads fast. If you do the right thing with enough customers, your name will be snowballed into the market. But make sure it’s a calculated risk and you know what you’re getting into, and there will be long days, and you may go a little bit without pay, but take the risk, make decisive decisions, and don’t look back.
4. What would you say are the top three skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur?
Answer: Be adaptable, be capable of taking risks, and be open to having your plan A not work out and be open to plan B, whatever it may be.
5. What is the best way to achieve long-term success?
Answer: Think about the long-term benefits and not the short-term benefits. It would be really easy for us to go out and make quick profits, but not be a respected brand a year from now. It’s about keeping your eye on the prize. You know, don’t be discouraged by the cruddy first year. There’s a goal in mind, and it’s not 2024. Just keep your eye on the prize and keep doing it.
6. Where do you see yourself and your business in 5 – 10 years?
Answer: The highest volume pine straw install company around Atlanta. I see it being the go-to, most recognized brand in Fayette and Coweta, and as a trusted member of the community. In five years, I’m hoping we can be doing 2,500 bales a day in pine straw.
7. Excluding yours, what company or business do you admire the most?
Answer: I know it’s an overused cliché, and I’m sure everyone around Atlanta says this, but Chick-fil-A. I think they have a great culture of excellence and incentivizing their employees and making their employees feel like they’re part of that culture. People love to go to work every day there. It doesn’t matter if you are the CFO or if you’re in the back of a restaurant.
8. How important have good employees been to your success?
Answer: It’s the most important thing. Your employees can make or break a company. When you have young, motivated employees that come into work every day and they show up on time and they do the job with a smile on their face, you know, you can step away because you know that they’re going to treat your customers with the same respect that you treat them. You don’t have to oversee and manage everything because you have quality employees who love their job and take pride in their work.
9. How long do you stick with an idea before giving up?
Answer: I like to think, how long do you stick with a certain approach until you pivot into something else? You stick with something as long as you can till you cannot do it.
10. What motivates you?
Answer: I think about the end goal every day. I wake up, I’ve got a baby on the way. I’m married, so I know I have to make it successful, and so I stay the course.
11. How do you generate new ideas?
Answer: Entrepreneurship is not about reinventing the wheel. You have to come up with new ideas. There are plenty of good business ideas that people just aren’t doing properly. I look for businesses that aren’t being done properly and, I say, “Let’s go do this properly. Let’s go do it right.”
12. What is your favorite aspect of being an entrepreneur?
Answer: Just meeting customers, meeting people, learning from the mistakes, and knowing that next time that mistake is made, we already have a solution in our back pocket and we’ll be able to pivot a whole lot faster next time.
13. What do you feel is the major difference between entrepreneurs and those who work for someone else?
Answer: I don’t think there’s too much of a major difference. I always say there are multiple ways to do your career right, and they’re both good ideas. It’s really what works best for that person. I would say something I’m decent at is composure. Being able to remain calm in really high-stress situations, being able to take a hit and just let it roll off your shoulder would be helpful because you’re going to take a lot of hits in the first year, and you just can’t let it bother you for a few days.
14. Who has been your greatest inspiration?
Answer: This is probably the biggest cliché answer, but, God. My father was very hardworking. I had the privilege of watching him go to work every day and provide. That’s a benefit that I had a good model to model my life after.
15. What book has inspired you the most? (OR what is your favorite book?)
Answer: I forget the author, but I know the book. It’s called “Mindset.” It’s about changing your mindset about situations and circumstances. Most people, when something cruddy happens to them, they quit. They give up and say, “This is it. I tried this, and it’s not going to work”, as opposed to, “This is just a problem that has a solution, and it’s my job to pivot and find the solution.” There was a Navy SEAL named Mike Murphy who would always write the word “good” on the bottom of his shoes, so that whenever he had a cruddy circumstance happen, he could just look down and say, good, I’ll figure it out.
16. What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve made?
Answer: The biggest mistake was when we first started. The model was completely different. We were going to subcontract everything, and we completely ignored one of the top five rules of business, which is that you have to control your supply chain. We were hiring these people who were the same people who might be giving the industry a bad reputation, and it was extremely unreliable. We couldn’t keep a schedule. We couldn’t promise a quality product to the customer, and we essentially had no control and no way to plan a workday.
17. How can you prevent mistakes or do damage control?
Answer: We made the capital investment to have our trucks and trailers and our in-house employees and stepped completely away from any sort of subcontracting model. We also built relationships with suppliers to ensure a steady flow of supply.
18. What are your hobbies? What do you do in your non-work time?
Answer: I have a really big family, and now I have in-laws, so we spend a lot of time with family. I like to hunt. A couple of times a year, we’ll go duck hunting or bird hunting. As every man approaching his thirties does, you either have to get obsessed with history or smoke meat. So, now I have a meat smoker. Me and my wife walk around a lot, visit random towns, and go out to dinner.
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