Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Episode 005. How much do you know about your business and industry?
How often do spread your knowledge and experiences through free media?
Every business has it’s friends, it’s competitors and it’s sworn enemies. It is amazing how many executives have a difficulty naming names and standing-up for their brand.
Ann Molloy, the sales & marketing director at Neptune’s Harvest, exemplifies this attitude that everyone needs when discussing their products in public.
Listen to our conversation about the highs and lows in the organic fish fertilizer business.
And to find out more about Neptune’s Harvest fine products, please click on the link below!
https://www.neptunesharvest.com/
Transform your company into an absolute Dream Business! http://brianjpombo.com/dreambiz/
Full Transcript
Brian: Who are your customers?
Who are your competitors in your industry?
Who are your enemies?
Today we’re talking with Ann Molloy. She’s the sales and marketing director at Neptune’s Harvest, which is a fertilizer company out of Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Stay tuned, we’re about to talk to her and afterwards I’m going to give you some thoughts on our conversation.
Podcast Intro: If you’re someone who refuses to go along to get along, if you question whether the status quo was good enough for you and your family. If you want to leave this world better off than you found it and you consider independence a sacred thing.
You may be a prepper, a gardener, a homesteader, a survivalist, or a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman.
We are here to celebrate you whether you’re looking to improve your Maverick business or to find out more about the latest products and services available to the weekend rebel.
From selling chicken eggs online, to building up your food storage or collecting handmade soap.
This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self-reliance for those that are living a daring adventure life off the grid.
Brian: Ann Molloy was born and raised in Glocester, Massachusetts.
After several years of traveling around the country and world. She settled back there and has been helping run her family business for almost 25 years, Ann has verseeing the marketing and sales for the Neptune’s Harvest division of Ocean Crest Seafoods.
Which came about to fully utilize 100% of the fish by turning the curie, everything that’s left over after you filet the fish into an organic fertilizer.
She has a wide knowledge of organic fertilizers and the fishing industry. She also loves to paint, right and see live music. Ann welcome to The Off The Grid Biz Podcast.
Ann: Thank you for having me.
Brian: Great to have you here.
What is it that you do for Neptunes Harvest?
Ann: I’m in charge of sales and marketing.
Basically do the ads for the company and I oversee the sales.
Brian: Have you always see yourself in the family business. How’d you end up here?
Ann: Well, actually I was an art major in college and I never thought I would be in the family business because it was a seafood company and I did the books for a little while as a teenager. I really didn’t like bookkeeping really wasn’t my thing.
But then when we went into the organic fertilizer business, I said, well this is something I could absolutely get behind.
I was definitely interested in the business at that point and I’ve been here ever since.
Brian: Oh, interesting. So you’ve always been on that side of things, since this began.
Ann: Right. I was a bookkeeper for Ocean Crest Seafoods for a short amount of time through high school and summers during college briefly.
And then I had my son in 1991, when he was about three years old, I went back to the family business full time.
Brian: Great. What’s the top selling one of the top selling products that you guys have?
Ann: I would say our number one selling product is the Fish & Seaweed Blend because it combines both products, which have a lot of benefits into one and then our Crab & Lobster Shell would be the other top one gets tilled in the soil before planting and the other against liquid fed. Those are our two best sellers.
Brian: What were some other products that you guys have available?
Ann: Started with the fish and that’s our main primary product, but we also have a Fish & Seaweed Blend, a straight seaweed, a couple specialty products, a Tomato & Vege Formula and the Rose & Flowering.
Ones more for the veg stage of the plant and then the flowering stage of the plant.
But those two products both contain fish, seaweed, molasses, humate, Yucca, liquid calcium and biological microbe. So it’s a very high energy mix and, oh, I’m sorry, there’s two more.
The Turf Formula and The Lawn Starter, all of those have the same ingredients, just varying amounts to get different results.
So one’s more for getting more vege, one’s more for getting more flowering budding. And then the lawn products are really just high energy mixes. They give you a nice green, healthy lawn and protect it from insect and disease damage.
And then we have the dry products, which is our Crab & Lobster Shell, our Kelp Meal, which is just the same seaweed but in a dry form.
And then we have Humate Concentrate and Biological, and some other products too for the farmers.
Quite a few products that you can learn about on our website, but we have quite a big line now. We keep adding to it all the time.
Brian: How do you come up with new ideas for new products, does it come from the customers?
So where did they come from?
Ann: It comes from the customers. Absolutely.
We really do have good positive growers that give us suggestions, but tomato and veggie and the Rose and flowering really came from cannabis growers to be honest.
They were looking for the vege and the flowering and they were using all these products anyway, buying them separately.
So they suggested we have a product that we put together with all those products that they like to use so they can have an all in one and keep it a lot more simple.
But it works great on vegetables, flowers and all sorts of other things too.
That’s how that one came about. And the turf formula with zero phosphorus came about because a lot of golf courses and landscapers and homeowners were in communities where they don’t allow phosphorus anymore, on lawns, so they wanted us to come up with a zero phosphorous lawn fertilizer for them.
That’s how that one came about.
Brian: Where are you meeting customers in cases would over the phone?
Is it online, Is it in person?
Ann: All of the above.
We do a lot of trade shows, so we do have a lot of one-on-one with customers there.
People call in all day long, so we’re talking with them there and then we have our website has a leave, a comment section and people can ask any questions there and it’ll come to my email sort of that way.
So all three ways.
Brian: Fabulous.
Who’s the ideal customer for Neptune’s harvest products?
Ann: Oh, we sell anywhere from a pint to a 4,600 gallon tanker truck, home gardeners and farmers.
Anybody interested in producing very high quality food, helping their soil, not hurting it with chemicals.
So anybody organic minded who wants to grow top quality produce and anything else and treat the earth right, help their soil become extremely healthy.
Brian: What do you personally like best about your business and industry?
Ann: Well, it’s a great thing that we’re utilizing 100% of the fish and not wasting anything. It’s amazing that it’s organic outperforms chemicals and I love the way it helps the environment.
It builds organic matter and soil, which helps sequester carbon, and it makes very nutrient dense food.
It really helps growers of all kinds achieve top results that they want.
Brian: Had you guys ever heard of anyone else using that process previously doing it?
How’s that come about?
Ann: Well, no, we hadn’t. When I was first into gardening I would to the stores and there was all chemical fertilizer and not hardly any organic options, at least around here.
We hadn’t really known about other people making anything like this, but we knew that the Indians did it.
We knew the Italian fishermen that buried the fish under their tomatoes at the best tomatoes in the city and they said big and flavorful.
We knew it worked. We knew it worked really well.
Brian: So what makes fish so special?
Why do they work so well as a fertilizer?
Ann: Excellent question.
So all the fish are caught very far offshore, very cold, clean mineral rich, North Atlantic ocean water. The colder, the darker the water, the more minerals in it.
The whole world used to be under ocean water. At one time they found fish fossils on the top of Mount Everest.
So our planets kind of been demineralizing.
Also, salt water is almost identical to the blood in our veins.
It has all the nutrients that plants and soil and humans need in nature’s perfect balance. Besides your nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, which you get with all chemical fertilizers, ours has those MBK but also has micronutrients, trace elements, amino acids, vitamins, enzymes, minerals, growth hormones that are naturally in fish, plus all your Omega oil.
So it really feeds the soil, feeds the biological life, and it raises the relative feed value and the total digestible nutrients in the food. Makes very nutrient dense food.
It builds the organic matter in the soil, makes everything so much healthier.
It’s really a win win for the environment.
When you filet a fish, 30 to 40% is the filet. So now ground up, liquified, stabilized, just enough to bring the pH down to 3.5 so it’s still approved organic.
We just use a little bit of phosphoric acid to stabilize it and then we screen it so it won’t clog sprayers. So it comes out like chocolate milk and a little goes a long way. All you need is one ounce per gallon of water to apply it.
Having all those things in it besides just NPK and nature’s perfect balance is really, it makes sense why it works so well.
Brian: What are your biggest gripes about your business or your industry?
Ann: Government restriction.
Fishermen is my biggest gripe because there’s a lot of fish out there, but the government has these strict restrictions that won’t allow fishermen to bring in their full catch. Well, that’s extremely frustrating, especially talking to the fishermen and knowing how much fish is out there and how much they have to throw overboard dead because when they drag their nets across the ocean and they bring the fish up to the surface, it gets the band like a diver coming up too fast, so they’re dead when they get on board.
And if anything over quota has to get thrown back that’s incredibly wasteful and extremely frustrating.
All the fishermen I talked to tell me they’re seeing plenty of fish back out there in the sea. That’s really frustrating that the perception is it’s overfished and they’re really putting the fishermen out of business.
If anything’s endangered now it’s the fishermen, not the fish.
Brian: Yeah, that’s interesting.
Why do you think things have gone that direction? Why do you think there’s this misunderstanding about it?
Ann: They’re mapping the ocean right now and they’re starting to lease it to stakeholders as they call them, but mostly it’s for rare and precious metal, sand and gravel, building pipelines.
It’s got to do with windmills and energy and maybe eventually oil rigs, things like that.
So they really have corporate interest in taking over the ocean and I think fishermen are the eyes and ears out there. They really don’t want them out there.
When they tried to drill for oil in the 80s it was the fishermen that got it stopped, but now there’s just a fraction of fishermen left, hardly any to fight anything and that might be part of it and I believe that they do want to control the protein of the world as well.
I think there’s unfortunately a lot of corruption behind it and not a lot of legit science.
Brian: That’s incredible. That’s absolutely incredible.
Commercial Break: Let’s stop our conversation right there with Ann.
I wanted to point out what she’s saying here about restrictions, rules and regulations. She actually goes more into it as the interview goes on, and it’s not uncommon across the board. People have mentioned these issues that they’re dealing with, especially with hikes and tariffs. Regulations increases in taxes both at the local, state and national levels.
These are realities.
There’s not a lot that can be done when it’s being forced on you or is there. There are options and it all comes from having enough resources and enough perspective that you can be flexible when you need to.
That comes with developing your business from taking it where it is to really being your dream business.
If you have an idea of the way you’d like your business to run, maybe you like to spend less time working on the things that you’re not as good at, be able to spend a lot more time on the things that you really are passionate about with your business.
All these things take planning and strategy.
It’s really difficult to talk about these things with an employee or with somebody else on team because they may feel like you’re trying to put something off on them. They may get the wrong idea.
They may just not have that business owner or executive perspective.
If you are looking for a trusted friend who just doesn’t have the conflict of interest as a participant in your business, then I’m going to suggest you get on the phone or a digital call with me.
Go to BrianJPombo.com/dreambiz go fill out the application.
I can’t guarantee that I’m going to be able to talk with you, but if you qualify for a free chat, we can actually outline a plan for you to develop a dream business. This isn’t anything that I’m selling.
This is a way for me to meet possible new clients, but most of the people I talk to don’t become clients.
If something happens where I can help you out with something and we can trade resources, we’ll do it either way. It’s called the dream business transformation. Go and check it out. BrianJPombo.com/dreambiz and now back to the interview.
Brian: Being on the sales and marketing end of things. Where are you finding your customers at?
Ann: We advertise in farm publications, garden magazines, and we sell through garden centers, hardware stores, and we sell to greenhouse growers, landscapers, golf courses.
We have a big, huge following of cannabis growers as well. Then we sell to big, huge farms that put it on hay and pasture field crops, corn, we all different types of things and vegetable farmers, vineyards, hemp growers.
It really does work on everything and increases yield and quality of all different crops.
Brian: So do you do mostly wholesale or retail?
Ann: We do mostly wholesale. We sell in drums, 275 gallon totes and tanker trucks to farmers. Then we sell retail sizes, pints, quarts, gallons and five gallon pails. It’s a wide mix.
We do have a website that people can order on buy from us directly if they want, but if I can find it in a local store, it’ll be a little bit cheaper.
Try to drive sales through the garden centers and hardware stores and hydro stores. But if people can’t find it in their area, they can order it on our website and all the pricing includes shipping, so it’s a pretty good deal.
Brian: Oh, excellent. And what’s your website again?
Ann: Our website is neptunesharvest.com.
Brian: Great. That’s nice and simple.
You’re selling them all over the place. I saw you guys have it on Amazon and your own website. It’s really fabulous.
You’re pretty ubiquitous, you’re all over.
Ann: We don’t sell directly to Amazon, but a lot of people do sell it on Amazon. And I think we have about a 4.8 stock fading with thousands of reviews, so it’s a really high positive rating out of five possible stars.
I think we’re about 4.8 on almost all our products and if you look at any of the complaints, it’s all that a bottle broke or something and nothing about the product not working.
Brian: That’s really fabulous.
It’s a nice fun industry and a lot of growth in it right now. If we were to talk again, if we had your on the show, let’s say a year from now and we were walked back over the last 12 months, what would have had to have happened for you to feel happy with all your progress concerning your business?
Ann: I’d like to be able to keep up with the demand and introduce new products, which we do all the time.
We’re actually working on one right now that I hope a year from now will be a big hit and while on the market.
Brian: Can you tell us anything about the new products?
Ann: Sure. So we have a Dry Crab & Lobster Shell right now.
We’ve worked with a new process trying to make it into a liquid. We have figured it all out now, so we micronize it and liquefy it.
So we have a Liquid Crab Lobster Shell, which is got the chitin in it, which helps insect damage and disease.
It’s got a huge amount of benefits and it can be foliar fed.
We tested it this past summer and it had phenomenal results, especially with the cloning.
It really helped with it and preventing transplant shock, keeping the plant very healthy, hardy, protecting from insect damage and disease.
It’s really making a strong, strong plant.
Brian: Yes. So much goes into that, that’s really interesting.
What are the obstacles? So you’re talking about keeping up with the man, you have the new products coming out. What are the obstacles you see getting in your way of being able to get where you want with that?
Ann: Hate to say it, but government really, they make things very difficult for you with all their rules and regulations.
And there’s a lot of chemical companies that have a lot of money that don’t really love the organic movement and make our lives very difficult.
That’s my number one beef if I had one right now.
Brian: So you saying it’s the larger companies are using government regulations, kind of try and squash out the little guy.
Ann: Yes, especially organic, yeah.
Brian: Wow.
What advice would you have for other business owners, obviously not competitors, but anybody else that maybe in a similar market, would you have any advice with all your years of working in this market?
Ann: Try to make labels as generic as possible so they can get approved in every state and do your research before you print labels and make sure they’re going to be approved everywhere because that’s very difficult.
Every state has their own regulations. It’s not a national thing. So you have make every state happy without making another state unhappy, by one change you make for one state could make another state not want it.
So you really just have to go as generic as possible.
Can’t make too many claims on your label at all.
Brian: Do you guys sell outside of the United States?
Ann: We do. We sell quite a few other countries, mostly bulk, not retail sizes. We sell full containers over to Europe and Asia, South America, central America, Canada.
Brian: Have you had more issues with the regulations here than anywhere else?
Ann: No. International is very, very difficult.
Could take a month to make one sale and the file might be an inch thick by the time you’re done. There’s so much paperwork that’s not easy either, but we try our best to do everything that they ask us to do so that we can get the product over there and not.
It stopped once it gets to the other country can get offloaded and utilized and not stuck on a boat somewhere cause they won’t release it.
Brian: Yeah.
What can any of our listeners do who might be interested in finding out more about your products and service?
Ann: They can learn a lot on our website.
We have a toll free one 800 number that they could call and talk to one of us in the office would be more than happy to go over anything over the phone.
We could send out a sample if needed and literature and pricing and answer any questions that may come up.
Brian: That’s just great. Thank you Ann for being on the show.
And your soul family one topic, is that right?
Ann: Yeah. Let me quickly, before I get off that, give you the another number. It is 800-259-4769.
So again that’s (800) 259-4769.
And then yes, we are a family business out of 45 employees, 16 are family. My father actually started the company in 1965 he bought the wharf here from my grandfather who was running progressive fish company at the time and my father’s fishing wharf was taken by the city of Gloucester by imminent domain to put the coast guard station in.
My grandfather was selling fuel oil to the fishing boats also and realized that it was make more money doing that than selling fish.
So he went into the home heating business and my father bought his wharf and changed the name from progressive fish company to Ocean Crest Seafoods. And that was like I said, 1965 the family’s been running it ever since.
When my dad passed away, he left it to the five kids and we’ve been running it.
We have a lot of cousins here, nieces, nephews, grandchildren. My son is here now. He runs the warehouse.
Yeah, big family business. A lot of pride in what we do.
Brian: That’s just incredible. That’s amazing. Thanks so much for being on the show.
Love to hear how things go with you guys for being on The Off the Grid Biz Podcast.
Ann: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. And all of that to you and all the listeners out there.
Brian’s Closing Thoughts: Well, I guess if you work with enough in any industry, you really get to know you really have a great knowledge of the product, of the people you’re serving and of the industry as a whole and that is definitely true of Ann Molloy.
I wanted to bring up a couple of points that she mentioned that I think really hit the nail on the head.
Anybody that’s working in an organic market can come out and say, Hey, organic is better because it’s more natural. It’s not chemical, it saves the earth.
Well, these are the same things that we’ve been hearing really for the past 40 plus years, but what about those that that message doesn’t work on and obviously there’s a huge market out there that is not purchasing organic because that message just does not ring completely true.
And I think Ann really got it clear when she mentioned how Neptune’s Harvest makes a solid claim that their fertilizer works better than traditional chemical fertilizer.
I mean, obviously if they’re making a good clean product in a good way, that’s fabulous, but if you can come out and say it works better than the traditional fertilizer out there, how can anyone beat that?
If that’s actually true, if it’s worth the money, how could anyone not go along with it?
That’s a powerful message within the organic community.
Why is that important?
That’s important because of the USP, unique selling proposition. Maybe you’ve heard of this before.
This is the concept of if you can be unique, if you could put out something different in a different way and be able to tell the story that goes along with that, that will really help your company to stand out.
If you’re not unique. It’s very, very, very difficult to stand above and actually break through and build your company up and that really brings me to the overall story.
She has got a great background story about this family that has worked long and hard in the industry, have used the main idea of fishing to create multiple different products in different industries and to eventually end up where they’re making this fertilizer and really standing out in the marketplace growing up from the point at which they started offering organic fertilizer, she has a knowledge base that is unparallel.
If I actually had specific questions for her regarding her product, she’d be able to go into great detail and tell us more than what she just brought up.
This is a point I want to bring back to you.
Are you fearless about pitching your product and service?
Do you have enough real world knowledge about it that you can go out onto a podcast, maybe onto a YouTube interview?
Can you get out there and actually speak with this much authority and with this much?
Honestly with this much fearlessness about how much better your product is than everything else out there.
That’s valuable. That can go a long ways because that confidence then gets transferred to the listener and possible customer in the future.
I also love the idea how she said that they were building products off of customers ideas and complaints here. They had different pieces of their products that they were combining together to create something.
All they did is they took that concept and create a brand new product out of it. That’s great.
And the question I have is do you interface enough with your customers regularly?
Are you using email?
Are you using the phone?
Are you in person with them?
Maybe at trade shows or other places?
Maybe if you’re selling in a retail location, do you ever show up to actually discuss things with customers?
Are you online?
Do you work with your social media team?
So that you can get on there and answer questions and talk back and forth with them. Maybe answer comments on Facebook or something of that sort.
Listen to episode three of The Off The Grid Biz Podcast with Mark C. Robinson.
He actually goes into depth on this point and I think it’s something that most businesses do not do enough of, but you can dynamically change your business and your relationship with the people that are purchasing your product.
If you can just interface more with them, have more real world conversations with them, find out what they love about your product, find out what they hate about your product and do what you can to change it. The final point I wanted to highlight that Ann mentioned is restrictions, rules and regulations.
It usually comes from government, but governments come in many forms.
I mean whether it be international regulations that she was talking about dealing with all the way down to local regulations when they were dealing with eminent domain.
These are things that businesses have to learn to live with because there aren’t many recourses, especially if you have a small to medium business.
So how do you fight it?
I’m going to go back and recommend that dream business transformation chat that we can have. Just go to BrianJPombo.com/dreambiz and go and look that up and see if you qualify.
Overall, that was a great conversation with Ann. I hope you got something out of it. I look forward to talking with you again,
Outro: Join us again on the next off the grid is podcast brought to you by the team at BrianJPombo.com, helping successful but overworked entrepreneurs, transform their companies into dream assets.
That’s BrianJPombo.com. If you or someone you know would like to be a guest on The Off The Grid Biz Podcast, offthegridbiz.com/contact.
Those who appear on the show do not necessarily endorse my beliefs, suggestions, or advice or any of the services provided by our sponsor. Our theme music is Cold Sun by Dell.
Our executive producer and head researcher is Sean E Douglas. I’m Brian Pombo and until next time, I wish you peace, freedom, and success.