Interview with Marc Elliott, President and Co-Founder of the Startup Disrupting the Landscaping Industry

GoMaterials, an online marketplace connecting landscapers with landscape material, may occupy a niche sphere, but entrepreneurs of all kinds would do well to listen to its founder Marc Elliott speak about the obstacles he has had to overcome since launching the company in May 2016.

“It did take us a significant amount of time to get our feet off the ground,” Marc acknowledged in an interview with Fundica. “[When we were launching GoMaterials], we didn’t have a running website. All we had was a PPT doc that mimicked what we wanted our website to do… I would cold call and visit potential customers to show them a demo and get them to sign-up for the upcoming summer.

Unfortunately, we didn’t finish our website in time for the summer that we piloted because the developer who was coding our site on the side kept missing deadlines. So, we built and coded an excel doc to mimic our web functionality and set up a google doc for people to submit their orders…”

And, despite having only these rough prototypes in place, submit people did. Since GoMaterial’s official launch this past May, their user base has grown by 242% and their average order size has gone from $1,400 to $3,600. Those familiar with the trails of the landscaping business are unlikely to be surprised by these statistics, though Marc remains modest about the company’s positive reception.

“The biggest benefit of GoMaterials, and one that we didn’t expect our customers to value so much, is that every point of contact for their material processing is in one system. It is such a powerful benefit that many of our contractors have asked us to get their preferred vendors to join our network, simply because it’s easier to order through us. When we were doing research prior to launching GoMaterials, everyone told us that this industry is all about relationships and that it is impossible to break them, yet we have proven that simplicity and convenience can overpower that.”

Marc knows first-hand about inconvenience in the landscaping industry; he was inspired to create GoMaterials while still a part owner at a landscape business in Montreal. While managing purchasing at that business, he began to see the price discrepancies between the vendors they were using and the amount of money he was leaving on the table by working with a select few. And that wasn’t the only issue. For most landscapers, placing an order of any kind requires perusing and comparing a myriad of paper and PDF catalogues—an inefficient process, to say the least. Had Marc had access to a consolidated resource like GoMaterials at the time, he could have augmented his incremental savings by 15-45%.

When we asked Marc about the “chicken-before-the-egg” challenge of concurrently attracting both vendors and customers to GoMaterials, Marc pointed out perhaps one of the biggest upsides to his company’s niche: its seasonality. During the off-months, the team is able to build up supply and demand simultaneously, meaning that the problem is resolved before it has a chance to start. 

As for the funding side of things, Marc says that most investors have been receptive to their solution, though he has encountered the occasional naysayer.

“We get some VC’s that hear landscaping, and you can tell right away that there’s almost this stereotype of the kid next door that cuts your grass. But, in general, most see the numbers and the addressable market and understand the opportunity that we’re offering. In my experience, it’s more been angels that have assumed that our market potential was small and that our clientele was not sophisticated enough to use an online service.”

     Though some people may be apprehensive, it is clear that most recognize GoMaterials’s promising future. At the 2018 Fundica Roadshow, which took place this summer over the course of three months and ended with a finale at Bonsecours Market on July 12^th, Marc Elliott and his team made it to the final rounds, pitching alongside eleven other finalists for a chance to win an equity investment award of up to $650,000. Though they didn’t come away from the competition with its grand prize, that hasn’t stopped them from envisioning what GoMaterials—and the landscaping industry in general—could look like fifty years from now.    

“I would like to see a completely automated ordering process, from project conception to quoting the materials to ordering the material to having those materials delivered, billed and tracked,” said Marc. “It is all so manual today, and there is so much opportunity to improve the process and save our customers money.”

            In the nearer future, GoMaterials plans expand to the US, specifically New York, which has a market ten times larger than that of Quebec. Regardless of where their expansion takes them next, we wish Marc and his team the best, and we hope to see them again at our 2019 Roadshow, be it on the stage or in the stands.