What happened to Garbologie

In my article back at the start of June I wrote:

It’s perhaps best summed up by comments I made in another time. A time when I was bold and saw more clearly how I might personally make things happen. A time also characterised by immense hardship. I may write more on those times later.

I was writing of Garbologie, and I think it’s almost time to share that story. Or at least to begin the telling of that story.

It’s a story that I’ve been cautious of telling because it’s a story of business failure.

I don’t want the story of Garbologie’s failure to reflect on my now.

To restate this more simply. I don’t want people to avoid dealing with me because I started a business that was bold, opinionated, and ultimately collapsed.

I am proud of what I did with Garbologie. Equally, I am not Garbologie.

That distinction has taken quite a while to sink in.

The Garbologie story

I’ll start telling the story by presenting a talk I gave to St Catherine’s College at the University of Western Australia on 14 April 2015.

I gave this presentation about a month after I’d called the administrators in. At a time when most people still thought Garbologie was roaring along, going from strength to strength. The talk’s invitation was:

The next graduate dinner is organized April 14th with the theme of Creativity and Social Responsibility — running a Sustainable Business. Adam Johnson, the founder and CEO of Garbologie is the guest speaker. He was also one of the Perth’s TED-speakers last year.

Attendees were (presumably) expecting a talk of business success. What was delivered was a little bit different.

The talk

I’ve been thinking and thinking and thinking for a really interesting story to tell you. Something worth the dinner. Something that will leave you on the edge of your seat, perhaps a tear in your eye, definitely a conversation afterward.

In the end I drew a blank. Sure, there are stories on how creative people can do incredible things, or how we can save the planet or how we need to take some responsibility for our actions.

Those stories exist, but they’re not particularly human, are they? They’re stories about other people in other places doing stuff we can’t relate to. So instead of those stories, you’re going to get my story.

My story is a story of driving and then surviving change. It’s a story about business, about the environment, but most of all, it’s a story about vulnerability. And since I feel so vulnerable telling this story, I’m going to tell it to a room full of people. The first time I’ve ever told it.

First, however, to my background. I graduated almost 20 years ago with a Bachelor of Arts and Environmental Engineering from Melbourne Uni. I backed that up about 10 years later with a Master of Environmental Law at the University of Sydney. I’ve worked in waste management for most of my career. I’ve also been endlessly fascinated by reading and writing stories, majoring in English in my Arts degree. Now I don’t know if any of that’s important — maybe it gives you a sense of where I’ve come from.

But enough of the background. This story begins in earnest about three years ago when I was two years into a three year long contract as the CEO of the WMRC, the organisation that looks after waste disposal for the western suburbs councils. It was a pretty good job but I was bored.

I wanted to do something different. I had gained a reputation as an innovator, but always felt constrained by the organisations I was in. Seeing a career of this boredom and frustration ahead of me, I told the Council that I would not be renewing my contract at the end of the three years. Furthermore, I decided to drop back to working 4 days per week. And I decided to use the one Adam day per week to work on a new business. A business I called Garbologie.

Garbologie started out as a blog. It was exploring ideas around creativity in waste management, and I was having a ball. It started to gain momentum. I worked up a business plan to open a business called Tip/Shop which would turn the idea of landfills upside-down. I worked with Clare Goodridge at The Creative Arts House (now Tinderbox Creative) to create an incredible new brand.

Then in May 2013 I finished up as the CEO and it launched. We started out recycling mattresses in a tiny factoryette in O’Connor. We did 28 mattresses in the first month. And then started to grow like topsy. We outgrew that by November at which point we moved into a huge new premises around the corner, to be the new Tip/Shop site. And we kept on growing. We quickly got to about 4,000 mattresses per month. We were Perth’s biggest mattress recycler by a long way.

We pushed boundaries. We moved again in April last year to separate the mattress business from the Tip/Shop business, thus enabling us to get Tip/Shop going. We put in a mattress spring baler that everybody was telling us wouldn’t work. It did. We developed all sorts of product lines from what would otherwise be waste. Stuff like the timber Product of Garbologie line. Coconut matting rebranded as CoirCoir.

We opened Tip/Shop. We got great press. We had heaps of staff, lots of love and even a cafe.

We were also losing massive amounts of money. And with investors pulling out at the last minute, we spent from July 2014 in bad way. I kept telling myself that I had to keep running, that we would take off soon enough. We never did. Instead it was agony. Eternal agony.

I made staff redundant to get losses under control. They poisoned the well for everybody else, leading to the cafe operators walking out after 5 weeks. Then other resignations until I had to shut down Tip/Shop in January. And finally, last month, I placed the whole of Garbologie into voluntary administration.

At which point the pain stopped.

A lot of money was lost.

The story should end there, but of course, that’s only the sad bones of what is actually a much more interesting story.

You see, business is about entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship is about failure. And failure is about learning and being in that moment of searing truth.

I could reel off a bazillion reasons why Garbologie failed. They are all the usual suspects like poor decision making, non-existent marketing and staff problems. Going through a divorce didn’t help. In truth, there were many, many causes for the failure of Garbologie.

Far more interesting is to understand what I learned about business, and particularly, about what worked with Garbologie.

Garbologie had an incredible brand. It was cool and clever and approachable all at the same time. We got the voice right, connecting very easily with people. We quickly got a huge following. I learned that brand is vitally important.

Garbologie had a great story. It was a bold story, taking on people and institutions everywhere to create a world without waste. We would tell people that we were going to do this, and they could see us doing it. All those mattresses. Steel, foam, resources reclaimed that would have gone into the ground. We were really bloody good at telling our story and so could punch way above our weight.

Garbologie had passion and empathy in equal measure. And that’s not a common thing. In fact, it’s really hard to be passionate but also empathetic. Both matter because they let businesses do good work. In a way that is true. And that attracts people to the cause. Far too easy for an organisation to be a passionate prick. Or caught in an eternal moment of empathy without getting the guts to do something that’s sure to piss somebody off.

In fact, what Garbologie had was a cause. We were the leaders of a movement to create a world without waste, and we were crazy enough to just go on and do it. At least until we went broke, but we didn’t let people tell us what couldn’t be done.

And it’s those things that are far more interesting to me than the obvious lessons of how to not fail. Who wants to create businesses with the intent that they not fail? What sort of idiot goes into entrepreneurship wanting safety? Since when was avoiding death good enough to be considered a life?

No, I’m interested in how to make business great. I want to help people be the change they want to see. I want to build networks, advance ideas, create bold new stories that accumulate to change the world.

I could mope. And trust me, I’ve done my share. I’ve copped my share of mockers, both when Garbologie was running and no doubt more will line up now that it has failed. But through the incredible support of my wonderful partner Clare Goodridge, I don’t need to mope or let mockery in. Instead we create new life.

We are working together in Tinderbox Creative, the rebranded Creative Arts House, and there we are making business great through brand. We are helping amazing people and organisations tell stories in a compelling way, a way that resonates with the deepest desires of humans.

It’s amazing. It’s fun. It’s a natural extension from that part of my life that was left lie fallow for years while I pursued an engineering career. The bit where I love to read great stories, and to write my own. Being interested and engaged in the world beyond an environmental or engineering lens. It’s incredibly powerful to teach entrepreneurs how to create a brand personality that people will fall in love with.

It’s something I love because I can help people be everything they want to be. It’s something that has been born from a hard year, personally and professionally. To know that we are planting the seeds of a thriving ecosystem of new entrepreneurs, new stories, and ultimately a new economy.

And I guess that’s what I came to love through Garbologie. This idea that you can change the script of life by an act as simple as deciding to change it. That you can do this deliberately, that it involves skills that are both innate and learned. That with Tinderbox we can make a true and lasting contribution to a better world, and we can do that through stories.

All of this boils down to a pretty simple proposition for me. We will all be hit by hard stuff, especially if we want to do anything interesting, anything outside the box. You live true, life gets hard.

It’s what you do when you’re hit that matters. I feel you can go one of two ways when confronted with hard stuff, especially stuff that knocks you down. You can stay down — you can’t fall any further if you’re already on the ground. Or you can pick yourself up.

It’s a choice between fear and hope. And I choose hope over fear.

The story since

It turns out that those words from April 2015 were prescient, true, and also unfolding in ways that I hadn’t anticipated.

I’m slightly concerned that revealing this story will negatively impact on me. Failure can be hard to understand.

And as you might expect, the story has evolved somewhat since April 2015. Having spent a couple of years helping people develop brands, I am now back in the world of waste.

It turns out it’s hard to escape this world.

I’m also much more engaged in the world of waste. I’m doing interesting work for good clients. I’m able to write as well, getting close to the place I want to inhabit in the world.

That is a place where I am doing challenging, interesting work alongside thinking, writing, pushing the conversation forward. Making things happen, leveraging what I have learned.

I’m not interested in a beige consulting job, nor a routine role in developing some waste business.

I’m in the world-changing game.

MRA lets me do all of this, and Mike Ritchie’s trust in me enabled it. I am truly grateful.