Rather than burn them or dump them into a landfill, I sold them at our nursery. That was good for the tree, good for the environment and good for me, because I got paid twice—once to remove it and once to replant it.

Trees that were too large to replant were recycled as landscape mulch. In the 80’s, we became the largest wholesaler of this product in the Hudson Valley. When DEC regulators decided that tree stumps were construction debris, I suddenly had a debris recycling permit, so I kept adding other things to recycle until we were recycling 200 tons a day by hand in the shell of our old office building. As we grew, we just naturally did what we had to do to keep doing business. In the early days that -- and a lot of hard work and ingenuity -- was our business plan.

My first business innovation was to save smaller trees that would have ordinarily been cleared to make way for new homes or roads. Rather than burn them or dump them into a landfill, I sold them at our nursery.