PhillyDeals: Organic fertilizer powers growth of Glen Mills firm

Barry Ersek was a precocious lawn-care magnate. Steve Lange was a self-taught plant scientist at a Delaware bank that wanted brighter gardens.

With 35 employees, they now run Holganix (as in holistic organics), a Glen Mills company that manufactures liquid compost-starter - their brew of fermented, pasteurized and refrigerated sugars, bacteria and yeast - plus cooling units, jugs and applicators to spread it on lawns, farms and ballfields.

Sales to NFL teams, Ivy League colleges, and landscaping services that want to use less chemical fertilizer and pest-killer nearly tripled in each of the last three years, to $4.4 million, landing Holganix on this year's Inc. 500 list of fast-growing U.S. firms.

As a teen, Ersek quit Penn State Brandywine after three weeks because business classes didn't tell him much about managing the lawn service he planned to run full time so he could marry his girlfriend. Using skills he'd honed as an underaged TruGreen telemarketer, he built Custom Care into a $2.2 million (yearly sales) business, sold it to Scotts Lawn Service for $3 million, and started scouting technologies that might give him an edge in his next, improved venture.

Meanwhile, at his lab in Newark, Del., Lange was improving an organic compost to produce on an industrial scale. As a part-time loan officer, he had advised a bank executive on gardening and was rewarded with a post as staff biologist at credit-card lender MBNA Corp. Lange hoped to develop the soil-building microbes of a well-turned backyard compost heap, purified for a longer shelf life, without the nitrates, sulfates or phosphates, to enrich the clay soil for bank office plantings.

Then Bank of America bought MBNA and cut funding. Lange,

turning to outside customers, needed business help. In 2009, Ersek sold his next company, Happy Lawn, for a price he said was above its $10 million in yearly sales and joined with Lange to form Holganix.

They've sold to Lancaster County farmers, but the firm's main customers "are in turf," said Ersek, "sod farms, grass [athletic] fields, landscape contractors. The Pittsburgh Pirates are a good customer. Notre Dame, Villanova, Penn. The Cincinnati Reds. Fenway Park in Boston. The Miami Dolphins, Tennessee Titans, Atlanta Braves."

"The main thing is, I use almost zero fungicide now," said Steve Gold, head groundskeeper for the minor-league Wilmington Blue Rocks at their baseball stadium by I-95. "It was like with the drug industry: The more you use chemicals, the more they don't work. Holganix is a better way to control it. I can spray as much as I want. It's stuff the grass needs."

"The customers are very happy with the fact it's organic," said Andrew Gabries, of Go Green Lawn Care in West Chester, who started applying Holganix three years ago.

"The price is not significantly higher, it's pretty much in line"

with the cost of

chemical herbicides, without the downside, he added. "And people tell me their yard looks better."

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