Pitchfest Design + Build Winner: Soil Connect, Pitch by Cliff Fetner

This series highlights our Pitchfest finalists. At the 2023 Housing Innovation Summit, we introduced a new program, coined: Pitchfest in order to bring new ideas to light, offer feedback that startups can use to advance their solutions, and introduce these innovators to potential advisors, partners, investors, and clients. A dozen companies made it to the final round, and four came out on top.

In this episode, you'll hear Cliff Fetner from Soil Connect give his pitch.

Visit the Summit website.

Transcript

Haley Baumeister (00:00):

Hello and welcome to the Housing Innovation Alliance podcast. This series highlights our Pitchfest finalists at the 2023 Housing Innovation Summit. We introduced a new program, coined Pitchfest in order to bring new ideas to light, offer feedback that startups can use to enhance their solutions and introduce these innovators to potential advisors, partners, investors, and clients. A dozen companies made it to the final round, and four came out on top. In this episode, you'll hear Cliff Fetner from Soil Connect give their pitch. They were the winners of the design and build category to get in touch with them, visit their website and find ways to connect in the description. Good

Cliff Fetner (00:39):

Morning, everybody. Just a quick thank you to housing Innovation for this opportunity. Appreciate it. We're a total soil management solution. Resourcing, moving, tracking, and coming soon. Logistics. Our mission statement, very simple one-stop shopping for any and all your dirt needs. We want to be the single source of truth for all your Earth movement. So what's the problem? We have two major problems. We're solving over 95% of every single job site. Either you have too much or you have too little. My grandfather used to say, Phil is something that we have. When we don't need it. When we need it, we don't have it. The second problem we're solving is how do you keep track of the dirt from job site to job site paper tickets? We're still using paper tickets, folks, soil Connect. We started with solving my first problem. I'm a third generation builder and developer by trade.

Cliff Fetner (01:34):

I grew up on the job site. I was always one of those kids who was on the equipment. I was never where I was supposed to be. Always bothering everybody. That's me. Never really left the job site and continued through the family business. At one point, I left the family business, started my own thing, and few years back, 2018, broke ground to my own job site. I had too much dirt. Didn't know what to do with it. Nobody needed it. Nobody wanted it. Big problem. Foundation guy always showed up, called me screaming and yelling. It was a language that I didn't understand, but I knew it wasn't really good. So what are we doing here? How do we move dirt? Well, we call everybody we know. I have memories of my dad at night after dinner, going into the living room, calling everybody he knows to try to figure it out.

Cliff Fetner (02:19):

So what has changed in in a thousand years? Absolutely nothing. Nothing has changed. Well, that's not true. We now have cell phones. So now we have the privilege of calling everybody we know during the day. Soil Connect. We have our marketplace, a platform. We're no different than Airbnb and Craigslist and Zillow and apartments.com and all those sites. I'm just using Dirt and aggregates on my site. So what are we doing? We're making it quicker, faster, and cheaper to resource and move your dirt. But maybe the most significant thing we do is we create closer connections. And by creating those closer connections, what are we doing? We're saving money because everybody in this room, room knows it's the cost of moving the dirt and the aggregates and the compost up and down the freeway. That's the expensive part of it. So if I can find you a closer connection, then you're saving money, you're saving fuel, you're saving the environment, saving you money.

Cliff Fetner (03:14):

But my favorite one liner is just the think of me as a dating app for dirt Swipe right. If you like what you see, everybody loves that. I love using it. Swipe right. If you like what you see, swipe left. If you're not interested, technically we don't swipe. We have matching algorithms that put buyers and sellers of dirt and aggregates Our marketplace. Orange pins are people looking to get rid of something dirt. We have 22 different types of dirt, aggregates, compost, mulch, recycled concrete, whatever. Yellow pins are people who need it. And so we match you. Very simple. And then you can communicate through the platform, text message, email, whatever. The blue dots there. It's just a cluster. So we just cluster you down because you have so many things, very simple to use. It's five easy questions. We also have what's called a A daily dig.

Cliff Fetner (04:04):

So you can put in what you're looking for. So if you're not on the site, then you can very easily get alerted. Next solution is E ticketing. Back to the second problem we're solving. How do you keep track of dirt? No more paper tickets, everybody. Welcome to 2023 E ticketing. We are tracking the loads through gps. We know where the truckers start, when they start, where they go, how many cycles they make. E ticketing irregulatory. We're the first in New York state to have an approved program with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. The digitized state manifest. No more paper truck drivers don't need pens or papers anymore, guys. We are doing everything for them. The truck gets loaded. You send a text message, DocuSign, whoever's in the field, scribble your name on the phone. We're automatically populating the form. We've added a route tracking history, so we know where the truck is every minute of every single day.

Cliff Fetner (05:01):

So if you have an infill site and maybe there's some contamination, maybe not, and you need it to go to an approved facility, this digitization is confirming that the truck actually got to where it was supposed to go. Total mitigation of risk for all you builders and developers here you can rest at night knowing that the dirt got to where it's supposed to go to Digital dirt brokerage. This is another part of our business where we are helping you find the dirt that you need. Okay, so we are finally at point that we can monetize our service. Our platform is free. You can download it right now, and you can come on our platform and play with it and see if you can find a match. And if you can't find a match, I can help you find a match. Because every single platform, we kind of have a similar problem. You gotta get everybody on your platform where we're going, being that single source of truth. One, stop shopping for any and all your dirt needs live tracking geofence. We'll be able to set up a geofence around your property so you know when the trucks are coming back so you can turn them around quicker and get more material moved. And we

Speaker 3 (06:15):

Didn't get to the business model. How are you making

Betsy Scott (06:17):

Money? So she wants to know how he is making money, and that's the first question.

Cliff Fetner (06:21):

We're making money right now. We're selling e ticketing, our sa, we're selling our SaaS products, and we're also now generating money on the dirt brokerage into the business. We are signing contracts with builders and developers and general contractors for a fee if we're successful in locating your dirt for you or getting rid of your dirt for you. And then the e ticketing we're selling as part of the package to find the dirt or get rid of the dirt. We're also selling our e ticketing to a lot of the dump truck companies along the way to digitize their entire workflow. Our biggest e ticketing customer is based out of New Jersey. They have 85 trucks that they run each and every day, and they're using our e ticketing platform. Part of our selling process of e ticketing is we've created an ROI calculator. We ask the owner of the business, how many trucks do you have?

Cliff Fetner (07:11):

How many stops do they make? How much you're paying an hour for your admin? How much are you paying to track your paper tickets? And at the end of the day, we're saving our customers money. So the sales process is easier because we're saving you money. And so I kind of lead with that is that I'm not selling you insurance. I'm not selling you diesel fuel. I'm not selling you a new piece of equipment. I'm here to save you money. And so it's a little easier process that once you are onboarded and we have a whole process about how to onboard the truckers that I'm actually saving our users thousands of dollars for using the CES products. Who's

Betsy Scott (07:47):

On the hook for unexpected bad or contaminated dirt?

Cliff Fetner (07:51):

So a couple of things there. Part of the platform that we have right now is we have the ability to upload geotechnical report and soil analysis report. So if you're buying dirt or getting rid of dirt, you have the ability to upload that. Once we make that connection, once we make that connection, then the, the buyer, if you will, is going out and hiring a third party consultant to go out and test the soil for themselves. So even though they may have soil analysis report supplied by the seller, the buyer is not taking a chance. He's getting his own third party consultant in there and testing it. Okay, so then the next question is, well, okay, the soil passes. How do I know that that's the soil that actually gets to my job site? Well, that's where our e ticketing comes in. Our e ticketing with the route tracking history actually tracks from job site A on a hundred main street to wherever your job site is. So you have total transparency into this old school world that you've never had before through the digitization of our e ticketing and our platform.

Speaker 5 (08:59):

My question relates to scalability because from my experience, you know, you've got the good old boy club of line developers and they don't like to let anybody in. And then where's the incentive on developers? Because I know developers, there's an incentive to them to mix the dirt and to clean it. You know, I've never heard that. And balance themselves on site because they can charge you for it, right? So where's the incentive for them to come use you guys? Because it takes away, you know, it takes away from money that they could charge us as a builder because they'll just mix the dirt or they'll move it to the future phase and then they get to move it again later. So how do you overcome those parts of it?

Cliff Fetner (09:35):

Bringing transparency into this world has has not existed before. The younger generation, everybody, they want transparency. They look for transparency. They have transparency every day, and that's what we're giving them. So when the big, big boys like you go out and buy a job site and you get a bid of for whatever the excavation earth moving contract is, you guys have no clue what you're actually getting for your money. All you are doing is you're buying low bid. Okay? I can give you the transparency into how much the the earthwork movement is, how much the value of the soil is, and I can track all that for you. I can also save you money because I'm going to give you access to sources that you didn't know about. And that's the whole transparency of what we're doing. We're putting everyone and anyone in the dirt business all in one place and at one time,

Speaker 6 (10:37):

What's the minimum quantity that makes sense to be on your marketplace? Because like I, as a, as someone who's built my own home, I run into this issue. So I get the problem. Is it for the small on your lot builder? Is it for someone that's the size of Damien? Like what? What does that look like?

Cliff Fetner (10:49):

Everyone plays on the platform in whatever capacity they can play. And I always use the same example in this. I'm New York City based, and for those that know the area, LaGuardia Airport was just completely redone. And LaGuardia Airport was a partnership between Shanki and Walsh. Doesn't matter. They generated over a million cubic yards of dirt from the LaGuardia airport site. There is not one person in the entire New York metro area who needs 1 million yards of dirt. That just doesn't exist. So what we've done is the transparency in the marketplace is by putting everybody together. So who is everybody that's the earth movers? That's the heavy civil guys. The excavation guys, builders, developers, general contractors, that those groups make up 50% of my users. The other 50% is everybody else. It's the dump truck guys, it's the pool contractors, it's the landscapers, it's the farmers. When we go into the Midwest, we have farmers on our site.

Cliff Fetner (11:46):

We're about to launch our market in Texas, Austin, Texas, May 11th, and we have ranchers who are signing up to our site. So look at everybody, put everybody all in one place and at one time, and that's the transparency that's never existed. And the transparency is now leading to efficiency. It's more efficient to put the bucket in the ground, put the dirt in the truck, and bring it somewhere, anywhere. It doesn't make sense just to pile it up and move it and pile it up and move it and pile up and move it. That's the transparency. Now back to circling back to what your question is. So now we have a million cubic yards. Everyone was taking a little piece of the million cubic yards, the small landscape contractor, the big heavy civil contractor, a couple of the landfills in upstate New York. So everybody can play nicely in the sandbox once the information is out there. That's the transparency I talk about all the time.

Betsy Scott (12:44):

Can you give us one sentence or two about your relationship to the truckers again, and you got 19 seconds?

Cliff Fetner (12:51):

Truckers initially push back, let's be honest, but I'm creating the transparency into what their drivers are doing each day. I'm creating efficiencies and I'm saving them money. So yes, it's a little tough initially, but once they let down their guard and they listen to the pitch, they're all in favor of saving money. Done. Thank you everybody. Appreciate it, <laugh>.

Betsy Scott (13:13):

Nice job. Thank you.

Haley Baumeister (13:16):

Thank you for listening to the Housing Innovation Alliance podcast. We invite you to learn more about Pitchfest and let us know if you are interested in participating in the next cohort at Housing Innovation Summit dot.