The principal focus of this podcast episode is the dynamic intersection of sustainability and the hemp industry, featuring an insightful dialogue with Jesse Henry, CEO of Alt Labs.

Throughout our discussion, we delve into the myriad challenges faced by hemp entrepreneurs, particularly concerning effective marketing and sustainable supply chain development.

Henry shares his compelling journey from traditional entrepreneurship to pioneering sustainable practices within hemp, emphasizing the necessity of innovative approaches to overcome inherent industry stigmas.

Additionally, we explore the critical importance of fostering demand mechanisms and collaborative relationships within corporate structures to facilitate the adoption of sustainable materials.

The conversation ultimately aims to equip listeners with the knowledge and strategies necessary to navigate the complexities of the hemp landscape and promote a more sustainable future. The discussion today engages deeply in the realm of hemp entrepreneurship, particularly focusing on the pivotal role that sustainable practices play in the hemp industry. Tyler Hemp, the host, introduces the episode by emphasizing the importance of hemp as a versatile resource that can address various global challenges, including environmental sustainability and the reduction of carbon footprints.

The episode features Jesse Henry, CEO of Alt Labs, who shares his journey in the hemp sector, illustrating how he transitioned from traditional materials to the innovative applications of hemp. The dialogue provides insights into the complexities of establishing sustainable supply chains and the need for effective marketing strategies to promote hemp products.

Jesse's narrative reveals the hurdles faced by hemp businesses in gaining market acceptance and the necessity for a paradigm shift in how we perceive and utilize this remarkable plant.

Through a series of anecdotes and experiences, the episode underscores the collective effort required to foster a thriving hemp economy, urging entrepreneurs to concentrate on specific niches rather than attempting to solve an overwhelming number of problems at once.

Key Takeaways:

1. The podcast episode emphasizes the persistent challenges faced by hemp entrepreneurs in effectively marketing their products and solutions.
2. A significant focus of the discussion revolves around creating a sustainable supply chain and its importance for the hemp industry.
3. The speakers stress the necessity for hemp businesses to find their niche and avoid spreading their efforts too thin across many markets.
4. A key takeaway is that establishing demand mechanisms is crucial for the success of sustainable materials in the market.
5. The conversation highlights the importance of communication skills in entrepreneurship, especially in conveying the benefits of innovative materials.
6. Listeners are encouraged to consider the broader implications of sustainability beyond just carbon emissions when developing their business strategies.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

1. Alt Labs
2. Heartland
3. Georgia Pacific
4. Hempitecture

Discover more about Jesse Henry: https://www.altlaboratories.com/

Foreign.

Welcome to another hempisode of Hemp Aware Radio.

This is your hemptrepreneurial host, Tyler Hemp, here to Hemp Power and hempducate your hemposphere as usual and focus on what's most important in life.

Hemp entrepreneurs and businesses working with hemp are constantly struggling to properly market and brand their products and solutions.

And so that's exactly why we've created Hemp Aware.

It's a hemp marketing and branding and educational platform to empower and uplift you with the essential tools and resources and strategies to bring your vision to fruition.

With Hemp, you know, our ultimate vision and mission is to create a paradigm shift in consciousness so that we can have healthier, happier, more abundant lives and solve the world's greatest problems around food, shelter, clothing, energy, plastics, medicine and fuel.

One of those ways that we're fulfilling that mission is to introduce you to other amazing hamsters and innovators in this industry to learn from and see how they're doing things and what's worked and what hasn't and help give you some insights and green nuggets that you might need to have your next breakthrough.

And so on today's show, I'm, you know, very pleased to have a special guest.

His name is Jesse Henry of Alt Labs.

He's started his own hemp company over the years and he's got a really inspiring story.

We actually recently met at a small get together in Miami where he's now based out of, and we had some really awesome conversation around sustainability, corporate responsibility, organic chemistry, supply chains.

And the reason I wanted to bring Henry on today's show is to introduce you to the role that he's playing in helping companies to develop their own sustainable supply chain initiatives.

And Jesse, as you'll see, is an energetic, charismatic, intelligent, dynamic guy.

And he's a visionary.

He's a leader at the intersection of sustainability, innovation, and he's at the forefront of the hemp economy.

As I see it, he's currently serving as the CEO of Alt Labs, where he's advancing sustainable technology and developing solutions that support supply chains and a circular economy, which we'll talk about here.

And so prior to his leadership at Alt Labs, he built and led Heartland.

It's a material science company focused on engineering, specifically with HEM fiber additives for plastics.

And that company has since dissolved and he's now doing his own thing with Alt Labs, which we'll talk about as well.

But he's ultimately helping brands to reduce their carbon footprint and find the sustainable Eco friendly materials to help improve their overall carbon footprint, as they say.

Without further ado, I'm super excited to introduce you guys to Jesse and let's kick it off, man.

I appreciate you being here and, and.

What'S happening, Tyler, thanks for having me, man.

Love, love the intro, love the enthusiasm for the space.

I, Heartland, I don't believe has dissolved.

They're, they're still on, on their journey.

And I, I believe even since my tenure, they've expanded from plastic additives into textile additives.

And as we met, for those of you who haven't met Tyler in person, he's wearing hemp clothing, he's got the socks, he's got the shoes, he's hemped out.

So when he gives you his hemp intro, he is through and through, Pure hemp guy.

Appreciate that, man.

Yeah, really cool story.

I think we have a lot of similar backgrounds in just the world of self development and consciousness and living a more harmonious lifestyle.

So I'd love to have you share a little bit of your background, like maybe the, you know, two or three minute version of where you come from, what sort of influences you've had and ultimately what kind of led you up to actually working with hemp in the first place.

I was born in Boston, grew up in South Florida, worked for Tony Robbins as a speaker, worked for Oren Claf, the author of Pitch Anything for a little over a year, and really found myself at a crossroads in my life where I was like, I don't, I'm not passionate about what I'm doing and really care about what I'm doing.

So I went on a walk one day and said, what do I care about?

And the theme was sustainable materials.

I really genuinely felt that there was a lot of people working on the energy transition, but not a lot of people working on the materials transition.

So I set out with my business partner at the time to go start a company.

We didn't really start in hem fiber.

We actually started in lab testing for cbd.

So we were using a technology called Ion Mobility Spectrometry, which tested infields, molds, pesticides, heavy metals, moisture, yeast, all the things you would want in a COA for CBD or THC.

We were exposed to the booming hemp market.

We kind of sat there and said, man, we're in lab testing, but what else can you do with this plant?

This plant is amazing.

And as you know, Tyler, you could do 50,000 things with hemp, but you can't enter into a market solving 50,000 problems, right?

If you go and look back at history, some of the best companies go look at, you know, Apple started in the education market, Facebook started in Ivy league colleges, then it was all colleges, then it was high schools and colleges.

Now it's 2 billion people a month.

And so when you're starting a company, you really have to find your go to market and you have to find that product market fit.

So when we started Heartland Industries, we tested everything.

We tested building materials, textiles, animal bedding, and we actually landed on bioplastics.

And so what happened is we went out to the plastics industry trying to sell bioplastics and we got laughed out of pretty much every room that we started it.

You know, there was cost concerns, there were scalability concerns.

And you have to remember, Tyler, people are buying petroleum based plastic for 50 cents a pound.

And so if they're going to swap out a bioplastic, it's got to be at price parity and at scale.

It was just really, really difficult to do with a bioplastic that you could produce kilograms of on a day to day basis.

And so we quickly pivoted at the beginning of Heartland from hemp based bioplastics into hemp based plastic additives.

And so we went to market in the plastic additive space, really looking to replace fiberglass, talc, calcium carbonate and other commonly used volume fillers and reinforcement agents.

Interesting.

So we'll definitely dive deep into like the biochemistry in that whole world.

But before we do, if we could take a step back and look at your childhood.

Was, was there like a pivotal moment or maybe an influential person or you know, from like age 1 to 10, like did something happen in your life or you have some sort of influence that you feel like kind of set the foundation for you to enter into this world of sustainability and organic biomaterials.

You know, as a kid, one of my big struggles was I had a stutter.

I was a really, really, really bad communicator.

And I did speech therapy for a little over a decade.

And what really got me out of my shell was, was stage acting.

And I went to the summer camp called Next Stop Broadway.

And my friends kind of made, made fun of me at the time.

It wasn't, you know, what the cool kids were doing over their summers.

But when you do stage acting, you do something called improv.

And improv.

They give you a scene, they give you a character, and they snap their fingers and they say go.

And all of a sudden you're not you anymore, you're some random person.

In some random setting.

And it gets you kind of like out of your head and into your heart and into your body.

And one of the other really fascinating things about stage acting is when you're singing, your brain can't tell the difference between when you're talking and when you're singing, but you can't stutter when you're singing.

And so one of the really good ways to teach people how to stop stuttering is actually to get them to sing because it trains the brain how to communicate without stammering.

My big roadblock as a kid was my inability to communicate.

I think part of the reason why I wanted to go work for Tony Robbins College was I wanted to take my biggest weakness and turn it into my biggest strength.

I've worked really hard on my communication skills and continue to work every day.

I mean, I've been in intimate connections where I'm challenged, you know, on a day to day basis on how to be a better communicator, as I think we all have, have been at some point.

And I still, you know, stutter at times, but I roll through it.

I'm much more confident in my ability to communicate.

And I, I wouldn't necessarily say that I had, you know, a role model or a figure that was driving me towards sustainability.

I think one of my kind of apathetic thoughts as a kid was, you know, how are all these, you know, oil companies making billions and destroying our planet?

How are all these consumer goods companies making billions and destroying our planet?

Or pharma companies making billions and destroying our planet?

And it kind of left me in this like apathetic state.

It wasn't a very empowering state.

It was kind of like, well, the world is kind of screwed up.

Like it's rewarding all of these people who are potentially harming the planet and then not giving that same reward system to people who genuinely care about the planet.

And so I think, you know, early on that seed was planted.

I didn't necessarily know what that looked like.

And then when I went to college, I studied entrepreneurship and that was my major.

So I was doing the textbook type work.

But you can't really learn entrepreneurship from a textbook.

You know, you gotta get out there in the world.

And part of the game of entrepreneurship is finding product market fit and getting that customer feedback loop and doing the customer discovery process.

So you can read all the textbooks you want about entrepreneurship, but until you get out there and talk to customers, it's all theory.

Ain't nothing like the real thing, baby.

Demonstration beats conversation Every day.

So, yeah, I demonstrate by doing so.

So that's cool.

So I feel like if there was one skill that every human being could master in life, it's communication.

Because every relationship is founded on understanding how to communicate.

Even, you know, if you're in sales, it's all about communication.

It's really cool to hear your background.

And kind of.

You walked into this and you were out on that walk one day just thinking, like, what.

What could you do?

Because you had kind of these seeds planted and that it came to the forefront, like, this plant is a miraculous plant that can solve all these problems.

And then you started working with Heartland, doing the testing, and then that started getting you into the.

The bio, like the fiber aspect of the plant.

How did that, I guess, evolve into ALT Labs?

And what's the main kind of mission behind ALT Labs?

And what is it that you provide?

Yeah, absolutely.

So Heartland's Heartland's journey was a lot of zigging and zagging.

There's some other great companies in the space.

Heartland really focused on taking a market position in the plastic additive space.

So, you know, I can't speak for Heartland's market position today, but when I was leading the company, you know, you could go talk to most Fortune 500R&D departments, and they were at least familiar with Heartland and knew what Heartland did.

We had some pretty tumultuous journeys in the beginning of Heartland, you know, starting in the plastic additive market.

We started with a natural fiber powder, and we're going and trying to sell a natural fiber powder to companies that have never used a natural fiber powder before.

So in those early days, we were working with large plastic companies.

We did some.

Some early R and D with Ford Motor Company, and man, they.

They came back to us after a round of R and D and they.

They pretty much had every problem you could imagine in an R and D project with a new material.

I mean, it was, you know, dust flammability, moisture bonding, bulk density dispersion, thermal stability performance.

You know, every single problem you could ever have with the new material.

We, we.

We had that problem.

And, you know, although that was a.

That was a hard phone call to get, we were getting similar feedback from other people.

So you're like, okay, like this, we're onto something here.

Like, this is.

This is a problem that we're having.

And in order for us to commercialize this material and Find product, market fit.

Like we have to solve this problem.

And so what Heartland did is we engineered a hemp fiber master batch or a concentrate.

And this was a hemp fiber pellet.

Kind of looks like chicken feed or rabbit food or maybe what comes out of the rabbit or goes in the rabbit.

And, and this was coated with certain materials to help solve those problems.

And so we sold that, those natural fiber pellets or the hemp fiber pellets into the plastic additive marketplace and we're able to solve a lot of the problems that we had faced in the early days of Heartland.

That was now a couple years ago.

Now what I'm doing with Alt Labs is I'm building out different technologies, all that support the same outcomes.

So I'm working on some online training, I'm working on some softwares, I'm working on some fun projects, I'm working on some data assets.

And really when I left Heartland I told myself there's a big gap in the market for sustainability focused media data, software training.

And I wanted to really take a market position in those places.

So over the past year or so I've been consulting in sustainable chemistry, mostly on the sales and marketing side, working with a few different companies all over the place.

Some venture backed companies, some private equity backed companies.

Actually did a big project out in Houston with a VC firm in biomanufacturing.

So I got a really good sense of how people market and sell these products into our industry.

And about halfway through that last consulting project, I'm like, I don't, I don't think I'm built for consulting.

I don't think that's my life purpose.

Awesome man.

That's, that's really cool.

So yeah, you've been very purpose driven.

I mean hanging out with someone like Tony Robbins, I would imagine that had a big influence on your, your consciousness or your focus and, and doing what not only brings you joy, but what makes a difference in the world and can make a dollar.

Of course now to focus on the actual processing of the hemp fibers that you guys were using as a composite additive.

What was that process like if, if you can share.

I don't if there's any IP I totally understand but like were you using the whole stock were or a mixture of the bast and the herd?

Like what, what did that look like.

So we did a lot of research on equipment, we tested a lot of equipment, we talked to a lot of people.

As you know, Tyler, the standard equipment stack is called decortication.

Equipment typically starts with separating the fiber and the herd.

It's very labor intensive and it was an equipment stack that we very early on realized was not the right fit for us.

Right.

These are scalable equipment stacks.

We looked at decortication and we said this is the exact opposite of what Elon is talking about here.

This is high capex, high footprint, low throughput per hour.

There's a lot of moving parts that can break and it requires a lot of energy in order to do.

And so we kind of flipped the model on its head, we used the full stock and we basically had a simple, I'll broadly call it three step process of milling the fiber and herd together, chemically pre treating that product with certain chemistry and then pelletizing that product before it's dried and backed.

We did patent the product or the process.

It's online.

If you just go search Heartland Industries or Jesse Henry, you could go on Google patents and like read the patent.

And this was a pretty innovative thing at the time.

So we had worked with some pellet mills, some wood pellet mills that make wood pellets.

It took, it took some refinement.

It's not like they were perfect out at the first go around.

There were some, there were some nuances there to them manufacturing the product.

But fortunately for the most part they had the right equipment stack, they had the right labor.

They've been working with natural fibers for decades or generations.

So they knew how to work with a cellulosic feedstock.

The big difference is their input feedstock comes from a forestry and ours comes from agriculture.

So big difference between taking in a tree and taking in a bale of hemp fiber.

So there are some nuances there, but fortunately we were able to forge some really good partnerships and this really helped with scalability in the early days.

I think one of the problems that hemp companies face is if you're going to buy a decortication piece of equipment, you're spending millions and millions of dollars, possibly more than $10 million plus in CapEx, depending on the scale that you're looking to do.

It can take years to commission that process.

And oftentimes, unfortunately, Tyler, the throughput is a lot less than, than the equipment spec'd for.

Hemp is a very light material and so it's really hard to stuff £10,000 an hour into a processing system.

And I think a lot of the equipment that's used in the hemp industry is graded for £10,000 an hour.

And a lot of those £10,000 an hour pieces of equipment, they might get £2,000 an hour.

So all of a sudden your economics and your financial model and your P and L, they don't work the same at £2,000 an hour as they do at £10,000 an hour.

So there's some nuances in the hemp market.

I think the hemp industry can win by leveraging other natural fibers as well.

The camp is a great fiber, but there's other fibers out there as well that are produced at commodity scale and price.

So I think the hemp industry has a really great opportunity to penetrate all these different markets.

I think what it's going to take is companies that are very, very particular about the market that they're tackling think a company like Hempitecture is a really great example.

And not to do the marketing for Hempitecture, but you know, they're in the hemp fiber based insulation products industry and they've also expanded into other natural fibers.

But they are best in class at that one thing, natural fiber insulation.

I think when hemp companies try to be everything to everyone, they become nothing to no one, because you can't be the best at everything.

You know, Facebook didn't start with 2 billion people.

They started with Ivy League colleges.

And so hemp company go try to solve a problem with hemp, not 50,000 problems with hemp.

That would be, that would be my little piece of advice for the hemp entrepreneurs out there.

You know, Heartland got a lot of attention from these other markets.

Concrete was a big market.

We did a good amount of testing in the rubber market.

Foam, obviously, Heartland's in textiles now, so they've expanded from plastic additives.

But there's a lot of attention that hemp gets because it's so versatile.

The problem for these companies and these startups is when you get a new lead that comes into the system and you're a plastic additive company, but you're getting a lead for concrete additives, how much time and attention and energy are you going to give to the concrete additives as opposed to additives?

Or as opposed to the plastic additives.

So it can be very difficult to focus.

I think fiber companies suffer from that because there's a lot of attention from a lot of places that aren't necessarily your main niche.

Absolutely.

So on that note of knowing that there's potentially 50,000 different things that hemp could be turned into based on your research, and knowing that hemp is a resource for food, shelter, clothing, energy, plastics, medicine, fuel, what do you feel like has been maybe the most overlooked or underutilized opportunity in the hemp industry?

Like, do you think it's plastics or is it possibly something else?

I'm going to throw a big curveball at you and show you a little bit of my hand and what, what might potentially be coming in future years.

But I think the most underutilized use of hemp is phytoremediation.

I think what's more about that there's.

Well, there's a lot of research there and you can go back to Chernobyl and see how different radioactive materials were remediated using hemp fiber.

There's a lot of plants that can do remediation, phytoremedia, radiation, phytomining, which would be sucking up heavy metals as opposed to solvents and hydrocarbons.

I think there's a big opportunity on this planet to remediate some of the land that's been abused over many, many years.

And I'm currently working on something that'll be launching next year that's not necessarily hemp specific, but focuses on phytoremediation.

I think this is a really important topic.

We have 900 million acres of arable land here in America, but we also have 50 million acres of oil fields.

And a lot of those oil fields have been abused year after year after year.

So I think there's a lot of things we can do to remediate that soil.

And I think hemp is one of those solutions.

So the hard part about hemp, Tyler, is look, concrete would be a great market.

Concrete additive, in order to hit even 1% by weight of concrete, you would need millions and millions of acres of hemp fiber.

So there's a, there's a gap from how do we get, from where we're at as kind of a, unfortunately like a nascent industry to how is hemp fiber the next commodity crop next to corn, wheat and soy?

Right.

Corn is about 90 million acres here in America.

Soy is about 90 million acres.

I think wheat is somewhere around 40, maybe 45 million acres.

You know, these are, these are produced at Scale, they're in commodity markets.

You can go to exchanges and arbitrage the price of corn today versus the price of corn next month.

And, you know, and hemp doesn't have that advantage.

Yeah, like under 100,000 acres.

Yeah.

It's faltered, it's gone up and down.

I think, you know, CBD has something to do with that.

I think has something to do with that.

I think the court of public opinion has something to do with that.

And there's some misguidance on what hemp is.

And, you know, if it's going to intoxicate your children, I think there's some problems with not having FDA grass certification, generally recognized as safe.

Once hemp gets marked, generally recognize as safe.

Just like wood fiber is, or linen or flax or agave or any of these other natural fibers that would be considered competitors.

Now, hemp can get into food packaging and you can do food contact.

You can touch that.

That market that's really focused on biodegradability and compostability.

And so I think there's some, there's some, broadly speaking, some unlock codes that hemp needs to go through.

I think some of the building materials codes are also a great opportunity for hemp to make a, make a big imprint.

But we have to talk about, you know, how do we get from, you know, tens of thousands of acres or a hundred thousand acres over to tens of millions of acres.

So we got to work with the big companies.

You know, Heartland was doing some work with Georgia Pacific in the early days.

And I love Georgia Pacific.

They got a great team.

They got really, really smart people working there.

But the big chasm was man, Tyler, they're the biggest natural fiber producer on the planet, and they're vertically integrated.

There's no company on planet Earth like Georgia Pacific.

They make Dixie cups and they grow trees and they take the trees and turn them into the Dixie cups.

And by the way, they also have the recycling.

They have the full supply chain.

It is a masterpiece.

The gap with Georgia Pacific is they're in forestry feedstocks and we're in agriculture feedstocks.

And how do you get a company that spent 100 years in forestry feedstocks to start using agriculture feedstocks?

And it's not as simple as just flipping a switch.

And so even for the largest natural fiber producer on the planet is a big switch.

So I think when you look at most of these industries, Tyler, they're used to using petroleum based goods and mined goods.

Right.

So they're using minerals and petroleum.

So introducing natural fibers into their supply chain, it causes new problems and new concerns and there's this cognitive dissonance.

They don't know what those concerns are.

So there's a lot of risk there.

And when there's a lot of risk and you have an R and D person, they rather keep their job than try to swing for the fences and try to be the hero.

Is that the problem that you're aiming to solve with your services?

Kind of sitting down with these companies to integrate and go through that process and be willing to take that risk?

Is that kind of what your intention is to oversee?

Or how, how like if you sit down with a client, they hire you to come in, help with their supply chain sustainability.

Like what does that process look like?

So most of my work has been with smaller companies over the past year and mostly on the marketing and sales side.

So I'm trying to help them scale the their ability to sell sustainable chemistry.

When I connect with large corporates, I do the song and dance and I promote them to use sustainable chemistry.

I introduce them to people that could be helpful in their supply chains.

But I'm trying to get out of the business of consulting, man.

I don't think that's my life purpose.

That's not why I was put on this planet.

And so I've committed to developing some of these projects and software and training and data and media because I believe that those are more scalable in terms of their impact.

Gotcha.

So like for our listeners that are maybe have a eco friendly company, like are you, are you working more with people that aren't, have, don't, don't have eco friendly and sustainable practices so that they can switch over or would somebody come to you that maybe already has a foundation of sustainability and now you can help optimize and fine tune that and help them share that message or what's kind of like if someone were to come to you and hire you, why would they do that?

Most of the companies that I'm working with already have a sustainable solution and they're struggling to get it into market.

So the consulting is obviously a bit more hands on.

One of the products that I'll be launching over the next month or two is, is a CRM and it's called circular CRM.

It's going to be focused specifically on companies in our sector that are moving materials, products, packaging that are promoting more sustainable solutions throughout industry.

So I'm optimizing the CRM specifically for long sales cycles because that's one of the problems in our sector and Supply chain partnerships.

And most sales cycles, you know, if you click on a Facebook ad, that guy's sales cycle is the time it takes you to click on the ad to the time it takes you to go to the checkout page.

Might be, you know, 15 to 30 minutes.

In the sustainable chemistry industry, commercializing new materials could take five to 10 years.

And also what many people don't realize is that brand owner who makes decisions and you think manufactures goods.

They don't manufacture anything.

They might not even assemble anything.

They're really marketing companies.

And as a marketing company, they have to manage a whole supply chain.

So they have tiered supplier bases, they have raw material suppliers, they have logistics companies.

And organizing that can become very, very logistically burdensome.

And so when you're optimizing a CRM and you're optimizing software for supply chain partnerships, for shortening sales cycles, you're helping, you're helping both the startup and the corporate.

Right.

Imagine if you're a corporate and it takes you 10 years to commercialize a new material, and now all of a sudden it takes you five years to commercialize that same new material.

How much money did you save by commercializing the material in 5 years instead of 10 years?

You saved millions of dollars in testing labor, you know, and now you're getting out to market quicker and you're beating your competitors.

Yeah.

Saving a missed opportunity.

Totally.

So I'm, I'm trying to help both the supply side and the demand side with the software and the data.

Right.

Training that I'm building.

I've been out of the training industry for 10 years now, since my time with Tony Robbins.

So I'm very excited to get back in.

And a lot of the projects I'm working on, I've been thinking, thinking about, for, for a long time, and I'm finally at a place in my life where I can invest the time, money and energy into actually building them.

Very cool.

So on, on the topic of entrepreneurship and hemp, there's a lot of ideas popping around in people's minds, some of them taking action, some of them not.

But for the people that are taking the risk or moving into the hemp industry, what do you see other than focusing on too many things and not doing the one thing?

What do you feel like are some of the biggest mistakes that people are making moving into the hemp industry and kind of like challenges that they're going to face?

How could they kind of better prepare their entry into this world?

And, and what do you see as some of the Biggest mistakes that people make that you could help them prevent.

That is a billion dollar question right there.

And I can share some opinions.

I don't know if they're right or wrong, but I think everyone, and I'll kind of zoom out from hemp and just talk about sustainable chemistry as a whole.

Everyone wants to build a molecule factory of the future.

They want to build that, you know, billion dollar exit which requires this innovative processing technology with this unique market application and customer demand pull through and all the investors to finance that molecule factory where you are producing sustainable chemistry at scale.

And I absolutely love that vision.

With that said, that is a very long journey and most people who try that journey fail.

And so the much more sustainable path is find a contract manufacturer that already has processing technology that you can leverage today, create really strong partnerships with that processing partner.

And your job as an entrepreneur is to go secure demand.

You are in the marketing and sales business.

And so yes, your supply chain is important, yes, your team is important.

But without the demand mechanisms, you're just a guy with a great idea that's talking to investors about the next big thing.

And investors, that next big thing is really risky if they're putting all their money into equipment.

And on the other side of that equipment, there's no demand driver.

They're like, why am I going to put $10 million into your equipment stack when you don't have a bunch of customers sitting there waiting for the outputs?

Very hard for an investor to put money into that.

If you were to go to an investor and say, hey, I'm going to take your million, 2 million bucks and I'm going to invest it in inputs for the contract manufacturer that I'm working with and sales and marketing.

Well, scaling sales and marketing is a lot more efficient than scaling, you know, an 18 month build out for a new molecule factory, that's, that's a, that's a tall order.

So I think people should be thinking more in terms of efficiency and how they can efficiently spend their time, money and energy to commercialize these new materials.

But I think most people in our industry want to be the hero they want to be.

You know, we came up with this new innovative molecule, this new innovative patent, this new innovative process, and we want to go raise billions of dollars to do it.

I mean, Tyler, even the companies that have raised billions of dollars are struggling.

So raising money doesn't actually solve the problem.

What solves the problem is finding a bunch of customers to raise their hand and say, me, pick me, choose me.

I want to work with this material, I want to work with this team.

I believe in your mission and your vision and your value and that is what's going to help hemp succeed.

But there's a lot of companies in our space specifically that have raised tens of millions of dollars that have struggled.

There's a lot of companies in sustainable chemistry that have raised hundreds of millions or billions of dollars who are either currently struggling or are on the verge of struggling.

So there's going to be a whole graveyard, not just in our industry, but in sustainable materials and chemicals as a whole, of companies that just don't make it.

And they're not going to make it because they run out of money.

They're going to run out of money because they didn't get the demand drivers and the demand mechanisms moving quick enough in order to create the pull through mechanisms to get the investment capital to bring the material to market.

So to dive deeper into those mechanisms of demand and conversion, what would you recommend are, because you could ask a million people, hey, would you want to buy this?

And you know, 90% of them might say yes.

But then when it comes to actually buying the thing to put up their money or make that switch, oftentimes after doing the market research, you find what people say isn't what they would actually do.

What are some ways that you can ensure that the market research is valid and you can actually put those demand mechanisms in place?

Like, what does that actually look like?

What could businesses do?

Is it an loi, Is it a proposal?

Is it a purchase order?

Like, what are the actual things that you would need to have to go and get that capital to, you know, to prove that you have the demand?

Totally.

So, yeah, investors want to see an loi, an mou.

It doesn't need to be a joint venture, but a joint development agreement.

If you can get a purchase order, that's great.

But if you can't get a purchase order, just getting any piece of paper with their signature on it, on their company letterhead that says, we want this material and if you can produce it at this price, we'll buy it.

Even if it's non binding to an investor, that's, that's a great demand signal.

There's a lot of companies that Heartland worked with over many years that they tested the material in labs, they did all the performance testing and we passed the specs and then they take our material and they put it up on a shelf and they say, well, you pass all the specs, but no one's currently asking us for hemp Fiber plastic additives.

Right?

Who's asking for that?

So we're gonna put it on the shelf and then when someone asks for it, we have you guys, you're, you're the guys.

Well, that's great.

But people aren't asking for hemp fiber plastic additives.

They're asking to reduce the CO2 of their plastic.

They're asking for more bio based content.

They're asking to lightweight their plastic, they're asking to replace their fiberglass or talc or calcium carbonate.

Right.

So they're, they're, they're not directly asking for hemp, they're asking for these solutions.

And hemp fiber is a vehicle to get to that solution.

It does take some pretty innovative marketing and sales skills in order to make this happen.

Because it's not just successfully testing your material.

That's the easy part.

It's creating the demand mechanisms in order for that company to get it into market.

And what I try to do at Heartland was help these big plastic companies with sales training.

Hey, here's how to sell natural fiber plastic additives or natural fiber filled plastic, because they don't know how to sell it.

Petroleum based plastic for 30 years, it's an arbitrage game.

It's a buy and sell, it's a commodity.

And then when you're using a new material, it's a little less commoditized.

So it takes a little more narrative and you have to know what questions to ask and how to figure out if hemp fiber could potentially solve that solution.

What's one or two nuggets that you, you could share with our audience?

Obviously if someone hires you, it could take weeks and months and years to develop a sales force to go out there and represent sustainable material.

But what, what was like maybe one or two golden nuggets that you could share to help them be armed with the languaging or the right questions, like what's something you could share with us that would be helpful.

So the right questions, you could probably take this transcript and upload it to ChatGPT and ask the 10 questions.

So I won't go through the questions.

One of the strategies that I used at Heartland was something I called land and expand.

So the really cool part, Tyler, about working in the industrial sector is you want to go to a big chemical company, there's 100,000 employees.

You could get a call with any chemical company that you want.

That's a fact.

And if you can't, now we got to have a conversation about why you can't get a call with one out of 100,000 people, right?

So if you just go take a big chemical company, you get on the phone with them.

The trick is, how do you get to call?

Two call.

One goes, great.

Every hemp company on the planet can have a great first call because the narrative is perfect.

It's beautiful.

This plant does everything for the planet.

It performs well, blah, blah, blah.

How do you get called to?

And it's not just how he gets called to, but who's on call to.

So I call the strategy land and expand.

Typically, my first call is with someone in the R and D department.

They focus on material science, polymer chemistry, mechanical engineering, or they're like the R and D manager who might have less technical skills, but manages the whole R and D department.

And at the end of the first call, I'm like, hey, this went great.

Really looking forward to a second call with you.

Who else from your team should be on that call?

Anyone from procurement, Anyone from your sustainability team, maybe your marketing and sales team.

And you start recommending other potential people who could be valuable in the process.

You want to loop in those people as quickly as possible, because what happens is these big companies have turnover.

So you could be working with the best R and D guy on the planet and they might love your product, but in three months, they might not be working there.

They might be working at the competitor, which can be another great thing for you, because now you have another entry point in.

But if you don't land and expand, you don't have anchors and hooks into that company that transcend that one person.

And so your first goal when you get into a company is to go from we have one champion in the company to now we have a little cohort of champions inside the company.

Now this cohort is moving our initiatives forward in all of these different markets.

So the way I kind of look at it is in a triangle, you have price, Performance and CO2.

And the whole game of the hemp industry and the sustainable chemistry industry as a whole Is to lower CO2 without compromising price and performance.

That is the whole game, that is the sales game that you're playing.

That is the R and D game that you're playing.

That is product market fit.

If you can reduce CO2 without compromising price and performance, you have now stumbled upon greatness.

That's the trifecta.

That is the trifecta is this little triangle.

And so if you look at the talent at a large institution that supports price, performance and CO2 at the price point, you have the Procurement team performance part, you have the R and D team and the CO2 part, you have the sustainability team.

So you always are going to need the trifecta dynamic between R and D, sustainability and procurement.

You gotta get those three people to talk and work together.

And oftentimes that R and D person is not working super closely with their sustainability team.

They might be working with the procurement team on a fairly consistent basis, but the sustainability team they might not be.

And so it's your duty and responsibility by the end of that first call to really get them not just vested in your product and your company and your mission and your vision and where you're going, but in looping in other members of their team who could help advance this initiative internally.

As much as you want to be the champion and go push this at 100,000 person company, you're just the hemp guy.

So you got to go find the champions internally who really believe in what you're doing.

And given that you can do that and give them all the sales collateral that you have that can help them internally, you can move the product development initiatives forward faster.

That's really great advice.

Yeah, I have not heard that approach from any of the 140 guests I've had on the show, so that's really valuable.

I appreciate you sharing that.

Based on our conversations previously, you have a very sustainable, eco friendly, healthy lifestyle and the things that you put on and in your body.

Of all of the hemp products that you've experienced since you've been introduced to this plant, what is your favorite hemp product on the market that you've experienced and why?

Man unbiased.

You know, Heartland's product to me is still, you know, if Heartland gets it, gets it in market and like scales it, that is, it's a game changer because it transcends plastic.

It's rubber foam, asphalt, concrete, cement, paper.

I mean, we really stumbled on the holy grail at Heartland, honestly.

In full transparency, I don't have any hemp textiles.

We'll change that hemp clothing.

Would love to get there.

I think, you know, hemp hearts was something that I used for many, many years.

Heartland's done some work in that space as well.

So we had our own hemp hearts and hemp grain.

I think in the protein market, hemp has a big opportunity to positively impact the vegan protein market specifically.

There's a lot of people who prefer vegan protein over whey protein, even though they aren't Vegan, the way the body processes it, the, the amino acid profile of the, of the hemp protein, I think is a bit different than a lot of the other proteins out there.

So I think hemp is a really big opportunity in that market.

It's tough, man.

I mean, it's, again, it gets back to hemp can solve the 50,000 problems.

What is it actually going to do the best?

Look, you know, I would love to see biofuels be a big play for hemp long term.

And, you know, we're.

If you look at the sustainable chemistry market, what is the largest produced sustainable chemical?

It's ethanol.

That's the ball.

That is, that is the one.

That is what we produce at volume, right?

Massive volume.

Yeah.

15% or 10% in every single person's car, given that it's not an ev.

Yeah.

So there's already a huge market for it.

Now.

It takes getting to scale and price points in order to make it happen.

So it still comes back to, you know, CO2 price and performance, unfortunately.

So would that be basically fermenting the biomass?

Like, would you take the whole plant?

Would it be the stocks, the leaves, the seeds?

Like, what would.

But I think there's, there's a huge opportunity.

One of the trends that Heartland didn't hit on like, nail on the head, but I see is, is waste.

And the waste narrative inside of companies and upcycling and valorizing waste is becoming more important.

And there is a, you know, I'll call it a misconception in large, large companies where they have a fear that by using productive agriculture land for industrial crops instead of food crops, that they're now taking food out of the mouths of hungry children in nations that are impoverished.

This is a very tough narrative to overcome for hemp.

Fortunately, given that you're dual cropping, you're getting a protein product and you're getting a fiber product, and that's.

Portland did very, very well.

So we could overcome that narrative because we were actually getting more protein per acre than corn or soy as well as producing a fiber.

So we were able to overcome that.

A lot of the industrial crops have a problem overcoming that narrative.

But if you go and look at like what industrial crop can hit tens of millions of acres and overcome that problem?

Hemp and flax would be the two big ones because flax does produce a seed which is pretty widely used.

I think flax is an interesting market, but most of the flax fiber market goes, goes towards linens.

Yeah.

And it, you know, it goes towards bed sheets.

And clothing.

And so there's less market availability for a product like that because it's.

It's already accounted for.

I think hemp really is a blue ocean.

It is about getting the farmers on board, though.

And farmers have been screwed over for many years, both in hemp and out of hemp.

The situation didn't help the hemp brand in terms of farmers appeal towards it.

And so that, you know, there's.

The hemp industry is interesting because it has to straddle agriculture.

Chemicals and manufacturing straddle the whole breadth of.

And when you lead with CO2 as a core part of your narrative, you're really opening the door to miss.

Miss the mark.

Because look at these sectors, man.

They are the most conservative sectors on the planet.

Agriculture, chemicals, manufacturing, these are concern people.

When you try to use words, words like climate change, global warming, climate crisis, CO2, that's not, you know, the farmer's not sitting there talking about, you know, parts per million of CO2.

Yeah.

But, you know, there are creative and nuanced ways to get around this problem for farmers.

You go ask a farmer, you know, hey, when did you.

When did you.

When did you plant, you know, 10 years ago?

When was your plant date?

They might say, oh, we, you know, used to plant in, you know, mid May.

Oh, interesting.

When's your.

When's your plant date this past year?

Oh, well, you know, it's, you know, mid April.

Oh, interesting.

So it moved forward a month.

Why?

Why to move forward?

Oh, well, it's.

It's getting warmer earlier.

You don't need to say global warming.

Yeah, you just ask them the question so that they arrive at the solution.

So I think the hemp industry does have a natural proclivity to want to tell people what the answer is and try to shove hemp down people's throats.

And I think the opportunity that we miss in that is asking questions so that people arrive at their own assumptions.

Absolutely.

That's a big part of sales, is getting them to answer the questions.

Last couple of questions here.

So going into these boardrooms, speaking to these major corporations, did you find the biggest challenges were more related to the integration and supply chain, you know, shifts, or did you ever encounter the stigma?

Like, is there still a very large perception around hemp as being this drug and the association with cannabis or medical marijuana and that side of the plan?

Like, did you encounter sort of being made fun of or just that, you know, stigma still?

I think there's definitely still a stigma.

Heartland for many years tried to brand itself like the Only articles that we put on our website that had to do anything outside of fiber were like the difference between hemp fiber and CBD so that we could educate the market and also educate Google, because Google was still, and this is pre AI days, Google was still a little confused about what hem fiber is versus what CBD is.

The stigma is a problem.

There's also this unspoken battle of preconceived notions by people in large industries.

So it's not just the stigma of hemp.

And so breaking down these limiting beliefs is kind of similar to the Tony Robbins thing.

It's all connected, man.

Breaking down these belief systems from people who have tried and failed on getting them either to double down on what you're doing or getting them as far away from your product development initiative as humanly possible.

That guy or that person can kill your product development initiative.

Within the company, their bad energy is pervasive, and you need to either learn how to transition that person's mind or get them very far away from your product development initiative.

There's creative ways to do that, but notably, if you have a champion in the company confiding in them and just saying, hey, I'm noticing on our calls there's a lot of pushback between this individual and us.

And I'm getting the sense that if this individual is involved in this product development, that it's just we're all just wasting our time and energy and money here.

So, like, you kind of draw out the two paths for them and let them be the delineator of what that path is.

But yeah, I think the stigma is one part of it, but also the limiting belief systems about what this plant is and what it can do.

Can it be produced at scale?

And then there's other random problems and it's all market specific.

So, you know, Heartland was working not just in commodity plastics, we were working in engineered plastics like nylon.

You know, getting over smell concerns, not just performance.

Performance is one thing.

Getting through smell concerns, because in automotive, there are strict smell requirements.

Smell testing like that is a big problem.

Getting over moisture problems, that is a big barrier to overcome.

You know, some people are concerned with molds and it's a natural product.

And so they're concerned about some of these things that only natural products would have a problem with as opposed to or mineral based products.

Yeah.

So depending on what market you're in, you need to understand what are the preconceived notions of that industry and of that individual.

And it's really your responsibility on that first call to ask really good questions.

Hey, have you ever worked with this plant before?

Have you ever worked with natural fibers before?

What's for experience been, what did you do?

What were the processing conditions?

It's not the material that's wrong, it's just the processing conditions.

Yeah.

Same temperature that they're heating up the mineral based additives and you know, it might be a drop in replacement, but if you're processing it in the same processing conditions that you're using minerals or petroleum based goods at, it's not going to process the same.

So you need processing conditions.

These are all just kind of like tricks of the trade that you pick up on over the years.

I'd say like really dial in on that first call, really get clear on the questions that you should be asking.

And you want to qualify people.

You want to figure out on a first call if someone's not a fit to work with you.

And I think there's a natural inclination in the hemp industry to just figure out we want to bring everyone in, we want to bring everyone together.

And what happens when you do that without really consciously delineating if someone is a good fit for your company or not, is you end up bringing people into the fold who aren't a good fit.

The bad apples, so to speak.

You're focused on some product development initiative that's never going to materialize that distracts from your company resources.

Now you're working on formulations and processing conditions and markets that you're never really going to tackle.

Just because it feels good that someone's reached out to you and has some demand mechanism for your product.

Absolutely.

Yeah, man, this has been really fun.

I have one last question that I always like to ask that's more on the philosophical side.

If you are on the world stage and you can share a message with every single human being on the planet, whisper some message into their ear, what would you want them to know?

It could be related to hemp or anything at all.

It's a good question.

Tyler.

I.

There's.

There's two statements that I've been reminding myself of over the past year.

It's been a pretty interesting past.

Like 18 months for me and a lot of ups and downs.

And I think like the, the, the two statements that I, that keep coming back to me are, you don't know how strong you are until you have to be.

And you can't lose if you don't give up.

Beautiful.

And for many, many years, it was not easy at Heartland.

You know, we were building not just a new market with hemp, we were building a whole industry.

You know, natural fiber master batches and concentrates were not a thing.

They didn't exist before Heartland came along.

So we weren't just, you know, trying to grow the hemp industry.

We were trying to grow in the chemical sector, this new product category.

And there's a lot of backlash.

You know, it took going to a lot of conferences and doing a lot of speeches and changing a lot of minds in order to get the court of public opinion to believe that this was possible.

But, you know, for how up and down the Heartland journey was, we survived a lot, man.

We were very resilient.

We went through a lot together as a team, and we, we went through some crazy moments that we were able to get to the other side of, and we, we didn't give up.

And so in the, in the, the year plus, since I've left Heartland, I've had more of those up and down moments.

And I keep reminding myself that, you know, there are some really dark days there, man.

And I think, you know, on a, on a philosophical level, I, I think part of me at times I felt broken.

You know, I'm 34 and I hadn't hit my stride yet, and I wasn't where I wanted to be.

And in these really weird, seemingly dark moments, it was that broken version of me that fixed me, that healed me, that picked me up off the ground and like, wiped the dust off my shoulders and said, hey, bud, you're gonna be okay.

You know, you just need a nice meal and someone to rub your head and give you a hug and tell you everything's gonna be okay and you need a good night's sleep and maybe a smoothie, like, give yourself a little treat and everything's gonna be okay, buddy.

You know, getting through all those moments was not only empowering, but showed me, like, not.

I, I didn't realize how strong I was.

And because I'm not giving up, I'm going to make it.

And so I think in, in the hemp industry specifically, there's a lot of that energy.

Like, you feel like you're fighting a good fight and no one's paying attention.

To you or no one's listening or people are just kind of shooing you off and, you know, it's, it, it feels like, you know, we're in an industry of people wearing tinfoil hats saying, one day you'll get it, one day you'll understand.

And there's a silver lining of truth to that.

And you also need to take that feedback loop and understand, hey, based on this feedback that I'm getting from industry, how do I need to change how I'm communicating?

How do I need to change the questions that I'm asking?

How do I need to change how I'm managing my team?

How do I need to change how I show up every day?

And so in the early days of Heartland, I'll quickly share.

We had an advisor, Eric Osterman, who was really promoting me to think outside the scope of CO2, and he was, you know, at the time we were trying to scale carbon negative raw material supply chains and build this replication model where we could print these carbon negative raw material supply chains across the planet.

And Eric kind of stopped and said, jess, like, you're reducing the problem down to CO2, and sustainability is much more than CO2.

How do you show up in your relationships?

What's the food that you're eating?

What is the chemistry that you're using on your body?

How do you think?

How do you lead?

If you're leading from a place of sustainability, you're becoming a sustainable leader.

CO2 is just one part of it.

And unfortunately, as a society, we have chosen the one pollutant that no one can agree on.

When there's hundreds or thousands of pollutants that we all can't agree on.

And that's a whole different topic for a different day, a different podcast, maybe.

Yeah, but, you know, unfortunately, you know, CO2 has become the devil in the room and the hemp industry has to talk about it because there's a lot of advantages, not just in the biogenic carbon, but what hemp does in the soil to using hemp fiber.

So we have to talk about CO2, but CO2 is just the surface level problem here, man.

There's, you know, extraction and pollution are creating hundreds of pollutants that are destroying our land, air, water, plants and animals.

If we don't solve those pollutants, you know, CO2 is not going to be relevant if there's too much arsenic in our air and water.

So maybe we can solve some of those pollutants that 100% of the population agrees on.

Pollutant that maybe no one will ever agree on.

Well, there you have it, hamsters.

You've been listening to Jesse Henry and this is your hempstrepreneurial host, Tyler Hemp.

It's been a pleasure my friend.

I look forward to having you on the show again and seeing how we can empower the Hemp is here together.

Send us your Messages support@Hempaware.com Let us know what you want to hear next.

And thanks so much Jesse.

Really appreciate having you on the show.

Thanks for having me, Tyler.