Innovator Marc Elliott on the Journey That Inspired His GoMaterials Platform

From episode: EP41 - Revolutionizing Plant Sourcing: Unveiling Go Material with Marc Elliott

Willie: Your story is inspiring and it's inspiring to me in a big way because it screams innovation. It screams that you saw a problem within the industry and you took it amongst yourself to make that problem, your problem and make a change in a difference for everyone, allowing them to use a platform that is just amazing dude. I love innovation. Innovation in this industry is something that is, something you don't see too often. Most people do the same thing as the guy next door. And that's just what it is. A copycat industry is what I call it. And you my friend are a pioneer. And that's why I know this interview is going to be something special. You guys listening, hold on tight because that's what it's going to be. Mark, talk to me, tell me what you were doing when this idea came to you and how go materials came about. Talk to me and tell us.

Yeah! I mean, I've been in the landscape industry, the green industry since I was 12, got a job doing landscaping so I can buy some movie tickets and go to the movies with my friends. My father never gave me anything and like, I've been bright as an entrepreneur since I was a kid, had to buy everything myself and figure it out. So at 16, started a landscape business with my brother. I'm after working in landscaping for 14 years. As we were doing it, I was probably about seven, eight years into it and we're getting into a lot of big projects, big city projects, huge commercial projects where in Canada, number one, brokers don't exist. I was having to work with seven, eight, nine different nurseries to find my products, try and figure out how to get them there logistically, send my guys picking up material and just found it a complete headache and saw an opportunity to solve this issue for landscape contractors. Saw that a lot of nurseries too, were working with pen and paper, email communication, text messages, phone. So I just wanted to bring about a way to streamline all this. And this was kind of at the boom of marketplaces when Airbnb came out and all this stuff and I was like, this would be a really cool idea to create a marketplace about this and bring all these vendors together under one source, organized logistics, you know? And that's where our mission comes about of making plant sourcing as easy as one, two, three. That's what we do here at Go materials. And that's what we strive to do for contractors. I reached out to Mike, who is a friend since high school and Shireen also, she helped organize this podcast. My two co -founders. I explained to them that I saw this opportunity and kind of kicked off the business there in early 2017 with a pilot year and then 2018 really got things moving, sourcing materials all throughout Ontario and Quebec for contractors.