An Award-Winning Lesson

Video showcasing Hillside Solutions as the 2025 receipient of the “End Market of the Year” award from Nebraska Recycling Council.

Here’s one of my favorite lessons from my time working at Hillside Solutions, an eco-friendly start-up …

If you want to change your company’s values, change where the money comes from.

I’ll explain how Hillside did it, how we won awards by doing so, and what it says about the trash-hauling business.

In solid waste, there are two ways to make money:
#1. Up front, by moving materials with trucks.
#2. On the back end, by controlling where those materials end up.

Most trash hauling companies also own landfills. They profit every time someone dumps a load.

In the early days at Hillside Solutions, we only had revenue stream #1.

No landfill. No tipping fees. That put us at a gigantic disadvantage.

So the question came: should we open a landfill?

Ultimately, we said no. Instead, we opened the region’s first industrial composting facility.

That one decision changed everything.
— It set us apart from billion-dollar competitors (that were publicly traded on the stock market).
— It demoted our incentive to bury waste. Our priority instead became composting it.

The result?

Years of growth—and 2020 and 2025’s “End Market of the Year” award from Nebraska Recycling Council.

So here’s my corny closer for you: business models aren’t just numbers on a sheet. They’re values in action.