The Beginning

It was December of 1983.  I was sitting in my half-finished office inside my half-finished fertilizer blending plant.  My chair was a five-gallon bucket with a pillow on it.  My desk was dug out of an old, abandoned office. My light was my college desk lamp plugged into an extension cord that ran across the street to a neighboring business. I had no electricity yet. It was a cold, wintry day.  I had spent the past few months putting together my first fertilizer plant in Waller, Texas. We did carpentry, electrical, plumbing, and concrete jobs, getting the plant ready to make fertilizer. As I was sitting there, God said to me, “Dean, you need to start getting some customers!” I was shocked…I had been so busy building the plant that I had done NOTHING to build sales.  Fertilizer season was two months away, and I had NO customers. So I went and borrowed a Houston Yellow Pages book and started calling landscapers, golf courses, schools, and anyone else in Houston who used fertilizer.  I would try to make appointments, but most of the time I just wrote down the address and went and knocked on doors. I carried my trusty pocket calculator and would sit in front of the customer and build fertilizer products, and give them pricing right there on the spot. Sometimes, I sold products that I carried around in my pickup. I sat on the side of the road and sold fertilizer right off the truck on weekends.  We would go to nursery shows with my kids, and they would sell products in the parking lot while I was at my booth inside the show. My kids sold fertilizer to our church members and delivered it with a red wagon in the neighborhood. It was hard, but I would not trade a single moment of what we went through. We always knew that we were where God wanted us to be and trusted Him to be there for us no matter what.

Dean Nelson, Founder and Co-Owner