Recycling trash into cash.

• Position: RUNNER - UP

After graduating from N.C. State and working for the city of Fayetteville as a landscape architect, Bill Hester drifted into rehabbing and demolishing old buildings. That got him into hauling demolition and construction waste, and by 2004 he had established ICAN as the largest independent waste hauler in the region. But all along, he had been toying with the idea of building a business from the tons of stuff he threw away. It took the company three years to get a solid-waste permit from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources--along with a bit of free business advice: "The state told us that we'd probably fail."

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It was almost right. In 2008, two things happened. "Construction slowed down; competition picked up," Hester, 50, recalls. "We lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was ugly. You pretty much wipe out your retirement, and you leverage what you can leverage." His three partners proposed selling the whole shebang or peddling off the pieces. "It seemed like if that happened, it would be a personal failure, so I sort of dug in my heels." Intense competition had made hauling waste--accounting for 40% of revenue--unprofitable. "We had to start pricing our service fees 30-40% lower than they were before." Without a landfill, the company paid for anything it didn't recycle.

"We had to recycle or basically fail." When ICAN's managers and workforce resisted the change, "we pretty much cleaned house and hired in some younger people." Shelby Anderson, 24, came on as sales manager. Norm Loomis, 50, tightened operations as production manager. "Shelby brought a customer-friendly, business-management approach to the mix," says Matt Todd, a specialist with the state's Recycling Business Assistance Center in Raleigh. "Norm's the no-nonsense guy on the yard who makes stuff happen." With Hester as the idea man, they set out to convert ICAN into a sales-oriented manufacturer of recycled products. "We started looking at everything we could pull out of the waste stream," Hester says. Instead of sending all wood waste, a third of what comes in, to fuel boilers, ICAN converted some of it into colored landscaping mulch. Concrete, bricks...