Northwest Arkansas Business Journal 2009 Fast 15: Aaron Stahl

Aaron Stahl, 27
Owner
P3 Waste Consulting, Fayetteville

Claim to Fame: Saving small business clients 40 percent to 50 percent on their monthly rubbish bill.

Next Step: Hopes to be successful in many different industries and has already started e-shadow.com, a career development Web site.

Aaron Stahl is not above dumpster diving for new business.

“Give me a trash can and an invoice, and I can save you money,” he said.

In a time when entrepreneurs are looking for opportunity and small businesses are looking for ways to decrease expenses, Stahl has championed a new niche within an old problem. The P3 business model is to simply realign business owners’ garbage-hauling and containment contracts with their actual usage and, if he can, reduce clients’ usage through recycling practices.

“For a restaurant, it’s done on volume, so they can reduce frequency based on less trash,” he said. “Sometimes it makes more sense to recycle, but anytime you reduce the amount of your garbage, you reduce your costs.”

He’s also been known to uncover over-priced fuel surcharges or hidden fees included in contracts that don’t make sense for a particular client.

He figures P3 saves some of its larger clients “in the six figure range” on their annual trash contracts, and averages between 40 percent and 50 percent per client, all on a contingency basis.

“I’ve done work at 150 locations and I’ve been able to save 95 percent of the people money. Pretty much every body is overspending,” he said.

Stahl didn’t start as a fresh young student at the University of Arkansas looking for a career in waste consulting.

While getting his degree in small business management, he caught the entrepreneurial bug and started looking at the rental house market. He crunched the numbers and decided building homes was more profitable. He and a couple of partners spent the next two years building.

“I knew I didn’t want to do home building forever … It was just an opportunity to take advantage of a good market and make some money,” he said of his six 3,500 to 5,500-SF projects.

He started P3 part-time in January 2005, but made it his full-time vocation in January 2007. He graduated from the UA in 2006.

Stahl said much of his youth was spent working on his parents’ farm near Mountain Home, and that helped instill a “work hard” ethic.

“I’m a doer as far as new ideas are concerned. A lot of people get caught up in the details of stuff … I try to make mistakes and learn from them,” he said.

(RELATED: Northwest Arkansas Business Journal’s 15 Young Pros on the Fast Track)