From Idea to Success: The Story Behind the Game-Changing Sprinkler Guard

Dylan Silver (00:02.085)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. And today on the show, I have a guest, Kwiatkowski, who has a product that is really interesting, a sprinkler head space that I’m interested in talking about today and learning more about Kenny. Welcome to the show.

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (00:02.414)
Hey folks welcome back to the show I’m your host Dylan Silver and today on the show I have a guest Kenny Kwiatkowski who has a product that is really interesting a sprinkler headspace that I’m interested in talking about today learning more about Kenny welcome to the show. Thank you Dylan thanks for having me on. You know I have some people who are service providers to the real estate space and I have people who are doing lending and

Dylan Silver (00:21.637)
You know, I have some people who are service providers to the real estate space and I have people who are doing lending and, you know, mini cost segregation tax attorneys and strategists, but I haven’t had anybody who’s got a product like this. So it’s great to have some diversity here. Tell us about how this came about.

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (00:28.322)
many cost segregation tax attorneys and strategists, but I haven’t had anybody who’s got a product like this. So it’s great to have some diversity here. Tell us about how this came about. Well, know, Dylan, it was just an idea that came to mind in solving my own problem in my lawn. I had these darn cement donuts around my sprinkler heads and you know, I had in a couple of places, I had three of them stack because they kept on sinking.

And they so they weren’t protecting my sprinkler head and with you know, my landscaper coming through he’s ripping through because he has a hundred lawns to do He’s not gonna worry about your sprinkler heads whatsoever. So now and again, they break and whatever, you know And you know and I’m spending 200 bucks every time my irrigation guy has to come to my house It’s like wow, you might as well fix all of them. So I I started making some prototypes It’s like I got to think of something better something that will do multifunction not just one simple function of protecting your sprinkler heads

So I started making prototypes out of cardboard. Then I went to some PVC pipe, crazy glue, and a little spray paint. And that’s how I came up with? Well, originally it was called the Grass Holt, but we rebranded it so it’s Sprinkler Guard is what we call it. Where I’m not McDonald’s yet. I need more of a terminology like Burger King. You know what you’re getting. Or Kentucky Fried Chicken. So we rebranded it. Sprinkler Guard. I call it Sprinkler Guard by Grass Holt. So it kind of describes what the product does.

Dylan Silver (01:50.897)
Yeah.

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (01:56.994)
But it does more than just protect your sprinkler heads against trucks, lawnmowers, weed-whackers. It actually helps with snow plows and snow blowers up north. But in addition to protecting it, the tube section keeps your sprinkler heads aligned, which the cement donuts didn’t do. There may be some other products out there, but it doesn’t have multifunctions like mine.

Dylan Silver (02:16.56)
Right.

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (02:21.806)
And for instance, we have a lot we have seen Augustine grass in Florida. It grows like a weed it grows sideways It doesn’t really grow up and down like northern grass like dry grass But but this is why I have this disc around it So this disc helps prevent the grass from growing over it. So the pop-ups pop up the rotators rotate And but you still have to maintain your lawn. I’m not gonna say it’s a hundred percent guaranteed You don’t mow your lawn. It’s not gonna get grown up. But what we did was ingenious

in my patents, we put these preparations on the bottom. In new home construction, these guys are just throwing in sprinkler heads, and they’re near your driveway, they’re near your sidewalks, they’re near the building, and they’re not protected. So the beauty part of these preparations, if it’s close to that, you could just score and snap this off. So there’s over 1,000 configurations here that you could customize this to. Even with the curbing that

You you put into your flower beds and so forth and I was silly I didn’t know how close mine were and it was like well, I’m glad I invented this so It is ABS plastic Flexible and we put a UV deterrent in here now. These are probably gonna last I’m gonna and I don’t put any warranty on it. I’m gonna say five years probably ten I mean, I still had prototypes in my yards that I just made myself

Dylan Silver (03:21.403)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Silver (03:46.139)
So one of the questions that I have, because I’m not a landscape guy, I do a lot of wholesale real estate and I recently got a real estate license, so I work with lot of distressed property. So the yard is the least of the concerns, but I do see, of course, crews that come and restore and fix and flip and then they’ll work on the yard. One of the things that I’ve noticed is when you’re stepping on a sprinkler head, you’re like, no, I just stepped on this, I hope I didn’t break this thing. Will it avoid that issue if you’re stepping on these, it’s not going to break the sprinkler head?

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (04:14.374)
Correct so what I tell people is for maximum protection make sure your sprinkler has about an inch below the top of the tube section and

So as you’re running, I run mine over and like over with my car all the times because they’re so close to the draw. They’re so close to the driveway. But you know, it pushes it down. But you just have to lift it up a little and reset, put some dirt under there. You have erosion all the time with water coming out of your sprinkler heads. So you got to adjust them accordingly. And what I did to make them look pretty, I just take some fish gravel and put it on the inside here. They do make some glow in the dark gravel, which I’m going to try out and put in my yard and see how that looks.

Dylan Silver (04:27.273)
wow.

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (04:52.646)
Hey, baby light it up a little in this way. I know where my sprinkler heads are but a lot of people You know, I got some naysayers out there and but it is what it is I mean, they don’t it’s gonna look like crap in my yard I’d rather I’d rather know where my sprinkler heads are than when they aren’t are They’re not gonna be in your middle of lawn because when they design irrigation system, they’re all around the edge of your lawns so

Dylan Silver (04:54.737)
This is Ryan.

Dylan Silver (05:11.857)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (05:16.709)
Now I want to ask you about your background when it comes to design and then landscaping. Were you always a landscape guy? Were you always big into landscaping?

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (05:21.394)
Design and then landscaping were you always a landscape guy? My background is public accounting, but I come from the school of hard knocks. I work my way through college whether I was a Mason in New York City or Hanging drywall with the Canadian French Canadian guys working on vacations Building building I built chimneys in my lifetime framed houses

The only thing I really haven’t done was roofing. That was not my big particular, but I know how to fix roofs, but I don’t want to be up there. I don’t want to be up there if I don’t have to. That’s all. So my background, yeah, my background, I do have a background in construction, yes.

Dylan Silver (05:52.433)
Sure, hanging off roads.

Dylan Silver (06:03.227)
Going from, like you mentioned, the counting into a that’s not exactly tangent, right? I want to ask you about starting this business and then also the prototyping and then getting it to where it is today. How did you go about that? was it connections that you had previously made? Or did you have to establish new connections in order to get the molding, in order to get your first marketing out there and sales and so on and so forth?

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (06:04.952)
the counting into a that’s not exactly tangent, right? I want to ask you about starting this business and then also the prototyping and then getting it to where it is today.

How did you go about that and was it connections that you had previously made or did you have to establish new connections in order to get the whole thing in order to get your first marketing out there and sales and so on and so forth? Well startups are how that’s what I could tell you So I have my you got to make prototypes And so I wanted to keep this local in my community support, you know give it economic impact So I went to a few local manufacturers until I finally found one, but I had a prototype

and they could see what I was doing and they said, well, we could build the mold over in Taiwan or China. And it’s like, well, as a veteran, I really have a hard time doing that. I just can’t. If I’m to say it’s made in the USA, I mean, it’s start to finish and all my stuff comes from the United States. But getting around and finding the right manufacturer was key and finding the right one who actually build molds.

Dylan Silver (06:55.654)
Yeah.

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (07:17.166)
So we started out with a little two cavity aluminum mold. Probably did, I don’t know, 100, 150,000 units off of that. And then we went to a four cavity mold. But the expense of going from aluminum to a P20 or S7 steel, it’s double the price. I mean, you’re going to spend $60,000, $70,000 on a mold without even blinking an eye.

Dylan Silver (07:39.749)
And so when you were going through this process, and was this the first time that you were diving into like materials and molds and so on and so forth, this is a totally new field to me.

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (07:47.726)
It was totally I was totally green and you know Which my dad was around because he was a chemical engineer But you know you got to learn and you try not to learn you know And like Thomas says and I my best my best accomplices are my mistakes. Well you get tired of making those mistakes So you try to put the best team around you?

Dylan Silver (08:08.945)
Yeah.

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (08:12.75)
and keep those positive influences. I mean, I had my wife and my family supporting me. But it was all out of pocket. It was all out of pocket money. So you got to be prepared. Then it’s like, all right, now we got to file patents. Setting up the corporation, that’s the easy part for me because of my background in public accounting. I do these in my sleep. But it was really getting the patents.

Dylan Silver (08:28.527)
Yeah.

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (08:38.83)
Now we, oh, we got to have trademarks. We have trademarks for the name, so nobody steals this and that. And boy, that was an adventure. And finding the right patent attorney too. I was local. There’s a big firm in town here. And I met Doug Cherry a couple years ago, many years ago. And he deals more with trademarks locally. But he has another, they have a nationwide office. So there was another guy within his firm that deals with patents. So we, you know.

design patent, utility patent, get those patents done. One thing I did learn, if you pay a little extra money, you get those patents done quicker. It’s a couple extra thousand. But sometimes they don’t tell you. If you go the normal course, it’s going to take you two years, maybe longer. mine’s a simple patent.

Dylan Silver (09:23.057)
Yeah, it’s a-

Dylan Silver (09:26.747)
So how long did it take you for the patent?

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (09:28.334)
Design patent probably probably about a year Yeah, about a year and the utility patent, which is the coup de grace about two years

Dylan Silver (09:40.347)
So when you were looking at designs and molding and patents and so on and so forth, I’m imagining a lot of this may be new, but some of it you may have had maybe an advantage from the accounting world as well. But where was the biggest growth point where you’re like, okay, this is obviously gonna be something where maybe I have to bring in outside knowledge, I really have to do my homework on X, Y, and Z?

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (09:52.11)
But where was the biggest growth point where you’re like, okay, this is obviously gonna be something where maybe I have to bring in outside knowledge I really have to do my homework on X Y & Z Probably the biggest my Achilles heel is the marketing aspect of it, you know I thought I was good at you know setting up the way I had helped paid, know contractors or whatever and Setting up the website set up the shopping cart then I got into Amazon and that kind of kind of blew up my product a little

Dylan Silver (10:17.958)
Wow.

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (10:20.878)
But come to find out, know, Amazon’s taken 55 to 58 percent off each sale That’s that’s Yes, sir, you know when you add in the shipping costs to ship to Amazon and they have a be packaged in certain way then You’re doing advertising on Amazon. Yeah, it really it really adds up quick, you know, they’re gonna take a third just if they’re selling it but then you add the shipping and other things the advertising and

Dylan Silver (10:27.718)
Really?

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (10:50.24)
It adds up quick. I mean, we were running six or seven different ad campaigns, and we’d look at them once a week. Which ones are doing good? Which ones are doing bad? OK, let’s look at our keywords. Let’s look at our competitions. Let’s look at the negative keywords. I mean, it was an eye-opener. What the hell are backlinks? it’s like, wow, that’s a horse of a different color. I understood SEO, but it’s like, how do I get ranked higher? How do I get ranked higher? And then it’s like, OK, let’s get this certification.

with the SBA. Let’s get this certification with the state of Florida. Oh, let’s not forget. Let’s get our Google profile going and get validated. There are two. And now I’m actually registered with the Better Business Bureau. So I’ll have their rubber stamp. That’s a good rubber stamp. I’ve been voted by best of best. And I don’t know where it came from. 2023 and 2024.

as best sprinkler head protection product out there in the market. And there is another company that voted for me as well last year. But if you pull up AI, my product comes up as the best sprinkler head protection product.

Dylan Silver (11:49.936)
Wow.

Dylan Silver (11:59.971)
That’s impressive stuff, because I know a lot of people used to be Yelp, right? And then they kind of phased out Yelp, although I think it’s still on Apple Maps. And then everyone went to Google. And then I found myself the other day going to chat GPT. I said, hey, for whatever it was, what’s the best? And I said, no, now I’ve replaced it. So the people are now doing it with the sprinkle heads. I want to pivot a bit here, Kenny, and ask you about what makes your product superior. I’m not a landscaping guy, so forgive me for some level of ignorance here.

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (12:09.326)
Not a problem

Dylan Silver (12:28.901)
maybe ignorance in this area, but what’s some of the advantages versus the other products that are out there? Is it weight bearing? Is it that it’s also going to keep it vertical? What’s some of the advantages?

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (12:32.094)
What’s some of the advantages versus the other products that are out there is it weight-bearing is it that it’s also going to keep it vertical? What’s some of the advantages? That you just hit the nail on the head my product does more than one thing versus the cement donut There’s some good videos by a colleague did Andy Humphries he’s the sprinkler nerd and you know, he went through all the different products out in the market There’s plastic donuts. There’s cement donuts. There’s this product that product but my outranks them all

It’s quality virgin ABS plastic with a UV deterrent that does multiple functional things. I have not seen a product that has customizable out on the market. Mine is the only one.

Dylan Silver (13:12.533)
I want to pivot and ask you about and I don’t know how much and maybe maybe some but about farming ranch. So I’m in Texas right so we’ve got a lot of vacant land. Florida has a similar thing. I’m also as much as I would love to say that I know a lot about this I don’t although I’m renting a ranch with some buddies. And so if you have you know large scale maybe more industrial systems are the sprinkler heads the same size or they larger. Are you familiar with with how this works and are you looking at maybe other verticals within the space as well.

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (13:16.823)
some but

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (13:23.854)
I’m also as much as I would love to say that I know a lot about this I don’t although I’m renting a ranch with some buddies and so if you have you know large scale maybe more industrial Systems are the sprinkler heads the same size are they larger? you familiar with with how this works? And are you looking at maybe other verticals within the space as well? Great question. So my product right now it’ll accommodate any sprinkler head up to three inches I’m in the process of building another mold that will accommodate any sprinkler head up to five inches

When you get it to commercial farming and stuff like that, those sprinklers are above ground. They’re on wheels and they just track themselves There is you know, some people do for like different like horse polo fields. They’re irrigating underground and not above ground

Dylan Silver (14:09.561)
I see. the main avatar would be basically single family residential homes, Or apartment complexes.

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (14:12.686)
basically single family residential homes, right? Well, HOAs, condo associations, not to say cemeteries. I’ve donated 180 units to the state of Idaho’s veteran cemetery in Blackfoot. What I did, I said, you guys pay for the shipping. My cost of shipping, it was like $100 to ship them 180 units. And they put them in the ground there.

Shortly, I actually invented a cover that goes on these. So people up north in the Mason-Dixon line, when they drain their irrigation systems in the fall, they’ll put these covers on to protect them against the winter elements. So not only am I in that cemetery, I’m over in Cocoa Beach, the cemetery there, and the National Cemetery here in Sarasota, Florida. So for folks who

Dylan Silver (15:00.721)
So for folks who are not using any type of sprinkler head protection, I’m assuming they’re basically throwing away money because they’re potentially making having to buy new sprinkler heads every so often because these things break, right? And so it’s not, don’t know what the cost is to get a new sprinkler head, but it seems like a hassle and it seems like it could be costly versus getting something that’s going to keep your sprinkler head, you know, available for five plus years.

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (15:10.83)
sprinkler heads every so often because these things break right and so it’s not I don’t know what the cost is to get a new sprinkler head but it seems like a hassle and it seems like it could be costly versus getting something that’s gonna keep your sprinkler head you know available for five plus years well Dylan you know you can’t buy back your time my coach JT Fox you can’t buy back your time yeah so I have a fractional CFO business still I charge my clients 150 $200 an hour but my time is really worth

about $200 a minute. If you really look at it, and your time is too, Dylan, you cannot buy back that time. So if you’re out there fixing your sprinkler heads in the middle of summer, sweating your butt out there, is your time really more valuable than be doing that? I think 300 % so. A new sprinkler head, all right, maybe $10 to $20, depending on what make and model. But you got to go out there and dig, and dig, and then release it.

And God help you, if dirt falls in that water line, now you’ve got to purge that out and try to suck that dirt out because it’s going to clog up that sprinkler head. Do you really want to be doing that? OK, so you call your local irrigation guy. OK, I’m going to charge you $50. I’m going to charge you $100 just for a trip charge. Well, while he’s there, he might as well replace a couple more sprinkler heads that are possibly faulty. Before you know it, you’re at $200, $300. You can buy a 10-pack for $65.

Dylan Silver (16:33.329)
Sure, makes all the sense in the world to me and I’ve seen them because I feel like I’ve stepped on some of them and I said I hope I didn’t break that thing and you mentioned going over one of these in a car so I mean you can imagine stepping on it isn’t gonna do damage. We are coming up on time here though Kenny. Where can folks go to learn more about the business to buy one of these products and maybe to reach out to you?

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (16:51.342)
and maybe to reach out to you. Sure. Go to my website. It’s www.sprinkler-guard.com. And you can find me. You can plug in Search Grass Hole, and you will find my website. You can find my business profile on Google. You can see my YouTube videos. I have plenty of videos on my website as well. My LinkedIn profile is out there. So come and join me. I support more veteran organizations and non-for-profits than any other company my revenue size.

Make me a liar and support more.

Dylan Silver (17:24.561)
Kenny, thank you for hopping on the podcast here today. was great meeting with you, talking with you here over the digital waves. And congrats on all the success and to your continued success.

Kenneth J Kwiatkowski (17:25.358)
Danny, thank you for hopping on the podcast here today. It was great meeting with you, talking with you.

digital waves and congrats on all the success and to your continued success. Thank you Dylan, thank you for your time.