"We didn't slow down enough to research and review"

Another business mistake story reported by Marcia Pledger of The Cleveland Plain Dealer. This story is from Nick Martello, president of ZymeAway, a small cleaning products company in Westlake, Ohio.

My company enhanced and marketed a cleaning product, and the first major test was Hurricane Katrina. We never failed a FEMA re-occupancy inspection. But people started using the floodwater and mold cleaning detergent for other purposes, and we made the mistake of marketing it.

We were expanding extremely fast, on track to hit $1.2 million in sales by our third year. Unfortunately, we didn't slow down long enough to research and review if our all-natural organic, nontoxic product had crossed over into regulatory compliance issues. The Environmental Protection Agency shut us down for nine months last year because suddenly our product was considered a non-registered pesticide.

Labeling concerns costs us over a half-million in lost revenue, legal fees and fines, virtually bankrupting our company....

We changed the product's name, label, literature and website in order to comply with the EPA.

It was a tough battle, but we're now in a position to grow in other areas, specifically targeting the hospitality industry with two new products: Bug-E-Spray and Bug-E-Dust, EPA-accepted, minimum-risk pesticides.

We learned the hard way that if you find a product has greater application than you originally intended, and it falls within regulatory agency control, stop, research and validate your product's qualification before marketing.