Tom Szaky knows well the meaning of the saying “Beware your dreams, for they may come true.”  With the 2004 Christmas retail season rapidly approaching, he was trying everything he could to scale up TerraCycle, a two year old venture selling liquid worm poop as fertilizer in used PET bottles. So far, he had been successful distributing through lots of smaller retailers, but had encountered a flood of rejections from the big box stores. Undaunted, Szaky finally landed a 15 minute meeting with Walmart Canada’s buyer. Instead of telling Szaky to “drop off the face of the earth” (he had been warned this was likely) Walmart Canada placed a huge order — for every one of its stores. But as he recounts in his engaging book, achieving his dream quickly turned into a nightmare when he was confronted with a stark reality: they had sold to Walmart without having the necessary infrastructure in place to handle the huge volume increase. Fortunately for Szaky, he had already laid the groundwork of financing from suppliers, equity investors and others to allow them to double sales in two months.