Go With the Flow

Whether it’s drainfield rejuvenation or stringent requirements for farm worker sanitation, Colorado’s Brown’s Septic Service adapts to new demands in their rural market

Brown’s Septic Service Inc. has managed to overcome shaky beginnings, a down economy and a rapidly evolving market by keeping a constant ear to the ground in the harsh, arid climate of Del Norte, Colo.

When Leonard and Cindi Brown moved there from Denver in 1995 to raise their sons away from the noise, crowding and crime of the city, they left jobs with Cindi Brown’s brother’s septic pumping business. The couple began what has become more than a decade-long career of rolling with the punches to find success as something of a niche liquid waste operator. The strategy has stood them well, building on a creative and flexible approach to business and a “never-say-die” attitude.

Leonard Brown grew up around his father’s excavating and septic installation business, and leased a vacuum truck from his brother-in-law to start septic system pumping in his family’s new hometown. “The first year, it was tough” finding where the work was in his new community, says Brown. “We had to scrape and scratch. I got out and beat the bushes and introduced myself around to excavators and building contractors,” he recalls. “Word-of-mouth took it off from there.”

COMMITED TO SUCCESS

There was a steady but slow rise in business. Then, in 1997, the Browns’ home leachfield began to fail. “I was reading all the time about this happening, and running into it with my customers,” says Brown. They knew putting in a new drainfield was one option, but they’d also learned about the ground fracturing and soil restoration machine, Terralift. With a hunch that there was a market for the technology, the company, light on capital, borrowed to buy one of the machines.

“It was one of those deals that it was either going to make us or break us,” says Brown. “But we believe if things are supposed to be, they’ll come together without too much problem, and they did.”

Cindi Brown concurs. “Leonard and I always discuss it and have to be in 100 percent agreement whenever we have a decision to make, but then we just go with our gut.”

It turned out to be a smart move. As Brown had read the market, there were more and more customers with failing leachfields. They were eager to take the chance on saving their existing fields rather than deal with the cost and hassle of having new ones installed.

It took some time to find the profit margins. The Browns say they probably did 80 or 90 jobs before they learned which leachfields were good candidates for rejuvenation and which needed to be replaced. But the gamble is paying off enough that they’re comfortable offering a 100 percent satisfaction guarantee on their restoration work.

“We’ve learned over time,” explains Leonard Brown. “If it’s an old house with an old 500-gallon metal tank and there’s a family of five or six living there, you know they just need to upgrade. If it’s one or two years old and is failing, it shouldn’t build up a biomass that fast, so there’s some other problem: installation issues, massive overuse, water table problems. We’ll camera the lines, and do some excavation to see if there’s a broken line somewhere. We’ve run across situations where (the installer) neglected to put in the silt barrier in a pressure system. If that happens, we’ll recommend that the customer go to an engineer, and the county will tell them what kind of system to replace it with.”

PORTABLES OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

Buoyed by the Terralift success, the Browns began paying attention to rumblings among customers unhappy with their portable restroom vendors. The couple’s two sons, Russell and Keith Brown, were getting old enough to join the business, and they contemplated the addition of portables as a service the boys could handle. In 1999, the company started with 20 Satellite Industries Inc. Tufway units.

Again, the first year of new service was tough. “It was hard for me to rent even 10 units,” Brown says. “But again, I beat the bushes talking to contractors and offered the best service. I also went to the county. This was before they had approved the current building code, and I suggested they comply with the OSHA requirement of one unit for 10 workers per week on any jobsite. They thought it was a good idea.”

This bit of entrepreneurial pushing again paid off. “Luckily, there was a builder standing there who cared enough about his guys and is smart enough to realize having a portable restroom on site actually saves him money because of saved productivity,” says Brown. “That pays for the unit, and that’s how I sold a lot of them.”

Business stabilized and the Browns began enjoying their success. Still, they knew there was more market share they could be serving, but weren’t sure how to find it. Mother Nature soon stepped in.

In June 2002, there was a large forest fire in South Fork, 17 miles away. “The Forest Service called for units to service that fire,” says Cindi Brown. “We sent some of ours and borrowed some from our nephews at Shirley Septic in Conifer (Colo.). Then the authorities wanted to set up another camp. We ordered another 50 units, and called everybody we knew who had trailers. We sent them down to Denver to Satellite’s warehouse, and had all 50 units sitting at the new camp by 9:30 the next morning.”

The problem, explains Leonard Brown, was that it turned out the firefighters had already knocked the fire down enough, so the second camp never really got going. “Here we were with 50 new units. They paid us for one day, then we had to take them all back.”

SMALL SETBACK, BIG PAYOFF

This setback wasn’t enough to offset the gains they’d made in new business and market visibility. By harvest time, they needed every one of those new units to service the area’s large corporate agriculture concerns with field units for harvest workers.

“That fall, we started getting calls from farmers from our phone book ads,” says Cindi Brown. “Leonard would also mention that we’d added portables when he’d service their septic tanks, so they’d call when they needed one. We also run radio ads on the local FM station, with a different theme every month. It works well. People hear your name repeated 3-4 times every day.”

So momentum was brisk when a health concern cropped up at the end of 2003. Deadly e. coli outbreaks caused the area’s lettuce harvesters to be hit with strict new sanitation regulations. Brown’s soon received requests for a different style of restroom trailer than was available at the time. The commercial farms specifically requested two restrooms on a trailer, with a better hand-washing unit than the barrel-and-spigot everyone had been using. The new rules also required containment of graywater.

“We already had six Satellite sinks,” recalls Brown. “Our rep had a bunch of The Wave and the Handiwash units. We ordered 24, all he had. I mounted those on trailer frames we’d built.”

Expedience, workload considerations and cost drove the decision to fabricate their own trailers. Brown explains, “In the winter, it’s slow and this gives us something to do with our sons.” The company built 28 of these 12-foot by 4-foot models.

MAKING PROGRESS

Brown’s now has 180 Satellite Tufway units. “We’ve grown every year by 20 units or so,” says Brown. “Last year, it kind of leveled out a little. We only had to buy eight new units. This year, it’s a little slower with the construction slowdown, and the lettuce harvest is probably a third of what it was last year. The price of wheat went way high, so farmers went to that instead of lettuce this year.” Wheat is harvested with mechanized reapers, so farms don’t need the restrooms.

Still, the company remains solidly profitable under careful management and cost-control tactics. Brown’s runs a 1986 International service truck with a newer 4,000-gallon tank from Truck Repair and Welding in La Crosse, Kan., and a Masport 400 pump.

Their 1982 International began life as a box truck, replacing their original 1970 GMC pumper. Brown transferred its 2,000-gallon tank — fabricated from two square steel transformers bolted together — to the new truck. He had his welding shop build the hose trays, and he plumbed and mounted its Power-Flo 330 pump. The old tank was replaced with a similar square steel model this summer, fabricated by his welder. Brown installed the hatches and scrubbers.

A 1996 Dodge 2500 3/4-ton service truck hauls a J-2900 jetter from General Pipe Cleaners. The company also fields two Ford F-550 portable restroom service trucks — one 2004, the other 2008, both built out by Satellite Industries — with 650-gallon waste/300-gallon freshwater tanks. The 2008 model was the first unit Satellite ever built with a hydraulic pump system. All the trucks’ tanks are steel.

With that size fleet and its large service territory, controlling fuel costs is a real challenge, but Brown isn’t thrown by it. “We’ve had to add a per-mile charge for fuel. We use a set mileage rate so we know how to figure and keep it simple, fair and understandable to the customer. People so far have been really understanding with the price increases.”

This understanding is something the Browns notice as a trend in their area. Cindi Brown says, “I think customers are more aware of and concerned about their septic systems. One of our challenges is really to educate them.”

Leonard Brown agrees, and believes this trend extends to pumpers as well. “The technology and regulations coming will eventually separate the fly-by-nights from the professionals. The days of the guy with the bib overalls and tobacco-stained T-shirt are gone. I think people are looking to be more professional.”

It’s a time the Browns look forward to, for their own company and the entire industry. They’re doing their part to build professionalism by proactively partnering with their customers as creative problem solvers who know how to go with the flow.



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