Business is good for John and Penny Taylor. They are a septic pumping company in central Virginia, and their customer base is expanding. If only they could say the same for their work force.
John Taylor’s greeting to a visiting writer was immediate.
“You come to work?”
He wasn’t entirely joking.
“Getting workers is the biggest problem we have. It’s not just us. The labor skill force is terrible. All these kids coming out of high school want big checks,” he says.
The day of his interview, in fact, one of Taylor’s employees didn’t show up for work, having told co-workers he was quitting. Taylor was disappointed because he was “an excellent employee.”
Everyone pitches in
Taylor says he wouldn’t hesitate to hire some of the many Mexican immigrants to the area because they are willing to work, but they don’t have the necessary driver’s licenses and he’d have to provide them a place to live.
“The septic pumping never slows down, except a week and a half before school starts and Thanksgiving to Christmas,” he says.
The Taylors run operations from a small office in the basement of their rural Appomattox County home. From there Penny Taylor handles the business end of the operation, talking to customers, quoting prices, billing and scheduling routes.
They are about three miles east of Appomattox Court House National Historical Park, the site of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender to U.S. Grant at the end of the Civil War.
One of their four daughters lives in a nearby house — they have two sons as well — and a 2-year-old granddaughter is a regular visitor.
The Taylors say they do what they can to attract and keep good employees. Workers are paid a salary, rather than hourly, a recommendation of state employment officials, Taylor says. He says employees average 50-55 hours a week, and they are paid overtime for weekends or special events.
“In winter, part-time guys only work four days and they get the same pay. These guys have to feed their families five days a week,” he says. “The pumpers are on salary, but they don’t work the same hours the portable toilet guys do.”
Taylor uses a time clock to track hours so they can be sure of how much time it takes to do the work.
They’ve set up a 401(k) for employees to which they also contribute, and they’ll pay half of health insurance premiums after one year’s employment.
Looked for better service
The Taylors started pumping septic tanks for their own benefit. They were not happy with the prices they were getting for pumping at the rental property they owned, so they bought their own vacuum truck.
“We didn’t do this for the general public. People just kept calling. I got off work and was pumping septic tanks,” Taylor says.
Taylor worked for a Pepsi distributor for more than a decade before taking up the septic and portable restroom business full time in 1996. His experience working for Pepsi provided marketing insights. Properly priced services, for example, mean continued business.
“Most business is repeat business,” he says. “It’s not all about price. It’s about the quality and the service they get.”
The same thinking applies to onsite system installation, which is a large part of the company’s business, he says. The service area is awash with septic systems. There are some municipal systems in the smaller towns, but subdivisions are booming and new septic systems are needed. Penny Taylor says 10 new subdivisions were built around Appomattox alone. The company installed two systems a week for much of the 2007 busy season.
Educating consumers
John Taylor says they do their best to educate residents about septic system use and care.
“We see these older people who don’t understand the concept of a septic system. You have to stand right over the septic system and show them, ‘Here’s your sludge level.’ It gets deeper and deeper until it’s in your field. A lot of time we can clean the field out. We can get it, but you lose part of that field,” he says.
Taylor developed his own system for cleaning fields using his jetter with the pump truck, combining a water pressure and vacuum technique.
“This works best on PVC or plastic pipe,” he says. “It’s not recommended for alternative systems. I’ve only had one system that it didn’t work on, but the system was 50 years old and it was concrete drain tile.”
The folks moving from the cities to the rural subdivisions are as uninformed, he says.
“You get the repeat customers who live and learn. They go to their basement and say, ‘What is that smell?’ We see quite a bit of that,” he says.
Taylor recommends Scott or Angel Soft bathroom tissue. He said another popular brand “is like cement. You have to add 1,000 gallons of water to break it up.”
Penny Taylor says that with uneducated homeowners, everything goes into the septic tank, including grease.
“I explain to people it’s like cholesterol. It’s hardening up,” she says.
Web presence
Penny Taylor says past attempts to remind customers when cleanings were due had poor results. She says the usual response was “Well, I think I’ll wait.”
Now, they hand out pamphlets to customers and they have an extensive Web site that includes a frequently asked questions, or FAQ page and chart for determining proper septic tank capacity. There are pages to request free quotes online, photos of portable restrooms, company history, a code of ethics and testimonials.
In 2002, the Taylors added portable restrooms, which now make up about 40 percent of their business. They have 500 units. Construction sites, festivals and ballparks are the predominant customers.
“About one-third are on ballparks from March to fall. There is a festival every weekend. We have two full-time guys; all they do is clean toilets, five days a week. When our daughter is home from college, that’s all she does all summer,” Taylor says.
Institutions provide work for both septic and portable sanitation business. Over the summer, they provided 30 restrooms to Liberty University in Lynchburg, and local schools are pumped regularly.
“We have school contracts pumping 35,000 gallons at a time. We have routine schedules with municipalities. We clean lift stations quarterly,” he says.
The company’s septic fleet consists of a 1978 Chevrolet C60 with a 1,500-gallon steel tank, a 1980 GMC Brigadier with a 3,500-gallon aluminum tank built by Longhorn Tank & Trailer, a 1997 Chevrolet C7500 with 2,500-gallon steel tank, and a 1999 International with a 4,500-gallon aluminum tank built by Amthor International.
Portable sanitation equipment includes a 1993 GMC pickup with slide-in 200-gallon waste/100-gallon freshwater aluminum tank, built by Imperial Industries Inc., a 2003 GMC C4500 with 300-gallon waste/150-gallon freshwater slide-in unit built by Pik Rite Inc., a 2004 GMC C4500 with 500-gallon waste/200-gallon freshwater slide-in unit built by Lane’s Vacuum Tank, and a 2005 Ford F-750 with 2,200-gallon aluminum tank built by Lely Manufacturing.
Utility vehicles include a 1993 Ford F-350 crew cab utility truck, a 2004 Ford F-350 crew cab and a 2007 Chevrolet four-wheel-drive pickup truck with lift gate. They also have two equipment trailers, a 1984 Mack R686 dump truck, a 580L John Deere backhoe with extended bucket and eight-, 12- and 20-unit portable restroom carriers.
The portable restroom inventory includes four trailers with attached restrooms, 20 handicap-accessible units, 381 standard units, eight freestanding units with hand-wash stations and 10 holding tanks. Manufacturers include Olympia Fiberglass Industries Inc. and Satellite Industries.
Routine truck and equipment maintenance is done at the company shop and more extensive work is farmed out.
Disposal issues
To limit unnecessary trips to the disposal facility, Taylor has installed four 1,500-gallon temporary storage tanks underground on his property.
Taylor says he spends $100,000 a year in disposal fees. He says county and local regulators will not allow them to use a dewatering system or do field application. He says 99 percent of his waste goes to Lynchburg, and when they do work for local municipal plants, those plants accept that waste.
Taylor disposed of 951,000 gallons at the Lynchburg facility during the past year, which was 17.2 percent of all deliveries, the most of 18 haulers using the facility, according to Lynchburg Wastewater Treatment Plant records.
“We are better off than a lot of places. Lynchburg takes restaurant grease from within their area. We take all kinds of things to them,” he says.
Greg Rogers, his septic installer, handles installation training, and Taylor the training for pumping. He is also a confined-space certified instructor.
Taylor says his crew works to live up to the company’s well-established reputation.
“I tell employees, my name’s on that truck or my name’s on that (company T-shirt),” he says. “Everybody knows me. I am a working owner and I am involved in all my septic pumping, repairing, installation and portable toilet services.”
