There are clean restrooms. And then there are restrooms cleaned by the team at KG&T Septic & Excavation.
“We take special care to make sure we always clean our restrooms underneath, around and through,” says Terry Johnson, who owns the northern Idaho company with his wife, Kristy. “We always keep the tanks clean. If there are splatters on the back, we get right in there and wash them out. They are clean, top-notch.”
If that’s not enough, restrooms returning to the yard get a special treatment. “It seems to me that the plastics in portable restrooms absorb odor,” says Johnson. So each unit gets a thorough power-washing with a mixture of degreaser and aluminum cleaner: “Our port-a-potties do not smell like port-a-potties. They smell good, always.”
That extra attention is just one reason the company has grown to 34 team members and a fleet of some 1,450 portable restrooms, despite operating from the small communities of Bonners Ferry (population 2,700) and Sandpoint (population 9,700), both some distance from major cities.
Besides supplying restrooms for construction, events and forest fire service, the company thrives on a diverse portfolio that includes septic tank and grease trap pumping; onsite system installation and repairs and time-of-sale inspections; pump and control installation; general excavation and materials hauling; drain cleaning, jetting, line locating and CCTV inspection; and pipe bursting for municipal customers. And don’t forget snowplowing in winter.
Deep Experience
The company draws on more than three decades of industry experience. “I was managing a trucking company in the early 1990s,” Johnson recalls. “My father-in-law, Keith Denning, didn’t like me being in the trucking business. He saw a newspaper ad for an auction sale of used restrooms and vacuum trucks in a town about 80 miles south of us.
“He said, ‘You should go buy that.’ I laughed at him and said, ‘I don’t have any money.’ He helped me get a credit line. We bought a pumper truck and 34 restrooms and were in business.” He credits the company’s slow and steady growth since 1992 to “a lot of sweat, blood and tears.”
For the first four years or so, Kristy worked as a bank teller and Terry did some work on the side to ensure adequate income. Things began to take off when they rented a backhoe and offered excavating services for septic system work, installing waterlines and other projects.
“We ran it out of our house for several years,” says Johnson. “Then we bought a piece of property on the highway and started getting more exposure and getting a little bigger. The recession of 2008 was challenging to get through, but with a solid foundation the business was set up to thrive when the economy turned around.”
Sole Supplier
Over time the company built its restroom inventory (except for the original 34) with units from Satellite Industries: Global II and Maxim standard models and 50 Liberty wheelchair accessible units, along with 150 Tag 4 hand-wash stations. The company buys portable sanitation and hand-wash products from J&J Portable Sanitation Products, including J-Tablets, J-Disc, J-Spray and Urinex, plus soap, sanitizer, graffiti remover and urinal screens.
The restroom color scheme is light gray panels and a black base. Each unit has a motion-activated, solar-powered LED light; pumping manager Casey Nelson was the brains behind the design and manufacturing. Team members assemble the restrooms.
About 60% of restroom rental is for construction; some 300 to 400 units per year are provided to the U.S. Forest Service for wildfire crews when needed. In an area of small communities the special event market is limited, but for that purpose KG&T has a four-stall restroom trailer built by Lang Specialty and two trailers with restrooms and showers, purchased new at an auction.
Units on long-term rental are serviced weekly without fail; they are washed inside and out then wiped down and hand-dried on every visit.
Going to Market
The vast majority of KG&T’s restroom business comes from word-of-mouth referrals, although the company is becoming more active on social media and with its website. The Johnsons’ son Ryan has been deeply involved in promotion.
“Several months ago we sent Ryan out for about three months with a pickup truck and a nice shirt,” says Johnson. “He went and visited all kinds of people in the construction and special event markets. We got a fair amount of business out of that.” Other promotions include participation in parades and other events, donations to community causes and membership in chambers of commerce.
Responsiveness to customers is a core attribute of the business. Phone calls are answered live during office hours from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays; on weekends and after hours, office team members rotate phone answering duty. As for delivery, says Johnson, “If you call, you get a potty. We don’t know the word ‘no.’” Units generally are delivered within an hour, or by end of day.
At any given time, about 700 units are out on monthly rental. More units go out on weekends, and a couple hundred are held in reserve for fire services.
Excellence on Wheels
The seven restroom service trucks are mainly from Imperial Industries. Each carries a 700-gallon aluminum waste tank with 300 gallons of freshwater capacity in the floor of the deck. “Freshwater in the floor allows us to have a bigger waste tank without going to a bigger truck,” Johnson observes. Trucks are painted white with the business logo in blue. KG&T contracts with a company that washes the trucks once a week.
Trailers range from a 12-footer able to haul six restrooms to a 40-foot unit that holds 20. “We have special events where we take 30 to 40 units,” Johnson says. Kristy adds, “We also mount Satellite toilets to trailers for customers who want to pick one up in the yard and take it to their own sites. We designed and manufactured our own drop-axle trailer for hauling those units, and it has been a hit with customers.”
Service crews handle designated routes, and a weekend crew takes care of special events and small routes. Crews generally range up to 80 miles south to Coeur d’Alene; 50 miles west to Newport, Washington; 80 miles northwest to Priest Lake; and a few miles east to the Montana state line.
Mechanics Rod Davis and Paul Nichols service the trucks at an in-house shop. They give the units a once-over after each workday and inspect them in detail every 30 days. They perform scheduled maintenance and handle most repairs.
Johnson sells or trades trucks once they reach roughly 100,000 miles to prevent more frequent breakdowns and shop time. “Downtime is so costly to us that I don’t like to take the chance of it happening,” he says. In addition, at that age the trucks still have substantial service life and so have good value on the used market.
The Septic Side
The KG&T pumping business is diverse and includes residential and commercial septic tanks, grease trap maintenance and pumping of tanks at businesses such as food processors. “We got into a couple of big companies over the years that have been very steady,” says Johnson. “Two to three loads per day come from some of them. Then as people saw our trucks going up and down the road, that picked up our residential pumping business, and we started putting routes together.”
The company has five vacuum units and pumps about 3 million gallons per year. Units include:
- 2005 Enterprise EV-130 vacuum trailer with a 5,600-gallon steel tank and Masport pump
- 2023 Peterbilt pumper truck with a 5,000-gallon aluminum tank built by Imperial and Westmoor Conde blower pump
- 2009 Kenworth Pumper with 4,000-gallon steel tank and Jurop pump
- 2001 Peterbilt single-axle truck with 2,800-gallon aluminum tank and Masport pump
- 2010 Peterbilt single-axle truck with 2,300-gallon steel tank and Conde pump
The trailer, towed by a 2015 Kenworth truck, is used for serving high-volume customers and for city routes with multiple septic tanks, in which case the smaller trucks pump the tanks and unload into the trailers. “A lot of our small cities have homes with septic tanks that are pumped out to the city sewer,” Johnson observes. “So we maintain those tanks.”
The company advises homeowners to have their septic tanks pumped every one to three years.
Customers are serviced on regular routes. After installing new systems, the company takes charge of maintenance: “People really appreciate that.” Because the service area includes sand and gravel soils and high groundwater tables around lakes, KG&T often installs mound and drip dispersal systems as well as Eljen alternative systems.
On the installation side, the primary machines are:
- 2024 John Deere 624 P-Tier front-end loader
- 2021 John Deere 62P front-end loader
- 2023 JCB 3TS-8T Teleskid
- 2021 Kubota mini-excavator
- 2019 Hitachi excavator
- 2023 Kenworth T880 sump truck
Running the Business
KG&T operates with office manager Kaprice Frederickson and colleagues Ketta Everhart, Samantha Frederickson and Marissa Smith working the phones, dealing with customers and dispatching crews. Back-office team members Kristy Johnson and Ruth Ann Wilson take care of overflow and manage payroll and bill paying.
New team members coming on board are trained on the job: “We bring them in and tell them it’s going to take a year until they understand it all,” says Terry. New office workers spend time in the field watching crews work so they understand the business and can be better resources for customers.
Staff retention is high in part because the company offers competitive pay along with health insurance and paid vacation. “Right now we are fully staffed with top-notch people who have been with us for many years,” says Johnson.
KG&T takes pride in being a family business. Kristy Johnson’s father Keith Denning works at the dumpsite on the family farm; her mother Gae works in the Sandpoint office. Kristy’s brother Gene Denning is an all-purpose team member. Grandsons Kevan and Nick work summers pressure-washing restrooms; daughter-in-law Leah cleans the office and shop and takes care of the restroom trailers.
Adding to the family atmosphere, the owners each year hold a Christmas party for employees and spouses. There are games and a gift exchange. “The minute we’re done, everybody is looking forward to the next year,” Terry Johnson says.
Kristy adds, “We have a great love and respect for each other, plus the same desire and goals to make KG&T successful.” After 32 years, it is hard to argue with the result.
