Pumper Profile Preview: A 1st Rate Pumping Service

Losing a husband and business partner meant finding strength in tough times.
Pumper Profile Preview: A 1st Rate Pumping Service
Pictured with A 1st Rate Pumping Service trucks are crew members Travis Taylor, owner Julie Southwick, and her son Jarred Southwick.

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It’s always devastating to lose a spouse. When that spouse is also your business partner, the loss feels even greater. 

Julie Southwick faced just such a tragedy in 2005. At first she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to run the company on her own. Her husband, Mark, had handled so much of the business. But then motivation began to push through her grief.

“My pride was such a motivator,” she says. “I wanted to keep what we had and I wanted Mark to be proud of me. I couldn’t really discuss things with the competition, and I didn’t know anybody else in the industry I could talk to about it. So I turned to a few friends who were in other types of business with their husbands.”

On the most basic level, keeping the business was initially an economic decision: They were co-owners but Mark had been the primary earner, so she had lost most of her income. But there was something else.

“I also love this business, so it was never a question of doing something else. After Mark died, I took the position that we were an old company with new owners, because I now had to learn new duties and skills, and was managing with the guys who really had only done fieldwork till then. We looked at where we were, and we all agreed we just needed to learn the details of our new positions – such as you can’t go into X business on Monday at 10, because that’s when the bread truck is there – and concentrated on just staying even with our existing business level and keeping our customers really happy.”

Southwick became more hands-on with the business, learning to take on all the day-to-day tasks her husband had done when he was alive. She admits there was a steep learning curve, but her determination to succeed in order to provide for herself and her family got her through.

One of the profiles in the January issue chronicles Southwick’s past 10 years as she learned to run and expand the business with the help of her family and friends. She also gives advice about tough conversations business owners need to have with their family and business partners. She learned the hard the way that there needs to be a plan for “what if…”

Look for the full profile on A 1st Rate Pumping Service in the January issue of Pumper, available online Jan. 5. Pumper.com will also feature a series of exclusive online stories about the business and how it has developed successfully over the past 10 years.



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