Old habits die hard. Jamie Decker admits he hasn’t looked at a phone book in years, but says he can’t quite bring himself to give up advertising in one.

Decker is the owner, along with his wife Brittany, of Decker Sanitation Services in Dorchester, Wisconsin, a septic and portable restroom company. The company is featured in this month’s issue of Pumper.

“I’m having a hard time getting out of them,” he says. “We’ve had some discussions about it. You don’t know which way to go.”

Brittany says they also continue to advertise in the local newspaper. “And we do menus and placemats, which have been huge for us. Also church bulletin boards — we do a lot of those. And we advertise a ton in our schools — school rosters, sports rosters, advertising for the different leagues. We did a billboard campaign two years ago where we were on a rotating billboard where every six months it moved to a different location in our area. We’ve seen quite a bit of response from that but it was a little on the pricey side.”

Less tangible forms of advertising include word of mouth, giving discounts to the schools, and just being involved in the community, she says.

But there’s no denying that these days an online presence is required for drumming up business. In 2016, the company hired Pinnacle Marketing Group to design a website. “That was a big undertaking just because of the expense,” Brittany says. “It’s hard to pay a certain amount of money each month for a website that you don’t know if it really is generating work or not.”

She’s sold on it now and Pinnacle continues to maintain the site. “It’s maintenance-free for us,” Brittany says. “We just have to call them. I send them pictures, and if I have ideas, they make it come to life for me.”

The young couple knows the writing is on the wall for the future of advertising. “We’ve been in the phone book for years, but it is a dying thing,” Brittany says. “Same thing with our local newspaper. It’s the way the world is. You have to be online and make sure your website works.”

Read more about Decker Sanitation Services in this month’s issue of Pumper magazine.