Growing a sanitation business requires more than just taking on additional work; it demands strategic planning and efficient resource management to maximize profit margins.

Host Pete shares insights on how restroom operators can successfully scale their operations. He discusses two primary strategies for growth: increasing volume by expanding service areas and adding new services or products. Pete emphasizes the importance of aligning company values with strategic goals and maintaining operational efficiency through optimized routing and effective team management. Additionally, he highlights the significance of investing in software solutions, like Service Core, to standardize processes and improve overall business performance.

Pete shares his thoughts about how restroom operators can prepare for growth and sustain performance as their businesses grow.

Pete dives into the intricacies of scaling a sanitation business, particularly focusing on portable restroom operations. Leveraging his own experiences and insights from the industry, Pete emphasizes the importance of smart growth strategies beyond just expanding fleets and taking on more jobs. He highlights the necessity of efficient operations, such as optimizing routes to reduce costs, and stresses the value of aligning business values with strategic goals to ensure cohesive team performance. The episode underscores that successful growth in the sanitation sector requires a balance of increasing service capacity and maintaining quality, as well as the strategic addition of staff and resources at the right time. Additionally, Pete discusses the potential role of technology and consultants in streamlining operations and supporting sustainable growth, concluding with a reflection on the importance of quality over price in customer relationships.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Service Core
• Acadian Sanitation
• JBar

Visit www.servicecore.com to learn more abut this week's sponsor

Visit www.getflushed.online/episode/kpis to hear more about KPIs

Visit www.getflushed.online/episode/j-bar to hear more about J-BAR

Field of Dreams © 1989 Universal Pictures

If you would like to appear on Get Flushed, have a question or an idea for the show, please email pete@getflushed.online or visit https://getflushed.online/booking to book a meeting with Pete.

If you enjoy Get Flushed and would like to support the show, please visit https://www.getflushed.online/support to send a tip to help cover our costs.

Hello and welcome to Get Flushed, the world's favorite sanitation podcast. My name's Pete. Today's episode is brought to you with the support of service Core, the easy to use software for liquid waste and roll off operators.

I've produced a few episodes with Service Corps over the past two years and it's really great that they've been able to support the show.

If you're not familiar with it, Service Corps is a versatile platform that helps operators get their jobs done, get paid, and provide better service to their customers. We'll hear more about service corps later in the show.

This episode is geared towards established restroom operators looking to upscale or grow their business.

I started to write this after I received an email from an operator who asked, hey Pete, I've been in business for three years and I'm looking to grow my operation. Are you able to share any tips or ideas?

I always answer emails like that, and when I typed my reply, it struck me that this topic would resonate really well with a lot of listeners, regardless of whether or not they're restroom operators. And as I fleshed out the script, I realized that a lot of my comments would apply to any small business in any industry.

However, this is a sanitation podcast, so I'm going to use examples that are from and about the restroom industry.

When I talk about growing a business, what I really mean is how to increase the overall size of the business to generate more revenue and thus maximize profit. And that's not just about attracting more work.

Sure, that's part of it, but taking on more and more jobs without a plan won't always lead to bigger profits. The key to that is to find efficient and effective ways to manage your extra work so that you keep costs under control and create bigger margins.

Now, we can measure growth in many different ways.

If you listen back to season four, episode eight, I looked at the magnificent seven key performance indicators that pros can use to measure and assess their business performance.

I won't go through those today, but I'll add a link to that episode in the notes, and you could also find it by using the search function on the Get Flushed homepage getflush online. Just type in the letters KPI.

I'm under no illusions today, and I'm not pretending that this is as easy as 123 growth takes hard work, every business is different.

Every owner or manager will have a different agenda, and what I'm about to share may or may not fit with the resources and constraints of your particular situation. That said, I am confident that the insights I'm going to share are built on good experience. And my examples are real.

Some of them worked, others didn't. But we can learn from both. If you build it, you will come. If you build it, he will come.

The phrase is often used by business gurus and it's relevant today because if you're in business and you can supply and service portable restrooms, the customers will come to you. Why do I say that?

Well, it's the nature of the market, especially after the pandemic, people are aware of the need for better hygiene and demand for restrooms is at an all time high.

I'd go further than that and say that I actually know several restroom operators who don't advertise and actually put very little effort into selling. Why? Because they're already busy. The utilisation rates are high, the drivers are maxed out and everything seems to be ticking along nicely.

They're happy and they like it like that. Of course, not everyone's in that situation.

And with rising inflation and higher interest rates starting to bite, it may be time to consider a different approach.

I don't want to sound dramatic, and of course economies always go up and down, but this time feels different and being proactive now might help you weather the storm ahead. When it comes to deliberate growth, I've seen and used two broad strategies. The first is to increase your volume or scale.

Quite simply, rent out more and more units.

You can do that by extending your service area, perhaps into a new town, or targeting customers in different markets that you haven't previously supplied. An example would be moving into the events world.

The second strategy is to increase your scope, and by that I mean adding new products that allow you to offer different services to your customers. Common examples in the restroom industry would be luxury trailers, temporary fencing or dumpsters.

Sometimes growth occurs because you win a significant contract, maybe a large long term deployment that creates an opportunity for you to buy extra fleet. That happened to my good friend Ryan Granger at Acadian Sanitation in Lafayette, Louisiana.

As a relatively new part time operator, Ryan was able to pool resources with other providers to respond to Hurricane Laura. And off the back of that he was able to buy more restrooms, which then saw him win a big contract for multiple units on a long term commercial build.

And that in turn allowed Ryan to give up his day job and become a full time operator. Within his own business. To be honest though, you don't always get to choose what happens, and it's really not as simple as buying more restrooms.

I'm going to talk through some of the things that I think pro should, would and could do to prepare for growth and sustain performance as their business grows.

With fuel prices at an all time high, every extra hour our drivers are out on the road is costing at least $100.

Driver wages and fuel are the biggest cost to pro's businesses, which means inefficient routes are the number one thing eating into our profits currently. If this all sounds familiar, then you might ask yourself, are my routes optimized?

Do my stop orders maximize service time and minimize windshield time? Is each route close to 8 hours? We all want to cut back on overtime. Do my routes have the right amount of stops and no overlap?

If you answered no or unsure about any of these, then you should look at service core software. Service core is an easy to use software built specifically for liquid waste and roll off businesses.

It's going to help you get your jobs done, get paid, and provide better service to all your customers. Service corps routing engine is going to make sure all your routes are optimized, balanced and dense.

With only a few clicks, you can go to sleep at night knowing you're getting every last dollar of profit you can out of each of your routes. Now's the time you need to be thinking about this. Come see what we can do at www.servicecore.com.

A few years ago I took a role as a manager in a large portable restroom operation. The business ran seven trucks out of 1. When I joined. There had maybe 400 restrooms on site, mostly on a two weekly cleaning regime.

A lot of the cabins were in a very sorry state. They'd wear tear and other damage, and a lot were on old wooden bases that were soaked from years and years of use.

Pretty much every urinal was caked in uric scale when it came to servicing. None of the drivers worked planned or optimised routes and none of them were really doing any cleaning.

They pumped the tanks and they restocked the consumables, but that was about it.

In situations like that, you soon get complaints and it doesn't take long before you get a reputation for poor reliability and your business starts to lose traction.

Now that sounds fairly extreme, but I think historically situations like that have been and probably still are fairly common in the restroom industry all over the world.

I wager that some of it will ring bells with you as a listener, either because you've seen it happening in the places you've worked or you're still seeing it happen among competitors.

The good news is that when you're at the bottom, the only way is up and it is possible to make huge improvements that will completely transform your business.

Even if I was delivering consistent and reliable service, I'd start any growth phase by making sure the values within the business were aligned to my strategic goals. You see, values are the beliefs in action that drive behavior.

If the people on your team don't know what you want or expect, they'll do their own thing. This is very much about how you live and breathe.

The tacit behaviors in your company, the things that people do and say every day are much more powerful than any written value statements pinned in a frame on the wall.

As a manager or owner operator, you can't tell people what to think, but when you're paying for their time at work, you can absolutely show them how you expect them to behave. I can't stress the importance of this enough. I've seen many businesses underperform because their teams lack cohesion. So how do you measure this?

Or does a driver pick up the docket, get back in their truck and head off to make the drop? Behaviours and actions in situations like that will tell you all you need to know. Can you grow your business without setting shared values?

Probably, but it makes things a whole lot easier if you're very clear about what you expect from every member of the team, including yourself. In my role, I put the customers first and I made sure we gave good service on time every time.

If you listen back to my previous episode with David and Tanis at JBar, you'll hear some great examples of how successful owners use their values to lead their teams. I'll put a link to that one in the notes of you could also search for JBar on Getflush dot online.

In any growth phase, there'll come a point when you have to add more staff, more trucks and more units simply because you've reached capacity. You won't have enough gear or enough hours to take on any more work. I've seen this happen.

When operators take on events, they over commit, so they use all their available floats. The unit's normally held in reserve and the only way they can service those events is to pull their drivers off regular routes.

That's understandable, but it also means you effectively punish your long term regular and loyal customers if you start to miss out on their servicing. When I started to pitch for events, I tried to assign a dedicated event crew.

I used casual hire for the non contact work like event installs and pickups, and I used overtime to get the unit serviced. While that helped us to meet short term demands, it wasn't really a sustainable approach.

Now, I know a lot of pros who work alone or with very limited staff. Maybe someone helped with their paperwork or accounts.

Some of them manage that really well, but others seem to be at work for 24/7 if they're not out servicing, they're making pickups and deliveries, they're sorting things in the yard, or they're catching up on paperwork. And therein lies the problem.

If you're already maxed out, it's really difficult, if not impossible, to expand simply because you don't have the time to give any new customers the service they deserve. When you're growing your business, there will be a critical point where you have to take on more staff.

And the key is knowing who to hire, when to hire and what you get them to do. It's a catch 22. Hire them too early and you may not have enough work for them, which means you have to dip into your reserves to pay them.

Leave it too late, you'll miss the boat and you'll burn out your team. I've sometimes heard operators say they can't hire more stuff because they don't have a spare truck.

When I hear that, I tell them that even without a spare vehicle, hiring another driver makes a lot of sense. Double crewing means you get the opportunity to train them and it allows you to service more restrooms each day.

That happens because you can share the tasks you perform during the clean and you cut down on the running about to and from the truck. And when you do get a new vehicle, the new driver will be up to speed and ready to double your reach as soon as they climb into the cab.

While it's easy to concentrate on operational delivery, another option is to hire someone to take on a specialist role, like sales. If you're a hands on operator who runs routes, you may be able to look after sales yourself. If you hire a driver and get yourself out of the cabin.

At other times, it makes much more sense to hire a professional with the training and skills needed to scout for new leads and convert their contacts into contracts. There are many other tasks that can also be delegated in that way.

You might bring an administrator to manage your paperwork, a bookkeeper to look after accounts, or someone to manage your marketing and social media. Those don't need to be full time roles, but delegating key tasks like that is a great way to free up resources.

I'm also aware that some buildable restroom operators work with restroom brokers who act like an agent and essentially contract work to you.

I'm sure that we've all heard good and bad stories about those arrangements, and I'm not going to say any more about those now, but I will come back to look at brokers in a future episode. Perhaps one of the smartest things you could do as a pro is to bring in a specialist advisor or consultant to help you develop and grow the business.

I'm talking about someone with expert knowledge of the industry, someone who knows what it takes for a restroom operation to succeed, someone who can give you sage counsel while respecting your achievements. Who can help you and your team make positive refinements that will add value to your business.

I'm not telling you to do this because I'm trying to sell my services, although I am available, and I'm not going to recommend any other consultants in this episode. But the fact is, when you're in the driving seat, it's not easy to read the map.

Having someone to provide independent and impartial advice can be worth every penny you invest. One of the things a good advisor can help you do is to map and refine your business systems.

And by that I mean everything that happens within your company from the moment a customer places their order to the moment they settle their final invoice. Most companies do things in a certain way because that's the way they've always been done.

The systems probably work, but when you're looking to expand, you need to make sure that your systems can cope with the extra demands that come with growth. There's nothing wrong with manual spreadsheets and lists, but if you want to grow, you have to systemize the way things are done.

That's important because you need to make sure that everything is done in a standard way, regardless of who does it, when they do it, or whether the manager is there or not. That's where software like service core is really valuable, because it helps you standardise every process.

The final aspect I want to discuss today is price. I'll admit that in my former role, I cut our prices dramatically in order to win business. I did that because we'd lost a lot of customers.

The ones who were still using us weren't impressed, and we couldn't really expect premium rates. Did it work well?

In the short term, it definitely allowed us to grow the number of contracts, but that wasn't enough to increase revenue, especially when we had to take on more staff or work extra hours to keep up with demand. In the long term, it also proved really hard to start raising prices.

Customers get used to cheap rentals, and even when you completely transform the way you work, it can be really hard to get them to accept a higher price.

on Fridays when everyone else has left. You see, quality is the key. Customers who chase the lowest price aren't really the ones you want, and they won't help you achieve your growth goals.

That's all for this week. I'd really like to thank John, Joy, Wendy and the rest of the team at ServiceCore for their support.

I've been Pete and you've been listening to Get Flushed, the world's favourite sanitation podcast, which was brought to you today with the support of ServiceCore.