THE TEAM
Frank King owns Action King Services in Lowell, Mass., a company that provides septic tank and grease trap pumping in addition to portable restroom rental.
King’s daughter Karen is vice president and general manager, his son Frank III is project manager, and Real Betty is the foreman for seven service techs. Marie Schofield handles dispatch and Sharon Eno-Maxim works part-time doing scheduling and invoicing. Sheila Richards, who has performed office duties for the company for over 15 years, coordinates the Haunted Happenings event, and everyone in the company gets involved at some point.
COMPANY HISTORY
When King got out of the military in 1966, he went to work for the Massachusetts Depart-ment of Corrections and then the State Hospital. But the pay scale was discouraging and he realized he had to find something else. His cousin was in the sewer business and another fellow he knew had a pump truck. “Both of them looked like they were doing pretty well, not a bad deal, so I got the idea from there,” he says.
King and his wife, Louise, bought an old oil truck, which was modified with a diaphragm pump, and he built a number of wooden restrooms. But the harsh North-east winters turned out to be too much for those units, persuading King to get out of that line of work and concentrate on septic service. He was lured back into it 20 years later, and today portable restrooms account for about 25 percent of the business. They’ve got 450 units, two restroom trailers and three vacuum trucks.
