All Affairs Potty Rentals in the New York City borough of Brooklyn serves a booming spring, summer and fall market for community festivals, concerts, parties and like events. Isaac Grazi’s father, Sam, started the parent business, All Affairs Party Rentals, in 1979. Today the portable restroom part of the business employs five — a fraction of the 30 that the party-rental business employs.
Isaac Grazi, who is in charge of the portable restroom subsidiary, talked to PRO about the joys and challenges of running a portable restroom operation in the nation’s largest city. “It’s pretty exciting,” he says. “You meet a lot of people. It’s a good business in the city.”
1. FINDING SYNERGIES WITH PARTY BUSINESS
Grazi is relatively new to the portable restroom business, but it was a natural outgrowth of the party rental company. “We go mostly for special events,” Grazi explains. “We’re a rental company, with chairs, tables, and tents. About five years ago we decided to expand; we got a lot of phone calls for portable toilets, so we decided to go into that.” Party or potty, the main customers are church festivals, community concerts and house or block parties. The portable restroom business supplies some to the construction industry, particularly in the winter. Grazi says the portable restroom business surprised even him. “It was busier than I expected.” The average event uses
10-20 units.
2. IF YOU CAN MAKE IT THERE …
Based in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst, All Affairs gets most of its customers from its home borough and neighboring Queens. Manhattan provides a small additional business, but Staten Island, “not so much.” Crews transport waste to the closest of three New York sites operated by the Department of Environmental Protection, the city’s sewage disposal and treatment agency: one in the Bronx, one on Staten Island and one in Brooklyn.
Summer is the busy time. One big event was Pepsi Smash Live, a concert held in Brooklyn Bridge Park that drew 5,000 people in 2006; All Affairs supplied 30 units.
Another source of business distinctive to the Big Apple is the film and TV industry. “We do a lot of movie shoots, and shoots for HBO (Home Box Office) and shows like Law and Order, ” Grazi says. They provided restrooms for a film shoot for The Departed, a Martin Scorsese movie starring Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg. But despite the glamorous sound of that assignment, Grazi admits he’s never gotten to rub shoulders with the big stars. “I’m not on site that often,” he says. “The drivers do tell me about them, though.”
