Stories in this issue of PRO show that the industry is ready to rock and roll as we head into the busy season.
If you’re in the South, you’ve been ramping up special events service for a good six weeks now, and if you’re in the cold North, you just finished the traditional start of the festival season, Memorial Day weekend. The construction season, more and more, seems like a year-round phenomenon for many PROS, though we all hope for an upturn amid growing economic concerns.
SHE KEEPS GOING AND GOING
Sherry Rodriguez of Take a Break Portables is a contractor who seems unaffected by an economic downturn. Rodriguez is the subject of this month’s PROfile story, which is a recap of her first year in business. Writer Sharon Verbeten (A Unit Every Day) interviewed Rodriguez every month over the past year to capture the challenges and excitement of starting and growing a business.
A diary of the Hayesville, N.C., PRO’s business-building reveals a marketer undaunted by a lack of name recognition and ready to fight for sales in an established marketplace. More than a talking point, Rodriguez backed up her belief that face-to-face selling would be the key to success for her new business.
She was quickly on top of emerging construction sites, stopping along the road to inquire whether construction crews had portable sanitation services. Her homework took her to county courthouses where she mined building permits and sought developers throughout a wide region.
After our initial visit with Rodriguez, when she was a hopeful upstart with a new truck and 22 units, an observer might have been skeptical of her decision. At the time, signs were already pointing toward a construction slowdown. In many areas of the country, especially Southern hotspots, the thought was that too many companies overbuilt their inventories during the good times several years prior.
Rodriguez seems to have proven to skeptics that there’s always room for an assertive businesswoman with her eyes carefully focused on customer service and new sales. While it can be an uphill battle toward profitability for a new portable sanitation business, she shares her positive experience with the rest of the industry.
Even as she burned the midnight oil to get her company up and running, I’d like to thank Rodriguez for blocking out time for the monthly interviews. I’d also like to thank her for a willingness to share, in great detail, the steps she took to create the foundation for her business. She exhibited refreshing candor in putting her story out there — whether she would succeed or fail in year one.
Maybe we need to go back in a few years and see if Rodriguez is still on the grow. I wouldn’t bet against her.
AN INSIDER’S VIEW OF NASCAR
When editorial colleague Ed Wodalski told me he wanted to put together a Working Vacation feature on the Food City 500 NASCAR race at the Bristol Motor Speedway in March, I had no idea he’d bring back photos of a PRO pumping out RVs of the racing legends. But Wodalski worked overtime (All Access Pass), following the hardworking technicians of A & S Portable Toilets and Septic Pumping as they served a who’s who of the racing world.
Wodalski was up before sunrise, tracking down several amiable A & S pumpers and joining them on routes weaving through hundreds of thousands of race fans at the track near the Tennessee/Virginia state line. As they carefully squeezed into tight spots with their International service trucks, Wodalski took snapshots of the crews at work, including Kenneth Mitchell, Pete Mullins, Daryl Smith, Dennis Young, Rodney Baldwin and Wert Harris.
While the Bristol trip was a treat for race fan Wodalski, it was just another day at the office for the A & S workers. In several years of serving the venue, they grew accustomed to waiting on the likes of NASCAR legends Darrell Waltrip and Roger Penske, as well as current drivers and a large media contingent covering the event.
Our thanks to Wodalski for a behind-the-scenes look at a team of crack PROs at work and the guys at A & S for taking him on the service route of a lifetime.
WHAT’D THEY SAY?
When Truck Corner writers Bob Carlson and Jerry Kirkpatrick submitted a column on “bulkhead inversion’’ inside dual-compartment vacuum tanks, I did a double-take and had to give Carlson a call to confirm he’d seen this phenomenon. Sure enough, twice in the past year, Carlson has seen cases where extreme pressure in the water tank has popped a dished head into the waste side of the tank.
How does it happen? You can turn inside for all the gory details, but it sometimes involves filling water tanks from the bottom using a fire hydrant. That leads to the other reference in the story (Bulkhead Inversion: Strange But True) that captured my curiosity. I wondered under what circumstances a PRO tops off a water tank at a municipal fire hydrant?
Carlson told me he’s heard about this phenomenon as well, and wondered the same thing. He said that apparently some PROs have permission from local governments to pull water from fire hydrants. Now I can understand this if the contractors are hauling water for firefighting efforts. But what other circumstances would allow for taking on water in this way? If anybody has an explanation, shoot it my way.
The bottom line, as you’ll see in Truck Corner, is that taking on water from a high-pressure source into a water tank built to handle low pressure can have explosive results.
