The Team
Jason Schulz operates Oh Jay Services out of Tomahawk, Wisconsin. His typical crew includes his girlfriend Ann Johnson, Nick Krutke and Jeff Darrin. But to tackle the Hodag Country Festival, the company needed reinforcements. Family and friends provided an assist, making up an Oh Jay Services team of about 25 people. Many had helped out at the festival in prior years working for other portable sanitation providers.
Company History
Schulz started Oh Jay Services in 2016. He was performing auto mechanic work out of his garage when an opportunity arose to purchase a restroom business that had split off of a septic service company. His friend who had purchased the restrooms when that company split up was looking to get out of the business. Schulz bought the company with 75 restrooms and four hand-wash stations, and now has 300 restrooms and 17 hand-wash stations, all from Satellite Industries. Vacuum trucks come from Imperial Industries and carry either National Vacuum Equipment or Condé pumps.
Making Connections
Although it was the first year that Oh Jay Services served at Hodag Country, Schulz had prior experience working the event. For a few years in the early 2000s, he assisted Pete’s Pump, which had handled restrooms for the event for decades, from the inaugural year of 1978 until the company founder passed away about 10 years ago.
Other companies have filled the void since, but for 2021, Hodag Country Festival organizers were looking for a new contractor. “I have a lot of friends who go to the festival and they encouraged me to bid it,” Schulz says. “We just figured out what it takes as far as time to service a restroom and looked at how many restrooms and what our fuel usage is from other events we’ve done. We threw a number at them and it worked.”
The Main Event
For more than four decades, the Hodag Country Festival has taken place in early July in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, typically attracting about 30,000 attendees, many of them camping on site for the entire week. The main music lineup runs four days from Thursday through Sunday, but campers begin arriving the previous weekend. The 2020 event was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but for 2021 everything was back on its usual schedule.
“I would have to think they were at normal numbers because there wasn’t much for vacant campsites,” Schulz says. “I know when we ventured out a few times at night there was a good crowd.”
Let’s Roll
Oh Jay Services had never handled an event so large. Fortunately, the music festival owns 420 restroom units and Oh Jay only had to provide minimal equipment. “They’re all set up on wooden skids and they just leave them out and hire a company before we come out to charge them up and power-wash them,” Schulz says. “We just had to do a final wipedown to make sure they were decent and put the toilet paper and chemical in to start. We did end up dragging our power washer out there a little because it was quicker than scrubbing all the units since they had sat for two years. That was an unforeseen thing, but I did want the toilets to be decent. It’s our name on the side of the trucks servicing them so we get the blame if they’re not.”
Because the units were owned by the festival, Oh Jay Services also didn’t need to worry too much about repairs. “They supplied us with whatever parts we needed,” Schulz says. “There were a few broken seats because of rowdy people and the general nature of the festival. But otherwise it was just broken door springs and stuff of that nature.”
In addition to the units already on site, Oh Jay Services provided two handicap-accessible units, four extra regular units for high-traffic areas, and six hand-wash stations. About 35 units were rented to festival attendees for their personal campsites. Schulz also bought some new equipment — a Kubota tractor and trailer to serve as a chemical cart and complement what he already owned and two 1,100-gallon water storage tanks so that water could be transferred quickly.
Keepin’ It Clean
After doing the necessary prep work, cleaning service routes kicked off on Monday, a couple days after campers began arriving but still a few days before the start of the musical acts. Oh Jay Services did a single route on Monday and Tuesday, then gradually picked it up as festival attendance increased. By Thursday and through the end of the festival on Sunday, crews did two four-hour routes daily, one at 7 a.m. and the second at 3 p.m.
“And then we just had to watch, because by the main stage, the units sometimes got a little heavier use. There were a couple times we had to go and do an extra service on a few of them,” Schulz says.
The Oh Jay Services team operated with three crews. A 2020 Freightliner service truck, completely self-contained with its own chemical supply, would run with a crew of three or four people and tackle an area of the main grounds containing 125 units. On the other end of the main grounds, a 2,000-gallon vacuum truck owned by the festival would pump units while a chemical tractor and trailer with a crew of four or five would follow to do the cleaning and restocking.
Outside of the main grounds in the overflow camping area, which contained about half of the festival’s units, Oh Jay Services’ 2000 GMC 2,500-gallon vacuum truck would do the same — pump out with a chemical tractor and trailer following to take care of the finishing touches. Once the routes on the main grounds were finished, crews headed out to overflow camping to help wrap up that final route.
“On the pumper trucks we’d try to have two people so that one person could be the door person and just hold doors for the other,” Schulz says. “Then we’d have four to five per chemical trailer.”
There were large, on-site storage tanks for the trucks to offload. Another septic service contractor handled those and hauled loads to the Rhinelander treatment plant.
The days were long. Although the final cleaning route would be finished by 7 p.m. Schulz, Johnson and Krutke would often be working a couple hours more to prep everything for the next day. It helped that nearly the entire Oh Jay Services team camped on site alongside the festival attendees they were providing restroom service for.
“Some had campers, some had tents. I ended up just sleeping in one of the pickups because it was more comfortable than laying on the ground in a tent,” Schulz says. “They set us up in an area on the main grounds where contractors are allowed to stay. We had access to power and water. And I had a friend who helped out with the cooking, which was very nice.”
Taking Care of Business Back Home
One significant challenge had to do with Oh Jay Services’ weekly routes for regular clients. Schulz says the employee who was going to be keeping up on that work during the week quit on the Wednesday of the festival. “I ended up going back and forth quite a bit,” Schulz says. “The good thing is we have a decent crew of people so I was able to leave. After the first day and the first round of service that was kind of a learning curve, we pretty much had it down to what it needed to be.”
Schulz was also able to call on his cousin to come for the weekend and assist with the work. “Normally we have two people run our normal route and try to bust it out on Wednesday and Thursday,” Schulz says. “So I started servicing and then my cousin went around servicing on Friday, Saturday and part of Sunday just to keep up with our weekly clients.”
Providing RV Service
Oh Jay Services also had to pump out festival attendees’ RVs. It was a task Schulz says he’d approach differently in the future. The week began with calls for RV pumpouts coming to Schulz’s cellphone, but it didn’t take long for it to become difficult to keep up with the phone traffic, not to mention that cellphone service was somewhat spotty at the festival grounds.
“You’d tell someone that we’d be there and then on your way you’d get flagged down by 10 people,” Schulz says. “It wasn’t working well, so we shifted to just having people flag us down as we were coming through an area.” Oh Jay Services pumped out at least 50 RVs a day, which Schulz says wasn’t necessarily more than anticipated but it was still challenging to keep up.
“There’s just not enough hours in the day,” Schulz says. “I feel like we handled it fairly well in that there weren’t too many people who got missed, but we have to figure out something better. I think we’re going to solve that by just having a service truck do nothing but RVs.” Oh Jay Services will hopefully have that opportunity at next year’s Hodag Country Festival.
