Having grown up on a dairy farm, Megan Wilson is no stranger to hard work. While working as bookkeeper for the previous owner of her company, she convinced him to buy a second vacuum truck so she could also run a route — and then she added marketing to her job duties to make sure it paid for itself.
The venture was successful and when the owner was ready to sell the business, he was happy to work out a deal with Megan and her husband Adam, who had since come onboard. Adam came with his own set of helpful skills. He had been working for a property management company, handling everything from leasing and rent collections to maintenance and evictions.
Today the couple operates the business, Ray’s Sanitation, out of their 14-acre property in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with a satellite yard about 45 minutes away in Green Lake. They have help these days — Casey LaMarche, part-timer Sam Kofnetka and Megan’s son Jake Knigge, who works around his college schedule. But they are both still very hands on in the field. Adam runs routes, does deliveries and pickups, works in the shop and performs maintenance. Megan also does deliveries and pickups, runs the office, answers the phone and, other than taxes, handles the bookwork.
The company’s main service line is portable restroom rentals but they also do miscellaneous pumpouts for boats, campers and hunting lodges. They operate in a 50-mile radius of Oshkosh and a 30-mile radius of Green Lake.
PASSING THE TORCH
The company is named after the original owner, Ray Hudzinski, who founded the business in Green Lake in 1986. He also did septic work but when he was ready to retire in 2009 he split the company into two divisions and sold the portable restroom side to his childhood friend Pat Metcalf. Megan was doing landscaping and office work for Metcalf at the time at his landscaping business, so he asked her to take on the bookkeeping for his new business as well. The company had 130 units and one truck but when inquiries started to increase, Megan knew they were going to need more.
“I could see the demand coming,” she says. “The first thing I did when we got that second truck was I went to all the chambers (of commerce) in the area and became a member and started going to their events, just getting our name out there. And I did a lot of cold calling. It went crazy. I doubled the business in a year. I couldn’t believe it.”
Adam got involved in 2014. He had often helped out but when Metcalf was ready to start cutting back he joined full time. “Pat would still help out and do small routes here and there but he said this is your baby now, you just run it,” Adam says. They did that for three years and then bought it in 2017.
“None of his kids wanted it,” Megan explains. “And I told him I would really like the first right to purchase it. We had run it like it was ours. Once we agreed on a price, it went really fast. There was no transition hiccup whatsoever.”
THE INVENTORY
The company now has 406 standard units (Tuff-Jon from The T.S.F. Company), 40 wheelchair-accessible and six flushable units (Satellite Industries), all with hand sanitizer dispensers. They also have 46 hand-wash stations (Tuff-Jon) and four 300-gallon holding tanks (Tuff-Jon and Liquid Waste Industries). Company colors are blue and orange so the Wilsons chose royal blue for their units, but also have hunter green for parks, golf courses and weddings to blend into the scenery.
In 2019, the company bought a restroom trailer from A Restroom Trailer (ART Co.) with two stalls on the men’s side, two on the women’s. It proved to be so popular for weddings and corporate events that in 2022 they purchased a second ART trailer, this one with three individual stalls.
For hauling equipment, the company uses a 2020 Ford F-350 with a liftgate. It can carry three units and pull the transport trailers — a 20-foot from LWI, a 20-foot custom-built aluminum flatbed and two custom 14-footers.
THE FLEET
The company has three vacuum trucks, all with Masport pumps — a 2020 Ford F‑550 with a 680-gallon waste/300-gallon freshwater steel tank from Imperial Industries, a 2022 Ford F‑750 built out by Satellite with a 1,200-gallon waste/500-gallon freshwater stainless steel tank, and a 2022 Ford F-600 from Imperial with a 700-gallon waste/400-gallon freshwater steel tank that replaced an older unit with a smaller water capacity. “We’re always trying to find water while we’re out on routes, so gaining 100 gallons in water really helps,” Adam says.
The company uses J&J Chemical deodorant products, soap and hand sanitizer. They dispose of waste at treatment plants. In late fall trucks are winterized. “We take all the freshwater off, we don’t use the water hoses,” Adam says. “We actually use windshield washer fluid. We put our disinfectants in there and use that to do spray downs. And we mix a lot of brine solution to put in the units.” Salt is placed in the urinals for units out on long-term contracts.
A PAPER TRAIL
Megan manages the accounts and scheduling using QuickBooks and Excel. She gives the guys a printout of their jobs each day and they write down the time they got done with each — “Which has come in handy,” she says, “because there have been people who have accused us of not being there.”
The company has a number of contracts for parks and golf courses that run from April through October. Construction work goes year round and really exploded in 2022, Adam says. A couple of their large contracts included providing 25 units with twice-weekly cleaning for a two-year hospital project, and 11 units for a two-year project for Oshkosh Defense which builds military vehicles.
MAINTAINING STANDARDS
About 40% of the company’s work is for events. The Wilsons prefer to focus on the smaller ones, 10 or 20 units — races, weddings, local festivals.
“Adam and I always want to be out doing the servicing, meeting the customers, creating those relationships,” Megan says. “That’s why we don’t do many large events. Plus, the larger the event the more people there are and the harder it is to keep the units clean. We are very picky and have a standard for how we want them to be.”
Their larger events include the twice-a-year Hmong Festival requiring 70 units (the only event they do a night cleaning for as it’s the only time they can gain access) and the Electric City Experience, a music festival in nearby Kaukauna, where they provide 55 units and a restroom trailer.
The biggest event for them (and the town) is the week-long EAA AirVenture Oshkosh, billed as the largest airshow in the world, attracting 650,000 visitors to the town of 67,000. All contractors in the area participate. The company generally provides about 40 units. Megan and Adam personally service them daily so their guys can work their regular routes. They also provide camper pumpout service. “I always joke about this but it’s absolutely true,” Adam says. “As soon as we pull into a camp area with a vacuum truck, it’s literally like the ice cream truck that plays music. We have people running to us.”
A HELPING HAND
Adam likes to connect with their customers and the general public through social media. He says they get a lot of good feedback on it, especially their videos. But, in reality, they’re both spread too thin to give it as much attention as he would like.
They’re also too busy to attend many community events but Megan says they provide support in other ways. “We do a lot of reducing the bill for groups like the FFA or Breakfast on the Farm, places that are trying to educate people and help the world be a better place.” They do the same for veterans’ activities such as re-enactments, fundraisers and honor flights.
Their support extends to employees. Benefits include health insurance, a retirement plan and trips to the WWETT Show. “And we do a lot of things on the side,” Megan says. “Just throw them extra cash here or there, give them gift cards to help pay for their work clothes. We paid for a weekend getaway for Casey and his wife and kids. We believe in treating the employees right because if we didn’t have them we wouldn’t have the business we have.”
A SATISFYING CAREER
The Wilsons say 2022 was their busiest year yet and in 2023 they hope to add another tech and buy more hauling trailers. “We’ve grown so much that our routes were easily 12-hour days,” Adam says. “It got to a point where you could see it in Casey and myself. We were just getting burned out.” But Megan and Adam both say they love what they do.
“I like the uniqueness of it, the fact that there’s not a lot of people doing this,” Adam says. “We’re not part of corporate America. As the master operator for the business I go to a lot of education courses and I get to see what our industry actually does around the world.”
Megan concurs. “We’re providing an important service for the world,” she says. “And then there’s the people you meet and the relationships that last for years, just being social with people. You have to be social in this business, you’re always talking to people. And I like to work. It is very satisfying for me. I’m a very numbers-oriented person and I love being outside and this gives me the best of both worlds.”
