Nothing is more important than family to Chris Hettich, co-owner of HHH Sanitation. He quit his job to join his father’s portable sanitation business 20 years ago to be closer to his family at home. But after buying his father’s company with brother and co-owner Tim Hettich, they agreed to close the door to family hiring for good at this Birmingham, Alabama-based business.
“If you’re running a business, family relationships that extend to hiring can complicate business decisions and lead to headaches, heartaches and hurt feelings,” Chris Hettich says. “That also includes best friends.”
It’s not that family members can’t be hard workers or even valued employees, but objectivity is often hard to come by when tough decisions need to be made.
“Making the right business decision often means putting an employee in a different position, laying them off or even letting them go,” he says. “When a decision affects a family member, you can lose a lot of sleep trying to do what’s best for the business.”
He credits the brothers’ successful management of HHH to a natural ability to sort out tasks according to their talents.
“I’m a people-pleasing sort of person, and Tim is a ‘git-r-done’ type of person,” Hettich says. “We’re yin and yang, and sometimes we cuss at each other. But we know this business inside and out, and we make all of our decisions together and it just works.”
The brothers occasionally hire their kids to help out at events, but there’s no succession plan in place. Hettich is quick to point out that demonstrating a keen interest in the business would need to come first, and the brothers would have to be united on the idea.
“We’re not counting on family succession,” he says. “We both want our kids to follow their own path. Working in a service industry is a life-consuming job and not everyone’s cut out for it.”
That doesn’t mean that the brothers haven’t formed close relationships with their employee team.
“They have secure jobs and they’re not always worrying about being laid off,” Hettich says. “We’ve been there for them through their own tough times. I’m not afraid to get in the trenches with them, talk with them, or pray with them. We’ve got a good crew here and we take care of them. Even if we don’t look to our families to hire, we see our employees as family.”
Read more about HHH Sanitation in the December issue of Portable Restroom Operator.
