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Fitting the Pieces Together: A Guide to Office Operations for the Liquid Waste, Portable Toilet & Septic Pumping Industries |
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When you run a portable toilet company, you eventually reach a point where you business has stopped growing and you want to expand you sales volume. The objective is to rent more units and service more customers. How you approach this many times depends upon how you entered the business to begin with. There are many ways to start a business, some of the stories of how people get into the portable toilet rental include:
We were running a septic company and our construction customers asked if we rented portable toilets.
We won a bid to supply portable toilets and we moved on from there
We were in the rental business and our customers keeped asking where they could rental a portable toilet, eventually we started to rent them ourselves.
This guy was selling his portable toilet business and was going back to just septic pumping.
I rented a portable toilet for a party and decided that for that kind of money I could run a portable toilet company.
Took over the business from my family
You can see that many people entered the business and grew with it. They did not come from a full-scale operation from which they could gain experience and skills on managing an growing a business. More then likely most started the business and through OJT - On Job Training and working HESS - Holidays Evenings and Saturday and Sunday to build the business up from a small beginning. A business reaches a critical size when the people and equipment resources start to break down. An example is if your business has only one inbound phone line. The number of new customers calling in stops growing because new customers are getting a busy signal. Other issues that constrain your company from growing can include:
Service route drivers are not being productive enough units/hr cleaned.
Billing operations take so long that you are not invoicing your customers.
Company has trouble hiring and keeping good people
You have some "long term employees" who KNOW how the business should be run and you feel very uncomfortable firing them.
You view office operations as busy work and "REAL WORK" is our there moving and cleaning units.
Not enough equipment, i.e., toilets, trucks, chemicals, etc.
Last but not least:
You feel uncomfortable that things are out of control and you do not know what is happening, but you want to grow the business.
If you believe this list of reasons that stops a business from growing, then a well run business will grow to its operational limits. If you want to grow your business, you have to remove the operational limits of your company. This is why simply buying out the competition does not necessary grow your business. Once you have the customers, they will move to other service providers once they realize that the service provided does not meet their expectations.