Business Description:
It's a husband-wife owned specialty pressure washer subcontractor firm. We help restaurants to control their fire danger by removing food grease build-ups from their hoods, ducts and exhaust fans. We also repair kitchen appliances and building ventilation equipment. When we noticed some of our customers struggling to make ends meet, we created a Profit Coaxing Training Center to help them.
About Your Business:
What Inspired Your Business:
My industry protects the public safety by working to keep a restaurant kitchen from catching on fire. We're gradually morphing into a one-stop center where restaurants and cafeteria operators can go to meet their equipment servicing needs, and find compliance consulting help.
Most Unusual Client, or Client Story:
We cleaned a kitchen exhaust system that had not been properly done for years. When you get large amounts of grease buildups inside the ductwork, the stuff tends to expand exponentially when you try to remove it. When we sprayed down the duct interiors over the fryers, grease started pouring out, and overflowed the catch bin we'd placed underneath it. This 2" thick puddle of ooze freaked out the maintenance staff, who had been instructed to stay there and help us clean up afterwards and get their kitchen back open for business the next morning. They poured over 5 gallons of liquid soap on the mess thinking it would help. It foamed and bubbled up, spread out over the entire floor, ran out the door and covered over 30 meters of the parking lot outside. It took us forever to get all the greasy soap bubbles cleaned up, and we still had to return a couple of days later to power wash the parking lot for the customer.
Recent Business Surprise:
We were shocked to learn we were the first firm to certify as kitchen exhaust cleaners and environmental cleaning technicians in the Western New York region. New York State has only had a standardized, uniform building code in place since 2003. The state is only now beginning to enforce the fire prevention and building code standards. We suddenly found ourselves in the unique position to save hundreds of food service jobs across the region that are at high risk for layoff by educating our customers in hood and exhaust fan maintenance requirements, and educating the governmental inspectors about the fire dangers that are so prevalent in the commercial kitchens here.
Fun Facts:
Top Selling Product/Service:
Hood cleaning appointments to remove food grease accumulations from hoods, ducts & fans.
Best Place to Get Work Done:
All work is done at the customer's kitchen or else virtually over the Internet.
Coolest Personal Item on Your Desk:
picture of my kids next to a lop-sided clay pottery pen holder my son made in elementary school.
Where You Plan to Retire:
travel around with an RV
Best Networking Tool:
contact with the local governmental inspectors & fire marshals
My Most Interesting/Challenging Business Problem:
Believability that we have the consulting skills we do
Business Challenge:
How to keep our own firm busy and profitable when our customers' businesses slowed down with higher gas prices and fewer people eating out. We are entirely dependent upon our customers to be busy. The more cooking volume they do at the restaurant, the more they need our equipment maintenance services. I thought I could just offer my financial recovery intervention consulting skills that I developed when I owned a little tax practice, but no one thinks that a "greaser" subcontractor would know anything about running a business office and my time available to offer this freebie is very limited.
Solution:
We're still working on that one. We're aggressively seeking ways to market our customers' restaurants, as a part of our own marketing efforts. I have many computer and accounting software tutoring skills, from prior jobs, so I'm looking into doing something from that angle as well - adding a value-added freebie perk to the hood cleaning service contracts. It appears that I'm going to have to register a DBA name for my firm in order to conduct the office automation and equipment operating cost optimization consulting services under. I'll turn my QuickBooks ProAdvisor website into a tutorial center, where my customers and other small business owners can access my step-by-step tutoring 24x7x365 and customize their own learning experience via an inter-active user interface. I also write two blogs, one here at Jumpup and one on my a-quipmentrepairs.com website.
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