At EST Associates, pipeline inspection is all about turning some clichés upside down. For example, the company motto could easily be: Do sweat the small stuff.

Or that one about forests and trees: Yes the forest is important, but when it comes to inspection, so are the trees. In short, attention to detail is Job One. That philosophy has helped EST become, in just a few years, a well-regarded inspection contractor that customers frequently call back.

EST Associates, based in Needham, Mass., came to the inspection business on a slightly different path. Owner John Carlin founded the company 20 years ago as an environmental sampling and remediation firm and later branched into inspection. But a strong reputation in its original field helped EST gain inspection customers, and the company has built a strong operation by setting a standard for high quality and focusing on customer service.

EST keeps customers by doing quality work, hiring skilled employees, and using reliable equipment. “The quality of the work is your selling point,” Carlin says. “Having the right equipment and appropriately trained personnel is the biggest selling factor.”

Building blocks

Carlin began his career working for the field service division of an environmental laboratory. He incorporated his own company in 1989, offering services such as wastewater compliance sampling for industry and municipalities. He called the business Environmental Sampling Technology Inc., but as its portfolio broadened he changed the name to EST Associates Inc.

“Sampling and monitoring is still a significant part of our business,” Carlin says. “But it’s also led to other services, such as measuring effluent flows from industrial facilities. We started doing the flow monitoring, which eventually led into the whole world of sewer system evaluation services that we offer now.”

From flow monitoring, the firm added smoke testing and dye testing, says John Corrigan, who now manages the sewer inspection services. A 10-year veteran of the company, Corrigan previously managed the O&M division, which provides operation maintenance of industrial wastewater treatment systems.

As EST moved deeper into pipeline services, the company saw bids coming out for sewer inspection and received direct inquires from clients about TV inspections. “We decided, ‘Let’s try our hand at this,’ and it has worked out very well,” Corrigan says.

Moving into video

The company bought its first inspection camera secondhand about five years ago, picking it up from a competitor who had used it on a project but didn’t want to develop that line of business. The firm bought a second camera in 2008.

“We ended up keeping the truck busy so often that we invested in another unit,” Carlin says. “From there, it just kind of took off.” With a full range of sewer service offerings, video inspection “kind of completes the circuit for us. A client doesn’t have to go to another contractor to get this all done. It’s one-stop shopping.”

The company’s services feed on each other. “We’ll do work for clients on a CCTV project, and that will lead to some other work,” Carlin observes. He credits the expanded services with helping profitability grow by 20 percent in recent years. The firm does most of its business in New England, although it’s beginning to branch out from that core territory (see sidebar).

Equipment and employees

EST uses remotely operated ROVVER inspection units and documents inspections with WinCan software, both from Envirosight. The company has taken advantage of the camera system’s flexibility, making a variety of upgrades that include:

• Carbide-tipped spike wheels, which offer better traction on slippery surfaces such as PVC piping

• A camera raise kit to handle high flow levels

• Enhanced LED lighting for better pipe illumination

• Stronger cable motors, which enable handlers to retract crawlers faster.

“The addition of the crawler and its upgrades paid immediate dividends to our business by opening the door to more municipal clientele,” says Carlin. “It also allowed us to expand services to full-scale pipeline inspections. That helps us identify and rectify numerous inflow and infiltration challenges for our municipal customers.”

Video inspection employs about five of the workforce of 30. Skill, training and exacting standards are keys for operators. EST uses the NASSCO Pipeline Assessment and Certification Program (PACP) for coding defects.

Along with related sewer services, the business is holding its own even in the down economy. “I wouldn’t say its recession-proof, but it’s recession-resistant,” Carlin says. “There’s a direct benefit to municipalities for making improvements to their infrastructure. The paybacks are readily observed. It is a tough sell because there’s nothing sexy about fixing the sewer system. Most communities want to build ball fields or bike paths or things like that. But there’s no doubt about the economic benefits.”

Hiring, training and retaining the best people is the company’s biggest challenge.

“We offer very competitive benefits packages,” Carlin says. “We really try to develop a sense of camaraderie among our employees and get them to treat every job as if it’s the most important thing they’re working on, which at the time it is.”

Watching closely

Corrigan notes that some clients reported working with other inspection vendors whose quality disappointed them. “A lot of it was the quality of the pictures, and the contractors missing defects,” he says. “The solution was getting our inspectors trained properly so they are seeing the defects – not just running the camera up the line as fast as they can, but actually paying attention to what they’re looking at.”

Quality inspection can be a matter of public safety. “We’ve had pipes with large holes in the top where you can actually see the asphalt in the street above, which comes very close to being a collapse situation,” Corrigan says.

The age of New England’s infrastructure also poses a challenge. “The most difficult stuff we’ve done is under drains in sewers,” says Corrigan. “A lot of times they change the pipe size, and a lot of times the plans just don’t tell you what’s down there. Typically, they’ve never been inspected. You get large mineral deposits in a lot of them. So cleaning them is a challenge, just so you can get the CCTV up the lines.”

It’s not unusual to come across an unmapped change in line size midway through an inspection that requires a last-minute change in the size of the crawler. So EST emphasizes to its employees the importance of taking time and thoroughly logging their observations, so that customers – mostly engineering firms or municipalities – can rely on those logs to guide them to the most relevant portions of the inspection video, so that they can determine whether a repair or replacement project is in order.

“We just finished up a job in one of the local towns where we did about 86,000 feet of CCTV inspection,” Corrigan says. “They’re not going to watch video of 86,000 feet. That’s what we’re being hired to do.”

Touching base

Communication with clients is the key. “We touch base with our clients routinely throughout the course of a project to make sure that we’re meeting goals and objectives,” Carlin says. “We always try to drive that point home in our internal meetings: The most critical thing is always trying to keep the lines of communication open.

“It’s really just a question of telling our employees, every time we have a deliverable, to follow up with a phone call or an e-mail correspondence, just to check in and make sure that the clients have a chance to review the information and get feedback. We can’t make any improvement unless we get feedback. So we really try to focus on communicating and, more important, listening to what they tell us.”

Thanks to that sort of customer focus, referrals by word of mouth account for more than 75 percent of the firm’s business: either someone who has worked with EST in the past or someone who has received the company’s name from another client.

A willingness to stay client-focused – like the time an EST crew went out during a Christmas Eve storm to sample stormwater runoff from a municipal landfill to meet a year-end board of health deadline – helps drive that repeat business.

When to say no

“You always have to put yourself in your client’s shoes and do the job,” Carlin says. “Act professionally and ethically, and as long as it’s within those guidelines, we’ll do whatever we can to make them happy.”

Of course, some customers exploit that client-friendly work ethic. In those rare cases, says Carlin, “I use Irish diplomacy, where you tell someone to go to hell in such nice language that they’ll enjoy the trip.”

Turning serious, he concludes: “There’s a very small group of clients that there’s just nothing you can do to make them happy. As a business person you’re probably better weeding some of those people out. Sometimes you just have to sift out the clients who are completely unreasonable or have unrealistic expectations, because they just drag you down. They’re not good for morale. But there have been very few of those.”

And as EST Associates works to keep exceeding customers’ expectations, Carlin doesn’t expect to encounter many more.