Setting an Example

Cleaning companies demonstrate civic responsibility and entrepreneurial spirit.

The city of Houston is just beginning to dig out from the wrath of Hurricane Harvey as I write this. Some of the city is still under water. Much of it is uninhabitable. 

As focus shifts to cleaning up and rebuilding, the city is facing another flood — this one bringing hope rather than despair. Countless contractors are sending crews to help with cleanup and to get water and sewer systems back online. 

I’ve said it before: You are first responders. You are health care professionals. Your role in community health is as critical as police, fire and emergency medical personnel. And the situation in Houston proved that. 

Davids Hydro Vac of White Bear Lake, Minnesota, immediately answered the call to help the people hurt by Hurricane Harvey. Company owner Mike Morehouse, along with his brother and father, packed up and headed to Houston on Aug. 29 while record rains were still drowning the area. 

Morehouse and his family members didn’t go to provide professional services or to pick up some extra business — they didn’t even bring a hydroexcavator or their sewer cleaning equipment. Instead, they brought a boat. They drove through the night, registered at a checkpoint, and then changed into their wet gear and went to work. 

They spent the next few days in some of the city’s hardest-hit neighborhoods, going house to house to rescue those who needed help. They spent another day helping stranded residents get the medicine they needed. They weren’t there for business. They weren’t being compensated. They were just there to help. 

You can read more about Davids Hydro Vac in this issue of Cleaner and more about the family’s efforts to help the victims of Hurricane Harvey at www.cleaner.com.

More for you

This month’s issue also features a profile of Chuck’s Septic Tank, Sewer & Drain Cleaning. 

I met Chuck Lang Jr. at the WWETT Show earlier this year. His entrepreneurial enthusiasm was immediately evident. We were introduced in the Vacall - Gradall Industries booth, next to a big hydroexcavation truck that had caught my attention days earlier. With its American flag and bald eagle motif covering the truck from bumper to bumper, it was hard not to notice. 

The truck, it turns out, was Lang’s and a pretty good representation of him and his business ventures as well. His father started the septic pumping outfit in the 1970s. Lang helped push the company into new services, and new services led to the spinoff of additional businesses. The hydroexcavator on the floor in front of us was a prime example. 

It represented growth and the expansion of services. And that wrap — all of Lang’s equipment is wrapped in that same motif. When his local vehicle wrap company couldn’t keep up with his new equipment additions, Lang and his wife bought their own equipment, formed a new company and started doing the wraps themselves. He saw a void — an opportunity — and he took it. Entrepreneurialism at it finest. 

In fact, the growth and proliferation of Lang’s family of businesses covers so much industrial ground that we’re featuring a trio of separate stories on those companies in this month’s issues of Cleaner, Pumper and Dig Different

There are lessons to be learned from each of these stories, and I hope they can help you make your business stronger. 

Enjoy this month’s issue.



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