If he wasn’t having so much fun, Rod Tarbox might get discouraged about all the challenges he faces keeping sewers and drainlines clear and running in north-central New Hampshire. His 22 years as owner-operator of Mt. Washington Sewer and Drain Cleaning has been one big challenge.

“The climate is against me,” he says. “The local economy is against me. Towns being so spread out is against me. It is almost a mission impossible. I have to reinvent myself every month to get ahead.”

For all of his bemoaned burden, his complaints are rather cheerfully aired and one suspects Rod wouldn’t have it any other way. That would be too easy and only half as much fun. 

His lighthearted grousing might just be a New England thing. The business owner says his family has been rooted in the region even longer than some of its oldest trees, the first family members arriving in the 1700s. 

Rod grew up in Massachusetts, which is also where he got his first taste of drain cleaning. He and wife Melissa moved to Berlin, New Hampshire, in 2004 and started Mt. Washington Sewer and Drain Cleaning. He was the crew, she was the office person, and that’s how it remained for two decades.

In the beginning, Rod chose work in the trades as a hedge against new technologies, outsourcing and other economic waves that can come along and wipe out unskilled labor jobs. As do all successful entrepreneurs, the couple started their business with eyes wide open.

“I knew that 95% of new businesses fail,” Rod says, “and I failed right off the bat.”

Or at least stumbled. During the startup time while he was handing out flyers and introducing his brand-new company to the community, he fell off his deck and tore his ACL. It left him hobbling. Rod was still healing when he got his first call from a paying customer.

“Are you sure you’re going to be able to do this?” the customer asked upon seeing the limping businessman. Rod responded that he had to do it, and he did, working with a 200-pound machine in a cramped space under a porch while wearing a cast on one leg.

He evidently completed the job to the customer’s satisfaction: The customer utilized his services several times over the next 16 years.

Mountains and forest

Berlin is a city of less than 10,000 people and the most northern city in New Hampshire. Because it sits on the edge of a mountain range and a national forest, its principal industry for a hundred years was pulp and paper mills.

When the pulp and paper mill industry began to falter, both the economy and the town shrank. Today, a couple of prisons provide some employment and the national forest is a source of both logging work and tourist recreational activity. In other words, the market is a shaky one for small businesses. 

“I have outlasted every type of business around here,” Rod says. “Our area is extremely weird. We have a lot of towns an hour apart, all of them 8,000 to 15,000 people. Old mill towns. It’s an economically depressed area.”

As a result, Mt. Washington Sewer and Drain Cleaning vans are on the road a lot. Most of the company’s customers are in Conway, 40 miles south of Berlin, or even farther south. It would make sense to relocate to Conway, of course, but the real estate market there is “insane,” according to Rod, so they commute.

“They” being Rod and his recently hired and very first employee, Matthew Demore. Rod says he would have hired a helper sooner, but he’d been discouraged by the quality of available laborers. He “lucked out” when Demore (his daughter Catherine’s fiancé) was laid off by a communications company and was persuaded to change careers. Now there are two company vans on the road, each of them attractively wrapped with the company’s cartoon persona of Rod the cleaner.

Full toolbox

Because he worked alone for so many years, Rod accumulated a multitude of tools to speed his work and reduce wear and tear on his body.

“I’ve always tried to find an easier way to accomplish something,” he says. “People sometimes would say, ‘You have a lot of tools.’ I’d tell them what I didn’t have in people [employees], I had in tools.”

To flush clogged lines, he mounted in his van a 4,000 psi JETTERS NORTHWEST BRUTE jetter as well as a General Pipe Cleaners JM1450 electric jetter for those cold days too bitter to work outdoors. His menagerie of tools also includes two Clog Dog drain snakes (Clog Squad), a Gator Drain Tools flex shaft machine and an Electric Eel drain cleaning machine. 

While he is not overly brand-conscious, Rod says he does stick with a manufacturer when a piece of equipment proves its worth. Consequently, he carries several Spartan Tool inspection cameras and drain machines of different dimensions, RIDGID cameras and drain machines plus a RIDGID Scout locating tool, and his favorite tool: an 8 mm Picote Mini Miller. 

Freezing temps and roots

One of the company’s services is freeing up frozen lines. Depending on the situation, Rod either jets away the frozen blockage or melts it with an Arctic Blaster steamer or electric steamer. Some winters are harsher than others.

“Last winter I got murdered,” Rod says. “My last frozen line call was April 16.”

But pipes in the area are always susceptible to the cold because they’re shallowly buried. 

Septic tank systems, of which there are many in the area, generally are underground only a couple of feet — not far enough to insulate them from minus 30 and minus 40 degree temperatures. Soil conditions also prevent some city sewers from being laid deeper than 4 feet, which, again, is not deep enough.

When freezing weather isn’t assaulting sewer and drainlines from above ground, tree roots are working on them in the ground. The area’s forested land and adjacent properties naturally produce “a ton of tree roots” to bedevil Rod and anyone else trying to keep wastewater lines free and flowing. The most insidious root systems, according to Rod, are those from weeping willow and maple trees as well as lilac bushes.

The roots problem is compounded by aging pipe that is vulnerable to incursions. Furthermore, much of the old pipe is lead stock or Orangeburg pipe, neither of which does well against roots.

Getting creative

Mt. Washington Sewer and Drain Cleaning mostly provides residential service, with about 85% of service calls made to homes. Even business calls are mostly to mom-and-pop establishments, so pipes being serviced are hardly industrial in size. Though he will tackle obstructions in pipes as large as 10 inches, Rod says 98% of the pipes he works on are 4 and 6 inches.

To reach his customers scattered across the region, Rod has developed several marketing techniques. Phone book advertising worked for a while. When he opened the company’s doors, he also immediately sought out plumbing and septic company referrals in times of emergency. He continues to build relationships with such businesses. 

Rod occasionally tried co-promotion. For example, a bakery started up in Berlin and Rod partnered with them for a while by buying trays of cupcakes and having them given away along with a business card for his company.

“It helped the bakery and helped us, too,” he recalls.

Like so many other commercial places of business in the city, however, the bakery eventually closed its doors.

Tarbox gravitated pretty quickly to social media to get around the distances in the market. The company’s Facebook page documents successful projects in interesting ways such as silently viewing a whirlpool develop in a successfully unclogged drain until the water all disappears. Rod sometimes puts up a post about a small business he rescued from a clogged line, thus also giving free publicity to his customer. In another post, an animation of Demore is shown tackling a sludge gorilla and riding it out of the picture — mission accomplished! 

“I get new ideas about how to work with AI to make our marketing more appealing,” Rod says of his imaginative posts. “It’s like building a mind brand in people. I’m trying to stay uppermost in the minds of people so when they have a pipe issue, they think to call me for the fix.”

His imagination really gets a workout on the company’s YouTube page. There the camera strolls through a sewer pipe accompanied by commentary from Rod, or viewers listen to a satisfying gurgle — almost a belch — from a cleared drainline. There’s one video with an on-camera thumbs-up from a satisfied customer and yet another of a humming Rod looking down into a toilet bowl and talking agreeably to someone or something he has discovered there. 

“Some people are crazy, or have a wild sense of humor,” Rod says. “I am both.”

What drives him a little crazier, so to speak, is when people watch and enjoy his social media messages but don’t acknowledge them publicly. When that happens, an endorsement opportunity for the company goes down the drain along with the sludge.

“It drives me crazy,” he says.

Rod says he’ll put up a post and 31 people will acknowledge viewing it, yet in his interactions around the area, almost everyone he runs into will admit they, too, had viewed it. “Then hit the ‘Like button,’” he says.

Ready to adapt

Rod tries to leave his customers laughing when he accepts payment for his work, but he is more than a comedian and marketing enthusiast. He’s a committed and thoughtful business owner making it in a tough market. He now has taken a first step in growing his operation with the addition of an assistant and is working hard to build a legacy company for the couple’s two young sons.

The 52-year-old tradesman looks back on his career to date and has ideas about how other men and women starting out can succeed as he and his wife have.

“Be ready to adapt,” he says. “Don’t fear change. Have confidence and always do the best you can. At the end of the day, you’re not in competition with others, but with yourself. Only you can make yourself a failure.”

Rod particularly recalls the advice of Robert Silva of Drain Medic, a work colleague before Rod decided to go for broke and start his own company.

“He taught me a very valuable lesson and that is to do your ‘re-calls’ while you are still on your call so you don’t have to go back. I always loved that. Take enough time to do the job right the first time.”

And then leave them laughing.