Turning Kitchen Grease into Gold: A Success Story
By Drue Ann Hargis-Ramirez, Write Right Enterprises
This is an article from an old pressure washing website called Delco that was published back in 2006 about a very successful kitchen exhaust cleaner.
The popular children’s fable of Rumpelstiltskin gifts a miller’s daughter with the talent to spin straw into gold. Well, the success story of Daryl Mirza and Christie Kaye-Mirza is no fable. Together they turned kitchen grease into gold, spinning a side gig into a corporate giant with $36 million in annual sales. What’s the story behind their success and what can you learn from their fable come-true?
Partners in Business & Life
Daryl was a computer techie and a people person. Not long after college graduation, he went into managing restaurants for Burger King, setting up new stores and establishing services for maintenance of the facilities. Christie, not long after graduation with a BS in Pharmacy from Drake University, was working three jobs with a dream of owning her own business. She often ran to the local Burger King for lunch between jobs. She recalls laughingly how Daryl would fight to serve her whenever she came in.
The Beginning “A Juggling Act”
“Daryl couldn’t find anybody steady to clean the kitchen exhausts,” Christie recalls. That’s when they noticed an article in Entrepreneur Magazine advertising a school called Black Magic. “Christie and I attended their school then came back and started on our own [business].” It was the mid-1980s. “Christie worked full time as a pharmacist and I worked full time at Burger King, then we’d come home and go back to bed for a few hours, wake up in the middle of the night, go out and clean a hood [or two], and go back to bed for a few hours, then the next morning we’d wake up and go to work again.” They started their first company under the name of “Ducts, Unlimited,” out of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Somehow they kept up their juggling act for the next five years.
They tried lots of different avenues in the power washing industry. For a few years Christie operated Christie’s Cleaning, doing flat work and exterior store cleaning, even as she continued to work full time as a pharmacist solely because she loved it. They even tried truck fleet cleaning and building restoration. Daryl recalls attending the first convention of the Power Washers of North America (www.pwna.org) where he first met Robert Hinderliter, President of Delco Cleaning Systems and founder of the PWNA. “At that time we only had a couple of employees and [were still] trying to find our niche in the industry.”
A Perfect Fit
In the end, they focused on kitchen grease exhaust cleaning. “We decided the money was to be made at night,” Christie says simply. “I was always the one in the kitchen doing the hood and duct work and Daryl was on the roof and he’d handle the heavy fans.” Christie smiles when she recalls how Daryl would have to lift her up since she stands only 5 feet, 3 inches whereas he’s 6 feet, 2 inches. She also maddeningly recalls how Daryl would frequently pilfer tools from her bucket and never return them. It is now apparent they were a perfect fit together and a perfect fit for the kitchen grease exhaust industry. “It was unspoken as to who would do what. We worked in the field for eight years together.”
Achieving Successful Growth
In 20 years they grew their company from a husband-and-wife team to a multimillion dollar corporation, primarily from reinvestment and acquisitions.
“Just remember you’re the last one to get paid instead of the first one in the feeding chain. Use the company’s money wisely to buy things and invest in things that will make a good return for the company. A lot of people don’t stay focused. If you have a piece of business and you want to go after a specific piece of business, stay focused on that. Put a good plan together and stay on it,” advocates Daryl.
In other words, if you’re going to diversify, don’t do it in a fragmented way, but put the resources behind it that will ensure success. A prime example is the story of Christie’s Green Machine. “Daryl and I used to take turns getting new vehicles. That year it was my turn.” Daryl had other ideas and convinced Christie to take the money and buy a filter cleaning machine for one of the companies called Filter Brite that they started. “Daryl would show customers our high tech cleaning system and jokingly say this is my wife’s car. I didn’t get a new vehicle for another five years, but the sacrifice moved us forward. It made our filter cleaning automated, a three-step process through one machine. Before, it had been done by hand.”
Daryl says that the average exhaust cleaning business does about $400,000 in business annually with maybe 20 companies in the country bringing in over $1 million annually. Their kitchen exhaust cleaning brings in $27 million annually in business. He attributes this partially to standardization of practices and services and the fact that they remain a family owned business. “When we purchased Facilitec-USA two years ago, they had 19 branches and we took it to the current 50 branches.” From these 50 branches around the country, they are able to operate their various operations.
Daryl says he is always looking for businesses that might have related markets that he hasn’t penetrated yet. In such cases, he might acquire the company and offer the prior owner a position at Facilitec, handling the branch and area for them.
Some Keys to Success
“People management is huge,” Daryl emphasizes. “If you can get people to work for you and enjoy what they’re doing, and pay them fairly, you can be successful. Being able to motivate people to do their job is critical because you have to be able to depend on those people while you’re doing your job.”
He also emphasizes the importance of not forgetting the people and keeping in touch with all your staff, not just your management. “We just had a big company meeting last week and had everybody here from around the country.” Daryl’s employees say he’s very approachable and easy to talk to, and he lets them know he’s always ready to hear their feedback.
“When we first purchased Facilitec, we went out to every branch within 6 months of owning the company. We went out and saw the employees and went out at night and met the crews. Nobody ever from that company in the prior ownership went out and saw the people and heard their concerns. It was a good show of support for the crew and management people [alike].”
In fact, their first employee, Michael Patrick Allen, still works for them today, operating out of Filter Brite, which is a grease filter exchange services in Illinois, one of the many businesses they have started over the years. “He had worked for Daryl at Burger King and when he graduated from high school he started working for us full time in September 1988,” says Christie.
Keeping the Focus on Customers
Daryl admits that working in the restaurant industry helped at the onset, but it wasn’t the key to their success. “You have to look at whatever service you’re going to provide and look at it from the customer’s point of view. What are their issues? How would you resolve them? And do it at a decent price for them. Look through their eyes at your services. I did have an advantage because I was on the restaurant side but that only got us so far. We still had to do the work.”
He acknowledges that while he’s a fierce competitor, he also respects his competitors. “Being in business is about relationships with vendors, customers, [and] competitors. If I screw up the account, we’ll lose it. You respect the competitor who took it away from you.”
He also keeps the focus on his customers by operating his own distribution system. “Our distribution center is a facility in Genoa City, Wisconsin. We acquired the facility when we purchased Prism last year, which is the filter and soaker division of our company now.” Prism, which was his last acquisition, has revenues of $6 million per year. The facility holds every product needed to do exhaust cleaning. “The 50 branches tell [distributing what they need] and they get a shipment once a month through our trucking system. We have three semi’s that deliver our stuff throughout the country exclusively.”
He also bottles his chemicals through the distribution center. Instead of each location keeping 55-gallon drums on hand, which is the norm for the industry, he has them put into one-gallon labeled containers to meet all chemical safety guidelines and ships them to the 50 locations.
In this way, he simplifies the distribution for all his locations. “Otherwise, I’d have 50 people ordering different supplies from different vendors, and then you’d have these managers focusing on supplies instead of managing customers.”
Marketing and Sales
Although his business does $27 million in grease cleaning annually, all his companies together with their related services brings in $36 million annually in sales. He notes there are different ways to grow companies. One way is through reinvestment, another way is through acquisitions, and a third way is through marketing and sales. He now employs all three methods.
“In the earlier years, probably the first 10-13 years, we did acquisitions,” Daryl notes. And although he’s always pursued new business, now they keep their philosophy simple. “We want the customer to call us.” If they call us, there’s a better than good chance they’ll get the business “So we do lots of marketing, postcards, advertisement in restaurant newspapers, [etc.], and that helps us attract those customers.”
Now he also employs a sales team consisting of eight salesmen around country. “Last year the sales team sold $8.2 million in new business for our company, not including acquisitions.” Even Daryl admits this number is unbelievably huge.
“With our acquisition of Facilitec, we were able to put a package together for them [the sales team] to address the needs of what customers were looking for. We gave the salesmen the tools they needed--better reporting, web access, and standardization for customers of products and services. They’re highly motivated but they needed the backend support.”
Our new business comes mostly from the smaller regional chains and mom-and-pop restaurants. Why the success in this area? At the smaller business level, Daryl explains, decisions can be made easier and there’s less hoops to get through than the bigger chains. And although Daryl readily states they can meet the demands of the bigger chains, they can now give the same level of services to the local businesses, the smaller guy.
A Bit of Advice
Christie recalls that it took her and Daryl three hours to clean their first hood, which would only take them about 25 minutes today. Obviously, they’ve learned a few things since the beginning.
“Wrapping techniques to make sure you capture your water are important,” for example, says Christie. “If you wrap your exhaust properly, you can funnel the water into a bucket properly and won’t need to clean everything in the kitchen afterwards. It cuts down on the hours spent on the job.”
What does Daryl have to add? “The more efficiently you can manage information, the better you are.” His computer techie background has come in handy in this regard. Facilitec handles thousands of digital pieces of information weekly. “The more efficient you are at doing it the better you’ll operate.”
He uses billing as an example. “We have two people that take care of our billing department and they bill about 2,400 invoices per week.”
He says that without computer technology, he couldn’t run an organization as big as their business has grown. “And I love the challenges you can overcome with computers. We just gave our field personnel Blackberries, but we’ve been able to incorporate a way to enter information into the Blackberry so it gets more quickly [into our database.]” This helps ensures more accuracy as well as speed.
Networking and Training
Daryl recalls that the technical training school he and Christie attended in the mid-1980s no longer exists, but there is other caliber training available, which he highly recommends. In fact, Daryl was an instructor at Delco’s university extension.
“There’s a huge advantage [for folks who take these hands-on courses]. The people who used to come to my Delco classes were there for four days and got a wealth of information. Schools like Delco’s are excellent, especially when they deal with one subject, which is critical. You’ll get your most bang for your buck.” He adds that you’ll realize a return on your money almost immediately in revenue. “You are going to save [the money] instantly just from the mistakes you won’t make because of the class.”
Daryl and Christie are also supporters of associations, such as the PWNA. “I wish I had an organization like the PWNA to bounce questions off of and ask advice [when we got started]. You can get amazing information, even from competitors,” Christie points out.
“It improves the industry,” Daryl says. Certification training and associations like the PWNA, he says, “offers ways for people to get better, to learn what they supposed to do, and how they’re supposed to do it, and not have such a big learning curve. When I started 20 years ago, I had to learn on my own.”
The roundtable discussions are the most important, in his opinion. “It is all about knowledge and what you can learn. The show and the presentations are good, but that’s about half of what you can learn. It’s interacting with the other people and learning from their mistakes and successes and mingling with them to get their information.”
With continued networking and ongoing certification training, the future will hopefully bring exactly what Daryl would like to see – “a higher standard of quality and care.”