The Green Industry's Resource Center

NEUSWEDE · #11 12-03-2011, 05:26 PM

Question about the business. What end are you making the most profit on? Are you doing clearing and then you just process it or is it like a municipality thing from storm damage. Are you able to sell off what you process to a mulch or compost company?

good looking operation though.

Kepple Services · #12 12-03-2011, 06:54 PM

2 more pics of the yard. I took more but some dont want to upload, weird... I took one of the grinder and others of the yard. One is a truck of ours loading for delivery, the other is our 544J with the largee bucket on we use for mulch. Got an order for 1300 yards, and delivered 500 today. We need a 100 yard walking floor next.

Kepple Services · #13 12-03-2011, 07:06 PM

A little about us, and me, I started my own company about 7 years ago, and when the economy took a crap I went with it.... Thus the Kepple Services name. I knew the 2 partners in this company and they where struggling also so we talked and came up with a plan. It was litterally at a point of something needs to change or give it up. They both have other full time jobs so this was a "also do" for them. They had 2 grapple trucks and a few accounts. I started as the only employee/manager/mechanic/everhything person about 3ish years ago. I worked(and still do actually) about 60+ hours a week hammering away at building it with them. One partner started going after the accounts, the other filled in as a driver when he could and I drove my ass off... About a year later we needed another full time driver, and hored our 2nd employee. less than 6 months later we needed another truck as a backup/fillin truck as we where getting busy enough that if one went down we are in trouble. Within 6 more months we needed another full time driver in that truck also. At that time we where taking most of our material to a landfill that we had a price agreement with, and the landscape debris had loads of trash, whatever in it... and was spending 20K a month or more in dump fees.. We then found someone else who was starting/running a yard and attempted to partner with him. We bouth the 2 laoders and the excavator then with a full line of attachments. The partnership thing didnt work out and we knew at that time we could not go back to landfilling it and opened our yard about 3 months ago. The grinder is our newest addition to us, its a used morbark 1300 tub with a 860HP cat. During all this we also started taking on larger jobs, like the 40 acre land clearing job, demo work, hauling, etc.

I know thats a whole lot of information, and its not even half of it, as we are still figuring it all out 8-)

Kepple Services · #14 12-03-2011, 07:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by NEUSWEDE

Question about the business. What end are you making the most profit on? Are you doing clearing and then you just process it or is it like a municipality thing from storm damage. Are you able to sell off what you process to a mulch or compost company?

good looking operation though.

I would have to say the hauling portion right now, as the yard was just a way to eliminate our dump costs, and bring in another revenue stream. But I see the yard as being equal to if not a larger profit area for us. One thing I forgot to mention is we are leasing land from a large 260 acre C&D landfill as process all thier material that they bring in as well as what we bring in and what out own customers bring us. We will process storm damage material also if(when) another storm hits us here. This landfill processsed 1+ million yards the last large storm we had. We can(and want to) sell off everything we bring in after processing. The wood we process into mulch, as i said earlier, and sell that. The other greenwaste we can sell for a few different things. We do have an order from a composter for a bulking agent and thats exactly what we have. We are talking to another who wants 50,000+ tons a year also.

Dan85 · #15 12-03-2011, 08:24 PM

Great photos, thanks for sharing!

ARP · #16 12-04-2011, 08:47 AM

Hope you're getting a little time off today Kepple! When you get a chance, please check you PMs.

Jelinek61 · #17 12-06-2011, 02:12 PM

Thats a cool operation you got going there. a lot of companies around here dont realize the value of their yard and tree care waste. I've thought about starting a composting side of my business before but never took the steps to actually do it. Anyway, keep the pics coming. we all like pics of equipment.