Business Spotlight: Bryan Michel, President & Owner of Enviro-Master of Cincinnati

TODD: Well, good afternoon everybody. Welcome to today's Business Spotlight. I'm your host Todd Rodden. I'm a certified executive and business coach. I own Aspire ActionCOACH based here in Southwest Ohio. We're thrilled to have you join us. We're also thrilled to have Bryan Michel join us today as well on the series. Bryan is the owner of Enviro-Master of Cincinnati — a leader in health and safety doing deep cleaning and sanitization in commercial applications here in the region. If you're new to the series, we encourage you to hit the subscribe button so you can receive future messages like you're going to hear from Bryan today. So without further ado, Bryan Michel of Enviro-Master of Cincinnati — welcome to the Business Spotlight. If you could be so kind, take a minute and share a little bit more about your background and how you got started in commercial services.

BRYAN: Thank you, Todd. My background is probably best described as — I've done everything from working for the United States Senate to real estate. I spent the bulk of my life in pharmaceutical sales and training, led global teams, developed training solutions for a digital transformation company, and also worked as a consultant for a company specializing in applied behavioral economics. That's really where I got more interested in potentially becoming my own boss. Just prior to this, I was leading a training team for a Fortune 500 insurance company. I had decided to get out of sales after twenty years and wanted to try something different. I quickly found out that salespeople are a little different than HR people — and I was definitely more of a salesperson. [laughter] I kind of knew by day three that it probably wasn't going to be my long-term home. I just happened to have a particularly challenging week at work and got a phone call from a broker who was selling a business. I'd gotten calls like that before because I used to own an import company on the side — a joint partnership with my brother-in-law in Peru, importing private label food — so my LinkedIn profile tends to get flagged as an entrepreneur. I was a little more receptive to the call that week. As the broker was talking, I realized I was already familiar with this business space because one of my former clients from the behavioral economics agency was now essentially a competitor. I used to help them design sales incentives. So I looked at the business model — it was a couple who wanted to retire after eight years — and I saw a lot of opportunity for growth. I bought the company and I've been working for myself for the past three years.

TODD: So that big step from a corporate environment to being on your own — I'm sure we're going to get more into that journey. To help some of our listeners, tell us who your ideal customers are and what services you provide.

BRYAN: That's one of the nice things about this particular organization. This is a franchise, but really any business could be a client. We don't work with residential — just commercial. But if you have toilets, hard surface floors, windows, concrete, patios, dumpsters — pretty much what most businesses have — we have services that can work for you. The bulk of our customers are restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, and fuel centers.

TODD: A great mix. We were talking offline before we got started about your different approach to how you provide these services — both the innovation and, in many regards, the mindset behind it. Go a little deeper — tell us what separates you in the marketplace from other providers.

BRYAN: Everything that we do, there are other companies that do similar things. We just do them a little differently. For instance, we clean restrooms — but we're not just going in and cleaning them. After we sanitize and deep clean, we apply a protective coating over all the fixtures that acts as both a dirt and germ barrier. It's effective for up to nine days. It makes it easier to maintain those restrooms while we're gone — things just wipe off with water. It's kind of like RainX for your car window, but for fixtures. It also has an integrated peroxide compound that continues to kill bacteria and viruses for up to a week, which reduces transmissible disease and eliminates the bacteria responsible for bathroom odors. It kind of keeps cleaning and sanitizing while we're not there. To my knowledge, no one else is doing that. Our power washing team does both indoor and outdoor power washing. We're actually able to power wash indoors because we have a water reclamation system that vacuums up all the water as we're spraying it — so we're not going to flood out a business. That system also lets us use high temperature and pressure inside. Most people don't realize it's actually illegal to power wash into a storm sewer — it's a violation of the Federal Clean Water Act. The Ohio EPA has a bulletin about it, but people just aren't aware. When you're power washing outside a restaurant, there's a lot of grease. If that went into the storm sewers from every restaurant in Cincinnati and Dayton, the Ohio River would be black. You can be fined thousands of dollars for that — $10,000, $20,000 — which could kill a small family restaurant. So we reclaim that water and remove it to be treated correctly. We're mitigating risk for our clients so they never get that call from the township, the city, or the EPA. Even our windows — we apply a protective coating that reduces the surface tension of the glass down to near zero, so things don't stick to it. It permanently bonds to the glass. Abrasion will wear it down over time, but you're not going to clean it off with chemicals. Birds can fly by, do their thing — rain's going to take a lot of it right off. There are lots of other companies doing the basics of what we do. We just do it at the next level.

TODD: So you bought a business that helps businesses put their best foot forward.

BRYAN: Yeah. It's very important for the work environment too. That's the impression businesses make on their customers — and it's also the environment their employees need to live in every day.

TODD: Great examples. So you mentioned you bought an existing business about three years ago and saw opportunities to grow. What have been some of the key growth strategies — marketing, operations, or otherwise — that have really helped get the growth engine going?

BRYAN: Honestly, I think the biggest thing was creating systems. The couple I bought it from had five employees and tried to do a lot of the work themselves. They did a good job — they built a really great foundation — but it becomes really difficult to scale when you're trying to do so much yourself. One of the first things I did was hire an office manager to handle day-to-day operations, which took a lot off my plate. Then, after about six to eight months, I identified one of our senior technicians who had been there a long time, came to the table with a lot of ideas, and clearly cared about the work. I created a route supervisor and manager role for him. His job was to lead the team — so if someone called off, he managed it. That created a lot more stability in the organization, better continuity of service, and the opportunity for quality control visits. QC visits gave us insight into individual performance — not to call people out, but to find opportunities to coach them to get better at their jobs. I'm from the school of thought that people typically want to do a good job. Sometimes they're just not aware they're slipping up. By providing that insight and coaching, we retained customers a lot better. We have happier customers and we've done a great job retaining good people. In a business like this where turnover can be high, creating that structure has primed us for rapid growth. Our first year we grew 35%, and our second year we grew 45%. If I didn't have that structure in place, it wouldn't have been possible.

TODD: Yeah, rapid growth will identify the weaknesses. That's when stuff breaks, right?

BRYAN: Yeah.

TODD: So that's great. Looking back, has there been a past challenge that you and your team had to overcome — and what did you learn from it?

BRYAN: There have been lots of challenges. Probably the most significant was during that year of rapid growth. It came because of one service agreement with a fairly large grocer. We were already doing a lot of different things for them — power washing sidewalks, cleaning restrooms — and they asked if we could power wash their fuel centers. Sure, it's concrete. But the more I looked into it, I realized there was a lot more to it. When we power wash a restaurant, we can inject the wastewater into a sanitary sewer because the grease trap separates out the oil and grease. You can't do that with a fuel center — you're dealing with toluene, gasoline, oil, and other hydrocarbons, and putting those into a sanitary sewer is a fire hazard. So I had three weeks to figure out how to mitigate that. Fortunately, from my background in government work, I knew some people at the EPA. I called them, figured out the regulatory compliance parameters, found a company that could build vacuum systems, designed a trailer, and spent close to $70,000 building out a machine. I found a company to treat the water — I was hauling over a thousand gallons every single night, bringing it back to my warehouse, pumping it into holding tanks, having this company come to pick it up. My warehouse did not smell good. [laughter] It was untenable, and I was having to charge the customer a lot of money to cover it. So I started working with a company out of California that had filtration systems, and I figured out how to build an onboard water filtration plant. I now have a nine-stage filter on my trailer — we reclaim the water, run it through the filtration process, run it back into a clean tank, and just continue to recirculate it. I've been able to reduce the water we use at each location by about 70%. I was also able to reduce costs for the customer — by about 15% to 20% — which they told me never happens. People don't come to them and say, “I'm reducing your costs.” I was able to do that without really taking a hit on my end, because a lot of that cost was going to the water treatment company. That challenge was largely responsible for the growth that year — we were servicing 96 fuel centers twice a year. I only had three weeks to solve it. It was an interesting time. And as a result, out of 106 Enviro-Master franchises across the country, we're now number one in power washing.

TODD: That's a great story — being innovative, finding a solution that ends up saving money, not just solving the problem. As you look forward, what's a current challenge you and your team have in front of you?

BRYAN: So we're number one in power washing, but we're around 60th or 70th in our core product — restroom services. I put so much effort and time into building out the power washing division that I honestly neglected that area. We're still doing well there, but not as well as we should be relative to the rest of our business. So a large focus for this year is to grow that team. I'd like to hire three or four more SNI technicians — grow to about 18 to 20 people. Finding the right people for those roles is a real challenge. And I also want to grow deeper and wider with our existing customers. We offer so many services that can help them. If it's a restaurant, we can do restrooms, floors, front of house, back of house, windows, drain solutions for fats, oils, and greases, power washing outdoors, dumpsters. There's no reason a customer doing our weekly restroom service isn't also having us scrub their floors once a month.

TODD: So building on that — long term, maybe five or ten years from now, where do you see the business going?

BRYAN: Our parent franchise, Charlotte, does about $4.5 million a year in sales. We're doing $1.5 million. There's no reason we can't triple in size based on that benchmark. There are no fewer than 5,000 businesses in our territory in the Cincinnati region. Right now we have about 300 clients — that's barely scratching the surface of what's possible. I'd like to double our customer count in the next two to three years.

TODD: What do you think are going to be the keys to unlocking that kind of growth?

BRYAN: Having a strong sales team. I've built a phenomenal operations team. My operations manager stayed on and has become my right-hand man. My office manager is someone I've been friends with for nearly thirty years. Where I've lacked is on the sales side. I've gone through a couple of sales reps and, even though I used to be a sales leader, I honestly just didn't do a great job of getting the right people in the position. I'm very hopeful about the person I just hired — I think they have a lot of promise. They're going to be essential to that success. I just get pulled in too many directions and don't have the bandwidth to be out there making 20 or 30 calls a day, which is really what this type of business requires. It's a very high-volume, transactional sales model — short sales cycles, sometimes as quick as ten minutes. That's not what I'm used to. I need a partner who can be out there, articulating our message and communicating the value we bring to customers.

TODD: You've mentioned your team multiple times — your office manager, your ops leader. What have been your keys to developing a strong team, and to attracting new talent?

BRYAN: I kind of subscribe to the Richard Branson philosophy — train people well enough that they can go anywhere they want, but treat them well enough that they want to stay. I try to give people as many opportunities to cross-train and learn new things as possible. I realize people are people. Their entire world doesn't revolve around working on my team — they've got lives, families, financial challenges. I try to understand that and work around their schedules, support them where I can. I think letting people know that you care, and doing what you can to support them, matters deeply. They're coming to work to support a family, not just because they want to work for my company. I try to meet people where they are. It's a reciprocal relationship. I like knowing who the people are that work here — who their family is, what their kids' names are, how their son did in the game this weekend. When we do Christmas parties, when we go out to lunch, I want people to feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves. I think that connection drives commitment. Happier team members lead to happier customers — it translates directly to service level, and ultimately that's what makes the company successful. When I first took over, I think there was some damage control to do in terms of culture. The first six months, turnover was just crazy. Now I have people who've been here for three years — people on our SNI team for two and a half years. In this industry, six months is a long time in that kind of role. My turnover is maybe two people a year out of fifteen. I attribute that to hiring well and building a culture where people feel valued and recognized.

TODD: As business owners, we're frequently looking at what we might do differently. If there was one thing you could change, what would it be?

BRYAN: The more systems I can get in place, the better. I'm limited financially — we're a small business and I'd love to have a robust learning management system, a CRM like Salesforce — but we don't have the capital for that yet. I'm in the process of getting a CRM up and running right now, and it's taken some time because I'm essentially building it out myself alongside my office manager. That's going to make things a lot more streamlined on the sales side — the institutional knowledge of what happened on previous calls, why a customer left a year ago, managing the funnel. We've done a good job building systems on the operations side. Now we need to do the same on the sales side.

TODD: Has there been a book, podcast, or leadership mentor that's been influential in shaping your journey?

BRYAN: When I was with the behavioral economics agency, we had to read a book called Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. It essentially quantifies that people don't always make the best decisions — because we're irrational. I have a degree in chemistry, so I like to think I'm super rational, but we're not computers. We're humans, and emotions drive about 90% of behavior. Even when you're analyzing a decision, how you feel about it influences the outcome. The book is written at a layman's level, but it examines the research in behavioral economics — the confluence of emotions and rational thought, and how they drive what people ultimately feel, think, and do. Once you understand that, you realize why a lot of programs and business initiatives fail. A group of smart people in a boardroom designs the most logical solution, rolls it out, and it doesn't work. And everyone's confused — because humans aren't automatons. They're emotional beings.

TODD: A great example with the cabbies. [laughter] We all fall victim to that kind of thinking. So as we get close to wrapping up — what are the best ways for folks to learn more about Enviro-Master and connect with you?

BRYAN: Go to our website — emcincinnati.enviro-master.com. You can reach out there, submit a quote request, and you'll get a call from me. I'll come out and visit you. There's also a phone number on the site to reach our main office directly.

TODD: And as you mentioned, there are over 4,000 businesses in the region that could potentially use your services.

BRYAN: Welcome all of them. [laughter]

TODD: As we close today, Bryan — great insights shared with our community. What are you inspired by right now?

BRYAN: Not to sound overly hokey, but honestly — I like to help people. The reason I got into politics initially was because I wanted to go change the world. Now I have fifteen families that rely on me. That's the thing that keeps me up at night. If we lose a customer or don't have enough work the following week, I have to go find it — because people have kids and families they're trying to support. I've always done a lot of volunteer work, so being an independent business owner lets me combine my philanthropic tendencies with my need to support my own family. I can help people while also earning a living. That's kind of what keeps me going.

TODD: That heart, that spirit of helping people — whether it's your customers, your employees, or your community. Bryan Michel, thank you so much for joining us today on the Business Spotlight and sharing your insights and your journey.

BRYAN: I appreciate the opportunity.

TODD: And to our viewers — we're thrilled to have you with us. Please hit the like button to help us build the community, and if you haven't already, hit subscribe so you can receive future episodes. Thank you all and have a terrific day.