Raise your hand if you want to spend time thinking about garbage!
Spoiler alert - no one wants more of their time to go towards managing waste or recycling. No one wants to spend hours poring over invoices. And no one wants to spend weeks unsuccessfully trying to resolve an issue with their hauler.
This is exactly why we’ve tailored our services to ensure you have an ally. When things go wrong - and they can - we have your back. We make the calls, we check the documents - and we make sure the issue gets resolved.
Psst! Check out why solving trash problems can be a waste of your time!
You need a waste ally because:
Your time is valuable
What you don’t know shouldn’t be held against you
Waste mistakes are expensive
You need market expertise
At the end of this article, you’ll know how to protect all of your resources - and prevent costly oversight.
Your time (and your staff’s) is valuable
Resolving waste and recycling disposal issues are time consuming. Why? For the same reason that it takes so long to resolve any vendor issue: haulers have less incentive to remedy a situation cooperate if you’re already paying them.
And on top of that, they don’t tend to be extremely well organized. The customer service rep we first speak with often has to get in touch with the driver or account manager to resolve this issue. This communication gap is just that - a gap. It means more time has to be spent to find out how to resolve this issue, but it also means that there’s an opportunity for the issue to fall through the cracks. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been told by a rep that they would call me back only (you guessed it) to never be called back.
For waste service or billing issues that I resolve, I often find that at least four communications touches have to happen before the issue is resolved. Touches mean that I reached out to the appropriate person at least four times via email or a phone call.This amounts to at least 15 minutes for each waste issue. I actually find that it takes me closer to 45 total minutes to fully resolve the issue. (I currently have a waste issue sitting in my inbox that has taken 55 emails to address - and it’s still not 100% resolved!)
You can’t afford to spend this amount of time on a waste or billing issue - and neither can your staff.
This is part of the reason why Vic Nussbaum of Southern Foods is so thankful he no longer has to manage his waste disposal issues: “Your thoroughness allowed me to spend time ‘managing’ the operations here at Southern Foods, instead of ‘managing’ our waste bills.”
Your time is your greatest asset - and we’re passionate about making sure yours is protected.
What you don’t know shouldn’t be held against you
Let me put this delicately - haulers do not always have your best interest in mind. In fact, they rarely do.
How do we know this? Among the thousands of clients we’ve helped, we’ve found that 90% of them were overpay on their waste. And so many of our clients aren’t passe about their waste! Many of them, like Tad for instance, are proactive about spending and monitoring their invoices. But they still are overpaying on their waste management.
Why? Because ultimately, they just didn’t know what they didn’t know. And what they didn’t know was being used against them. Their haulers write contracts in their own favor - and they had no idea. Their contracts were auto renewing, or they didn’t limit price spikes. They were paying outrageous fees, or were using the most expensive hauler in town.
Haulers have normalized these practices - but that doesn’t mean that you have to accept them.
Learn how to evaluate your waste services - and fix them.
These practices all but guarantee that you’re overpaying for waste and recycling disposal services.
You deserve to have an industry expert find the gaps in your waste and recycling management. You need an independent party to look for, find, and resolve the gaps in your current waste removal process. When it comes down to it, you can’t afford not to!
Waste mistakes are expensive
Ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s expensive.
Not knowing what a good contact looks like can cost you thousands over the period of your term or contract length.
Not knowing that waste fees are actually optional can cost quite a bit too.
And not knowing market rates for waste and recycling disposal can be exorbitant.
We had a client recently who was overpaying by $60,000 a year because they were using a pricey hauler. They thought that what they were being charged was normal. It seemed normal because they didn’t know what other area haulers were charging - or if that hauler was charging other clients the same rates.
To make matter worse in this instance, the client is a non-profit entity and the hauler actually sponsored some of their programs. The client wrongly assumed that the hauler was providing them with good pricing because they were “partners”.
When haulers contract with you, they plan on charging you increased rates over a certain period of time. Profit margins for the haulers almost always increase every year. We’re talking 99% of the time.
Get our free guide to stop overpaying and reign in your spending today!
This isn’t to say that the whole lot of them are bad, or that they’re all intentionally out to get you. On the whole, rate increases aren’t actually a bad idea. Gas prices tend to go up, dump rates increase, and any perceptive business will likely take this into account.
The problem is, these rates typically go above and beyond standard cost of service increases. We’ve seen haulers increase their rates up to two times per year - with 15% increases each time. If you’re paying $100 at the beginning of a five term, you could be paying up to $440 by the end. That’s a 340% increase!
And most companies aren’t just paying $100 for waste each month. They have by multiple pieces of waste equipment at multiple locations. (This is exactly why we always tell our clients that the more locations you have, the greater the savings typically are!)
Let’s use a real world example. Suppose you have eight locations and two dumpsters each with $100 pick-ups at each location. Initially, you’ll start out paying $1600 for all the waste expenses at all locations. But At the end of that five year term, you’ll have seen a 400% increase. Your new rate? Over $6470.00 each month!
That’s money that could have gone toward any number of costs: bonuses, apartment improvements, upgrades at your properties. But it can’t - because you didn’t know you were overpaying.
What you don’t know is hurting your bottom line. Why let that happen? Book a free, informal consult with our CEO, Tyler Brunson, and learn how our expertise can help you save big.
You need market expertise
Sometimes, you need expertise to help you understand what is going on. If you want to buy a house in the south of France (as we all do), you’d likely need a realtor who spoke both French and English, right? You’d want someone who knew the housing market - and someone who spoke both languages.
In a lot of ways, we’re like that realtor. We know the waste industry, and we speak its language. We know where to look for savings, and we have a 95% success rate of finding them.
We know how to make airtight contracts, how to prevent price spikes, and how to reduce fees. These are things we do for our clients every day, in almost every industry - and it’s what we can do for you, too.