When we met with Will Niccolls 5½ years ago for the April 2019 Business Spotlight, he had been in operation for only about 3½ years. With his innovative plans for Green Latrine and his highly advanced strategic market management model, it is fair to say that he was in the process of revolutionizing the Seattle market and that in this past half-decade, he has done it.
It’s a monumental feat, even with his Master’s of Organizational Leadership, but for the brilliant and amiable Niccolls, it was nearly predictable. His 2024 marketing messaging declares Green Latrine as the best choice in Seattle “for all your Porta Potty needs,” and he mentions that it’s a family business and very highly rated in Seattle! All true enough and nothing unusual in any of that. But, wait till you see what IS unique about his proven ability literally to manage the very way competition works in his market.
That may seem patently impossible at first look because his business is not the biggest Seattle player in the portable restroom rental market. Others are much larger. But, that’s what makes the story fascinating! How can he be doing that?
How Niccolls Came to Reshape the Seattle Market
From Academic to Entrepreneur: Will explained in our first interview back in 2019 that he earned his Master’s Degree in Organizational Leadership with the assumption that he would be working in a large corporation in the leadership of some part of the organization. He said, “That’s what I got my MA to do.”
As we discussed in the 2019 article, Niccolls’ green initiative in his startup was a very bold choice for sharing corporate responsibility and for bringing a marketing methodology to the field that benefits Green Latrine (GL) and its customer companies. But, Will Niccolls has been doing something else, something extraordinary in leadership of the fiercely competitive Seattle market.
But, beyond the fundamental influence of Will Niccolls’ advanced broadscale leadership skills on the Seattle target consumer market for his company’s services, he quickly launched an unprecedented regional market management strategy. He began helping other small operators, bolstering their businesses, and mentoring their owners on an ongoing basis! First one, and then two, and then three of his competitors!
He then merged these collaborations into a network of small operators consolidated to offset the power of the two largest competitors in the area (which are both huge national vendors). This move by the Green Latrine leadership is arguably the most forward-thinking approach to market disruption in any industry in the United States.
Unique Family Business in Seattle
At the time that Will and Kyleen Niccolls started the business, their daughter was in early elementary school and their son was a toddler. Their daughter started high school this week and their son started 7th grade. Both kids play a lot of soccer. Their son plays all sports. (The kids wear the GL merchandise to school. Pretty adorable.)
The Niccolls children have been around the business during summer seasonal events. Every summer, they spend time out in the truck with Dad. They understand all the aspects of the delivery process, and at night they come back to the shop with him and help with tasks.
Will sees important benefits for his kids’ development in being exposed to the family business. He reflects on the contrast with more typical lifestyles for youths, “Today’s youth culture is head down and facing your phones. This work is tangible, hands-on, visible, real, not virtual. It’s not some Zoom meeting. It’s a lucky facet for us as parents.”
So, yes, Will Niccolls is a classically normal businessman with a classically normal family life. He expected to spend his career in a position of straightforward corporate management. But, he did not envision himself transforming a competitive market by forming a veritable bloc of local competitors working together to challenge the big industry players — the same kinds of corporations he might have opted to represent instead — and to win together as a unified competitive market force.
Green Latrine Introduces Green Portable Toilet Rentals
By the time of our 2019 interview with Will, the Green revolution had been sweeping through the consumer market in the United States, affecting many, perhaps most, industries. But, as is still the case today, even some of the biggest companies are just now slowly getting around to making moves to go green, or at least a little greener. But, Green Latrine was green before the startup, hence the name.
Back in 2019, Green Latrine started out providing green benefits, which was, as we noted in the original article, “rare” in portable restrooms. A big benefit for customers was the ability for them to offer the green portable restroom option, in turn, via Green Latrine, to their own environmentally concerned customers. Today, it’s fair to say that many more portable toilet rental businesses are offering green(ish) operations for customers’ peace of mind.
But, per our previously printed observation Will Nichols was “a pioneer in the industry when he started GL 9 years ago, virtually standing alone as a green portable restroom business. The Green Latrine concept was groundbreaking.
His position on the situation for his green service in 2019 was, “…it’s a neat element. I’m really proud of it, and we do have some green-conscious clients. But, so far, typically, price has driven more business for us than the green priority.”
Early Pricing Dilemma
Will shared this key information with ALW in 2019 about the transformation of his thinking from the time he started his business in 2015 and our meeting in 2019. “When I first started, I felt like I should do whatever it took on pricing to get a client. So, I was playing the pricing game — matching prices, deeply discounting, etc., and really devaluing my own product. I came to realize that by doing that, I was saying to prospective customers and to myself that I wasn’t worth my own price. At some point, I thought, “Take pride in yourself man!”
Now, as the years have gone by, I tell prospects, I’m not the lowest-priced service in town, but we have amazing service. In fact, customers are stunned at how amazing our service actually is. As time went by, I learned to let new business go, if I don’t believe the client will pay a reasonable price.”
Web Marketing In-House at Green Latrine
Today, Will reflects on his experience as an owner in this difficult business. “The only way to succeed in this industry is just to work. A lot of operators think that just means toilets, trucks, and operations processes. You can have the fanciest trucks and best equipment, but if you aren’t really working all aspects of the business, you’re leaving money on the table. For me, it’s been about getting away from what I’m comfortable with and undertaking new things to make the most of the business.
So, I’ve been training in online marketing schools, reading books, etc. I’ve learned how to use SEO, Pay-Per-Click, Google Ads, Google My Business, and other ways of increasing sales. For SEO, we pay a monthly monitoring fee to SEMrush, and we use CallRail to see where inbound calls originate.
I’ve done 80 % of the web work myself, and I’ve got a marketing contract worker who has done the other 20 %, under my instructions. It’s such a key component of this industry. We’ve both been building our skills and have advanced the company’s web presence together.
Green Latrine Changes Competitive Mode in Crowded Seattle Market
There are 3 other competitors in the area, and we share jobs. We will pass work to each other. We’ve shared employees. We have a family member of one of the other competitors working with us. In a market like Seattle, the big guys are so big that though there’s a ton of market share for everybody, we couldn’t possibly grow fast enough to meet those national brands on our own.
Competing with them is a lot easier when working with our smaller competitors. For example, if we don’t have a luxury trailer available, we’ll frequently rent one from a competitor to provide for our customers. So, we’ll just serve as a reseller of one of our fellow provider’s services in the market.
Explosive Growth of Green Latrine
Our summer employee count is about 35, plus myself. We have a Director of Operations, Scott Turner. He’s a driver of our success. My schedule is pretty seasonally dependent. In the summer, it’s all trucks and toilets, and in winter, I’m mostly in the office. Scott and Jesus have been with us since the beginning when we started hiring 6 years ago. Multiple other employees have been with us 3, 4, or 5 years. Employee longevity has been the key to our success.
We did pick up hugely during COVID. We were very busy during that time. People were looking for the sanitation benefits we offer. We had handwashing stations when the big national brands didn’t, so we were better able to respond to the local builders when the government reopened construction as an essential service. There was a huge spike in web traffic, about a 1,000% increase. (Amazon, Microsoft, and others here in Seattle underwent huge growth, exponential growth, in some cases during COVID. There was also an increase in residential construction during that time.)
At this point, we figure we can handle it if we grow above 30% to 40% it really hurts. It takes a toll on our team, our equipment gets stretched, our trucks are overused, and we run out of toilets on weekends. A growth rate of 20% per year in revenues, year over year, as we’ve been growing, works well for us.
In 2019, we probably had 500 portable toilet units. Today, we have about 3,000 portable toilet units, around 400-500 handwashing stations, other equipment, pump and tank trucks, delivery trucks and trailers, service vehicles, other vehicles, a crane tower unit and a crane lift kit (with precision delivery scheduling), and other work assets. We’re now a $5million company.
Scaling Green Latrine in Seattle
As Will explained in 2019, “There are national and huge regional portable restroom companies here. Breaking into a really well established portable toilet market has really been an education. It’s been all by word of mouth and people who’ve become friends of the business “evangelizing for Green Latrine. They introduce Will to event producers and others who need their services.”
As Will reported in 2019, “Our growth has been phenomenal year to year. Sales tripled one year and quadrupled another. We’ve been extremely fortunate. We really focus on the service. We provide really good stock and high-quality deodorizing.” Due to this high quality of rental products and services, today, in 2024, Will Niccolls’ Green Latrine has thousands of rental units, a fleet of trucks, and a big team of drivers and administrative staff.
The traffic flow to Green Latrine services continues today, at the same high rate as Will assessed in 2019, “Our phone rings pretty consistently with a lot of repeat business and the occasional new business. With new projects from current customers, we’re lucky to be able to maintain the steady flow of business that we have without any marketing.”
Will Niccolls Leads Seattle Market Competitive Reorganization
Here’s the impressive story Will originally shared with us about elevating a peer competitor and the portable restroom rental industry as a whole. He mentioned this only as a peripheral detail until we started asking more questions about this fascinating habit he had demonstrated in the Seattle market. It was one of helping peers and appreciating business owners’ roles in protecting the image of the industry beyond just providing good quality rental products and service:
“One customer we worked with who became a friend shared with me that when his company got the bids for the work we did, they had gotten three bids. There was a higher priced bid than mine. There was mine, which was about ten % less, and there was a third bid that was about 35 % less than mine.
I called the latter competitor and told him, your bid was 35 % lower than mine and even lower compared to the highest bid, vs. a more normal ten or fifteen % below. That’s leaving a lot of money on the table unnecessarily. But, it’s also concerning to prospective customers. The customer in this case ended up coming with me because they were concerned that the bid you offered was too low to deliver quality.”
The competitor took it well, and I’m glad I made that call to help that person. We had a nice conversation. He had actually been in the business longer than I had. Since then, I’ve had the same conversation with two other competitors. I believe in the power of the industry. All of us in it need to do our part to preserve it, for our own, and everyone’s best interests.
For example, there’s a very large portable restroom company here in town that I’ve seen invest in the industry. I want to be a guy who engages in growing and improving the image of the portable toilet industry.”
Culture of Quality Commitment and Innovation
As we observed in 2019, “Green Latrine’s unique 10-point Clean Guarantee is another industry ground-breaker. We’ve seen such guarantees across the portable toilet business and a number of other industries. But, this quality checklist for customers appears to us to be a fresh concept in the U.S. American portable restroom market.”
When we originally asked Will about the inspiration for the idea and his motivation for promoting it as the centerpiece of his service policy, it seemed to be, for him, just a practical matter for optimum health protection. Today, in 2024, he has married that concept to his philosophy on how to retain top talent for his business.
“The quality of the people we bring in and that spirit, that culture of the community working together to grow something, sharing the success, is really attractive to people. For employees to be a part of that is essential for them. They want to have a purpose they believe in. Growth only for the purpose of increasing a business owner’s wealth is not very appealing to people.
For us, investment in salaries, supplies, and equipment to make it a better place to work involves good compensation, including a strong benefits package, and meaningful giveaways. Employees receive fully-paid medical coverage after an initial period. We pay $30 per hour for some drivers.
We have a sizable team, including a manager, a CSR sales team manager who takes inbound calls and does Receivables, a couple of outbound sales reps, and a dispatcher, (for a total of 5 workers in the office, plus the operations director Scott, and me. We also have several managers in the field, about 25 drivers, and 2 guys who work as provisioners. They handle the dump runs to a sewer plant and service some of the tank truck systems.
We outsource repairs to a diesel mechanic. Our pressure washing team is from a second-chance nonprofit employment resource. They wash trucks, toilets, and other equipment, and they make sure the trucks are fully stocked and operational.
In 2019, Will explained, “You do have to be willing to share some of the wealth. We provide a competitive salary, but we also want to give our employees positive experiences.” So, the company gives gifts, tokens of appreciation, lunches, and dinners to celebrate success. We have a Christmas party. We try to make things fun for the guys and do things that other companies may not do to show respect and appreciation for loyal employees.
Advice for Industry Newcomers from Will Nichols
An important management basic in the industry is attending relevant association meetings. For us, those include the American Rental Association, the Portable Sanitation Association International, and several others. You’ll learn, and you’ll meet other portable toilet rental business owners from all over the country. Read all the relevant magazines to understand what others in the business are doing to succeed. I’m still a rookie after 9 years! I want to continue learning.
Further, Will’s valuative philosophy, as he explained in 2019, still applies, “The experience of doing this for a few years has given me time to build the confidence to price my services at the level that I’m worth. At the start, I didn’t do myself any favors with my rock-bottom pricing. I’ve since had to drag those early customers with me through rate increases while trying to maintain good relationships with them. There shouldn’t be any gouging with prices, but there shouldn’t be rock-bottom, no-margin prices either.
As an industry, we should respect ourselves, which means fair pricing and delivering amazing service. Remember that fair customers are willing to pay a fair price for really good service. So, it makes no sense for someone to race to the bottom, slashing prices.”
The takeaways from Will Niccolls in 2019 and 2024 are still ideally aligned with the best general business management training principles: always keep learning, commit to consistent quality, price fairly, and collaborate with everyone with whom you can find opportunities to benefit mutually. That’s the kind of advice for success that we would expect to receive from an industry thought leader like Will Niccolls, and he continues to deliver.