We are a dealer for multiple vacuum truck manufacturers. Some of those include Presvac Systems, in Canada, Imperial Industries, Wisconsin, Vacall Industries, owned by Alamo in New Philadelphia, OH, and RapidView, in Indiana. We also distribute for US Jetting, a manufacturer of jetting equipment out of Georgia. We sell most major brands of vacuum pumps and blowers, including Massport and National Vacuum Equipment pumps. Trucks we are selling can be found in the Truck Paper, published by Sandler. It’s a classified ad forum for selling commercial trucks. We also attend the annual WWETT show as another important way to connect with people and provide information.
Vacuum Sales – Our Role at the WWETT Show
At the WWETT show, we support the equipment brands at booth locations there with members of our own team. We go to their booths and engage with their visitors, to answer questions and offer information about their trucks.
As a distributor for them, I think we serve best in a support role at the event. My father started our family business when I was just 11 years old, so I grew up in the industry. I’ve been attending the WWETT show since 1982, when I was a Junior in high school.
Growing A Family Business
My pop was a pipefitter. In 1977, he was running a big crew for Mobil Oil in Paulsboro, NJ. One of the refinery cleaning contractors asked him to build a vacuum truck. He built that himself. We built the first couple ourselves, and then we became a distributor for Presvac, in Canada.
He started as a sole proprietor in 1977, and we incorporated in ‘82. I eventually became partners with my father, and I’m currently President of the company. My pop passed away in 2001. In ‘03, I bought out my mother. My father was a really smart man with a great mechanical mind. When I got out of school and came on board full time, he handled the mechanical side and I handled the sales.
My mom recently passed away. I have 3 kids. My children are all heavily involved in the company. They’re helping build the business. We’ve pretty much quadrupled the revenues since my dad passed. My oldest son, Jimmy, handles equipment sales. My younger son, Tommy, handles service, including rebuilding pumps and other equipment. My brother-in-law, Bill, oversees the shop and parts.
I’m a sales rep as well. We have a couple of other sales guys, for a total of 4, including my son and me. I do some cold calls, but I’m more of an order-taker now. We have a lot of old customers that I’ve been doing business with since I was a teenager. So I don’t really go out on the road a lot, unless a guy wants me to help build strategies.
My youngest, my daughter, is in the office. She helps with bookkeeping, cash flow, etc., on the financial side, and my wife is the company’s CFO. She handles all the financial aspects of the business and runs the office.
VSI: Small Business – National Brand
We do push our VSI brand quite extensively. Every truck gets our mudflaps and sticker. The main thing I want to get across to people who need the products we sell is that we have over 100 years of combined experience in our family team.
We truly care about our customers. We become friends with our customers. We understand what downtime is to them. In the service industry, that’s the killer. As long as their equipment is down, they’re not making money. A solution we offer is our Code Red service structure:
Code Red Service: If a truck is down, we pivot and shift priorities as necessary to triage it, figure out what it needs, and give it the immediate treatment required to get it back up and functioning.
Code Blue: This is our normal operating level for pre-sold equipment.
Code Yellow: This is our mode of handling stock equipment that we offer for sale.
This service priority code system has contributed a lot to quadrupling our revenues, because it has demonstrated to our customers that we understand their urgent priorities and make those our own.
Planning for Growth at VSI
We’ve done a lot of future planning too, in addition to implementing our highly responsive service system, and that planning has further facilitated our growth goals. We’ve outgrown our parking area. We have a 10,000-square-foot building. We’re looking for a bigger property now. The new one might be 12,000 square feet, and maybe laid out a little differently. We want 6 to 8 acres
We’re planning for the next 20 to 30 years of growth. We’ve worked really hard, and I am personally very content with what we have. But one of my and my wife’s biggest goals is to eliminate debt for ourselves and our kids. When we bought my mother out, we were burdened with a lot of debt. That’s all gone. We don’t like debt. We want to make sure we’re debt-free when we decide to retire. We’ve reached that point of freedom from debt, and we want our kids to be able to take over and not have debt in the future.
They’ll have a brand-new facility, but it will be self-supporting. We want it to have a training room, where we can bring in customers, maybe 15 to 20 people at a time, and share our knowledge with them. A couple of Open House days in a place where we can do training with equipment — I think that will go a long way to show how we feel about our customers.
Service Foundation for Sales
Service has carried the Sales Department at our company. We want to make sure that every piece of equipment we sell is of the highest quality, then we back it up with service. We also have a rental business that we started in 2008. That’s a service-intensive business too. Ours is just a small rental shop compared to bigger services of its kind out there. We offer liquid vacs, combo jet vac trucks, etc. for rental. Right now, everything’s out on rent, except one piece, a street sweeper truck. That’s kind of a new service for us.
The Nitehawk Distributor for New Jersey
We’re the New Jersey Nitehawk distributor. We would like to expand that service. We don’t want to forget what got us here, but I would like to be a serious player in that area. We have sold a lot of Vacall sweepers. Primarily, what we sell for Vacall is their combo unit by Gradall. They have a catch basin cleaner, and they can do a sweeper. They’ve gone to a single engine machine, which a lot of operators have discovered they prefer now. Nitehawk is smaller, a 5-yard machine, and Vacall is a 10-13-yard machine.
VSI Inventory and Sales
We usually have about 20 pieces of equipment in stock, a mix between new and used. [In response to our question about water trucks, Jim responded]: Yes, we do build the water truck. I don’t go out and solicit sales of water trucks. I do have customers that come to me. We also just finished building one for the Delaware River Port Authority.
We built them a Vacall combo jet vac truck. We’re going to do two more for them. We’ve done some water trucks for DuPont. I’ve sold them water trucks and some vacuum tank trucks. And we built a water truck for the Port of Wilmington, just for flushing parking lots, etc.
The VSI Dream Team
I think the key to success is putting the right people in the right positions. We have about 20 people on our team all together. For the core business, which is to handle selling trucks, we have about 5 people. There’s my wife managing finances, and the rest are support staff in the office. We have a sales coordinator and a marketing person. We have about 8 people out in the shop, including Billy. I oversee operations. We do have a cleaning person; we sub that out.
My best overall advice to someone entering the industry would be to surround yourself with good people, and plan. Make sure you plan for the future.
For information about Vacuum Sales, Inc, Lindenwood NJ, you can call (856) 627-7790, or visit vacuumsalesinc.com.