Return to Virginia Business - May 2001

Minding Your Business
Blue collar dollars

Dot-coms may be tanking, and major corporations are laying off employees by the thousands. Yet two blue-collar guys are hiring more employees than ever and generating so much business that they can’t afford to slow down. In fact, between 1997 and April of this year, their company’s revenues have grown from $40,000 to $3 million.

The secret? "I’m from the old school of hard knocks," says Steven Vaughn, president of Custom Contracting Inc., an asbestos abatement and lead remediation company headquartered in Pulaski. "I don’t even check my e-mail."

While the rest of the country was going bananas over the dot-com revolution, Vaughn and James Minnick, his partner and vice president of the company, were growing tired of working for someone else. With nearly 30 years of experience between them, the duo decided to create the company with money acquired from the profit-sharing program of their former employer, Hico Inc., in Christiansburg.

Vaughn’s property in Pulaski is the site of the main office. Seed money, completely from the pockets of the two partners, totaled $12,000, and was used to pay the secretary and begin the work. "We didn’t even draw a paycheck in the first year," Vaughn says.

Vaughn and Minnick only did roofing, painting and other odd jobs in the beginning because they could not afford the insurance costs to do what they wanted: asbestos removal. After one year, however, asbestos removal became their primary business. And the profits took off like a rocket: Revenues jumped to $650,000 in 1998. Soon after, the company landed its biggest job — a $1.4 million contract for asbestos removal work at the Nassau International Airport in the Bahamas.

Part of its success can be attributed to the only loan the company has accepted. Virginia Mountain and Housing Inc., a venture capital funding company in Christiansburg, gave Custom Contracting $20,000. While the loan was instrumental in the company’s phenomenal success, Vaughn is a man who has been on his own since he was 15 years old and doesn’t like owing anybody anything. "We paid off the loan two and a half years early," he says.

And despite the growth of the business, Vaughn is not interested in accumulating a lot of debt. "We don’t owe money on the equipment or anything — we own it all," he says. "When we opened our other office in Radford in 1998, the building was $200,000, and we paid for it in cash. If we can’t pay for it [up front], we don’t need it."

Vaughn and Minnick maintain a hands-on approach to the company, managing all of the projects themselves. But the goal of the company’s future is to grow slightly bigger and level off. "I don’t want the company managing us," Vaughn says.

— Holly M. Rodriguez

Return to Virginia Business - May 2001