My Father's Strategy

When i was six years old, my father decided to make a leap and start his own business. It was a simple idea and for the first fifteen or so years he was basically the only company in Utah and Salt Lake County the focussed strictly on concrete removal.
At first his strategy was to both tear-out and replace concrete, but he soon changed his focus to tear-out in an attempt to gain the loyalty of the other concrete finishers that you can find everywhere; it worked and for almost 17 years he never had enough time to do all of the work that everyone was sending him.
At first, looking at it from the Porter's Five Forces:
Rivalry- there was none to speak of.
Supplier Power- no real power, they were happy to sale the machines for below MSRP.
Customer Power- none to speak of, who wants to remove a driveway with a sledge hammer? Or they could simply live with the inconvenience of a crummy driveway.
Substitutions - hardly any. the only to even worth mentioning was concrete lifters, but they were almost as much as a replacing.
Barrier to Entry- This is the only real risk he had. The only barrier was the $60,000 to get started.

Overtime the market changed, other contractors started to see haw quickly my father could earn his couple thousand and started to enter the market.
Recently, the rivalry changed.
Rivalry- is high, there are a lot of small companies that remove concrete for residential customers and most every large company has a removal division now days.
My father and I discussed the problem and sought a way to differentiate Ben-Crete from all of the other Removal companies. The solution was to integrate two separate industries: the removal industry and the trash dumpster industry.
By expanding to buy a heavy duty dumpster truck we were able to increase the amount of removal we could do to nearly 250%.
We recognized that most of our work day was wasted running the load of removed concrete to the dump, and waiting for the dump truck to be loaded. By expanding we were able to pull onto a job, drop the first bin and equipment, and run for another bin. Meanwhile the other worker would load the first bin and prepare either for the next bin or the next job.
This expansion also opened up a new revenue pool of trash, that many contractors loved because our bins were shorter, but could hold just as much as any other trash company, not to mention they never worried about the weight because the truck was legal for nearly twice as much as the other companies.
Today our investment of has paid off. the truck paid for itself in one year and now with the slow economy the trash has become nearly our main business each week.


There was