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This is a great article about our portable toilet supplier, Satellite Industries.

Twin Cities portable-toilet maker flush with orders

By Susan Feyder, Minneapolis Star Tribune

MINNEAPOLIS — This year’s torrent of natural disasters is providing a mini-windfall for Satellite Industries, a Plymouth, Minn., company that claims to be the world’s largest supplier of portable toilets.

Satellite recently sold about 1,000 toilets for use in earthquake-ravaged Japan. Another 1,000 have been sent off this summer to several areas in the U.S. destroyed by tornadoes, fires and floods, including Missouri, Alabama, Arizona, New Mexico and North Dakota.

“We don’t wish this on communities, but these disasters have certainly helped us this year. They’ve given us a sense of purpose,” said CEO Todd Hilde. The surge in demand from areas in crisis has helped offset a sharp decline in demand because its major source of business, the construction industry, has tanked.

“It’s been traumatic,” Hilde said of the drop-off in business from construction-related customers, which traditionally have accounted for about three-fourths of Satellite’s sales.

A recent trip to Satellite’s Plymouth warehouse found little assembly work being done, with shipping-ready portable toilets lined up like wallflowers at a school dance.

The High Tech Deluxe Flush, an upscale model made for outdoor private parties and weddings, has a subtle taupe exterior and features a stainless steel toilet bowl. Some units are wheelchair-accessible with handrails, and others have casters so they can be wheeled in and out of elevators on multi-level building sites. The company has 11 models.

In a different part of the warehouse a lone mechanic worked to install a huge tank, pumps and hoses on a truck. Satellite purchases Ford chassis, retrofits them and sells them for servicing toilets.

Satellite was founded in 1958 by Hilde’s father, Al, who discovered that toilet facilities left something to be desired when he was serving in the U.S. Army. Both Hildes expanded Satellite over the decades. It now does business in more than 80 countries.

The company previously rented out portable toilets it manufactured. In 1988 Satellite sold its rental and servicing operations to focus on designing, making and selling its products to other companies that rent them out. Satellite now has more than 1,000 such customers, approximately 800 of them in the U.S.

One such client is A1 Evans Septic Tank Service in Minot, N.D., which in the past few weeks has bought about 150 toilets from Satellite. The portable toilets are being used by businesses, hospitals, government buildings and checkpoints for the state’s National Guard, which has been called in to help flood recovery efforts in the area.

“This is by far the busiest I’ve ever been,” said Sandon Varty, who has owned A1 Evans for 12 years. He and his crew of about 10 employees recently have been working 12-hour days, seven days a week, delivering and servicing toilets.

Even though the Souris River has crested, the need for the toilets is continuing as some water mains were broken by the floods. “The city is asking people to conserve water, and that creates a need for portable sanitation,” he said.

Varty said North Dakota’s oil industry boom has kept the state’s home and commercial construction businesses humming.

That’s not the case for most of the U.S., which has seen residential and commercial building activity plummet the past four years.

The downturn has been so dramatic, Hilde said, that the recent spate of sales to disaster-struck areas would have been even bigger except his customers in those areas already had plenty of units they weren’t renting to construction businesses. In contrast, Satellite sold about 10,000 portable restrooms to customers in the Gulf of Mexico area after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, before the economic and construction industry meltdown.