It doesn't seem all that long ago I was fired from my career of almost 9 years. I had given dedicated, company colors service day in and day out. I had sacrificed time with family, traveled, long hours, and all the other wording that typically goes along.
In my search for my own business, I tried a multitude of ideas along with a wealth of research, and talking with franchise recruiters. Nothing fit or fulfilled my internal needs or peaked my interest.
Along the way in this journey, a partnership opportunity arose through a couple my wife and I have been friends with for better than 10 years. I can't ever remember discussing work with either of them. I didn't know what their company name was or what their offering was. When they heard I had a job change, Don and Katie presented me with a few different ideas on how to partner with them and expand a new service offering to their existing organization, IAQM.
I went home and reviewed these ideas with Amy. I started doing my research on each service. I went all the traditional routes of Google first, YouTube, then ratings, reviews, demand, competition, risks, concerns, rewards. Over and over after reviewing a product or service, I continually came back to looking at dry ice blasting. I was fascinated and had not ever seen or heard of this.
I am coming up on a year in December with my adventure into dry ice blasting. We bought our first piece of equipment in January. We did our fist mold remediation job immediately following the equipment purchase. It went horrible. Everything that could go wrong went wrong. We had down time, delays, it was not going at all as fast as advertised. Dry ice was turning into water blocks of ice clogging up the line and building up in the unit hopper. We finally finished the job. It took a few hours longer than if we had completed the job manually, with previous methods.
Hard headed, bound, and determined I took on another mold job. Same problems, and some new ones. Still we did not complete the job and save any time or man hours as advertised. It did not take as long as the previous job, but we were not impressing anyone or blowing the doors off. No pun intended.
At it again with another job. I shaved off a little time, the problems I did have, I was able to trouble shoot a little faster. Some of the previous issues I had learned to prevent through research, YouTube, and calling other ice blasters across the country.
DUH! All my previous careers, I built myself up by grabbing onto various mentors here and there. One for business. Another for career. One for personal growth, Spiritual, attitude, a marriage. I needed a blasting mentor who I was not a threat to and could call on any time. I called a couple and posed the mentoring to them. Everyone responded with, "Call me anytime. I went through all the same things. Good luck Willie. It will get better. Don't quit."
Today, I am 11 months into blasting. I can beat any traditional, manual labor methods. We don't deal with the down times. I can see and get ahead of those issues, and or all out avoid them together. I still call on my mentors before, during, and after jobs.
I have seen so many applications for dry ice blasting. We have cleaned inkers, brass fitting equipment, removed grease, oil, and grime build which was compromising the quality output and production of machinery. We have done mold remediation drastically reducing the traditional times and allowing home owners to return to normal living back at home sooner. We have finished a fire restoration and soot removal job in days compared the weeks the job was scheduled to take. We removed spray foam insulation from a home after a lightening strike in under 14 days. The job was forecast at 30 days prior to the introduction of dry ice blasting. We have cleaned and decontaminated equine transports for top performance horse owners to improve the living,transport conditions, and give these owners an edge over their competition.
I am proud to say we have not done a job to date without a raving, written testimonial to follow to date. Clients have thanked us for getting them back into their homes ahead of expected days living elsewhere. Production and maintenance managers can't believe how much production time was gained compared to their previous cleaning methods. Production equals dollars. Downed or quality compromised machinery only costs money. Maintenance, Quality Assurance, and Plant managers all rave over having the product quality output restored.
Most recently, I had a safety manager for a steel facility thank me. She said before, people had to enter into the production equipment space. OSHA was not a fan of this she stated.
We were able to effectively blast needing only line of sight, which we had. Our technicians did not have to go down into their equipment; a chemical, resin, fume-filled, adhesive, poor air quality, hot environment.
We continue work to expand this division of IAQM and get the word out. We have added equipment and expanded our bandwidth. We have multiple technicians now thoroughly trained to safely, efficiently, and effectively operate our dry ice blasting equipment.
For more information about our dry ice blasting and a short demonstration video, click on the link below to go directly to our dry ice blasting page on our site.
To have your questions answered regarding your project, schedule a consult, or project, call (972) 564-0477.
