Scott’s Story
My previous experience is in optics. I worked as an Optical Mechanic and an Optical Dispenser for a period of 10 years. During that time, I had no experience in graffiti removal whatsoever, I also had no interest in the subject at all.

I thought my future was going to be in optics. I could see myself moving up the corporate ladder, and this is something I wanted to do.

My brother John’s background is plumbing. He’s been a plumber all his life. He then moved into the wholesale side of the business and started a company that sold bathroom vanities, toilet suites and that sort of thing.

He spent his time wholesaling plumbing supplies to hardware stores.

Then one day this chemist said to him, “When you’re out selling your plumbing products, can you just go to hardware stores and see if you can sell my graffiti removal products?” John replied, “Oh yes, no worries.”

He took it on but nothing ever came of it.

His business struggled on for about 2 years until one day his partner left to move to Queensland, placing him in a bit of a predicament. He asked me if I would like to join him in the business. I thought about it long and hard before deciding to take a gamble. I thought if all else failed I could always go back to optics, as I’m qualified in more areas than most people and would therefore find it fairly easy to get a job.

I would give it 12-months, and if it didn’t work out, I’d revert back to my old occupation. My wife wasn’t very happy about it at all.

But I took the plunge and started selling plumbing products and hardware items. Even though our sales increased, we still had problems with our suppliers, making it difficult for us to supply our customers on a regular basis.

I began taking a closer look at the graffiti product and said, “Why don’t we try to do something with it?”

Well, eventually we began selling three products: a graffiti remover liquid spray, a graffiti remover in gel form and a sacrificial anti-graffiti protective coating.

We decided to make-up a few labels and began promoting the products to hardware stores and local councils. People were amazed as they had never really heard of anti-graffiti products before.

It started selling; hardware stores began putting it on their shelves and it was proving quite a success for us.

The only problem was, people were buying it but not re-ordering, so we wanted to find out why.

We started putting our phone number on the labels. This generated calls from people asking us to remove graffiti for them, as they still weren’t sure how to do it themselves. We also had no experience in removing graffiti ourselves. We were working out of John’s home in Epping. It was a home office set-up, which wasn’t really adequate at all. I was living at Seven Hills in Sydney’s West; John was living in Epping, in Sydney’s North.

But once people started asking us to remove their graffiti, we thought we might as well give it a go. So we bought a little pressure cleaner and we thought this was the way to go – we could make decent money by providing a service and selling our products at the same time.

We began receiving more and more phone calls from clients. I then started searching the internet and found that the Holroyd Council had put out tenders looking for someone to clean their toilets and remove graffiti. We began debating whether we should do this or not. So we thought why not, we’d take a gamble – working hand-in-hand cleaning the toilets and removing the graffiti. We were the successful tenderer.

But we didn’t know how to clean toilets either. We had an outline of what we were supposed to be doing, but we weren’t too sure.

We started working about 18-hours a day, because toilets had to be cleaned after hours. We worked these hours for 18-months, not sure where we were going.

Then one weekend we were surfing the internet and came across another tender for graffiti removal from schools and railway stations for the Department of Public Works. We tendered and made the preferred supplier listing ranked 3rd. At first, we picked up small jobs, because the other companies couldn’t deliver. Then one day the preferred supplier folded and we moved up the ladder, which enabled us to get more work.

We decided the time had come to move out of the home office and a mate of John’s, who owned a factory at Pendle Hill, asked if we would be interested in renting the rear of his factory. We went and had a look. It was dirty, run-down and had mould on the walls, so we cleaned it from head to toe. We fitted the cheapest carpet we could find, and made use of some old desks and chairs. But it was better than the home office and it was something we could call our own. The rent was very cheap; they looked after us and gave us help whenever we needed it.

After setting the office up, we applied for a central phone number, making out we were bigger than we actually were. People started taking us more seriously.

The business was growing more and more. We were still working 18-hour days, but we found with more and more work coming in, we just couldn’t handle it. We knew we had to put someone on. We “bit the bullet” and employed a friend. We gave him some training, sent him out on his way and thought we were doing fantastically well.

At about this time, my pregnant sister, Heather, had just been made redundant. She used to come in 1-day a week to answer the phones. This soon became two days a week and now she is with us full-time.

Getting back to our 18-hour work days, we worked very hard, but we enjoyed what we were doing. We knew we couldn’t go on like that for much longer, even though we had employed another person, so we decided to sub-contract out our toilet cleaning work, preferring instead to concentrate on the graffiti removal side of the business.

Work started rolling in, so we decided to employ another person, again a family member. Everything was rosy and sweet. Business was going well – in fact, it was thriving. Public Works and Holroyd Council kept giving us more and more work. We decided to employ another person, which made 3 all up. With that also came another three cars, so we had 5 people on the road, including John and myself. I was out there removing graffiti during the day and taking my paperwork home at night.

But I knew something had to give.

I decided to take myself off the tools for a couple of days each week just to concentrate on running the business and this proved quite successful.

We soon found that through working with Public Works and Holroyd Council, we began building quite a reputation for graffiti removal.

By the end of the 1999 financial year, the company actually made a net profit of $70,000.

We were stoked with that result and bought more machinery and planned to make some improvements. We diversified slightly, but still 98% of our work was contract work, which was secure. It was steady, reliable and we knew we were going to get paid.

After doing so well that year, I knew we could do even better but I didn’t know how to go about it. I didn’t know where we should be going, what we should be doing, what direction we should be taking, whether we should be taking more risks or even whether we should stay where we were.