Firm finds sweet smell of success with his leadership

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Erik Grimm was checking out the trash cans at a recent Rochester festival. Nothing unusual about that. Grimm’s company provides trash pickup for a lot of events and he likes to drop in now and then to make sure everything is shipshape.
But this time, something caught his eye: Two women were eating lunch off the top of a Suburban Disposal trash can. Grimm took a photo.
“I sent the shot to the event organizer,” Grimm says. “To me, that photo said: Suburban Disposal trash cans not only look good but they’re clean enough to eat off. So in some small way we improved the customer experience and enhanced the overall festival. That photo was proof we’re doing a good job.”
It also meant that Grimm sweats the details. Maybe that’s because he has a degree in accounting. But more likely it is because he is proud of Suburban Disposal, a family-owned business that has been a Rochester success story since 1962.
Suburban Disposal recently acquired another company, Certified Document Destruction and Recycling Inc. Together the companies offer state-of-the-art document shredding, plastic media destruction, and computer and office electronics recycling.
“It’s great for customers to have one contact,” Grimm says. “The last thing people want to think about is waste removal. It has to be handled efficiently and reliably, and more and more it has to be green, so we’re focusing on that.”
Suburban Disposal is also big on customer service.
“When a customer calls with a question-which bin do I put milk jugs in, or what do I do with old roofing tiles, or how do we get rid of our legacy computers?-we make sure we have someone who can answer the question first time around.”
Since Grimm took over Suburban Disposal in 1998, the company has been on a 10 percent growth track year over year. Certified Document Destruction and Recycling is growing at 20 percent per year. The two companies employ roughly 75 people.
“Over the years, we haven’t really created a tremendous number of new jobs,” Grimm says. “But I think we’ve made quite a contribution to the region. By making continuous improvements to the nature of our operations, by leveraging technology to produce productivity gains, we’ve made it possible for us to keep employees and increase the value of their services.
“In other words, we’ve fundamentally changed the nature of the work so we can keep our people, accommodate an aging work force and pay our employees more. We’re on the leading edge in this regard, on par with the largest waste disposal companies in the country.”
Grimm works with a number of civic organizations. He chairs the Western New York arm of the Volunteers of America, serves on the board of the YMCA of Greater Rochester and is organizing 15 events this year for the Young Presidents Organization.
Grimm’s wife, Susan, is a chiropractor-a good thing because Grimm’s typical day begins at 5:30 a.m. with an hour of swimming, and he’s into bike and ski racing, kayaking and rock climbing. He and Susan are training for a three-day, 90-mile canoe race in the Adirondacks. Grimm completed an Ironman in Hawaii last October. His father, Carl, also has competed in triathlons, and his sister Heidi is a member of the Army’s World Class Athlete Program.
“Family vacations,” he says, “are kind of brutal.” n
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10/10/2008 (C) Rochester Business Journal