They are pioneers.
They are people who proclaimed, “The old 9 to 5 is not for me!” and boldly struck out on their own.
They are local inventors and they all share a common drive: to see their ideas and dreams come to fruition.
Victor Griffith, Ozzie Chu and James Nesland have all done just that.
Figuring out a better way
Victor Griffith ran a termite and pest control business for 30 years.
Being in hundreds of houses over those years, Griffith noticed that mold was a hard problem to eradicate.
“I actually couldn’t get rid of the mold in the house,” Griffith recalls. “Every time I retested it, it came back. And I thought, ‘What if I created negative air pressure (in the house)?’”
Using tents and tarps that he utilized in his termite business, Griffith began experimenting with ways to suck the air out of the home, carrying with it any mold spores that were disturbed during the clean-up process.
Griffith finally came up with a system that utilizes eight-inch pipes that are inserted through the windows of homes. Devices used on helicopters control dampers on the ends of the tubes allow dirty air to exit and clean air to come back into the home.
“While you’re cleaning on the inside, you’re actually putting a lot of mold spores into the air,” Griffith says. “So this acts like a big old tornado vacuum cleaner and sucks all the mold out of the house.”
The method didn’t work immediately and Griffith had to test the procedure out a few different times on empty homes before he perfected it.
“It took about six months to perfect it and get it running the way it should,” Griffith says.
But in 2002, he invested about $200,000 in equipment and had his FAS-TRAC (Fungal Air Systems-True Removal of Airborne Contaminants) system perfected.
His new business, Breath Easy Mold Remediation Inc., was born.
Griffith says the business earns in excess of $1 million in annual revenues.
“It’s worked out very well,” he says. “We are what you might call a recession-proof business.”
Griffith also has invested in state-of-the-art infrared and fiber-optic equipment that lets him peer inside walls to detect moisture, the breeding ground for mold.
His advice to someone striking out on his or her own?
“Be ready to have a lot of hats and be ready to wear them all and wear them to the point that your employees are proud to work for you and your company,” Griffith says. “Working right with them gives you respect from them. And that respect for you will give you the best employees you can get. That is the key to this business or any other business.”
Why don’t we start something?
Ozzie Chu was enjoying a happy existence in research and development at Tropicana in Bradenton until 2004.
That’s when, after working there for six years, Chu learned that the company was moving its corporate headquarters to Chicago.
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