The line of successful powersweeping business owners in the Blackerby family has continued to grow in central Kentucky over three generations. Today, Jim Blackerby Jr., Owner, Lexington Pavement Sweep, and his son Jim Blackerby III, Owner, Louisville Pavement Sweep, are perpetuating this great tradition. Both provide commercial sweeping solutions to customers with properties of virtually all types and sizes. Jim Blackerby Jr. has been serving the Lexington market for over a quarter of a century. We were fortunate to have the opportunity to meet with him recently and absorb some knowledge from this great industry veteran.
Here, Jim Blackerby Jr. shares some of his reflections on the range of opportunities, changes, and challenges he has encountered through his exemplary leadership career in this field of heavy-equipment operations and B2B service management:
Origin of the Blackerby Industry Legacy
My grandfather was a real estate developer. He owned a shopping center, and after his death, his four kids managed it. I was only about 17, but I was interested in business, so I went to their monthly meetings to listen and learn. I kept hearing them complain about how dirty the shopping center parking areas were, so I asked if I could clean them. They said, “Why not?” They reasoned that the condition couldn’t get much worse, so they had nothing to lose by letting me try to do it.
I would walk the shopping center until I had covered every inch of it. I’d carry a bag and put probably a thousand cigarette butts in it. In those days, everyone smoked, and areas for public access were all wall-to-wall cigarette butts. I upgraded to a bucket, but you couldn’t just walk into a store and easily get litter pickers like you can now. So, you picked it all up by hand. [Jim jokes:] Now I feel like I’m immune to every disease.
After graduating from the University of Kentucky, I became a stockbroker with Dean Witter. After 5 years in that sales career, we had an outside sales firm come in to pitch their product, which was Managed Futures. They told us we needed a product that could increase in value even if the market was in a period of decline.
They said, “We needed something that could zig when the market zagged.” Their rep said, “Let’s face it, anyone could have made it in the past 5 years of a bull market.” That statement was unsettling enough to get me thinking about an alternative income stream. I thought back to 15 years or so earlier, when I was picking up litter at my family’s shopping center.
So, I went back to pursue the family parking lot cleaning idea. Dad said, “Sure, you can do it if you want to.” Then, a client discovered I was cleaning parking lots and asked me to come and do his property. It wasn’t long before I was presented with another property, one that was too big to do by hand. So, I bought a sweeper truck and planned to have someone else drive it. I was going out at around 10:00 pm to do the power sweeping work, and then, in the morning, I was going to work as a stockbroker.
By the 6th month, I already needed a second truck, and then a third soon after that. But sitting at my desk one day, I found myself reading an article and realized I didn’t know what I had just read. I tried several times and still couldn’t focus on it. I was just too exhausted. So, I decided it was time to stop doing both jobs. It wasn’t fair to my financial customers at that point. I went from there to adding trucks and growing Lexington Pavement Sweep.
I found it amazing what people can do in one day to a parking lot. It can start the day clean and end with trash overflowing from the trash cans and thrown everywhere on the pavement and in the landscaping. But when I left the property, it was beautiful. I would think, “Damn, instant satisfaction!” With each lot I cleaned, I had the same great feeling. The sun would come up every morning at the end of my work night, and I didn’t even feel like I had worked.
Lexington Pavement Sweep Business Model
We offer powersweeping service across about a 100-mile radius around Lexington, and we perform just about any related service our customers need. That includes basic day portering tasks like litter pickup. We clean up dumpster corrals, fence and bushlines, grass areas, and homeless encampments, and we haul away illegally dumped bulk items. We also provide snow and ice control.
The rest of the world is sleeping while you’re out doing what we do. So, the lots are empty. We cover almost every inch of the property and see everything. I would be surprised if many of the property owners know the exterior conditions of their properties as well as my drivers and I do. So, we’re able to inform the property manager quickly of any issues they need to address, and we promptly follow through on any requests they make for us to provide the solutions.
The percentages of our revenues from each of our service lines are about 60% from parking lots, 10% from portering, 20% from construction (mostly road construction) and industrial facilities (mostly factories), and about 10% from municipalities and HOAs.
Our company is a member of 1-800-SWEEPER. It’s been an excellent affiliation for us in generating new business, and we can call any fellow member and ask questions about anything we might need to know. With us all scattered throughout the country in different area codes, we can speak freely and openly with each other and help each other without competitive concerns.
Equipment at Lexington Pavement Sweep
We have about 16 trucks, including 8 retail parking lot sweepers, 2 construction sweepers, 3 snow removal trucks, and 3 day portering trucks. The construction sweepers are Victory Mark 3s. The parking lot sweepers are Nitehawks and Victory GXs.
The NiteHawk is hydraulic. They require almost zero maintenance, other than oil changes, filters, etc. The maintenance they do need is very easy, and we have had minimal downtime over the years.
Jim’s son, Rhys, sitting in on the interview, added, “Dad has had a close working relationship with the NiteHawk team. When we have had questions, they’ve always had our back. They’re also very good sweepers for parking lots. They can pick up cups, papers, and all kinds of sizable debris. We have the Victory Mark 3’s for picking up rock and heavier material. The GX’s are perfect for parking lots and can perform light construction cleanup when needed.”
Our in-house mechanic has a fully outfitted repair truck, so he can go out and fix a vehicle broken down on the side of the road. It’s been extremely helpful to have a mobile fleet repair truck.
Day to Day with the Lexington Blackerbys
I’m not the mechanical kind of guy. I’m probably more of the computer spreadsheet kind of guy who likes to get dirty too. I get the guys started on some nights. Rhys gets them started on the others. I handle incoming checks. He does the invoices. I go to the garage when needed. We each do some of everything. The best part is that we do a lot of the work together.
Jim’s younger son, Rhys, is growing in his role toward becoming a fully-fledged business leader, with his dad systematically teaching him everything he knows. About his career development, Rhys said he sees himself as a Jack of all trades, master of none, at this stage. But he acknowledged that he is working to become a master of all those trades in his expanding management purview.
Rhys’s older brother, Jimmy, who owns and operates Louisville Pavement Sweep, is 4 years older. Rhys reflects, “Watching him, and watching my dad, has been the most important part of my own development process. My typical days are in quality control, driving trucks, getting the guys going, and other tasks. I’m the driver of our construction and city sweeper truck. I do admin work, fleet management, and the scheduling.” He added, “My brothers and I all grew up seeing Dad’s hard work; we always knew what hard work was. Fortunately, I enjoy doing the same kind of work he does.”
Quality Management at Lexington
Rhys explained, “We do customer site visits routinely to make sure everything looks in order in the daylight. We check in with our customers to hear their thoughts and stay in touch with their changing needs. Our employees take photos, before and after servicing a property. They will take pictures of any problems that need to be addressed at the site. A lot of our customers manage multiple properties. When they call to add service for a new property, that’s a perfect opportunity for an additional check in to help ensure customer satisfaction.”
[Jim continues] We know we’re performing consistently high-quality parking lot sweeping. So, if we don’t see that someone has spray-painted graffiti on a dumpster corral or side of the building, or dumped a couch, or that there’s some other reason to call the property manager, we check in with a phone call to make sure we do not allow too much time to go by without talking with the customer. We work on cultivating relationships.
Internal Culture of Lexington Pavement Sweep
Our right-hand man in every aspect of the business is Jordan Miller. He’s been with us about 13 years. Without him, we couldn’t do what we do. We know how fortunate we are to have him. For team management, we have our most knowledgeable and trusted leadership group. We call it our Core 4.
Blackerby’s Lexington Core 4: The Core 4 answer questions, do training, and act as shift supervisors. In that group are our two head people, Jordan and Shawn Gilpin. They serve as our lead trainers. Every new employee spends the first two weeks split between these two professionals, then the next training period with the other two of the core group.
I would like to have a Core 10, a Core 20. I want everybody to feel the same pride that I do in what they’ve done each day. I work for Lexington Pavement Sweep. I’ve got my purpose, they have theirs, and none of us can succeed without each other. We’re all playing an important role in the business.
Advice for New Powersweeping Business Owners from Jim Blackerby, Owner, Lexington Pavement Sweep, Kentucky
You’ll have to have several shopping centers to pay your bills, and sweeper trucks are now at least $100,000, so, for most new businesses, I think starting with a used truck is the only thing that makes sense. With any sweeper truck, you’d better be mechanical and meticulous. You may want to ask yourself, “Do I even need a truck for your first place?”
You could still take a bucket and get yourself a picker tool to start out in many places. When you build up enough total area to clean that you can’t do it all by hand, then you can advance to getting a truck. But you need a base of revenue to buy a truck, and you can find dozens of smaller places perfect to start with the bucket to build up that base.
Rhys added, “I am 32. Though I’m a younger person in this industry, I would say be sure you have the mental fortitude to handle everything it takes, across the board — the employees, the customers, the challenge of getting new customers. Every day is different. You never know what to expect.
If you think you’re going to have a 9 to 5 schedule and plenty of regular time with family, you should know that it’s not likely to be that way. With problem-solving and countless surprises, it can be 24/7. But if you like seeing something go from bad to good, dirty to clean, it may be a perfect business for you. Just be ready for the grind.”
On the Blackerby Family’s Industry Legacy
Jim Blackerby Jr. and his older son, Jim Blackerby III, have built two thriving businesses in Kentucky from the ground up, both of which are respected employers in their communities. Further, Jim III has developed a unique and highly effective software platform for sweeping business management, which is now utilized via subscription service by other companies in the industry. The senior Blackerby has also trained and coached his younger son, Rhys, who has become a stellar management contributor in his own right.
Jim Blackerby Jr. has created a great family legacy in our industry. Yet, he’s a little amused by that notion and makes light of it. [Jim joking] I have a third son in Nashville working for Metropolis, which produces technologies for parking garages and parking lots, like electronic license plate readers, cameras, etc. I don’t know if he was possibly prodded toward that career by being around parking lots and a parking lot sweeping business.
Only in his early 60s, people in the family are already starting to ask him about whether he has an exit strategy to shift over into retirement. In response, he merely jokes about the problem of what to do about his cell phone number if he retired. After all, it’s the main contact number for the entire company.
By our observation, it is certainly in the interest of the industry to keep Jim Blackerby Jr.’s expertise contributing to the betterment of the field, from Kentucky outward. So, while we wish for him to enjoy his life fully, we hope his answer to the cell phone question is — don’t retire.
For information about Lexington Pavement Sweep, Lexington, Kentucky, you can call (859) 533-9065, or visit https://lpsweep.com.