Twin Enviro’s Liman Reflects on a 50-year (and counting) Ride in Waste Management

In 1969, after his discharge from the Army, Les Liman, founder of Twin Enviro in Colorado, got a job in a restaurant at a ski resort in Steamboat Springs, thinking he’d just be a ski bum for a while. But he was sharing a trailer with a guy who cleaned commercial kitchens who needed someone to haul trash, which was Liman’s start on what’s so far been a 50-year ride in the waste business. He expanded quickly across parts of Colorado, and snapped up other business types along the way, including an environmental testing lab that has since gone global.

Liman got his foot in the door early. The resort area where he landed that first job had no organized waste collection operations, and no competition. Tooling up to service those first few customers simply involved trading his Ford Mustang for a used Chevy pickup truck, but he was on the lookout for more gigs while tapping into advice from a mentor he found, the owner of a trash company in Denver. He fast outgrew his first set of wheels and got a bank loan to buy a 16-yard rear loader.

Liman soon landed a job in a nearby town called Hayden, ratcheting his hauling operation up another 300 stops.

In those early years, the coal industry was doing well, and he moved into the roll-off business, servicing a major construction job for two coal-fired power plants and then got more work with coal mining companies.

That decade he got into roll-offs –the 1970’s— also marked a major turning point that could have gone bad; but it didn’t.

“The town of Steamboat decided to annex the ski area, and the issue was, were they going to extend municipal trash service to this area? That extension could have taken my customers in Steamboat. Instead the town contracted all their work to me,” recalls Liman.

Equipped with a rear load, a front load, a roll-off and a few employees, he could make money – enough to get a loan to keep growing, right along with the burgeoning ski towns.

But it looked like big competition was on Liman’s heels. In 1979 Colorado’s Public Utilities Commission deregulated trash collection so other companies could get started. Just as with the Steamboat annexation, the new landscape, with its potential market disruptions, ended up working in his favor.

“Some haulers were not comfortable with the prospect of having to compete. So, a lot of trash companies suddenly became for sale, and I could get a good deal,” says Liman.

His company, Downhill Pick-Up, was up to 15 staff and eight trucks when he bought a waste company in Breckenridge and Copper Mountain, putting himself on the map in that ski resort area, as well as in Vail.

The potential for new competition was at the entrepreneur’s door again; Steamboat decided not to renew his contract and it let potential competitors sign up for what company they chose. By this point there was another hauler in town. 

“People signed up for the hauler they wanted, but I got most of the work because my name was well known by then,” he reflects.

Around 1981 Liman laid tracks in Western Colorado where there was a lot of powerplant construction and coal mining. And then a nearby jurisdiction opted to contract out the operation of its disposal site. So came another notch in Liman’s belt when he took that job over, landing his first landfill.  He’d buy a second disposal site in Steamboat in 1983.

As the ski towns and construction work continued to boom, Waste Management came in and bought his Summit County hauling operation (Breckinridge and Copper Mountain), and also bought the Downhill Pick-Up name.  

“I kept the landfills and kept competing with them in Steamboat. And I renamed my company Twin Enviro Services. My wife and I had twins by then, a boy and girl, thus the name.”
Liman had a new focus in front of him when he bought ACZ Laboratories, which analyzed monitoring well samples and did other environmental testing.

“It was a struggle for a while. I had to learn the business part of that lab.”

He stuck with it, and what started as a six-person operation has grown to 62 staff and does $8 million a year analyzing samples around the world.

He’s left ACZ co-presidents Brett Dalke and Matt Sowards in charge.  

“One cool thing about Les and his business style is that he gives Matt and me a lot of freedom. But he’s also hands on. He’s a pilot, and we fly together for work, which has been a chance to connect and break down formal barriers that exist in a business setting,” says Dalke.

With a taste for running operations beyond in the trash world, Liman ventured into more new frontier: providing portable toilets for construction jobs. Sales of this new line ultimately led to more waste work – collecting and disposing drilling fluids and other liquids.

He needed a way to solidify the liquids, so he began taking ash from coal-fired power plants to use as a medium to do this.  That liquid solidification business has since dwindled, as changes evolved in the trash world.

“Now we mainly just collect and ship liquids to another facility because regulations got so difficult, and we were too small to comply,” Liman reflects.

These days he’s taking it easy, relatively speaking, working about a 30-hour workweek. Marlin Mullet became the CEO of Twin Enviro in 2014, 18 months after coming on board.

“I had by then seen every aspect of the company, and Les pretty much let me run the company once I became CEO. We had a lot of conversations about strategic direction and how we want to grow. And he and I did solid teamwork to make it work,” says Mullet.

What have been keys to success of his small empire that now includes a liquid waste facility, several hauling and landfilling operations, a materials recovery facility, the portable toilet work and independent testing lab? Here’s Liman’s take:

“From the start I followed the advice of my mentor, who eventually sold out to BFI. That advice was, get control of the disposal sites in my market areas; that would ultimately give me a leg up on the collections side as well. 

I was never afraid to borrow money or keep reinvesting. And that’s worked out really well.”

But it’s not all about strategy and guts. He chalks up some of his success to luck.  

“When I moved to Steamboat Springs (pop: 1,300) who could have guessed that it would grow to 20,000 people with another 17,000 tourist beds? Or that I would get the only public utilities trash permit in Steamboat Springs and be a protected monopoly for eight years, which gave me time to learn the business?” says Liman.

“Between all the opportunities that came my way I look back and say: It’s been 50 years; what a great ride.”