Royal Coulter has done whatever it
takes to make sure his family business succeeds.
With his father’s untimely passing,
Coulter took night classes at the local community college to learn how to run Coulter
Cos. Inc. One of the first things he did was
enter the hazardous waste transportation
and disposal businesses. One of the
company’s landfills
became the third
facility in the country
to receive a hazardous-waste permit,
and this new line of business fueled the
company’s growth for the next 20 years.
Coulter also saw other opportunities to
enter new lines of business that complemented its waste-industry expertise. He
established an environmental testing laboratory that would not only provide in-house testing services for his group of
waste companies but also provide testing
services for local municipalities and industries.
Although testing labs don’t generate the
returns that landfills normally do, Coulter
built a new lab facility in 1995 to accommodate future growth while signs pointed
to an overall decline in the industry segment. The new state-of-the-art facility
enabled the company to incorporate other
smaller labs that couldn’t keep up with the
latest technologies. Today, the company’s
lab is the largest of its kind in Illinois and
employs more than 100 people.
One of the company’s greatest strengths
is that it can provide a wide range of services — hazardous, solid or liquid waste disposal, analytical, consulting and remediation services — that other competitors
don’t have the ability to offer. By leveraging
all of these services, the company has managed to compete against companies 12
times its size.
HOW TO REACH: Coulter Cos. Inc., www.pdcarea.com or (309)
688-0760