One day, eight years ago, Brian Hina came home from work in the morning, and his wife Susan Snyder-Hina asked, “What are you doing home?”
He’d been fired.
Brian spoke with a few people about working for them, but he would make less money.
“I started writing down all the things I wanted to do, and the next thing I know I had the vision, mission statement and goals all written up,” Brian says. “And I’m looking at it, and telling Susan, ‘There’s nobody out there that wants to do it the way I want to do it.’ So, she said she’d help me.
“And who’s better than having somebody you trust.”
Today, Hina Environmental Solutions LLC focuses on the testing and abatement of asbestos, silica and lead-based paint, as well as mold remediation, radon mitigation and meth lab clean up.
HES is set up to avoid the mistakes Brian saw as a vice president and president of two different companies in the same field.
He made sure that an awareness of culture has been a part of the business from the beginning, and also set up a workflow, from the first client meeting to job completion, that allows HES to do more with less.
Division of labor
The couple found the division of labor easy to set up. Brian likes sales and handles scheduling, operations and production as the minority owner and vice president. Susan handles the balance sheets, profit and loss statements, and human resources as the majority owner and president.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t the occasional hiccup that takes compromise.
As with any other business, your accounting people don’t always get along with the sales people, Brian says.
“So, we don’t see things in the same way when we look at the business,” he says. “She’ll be gripping at me about gross margins and I’ll be worried about sales.”
Unlike many other husband-and-wife business teams, Brian and Susan don’t have rules about not talking about work at home.
“We actually diffuse at night when we go home. We have a cocktail and we sit around and talk about what’s happened during the day and what may need to be addressed,” Susan says.
“We have no kids. We have nowhere else to put our energy. Our workplace is our children,” Brian says.
While work comes home, their personal lives can come into the office, too.
