Family Ties

Minnesota’s Flygare family builds a full-service excavating and installation company powered by referrals and teamwork.
Family Ties
Left to right, Dean, Debbie and Darren Flygare operate the 21-year-old family business. (Photo courtesy of Flygare Excavating Inc.)

Interested in Excavating?

Get Excavating articles, news and videos right in your inbox! Sign up now.

Excavating + Get Alerts

Word of mouth was the most powerful tool Dean Flygare had going for him when he opened Flygare Excavating in 1992. Residents in his small hometown of Annandale, Minn., had watched him develop into a first-class heavy equipment operator and licensed onsite installer while working for his brother-in-law, Ed Purcell.

The rural area, peppered with lakes and single-family homes, proved an ideal location for Flygare to build a full-service excavating company specializing in mostly residential onsite installations. To stay busy in winter, he plowed and hauled snow, thawed soil for construction companies and jetted frozen pipes with hot water.

Flygare, 53, runs the business with his wife, Debbie. In 2006, they welcomed son Darren, 31, to the partnership. “I believe he will take charge of the company in 10 years,” says Flygare. “Right now, we’re just happy working together as two adults who happen to be father and son.”

Gaining momentum

Flygare often worked unsupervised as he neared the end of his 11 years with Purcell. The opportunity enabled him to build a solid reputation with community members and other contractors. “Many of them spurred me on to start my own business, but I joined a company in neighboring Saint Cloud instead,” says Flygare.

Shortly after beginning work in spring 1992, he began buying used equipment and freelancing as Flygare Excavating in his spare time. By autumn, he was busy enough to become a full-time small-business owner. When Purcell closed his doors several years later, many of his customers turned to Flygare and have remained loyal.

Debbie Flygare’s experience handling payroll and taxes for other companies made her a valuable business asset and counterpoint to her husband’s impulsiveness. “We’re a good balance because I’m a bit of a risk taker, while she is levelheaded,” says Flygare. “If I were in a buying mode, Debbie made me look at the numbers, decide if we really needed something, then figure out how we were going to swing it. I give her full credit for not letting me go too far out on a limb.”

Until 2008, contractors and homeowners hired him to install 40 systems per year. To keep up with demand, he hired his younger brother, Jason. From age 14, son Darren spent summer vacations working with them. He joined the company full time in 2000.

Installations were usually trench systems or an occasional pressure mound for homes, seasonal cabins and the rare restaurant. Then and now, installations generate 50 to 75 percent of the company’s revenue; the remainder is excavation.

A team approach

Many properties Flygare worked had high water conditions that required more than just a mound or were unsuitable for them. At one such location, Flygare met designer Bernie Miller, owner of Miller’s Sewage Treatment Solutions, and past president of the Minnesota Onsite Wastewater Association. The men impressed each other as they worked to design and install the system.

Although Flygare was a licensed designer, he preferred to concentrate on installations and excavations. “Meeting Bernie was a turning point because he dealt with advanced treatment technologies,” says Flygare. “Now I could refer customers with site problems to him and he referred customers who needed an installer to me.”

Flygare also gave up transfer of property inspections, as they interfered with what he did best. “Inspections are part of Bernie’s business, so we refer them to him,” says Flygare. “We do, however, take ownership of every system we install, and I believe that sets us apart from other good companies. No matter the age of the systems, if we installed them and homeowners call with questions or problems, we help them.”

The largest system the company has installed serves a children’s camp that was adding three bunkhouses. Miller designed individual systems for the dwellings to monitor the performance of different drainfield media. Each had treatment tanks and a pump tank dosing to a drainfield on a hill. One absorption bed had stone-and-pipe trenches, another had two different brands of gravelless chambers, and the third had EZflow geosynthetic aggregate.

Moving on up

Another milestone in the company’s history was building an 80- by 54-foot shop with 45- by 30-foot office and pipe room on 5 acres a mile east of Annandale. The building has three drive-through service bays with overhead doors on both sides.

The facility is far removed from the days when Flygare worked out of his home, then rented half a storage building in town. He eventually bought the property, only to have part of the roof collapse under heavy snow load. Flygare razed the structure and built his first shop. When the business outgrew it, he bought the present property.

Flygare usually kept equipment for several years, then upgraded. The recession taught him to run a leaner business and alter his equipment replacement schedule. “Although things were lean for a while and we depended on Debbie’s income, we didn’t sell any machinery,” he says. “Because of her efforts, we come out looking good.”

The outlook is improved. “The last two years we’ve been swamped until Christmas, then we have four months where things quiet way down,” says Dean Flygare.

Off-season work

Plowing and snow removal keep the team busy in winter. Flygare jettisoned residential accounts when they moved to the new shop, and cleans only commercial lots. When wet, heavy, deep snows overwhelm the pickup trucks with snowplows, they use a John Deere 310 loader backhoe to pile up the white stuff. “This year we serviced some large commercial lots with numerous dead corners,” says Flygare. “The plows had a hard time back-dragging, so we bought a snow bucket for the loader and scoop it up.”

Two state highways run through Annandale, and the pair plowed and hauled snow for the city until it grew large enough to handle its own cleaning. “Now we just remove the snow in our International tri-axle dump truck and Volvo tandem-axle dump truck,” says Flygare.

In 2011, Flygare bought a portable Magnum Gold 3.6 gpm/4,000 psi hot-water pressure washer from Easy-Kleen to clean sewer laterals in summer or thaw frozen ones in winter. Before loading the unit on a Bobcat trailer, they added RV antifreeze to the water in the washer to prevent it from freezing en route.

On site, hundreds of feet of garden hose hooked to an outside faucet often fed the washer. “With that much hose run out, we worried the water would freeze before it reached the boiler,” says Flygare. “The entire operation was a hassle.”

In 2013, they bought a 5- by 8-foot enclosed trailer, mounted the pressure washer and a 100-gallon water tank in the front, and ran the diesel-fired boiler’s chimney out the roof. The pair also used the jetter to flush pressurized drainfield laterals. “Opening the clogged orifices is often all it takes to restore a system’s functionality,” says Flygare. “The problem is most drainfields don’t have clean-outs, so we waste time trying to find the ends of the pipes.”

With recent code changes mandating each lateral have a clean-out with piping in a valve box, Flygare anticipates cleaning more of them. Another work avenue arrived when Annandale required the inspection of sewer laterals for real estate transactions. The pair uses a K & K camera system (Sewer Eye) with Sony digital video recorder to document the procedure.

Warming trend

One irregular winter activity began in 2003 when contractors with major housing projects wanted to excavate basements and footings year-round. In winters with little snow, frost penetrated 24 to 36 inches. “Digging through that much frost is hard on equipment and tough on foundations when backfilling with frozen chunks,” says Flygare. “The answer is ground thawing.”

Father and son visited a heater rental service in Saint Cloud, analyzed the ground-thawing equipment and fabricated their own unit. Flygare bought a 5- by 12-foot-long enclosed trailer. His father, a salesman for a plumbing and heating supply company, ordered the 150,000 Btu boiler, hose and parts. His uncle, a master plumber and boilerman, installed the boiler, a 100-gallon fuel tank, manifolds and valves.

“The heater has six closed-loop systems,” says Flygare. “We built five reels each holding 500 feet of 3/4-inch heater hose with quick couplers that snap onto the boiler valves.”

The hoses, laid on 12- to 12.5-inch centers, were covered with frost blankets anchored against the wind with sandbags or two-by-fours. Depending on the soil and with the boiler running almost constantly, the unit thawed 12 inches per day.

Supporting onsite technology

In 2007, the business faced a serious threat when the Clearwater River Watershed District proposed running a sanitary sewer around the Chain of Lakes and building a wastewater treatment plant. Flygare also believed the plan was wrong for the area, thinking the population density didn’t support it and soils were onsite friendly.

“A manager on the board was pushing the big pipe and stakeholders were there to counter his intentions,” says Flygare. “It’s not right to force people to hook to sewers after they did the proper thing and upgraded their systems.”

The opposition won. Two years later, those who believed funding would be readily available for the project changed their minds and accepted onsite systems as the best option. That winter, the district established a Wastewater Management Task Force. Flygare has served on it from the beginning.

As residents watch Darren Flygare become a skilled equipment operator and licensed installer, they often ask his father what the journey was like for them. “It wasn’t always easy,” he says. “When Darren was 18 to 23 and knew everything, we often butted heads. He had to grow up and I had to learn to let go. That was the hardest part, and I’m still dealing with it.”



Discussion

Comments on this site are submitted by users and are not endorsed by nor do they reflect the views or opinions of COLE Publishing, Inc. Comments are moderated before being posted.