When Jack Tidey started his excavation and septic installation business in 2005, he was working by himself, so it didn’t matter so much when a rainy day prevented him from going to job sites with heavy equipment. There were always plenty of other things he could work on for the business. But it was a different story when he started hiring employees.
“It’s been a major issue,” says his wife Lisa. “We get a good rainy spring that puts us out of work for a little bit. When we can afford it, we have people do cleanup, organize the shop, make cold calls.”
In 2025, the company, Tidey Excavation in Avoca, Arkansas, added a couple of new services that don’t rely on the weather — septic repairs and inspections. Their new lead installer, Angie Bingham, who oversees the septic side of the business, had experience with those skills from her previous employer.
“I was a pumper for five years so I learned the functionality of the septic system — the biology and all that kind of stuff,” she says. “It’s been fun to bring that knowledge over here and get to start doing service calls and repairs. It gives us an opportunity to have work to do when we can’t run excavators.”
And the bad weather actually brings in more work. “We get a lot of pump calls after we’ve had a lot of rain because lateral fields are overwhelmed and pumps start crashing,” Bingham says. “They’re overworked because they’re pushing into a lateral field that’s already saturated. Sometimes it’s a temporary issue and you just tell them to minimize water usage until the water dissipates a little bit. Sometimes it’s an older pump and overrunning the pump has burnt it out. It could be an instance where the pump is bad and we need to replace it.”
Time-of-sale real estate inspections are not required in Arkansas. “It’s unfortunate because I’ve met many customers and even Realtors that assume that that’s included in their home inspection, but they’re not,” Bingham says. “But we get a lot of calls because people want to make sure they’re not buying someone else’s problem.”
Read more about Tidey Excavation in the February issue of Onsite Installer.
