Vice President of Environmental Services, IWM Consulting Group, LLC

My name's Greg Scarpone, and I'm an environmental consultant, and I own IWM Consulting in Indianapolis, Indiana. An environmental consultant will get involved with assessments of properties, facilities or land that have been impacted by human activities, and it can be chemicals, accidental releases, historical releases that you find. So part of that is we assess, identify a situation. Yeah, an example would be you have a gas station that was in Muncie, 1930, closed in 1935. They never took their underground storage tanks out, it became a florist, it became a dry cleaner, then it became a drugstore. Then they tore it all down and they turned it into a, let's just say a house. And then some day they do some utility work and 40 years later you dig up and you find this old underground storage tank, and it has holes in it, it's leaked, so gasoline's gotten into the ground. So that's kind of an example of a historical release where past utilization of a property kinda forgotten, left behind, and if someone tries to redevelop, you kinda discover all sorts of interesting things. It can be as simple as a property transfer, so that would be a bank, a lending agency, will ask this type of information. It's called an environmental phase one assessment. Or it could be the person who wants to buy the property. They'll come to us, we'll do a record search, go through all state, local, we'll look at historical photographs. We don't go out and actually get physical samples on the property, but that's something we can get information, two to three weeks, get the information back to the lender or the potential buyer and say yes, this site is clean, no problems, or there's some historical things that might need to be looked into, to we've been on some projects for over 10 years, where we go out and we collect multiple soil and groundwater samples, find widespread contamination, and then we have to go clean it up. And depending on the type of chemicals, how far it's gone, how deep it's gone, it can take years to clean up. But basically part of the cycle of sales is having the contacts, getting involved in volunteer projects, getting involved in municipalities, your local community, the basic marketing, but networking generally. And then from the project management side, I might land the work, but I might also be involved with scheduling soil and groundwater sampling, and I'll take it all the way through the cycle from assessment to potentially remediation. So small business owner, you gotta wear many hats.