Demo Diva: Building a Business from Disaster

At a crossroads after Hurricane Katrina, Simone Bruni created Demo Diva out of a need to make a different and be a part of the cleanup process, and ended up turning the business into a huge success.

New Orleans, LA-based, Demo Diva, grew out of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Owner, Simone Bruni, was originally involved in the hospitality industry, however when the hurricane hit in 2005, many homes and businesses in the city were devastated. As a result, there were no jobs available in the hospitality industry or any other local industries since almost everything was shut down—the main business was cleaning up debris. “I wanted to be a part of rebuilding New Orleans. Everywhere you looked there was equipment coming into the city for debris cleanup,” says Bruni. “It was the first time that I was really tuned into measuring debris and storm debris cleanup, trash, etc. I became in tune to the fact that it’s a big business. Being that there was really no other industry at the time, I had to make personal decisions about how where I was going to go, so I got involved in the whole construction debris world. It was a chance to be something that was so much larger than me. There was a passion in the city to be a part of something and that really is what drove me—a sense of community. It was a fantastic opportunity to make a difference in our society.”

After deciding that is was an industry she wanted to go into, Bruni wanted to take a different approach and look at it from a marketing aspect. When she first started Demo Diva, she did not have any intention of owning equipment, instead focusing on marketing and getting the contracts. Initially targeting women for demolition, cleanup, gutting and hauling, Bruni explains it was because she assumed that men wouldn’t know what she was talking about. However, she did make contacts in the industry who had the equipment and who would haul debris offsite. “Once I realized I loved the industry and I wanted to be invested in it, I invested in excavators, trucks, bobcats, dumpsters and painted everything hot pink as a signature color,” says Bruni. “I had no idea that when I started Demo Diva that in two years, it would catch on the way it did. The city really embraced me and suddenly it wasn’t just women hiring me but everyone. We started out a small business on an 8-foot card table and within six months, there were two employees working out of my house and we were subcontracting everything out. The first four years after Katrina, we were slammed with flooded houses.” Now, not only does Demo Diva serve all of New Orleans, they have also worked on all of the Mississippi gulf coast, and have gone north into Baton Rouge and all of southeastern Louisiana.

Marketing and Growing the Company

Initially growing rapidly to accommodate all of the flooded properties, over the last few years, Demo Diva has whittled down to steady projects and Bruni is satisfied with the point that she is currently at. “I am at the most content I have been in the seven years I have been in this business/industry. I’ve got a fantastic staff. I have now a pool of subcontractors that I can work with. Although we still work on flooded properties, now we are doing a lot of blighted properties. The city of New Orleans has about 30,000 blighted houses and we have helped to take down around 10,000.” She also points out that they are busy on commercial and industrial jobs, where she works closely with an abatement company on how to disposal of hazardous material, like asbestos.

Marketing has always been a large part of Bruni’s strategy to get Demo Diva’s name out there. Her dumpsters are custom-made with welded 12 foot panels added onto the side of dumpster so a 4 x 12” graphic of the company logo can roll around the city as mobile billboards. “I own a fraction of what the largest dumpster companies own in this city but we appear to be neck and neck,” says Bruni. “I keep my dumpsters constantly in circulation and graffiti-free. I look at it as we are not in the trash business, we are in the marketing business, we are in the business to sell demolition and debris removal.”

Bringing her marketing knowledge over to the trash business, she has focused on making it fun and that includes sponsoring and being a part of many annual community events. In May, Demo Diva will be participating in Lemonade Day, which is a national incentive for kids to have lemonade stands across the country. “I will be staking the corner by my office and we will be putting a pink, pressure-washed dumpster there where the kids will actually be serve lemonade out of it. We will also have the big, pink excavator out there holding a basket of pink lemons, flying an American flag and selling pink lemonade. I am teaching these kids, I have made money in the trash business, in the dirt, and you can too and have fun,” says Bruni. Demo Diva has also mentored girl flag football teams, participated in community parades in one of their dumpsters, throwing pink socks and pink flower seeds. In addition, Bruni has spoken at high schools, and homeless shelters, encouraging people to have hope. “I’m a big supporter of a drug rehab program called Teen Challenge because I believe everybody deserves a second chance. I’ve also partnered with New Orleans Mission, a homeless shelter. They have started a re-entry program for men to get back into the workplace and I have worked with them to get workers for particular projects and these guys are so proud to put on a pink Demo Diva T-shirt with the yellow safety vest and hardhat and they felt like they were part of something.”

Facing Challenges

Success does not come without some challenges and at the beginning of the company’s development, Bruni found that she had a hard time developing some relationships in the industry because there was still a mentality of ‘the good old boys club’. “If I don’t go fishing or play golf, I find that it’s challenging to win jobs based on those types of relationships, so I win and keep them in a different way. I find that I am not discriminated against because I’m a woman, but rather because I don’t really socialize in the same way as the others,” says Bruni. “However, once clients get to know me, I have made some really good relationships with people who believed in me and really stuck with our company because of our service.”

Bruni also points out that changes in emissions that have just passed in California for heavy equipment (including trucks and excavators) to be up to standard from 2008 forward have caused many people to sell off heavy equipment. Although the change in regulation has not come to Louisiana yet, the biggest challenge in New Orleans is finding the people who can transport the debris or trash who keep their trucks up to code, including tires, weight, etc. “This is the main complaint I hear, whether they are hauling sand, crushed concrete or debris, the debris transportation is a big factor.”

Current Projects

Bruni says that the New Orleans market has really been insulated from the downturned economy explaining that there is a huge influx of young entrepreneurs bringing in new businesses and new restaurants. The city is also building levees, hospitals and schools so that has kept Bruni busy. The economy has not affected the company, their scope of work has just shifted from residential to commercial. Currently, there are three big projects that Demo Diva is working on—clearing a site for a new Waffle House, cleaning up a 100-year old collapsed wharf on the port of New Orleans and the cleanup of a historic four-story building that got hit by lightning and imploded. Demo Diva is salvaging all of the bricks and beams for resale while the rest will go to demolition.

When it comes to getting rid of the debris, Demo Diva generally separate what they can. “Most bricks are newer so they just get recycled or crushed. All concrete and scrap metal is recycled or sold. When it comes to wood, it depends on what it looks like, etc. if we can sell it. We dismantled a number of buildings where we saved heart-of-pine planks or red oak tongue-in-groove flooring and then sold them later,” says Bruni. “We try to send as little as possible to landfills. If I have eight trucks that come off of a jobsite, six are going to be concrete, and two are 100 yarders of C&D. Salvage is also costly so it’s what the market will bear. I know that I can sell an 8-inch baseboard quickly and get my money back right away. I have to pick and choose.”

Of all the projects that she is currently working on, Bruni is most proud of the fact that she has been invited to go to Japan tour a cleanup site and share her story. “I shared my Demo Diva story with a Japanese delegation who were invited by the Council General of Japan to New Orleans to look at the city a few months ago. They looked at how we cleaned up our city, how we restored our markets and economic development. They had asked for an entrepreneur in the community to come and share their story and I was chosen. They loved hearing my story of hope and invited me to go to Japan in mid-May for a week to tour their disaster site and talk about how I helped clean up New Orleans, marketing, business practices and share my story. It is a huge honor. I will be going to Kamaishi and Morioka, Iwate,” says Bruni. “Can you imagine? From cleaning up my neighborhood to going to Japan is huge. It is by far our greatest achievement.”

Looking to the Future

Bruni stresses that currently, there is a blight epidemic in the country and Demo Diva is in the process of doing research and development on the different areas affected, including Las Vegas, Detroit, and other major metropolitan cities. “With the downturn in the economy, you have neighborhood and housing and banks foreclosing on properties, etc. and we really believe that it is a very fertile ground to take Demo Diva to a franchise level—that’s what we’re working on right now,” says Bruni. “We had a woman from Denver visit us and she was interested in developing the first Demo Diva franchise. She loves the marketing materials, how things are run and she is already in the construction industry, so we may be going there within a year or so. This is the buzz that we are feeling.”

For more information, contact Simone Bruni at (504) 486-4121 or e-mail [email protected].

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Awards and Recognition

2008 Gambit 40 Under 40

2008 City Business Women of the Year

2011 Louisiana Woman Summit Award

2011 Junior Achievement Rising Star Award

2012 Louisiana Women in Government Big Dream Award

2012 Brees’ Dream Foundation Mentor of the Year