Nisly Brothers Inc. was recognized last week as the Hutchinson / Reno County Chamber of Commerce Small Business of the Month for October. In its 62nd year, a key to the success of the business, said Marvin Nisly, president and operations manager, has been building and maintaining relationships.
“That was one of the things he (Menno) valued highly,” Marvin said. “For instance, he valued long-term relationships with our vendors, like Brigman Oil and Elliott Insurance. He didn’t shop for the cheapest. He was more concerned about the value that relationship would bring. I think I’ve picked up some of that. I love doing business with people who do business in our community.”
“We had a consultant come in some years ago who said for every load of diesel, we should shop it out before we bought it,” Nisly said. “I thought ‘Well, that’s probably one way to do it.’ But we have Brigman who takes care of us and brings fuel when we need it. He watches the market for me. So I didn’t want to do that. I like relationships. I like to work with people for a long time.”
They also rely on relationships to build with their customer base. But, conversely, the type of relationship the company – which serves residential and commercial customers primarily in Reno County, but as far south as Medicine Lodge and Kingman, west to Greensburg and east to Hesston and Newton – tries to establish is one of invisibility.
“At the end of the day, no one likes to think about garbage,” said Nisly, 57. “You sign up for service and hope they do a good job. Unless they do something wrong or are trying to gouge people, you don’t think about it. People move in and out, but for the most part, looking for a new garbage man is not high the rank of fun things to do on a Saturday afternoon. Our service is supposed to be invisible.”
Menno Nisly had been working for the Mennonite Central Committee as a volunteer in Akron, Pennsylvania, Marvin said, when he moved back to Kansas in the early 1950s. “He saw all the waste and thought ‘Why don’t I haul garbage and feed it to my hogs?’” Nisly said. “And that’s what he did. In the early days, he cooked the garbage down and fed it to the hogs. When I was growing up, we’d collect bread from the Rainbo Bakery and feed that to the hogs. A job for us kids after school was to get the bread out of the wrapper. We made a lot of hogs fat in those years.”
In 1956, running a trash service won out over farming for supporting his family, Nisly said, so his father went into the trash hauling full-time. One of his first big contracts was as a subcontractor for the City of Hutchinson, providing collection for commercial customers.
“We were working on the back of trucks in grade school,” Marvin said. “Today OSHA and other regulatory agencies would scream, but, like on the family farm, there were jobs to be done… We weren’t driving trucks, but we were helping on back.”