Today we’d like to introduce you to Kevin Bowen
Hi Kevin , so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
For Labor Day weekend in 2017, my wife and I and our 2 boys came to Austin for a long vacation from our home in South Florida. Little did we know, our 4-day vacation would turn into being stuck in Austin for 2 weeks while Category 5 Hurricane Irma was headed in a direct path over our home.
We initially were staying in an ABNB on South Congress. When we decided to stay instead of trying to go home and battle with a Category 5 Hurricane with a 5-year-old and 3-year-old, we ended up in another ABNB overlooking the Pennybacker Bridge. It was here, over the next week and a half, that we decided to go home and put our house on the market to sell and move to Austin before our boys started in Kindergarten, assuming there was anything left after the storm.
In FL my wife and I both had corporate jobs and I had a side hustle selling real estate in my neighborhood. We had planned it would take 60-90 days for our home to sell given the market conditions which would leave us plenty of time to come back to Austin and figure out where we would live.
Well, once our home hit the market, surprisingly within 18 days, we were under contract with sellers from out of state who only saw our house via Facetime. Mind you, this was 2017 before video tours were a thing. This sped up our timeline significantly and we were left scrambling to figure out where we would live in Austin right before the holidays. Given the timeline, we did not have the time to come back to Austin to find a place, so we opted to copy the family buying our house and buy the site unseen. We found a new construction Condo in Round Rock that we ended up buying.
In 2017, working remotely was not very popular and our current corporate employer would not allow us to do that which resulted in us both resigning to fulfill our desire. I planned to immediately jump back into real estate, given my success in FL, and get licensed in TX. My wife planned to immediately get back into corporate America.
We arrived at our new condo on December 21, 2017, just in time for closing and to unload the Uhaul packed with live house plants that the movers wouldn’t take and our Holiday Decorations to make Christmas special for our boys, in a new place, with no family and no furniture. The moving company showed up on December 23 and packed our place full of boxes. Unfortunately, the layout of our new condo was very different from our single-story home in FL and most of our furniture did not fit, leaving yet another problem.
After working through all of that, my new Real Estate career started to take off, but my wife was struggling to find her passion in a new corporate career. She decided it was a great time for her and our family to finally venture into what we’ve always talked about in starting a new business.
My wife recruited a business head hunter to help her identify business opportunities that fit her and our family’s profile of what we desired. After weeks of one-on-one and group interviews with the recruiter, he finally had some recommendations for us.
The first recommendation is in-home health care. After careful consideration, that was a no. Too much competition and in our opinion, this wasn’t the right market for us.
The second recommendation is child daycare. That was no. While we love our children, we do not want to also worry about other people’s kids or the parents of those kids. Also, growth and expansion were limiting factors for us as well.
The third recommendation was commercial kitchen exhaust cleaning. We were intrigued. After much thought and research into the category, we decided this would be the path we needed to take.
My wife has an extensive marketing background and did a lot of market research before the decision. Between her marketing background, the new information we have acquired from the market research, and my background in training, coaching, and developing employees, we felt we had a winning decision set up for success.
Since launching our business in July of 2019, we have safely performed thousands of commercial kitchen exhaust cleaning jobs across Greater Austin and San Antonio, removing heavy grease build-up, and preventing kitchen fires in restaurants and commercial kitchens all across the area. Since then, we have prided ourselves on hiring a diverse group of amazing employees who are all focused on our top company value, Self Improvement.
We have expanded our services from not only cleaning commercial kitchen exhaust systems in your favorite restaurants and venues but also completing heavy grease removal and deep cleaning in any back of the house for restaurants, exhaust fan maintenance, and repair. In our efforts to continue adding value for our customers, we will be adding fire extinguisher maintenance, repair, inspections, and sales in the coming weeks, and by the beginning of the new year, we will also be offering full fire suppression services.
We are excited about the roots we have established in Round Rock and the Austin area and we love that we can give back to the community and continue to make sure our community’s favorite establishments are kept safe from fires!
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It hasn’t always been smooth. We launched our business, 6 months before covid and we shut down for 2 weeks. We were, however, considered an essential business, so we had to quickly adapt and figure out how to operate during those challenging times.
The nature of our business is overnight, dirty work. Finding employees for this business is probably one of the most difficult I have ever encountered in my 20+ years of managing and hiring people. Our ability to execute in this area is a testament to the exceptional employees we have and retain along with the strong systems and processes that they have helped develop and implement over the years.
As you know, we’re big fans of Bowmar Industrial Services, Inc. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
Bowmar Industrial Services is a Commercial Kitchen Exhaust Cleaning and Fire Protection Company. We specialize in keeping your favorite restaurants and venues safe and free of grease build-up which acts as a fuel source for fires.
Bowmar Industrial Services has the industry’s best hood cleaning service technicians, with the most effective processes and efficiencies in place, supported by the strongest quality control management team in Central Texas, and is backed by the industry’s BEST Hood Cleaning Service Providers Guarantee!
We service thousands of commercial kitchens in the Greater Austin and San Antonio area of Texas. Bowmar Industrial Services is your local Greasebusters Dealership. Our cleaning hood cleaning service technicians are certified USAKE Specialists and stand behind our company values to ensure our clients are delivered the highest quality service they would expect.
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
We guarantee that your kitchen exhaust will pass any NFPA 96 inspection conducted by your local fire municipality, Ansul inspection, or insurance company within 30 days of our last servicing or we will immediately reschedule and complete an additional hood cleaning service FREE of charge AND give you 10% off your next service!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.bowmarindustrial.com
- Instagram: @bowmarindustrialservices
- Facebook: @bowmarindustialservices
