Septic Owners Edge is an independent publication for people who own septic pumping, inspection, repair and installation companies. It is not a lead-gen directory and it does not sell listings. It exists so an owner can check a marketing claim against real numbers before signing anything.
Who edits it
Steven Von is the editor. He has spent years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, septic and excavation companies among them, and he builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. He has sat on enough sales calls aimed at trade owners to know the pattern: big promises, no data, a 12-month contract. The guides here are the opposite. They give you the steps, the costs and the scripts whether or not you ever call.
Where the numbers come from
Every benchmark figure on this site traces back to one dataset. Once a month, public Google Business Profile listings in the septic service category are pulled for every US state, deduplicated by place so one company with two listings counts once, and summarized: review count, star rating, whether a website is listed, hours, photos, public email. The current pull covers 9,348 septic companies in 50 states.
Only public listing fields are used. Nothing comes from inside any company's Google account, and no individual business is named. Medians and percentiles are reported rather than averages because a handful of large regional pumpers would otherwise distort the picture for a one-truck operation. The report is licensed CC BY 4.0.
Editorial rules
- No pay-to-play. No vendor, software company or agency can buy a mention, a review or a placement here.
- Every claim is either sourced to the dataset, sourced to a primary document such as a Google help page or a state health department rule, or marked as the editor's opinion or an example.
- Prices in the guides are ranges drawn from what owners in this trade actually charge and pay. Your county and your soil will move them.
- No invented client stories.
- Plain language. Short sentences. No hype words.
How the free trial works
Any of the twelve services on the free trial page can be run for a septic company for 14 days at no cost. No card is taken. You text or call (385) 527-6736, say which service you want and what area you cover, and setup starts after a short call. During the two weeks you see the real thing: ads running, review requests going out, missed calls getting a text back. At the end you look at your schedule and decide.
The trial exists for a simple reason. Septic owners are used to paying first and hoping. Marketing should be judged like a new truck: you drive it before you buy it. If the two weeks do not put more pump-outs or inspections on the calendar, you owe nothing and keep everything that was set up.
More on the data and the trial on the FAQ page.