An environmental consultant is an educated, skilled, and experienced professional who helps businesses and government agencies comply with federal, state, and local environmental regulations. 

While we tend to be an earthy bunch, a good environmental consultant is more similar to a tax preparer than a "tree hugger".  Our job is not to "save the earth" or pass judgment on your business -- our job is to help you to conduct your operations as efficiently as possible while advising you on the rules and regulations that affect you. 

Soil sample in a laboratory-supplied glass jar with Teflon-lined lid (January 2006).

Why are sampling details important?

Environmental orders are published every Friday in the Texas Register (www.sos.state.tx.us), often with  over 50 orders per week. What can you do to avoid being one of these?

"Environmental strategy" is the process of meeting the requirements of environmental law at the lowest possible cost and then leveraging those requirements in your favor.  

Environmental strategy is similar to tax strategy.  Hiring a tax strategist often saves you more money than if you had tried to do tax planning and filing yourself.  By hiring an environmental strategist, you not only meet permitting and compliance requirements, but it may also help increase your customer base, lower your insurance rates, meet your suppliers' risk criteria, help you get better property deals, minimize certain types of liability, save you from spending money on administrative penalties, or all of the above. 

Because Steele Environmental Services, LLC was a developed in direct response to your specific smaller operational needs.

If you are reading this, chances are that you are:

1. Too big to ignore your environmental compliance issues

2. Too small to hire your own full-time employee to manage them, and

3. Too tired of trying to assign environmental duties to other employees who are neither trained for nor interested in the work, and who are too busy with their own jobs to do it anyway. 

In our experience, "compliance defiance" is rare.  Entrepreneurs generally do not take the risks of  starting a business only to deliberately leave themselves open to enforcement, and local governments do not want to be vulnerable to negative publicity.  But most have not yet discovered a workable compliance management method, and so issues get pushed to the back burner, sometimes for a long time.  

Aerial photograph of industrial facilities at Turkey Bend, Buffalo Bayou, Houston, TX (www.terraserver.com).  What would you need to know before you purchased one of these sites?

Section of a floodmap digitally revised by FEMA after Tropical Storm Allison (courtesy of www.tsarp.org).  What might happen if you try to refinance a business in an area like this?

To our knowledge, we are the *ONLY* environmental company that was specifically founded to service SMALL BUSINESS and LOCAL GOVERNMENTS.  

Our entire "service model" business approach is unique as a result.  Our financial overhead is low, our investment in information technology is high, and we have developed proprietary organization and management systems to maximize efficiency in providing low-dollar services to large numbers of clients and to ensure compliance continuity over time.

Why don't other environmental companies do this?  Because they are designed for the opposite market - they typically operate according to a "commodity model" in seeking high-dollar repeat business from a small number of clients.  Traditional firms are salary- and overhead-intensive and their financial success often depends on large contracts, to which they give priority.  That's great for THEM but, as a consequence, they are just not set up to serve YOU in the ways that you need. 

That's the very FIRST job that we can make easier for you.   Try cutting and pasting this text into an email or memo to your supervisor:  

Date: ____________________

RE:  Environmental

Hey Boss -

Do you remember telling us that you wanted a better job done with our environmental stuff?  Well, I think I found a way.  There's an environmental company that sets up compliance systems and trains facility operators on what they need to know for their specific facilities.  They aren't one of those large generic companies - they designed a system just for small businesses and local governments.  I know you want us to take care of this stuff in-house but nobody here is properly trained to do that yet, so this could be the bridge to get us there.   They have a web site set up at www.EnviroSteele.com, and they'll also tell us what we need for no charge.  Do you want to call them, or do you want me to do it?

Thanks,

________________________________

There are THREE (!) different environmental programs and numerous OSHA programs reflected in this single photograph.  Do you know what those programs are, and what they require?