Beats to seats

Most people know Dave Galloway as the owner of city’s most popular deejay company. So, what’s he doing in the porta-potty business?

Photo: Dave Galloway

IN 2018, DAVE Galloway was at a business marketing conference in Las Vegas, sitting through the day-one keynote. “This guy got up, and just started packing up his bags,” Galloway recalls. “He said, ‘I’m not supposed to be here. I thought this conference was about how to get a handle on your business. I need operations help. My business is ­growing so quickly, I can’t even keep up.’”

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As he heads out, Galloway asks the obvious: “What kind of business are you in? And he says, ‘I do portable toilets.’ And he just left.”

The encounter rolls around Galloway’s mind for a few years, and he still has questions about it. “Why did you tell me that? Why didn’t you just pack up your bag and go? Is this some sort of sign from the universe? Should I be doing something with this information?”

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So, early in 2024, Galloway punches a question into Google: How much does a single portable toilet cost? “Which for the record,” he says, “is about $1,200.”

The other thing you need to know about Galloway is that he is a well-known deejay in town and owner of the Alpha DJ Company. He’s often involved in the planning of large social and entertainment events, many of which are outdoors (you can probably see where this is going).
The next thing Galloway does is get in touch with a guy in Orillia who had just sold his portable porta-potty business. He tells Galloway that if he drives to Orillia, all the knowledge he’s gained over 20 years of business is his.

“That’s probably worth a three-hour drive for me,” Galloway reasons. Five hours and a full notebook worth of wisdom later, Galloway is sold; he pulls the trigger and invests in some portable toilets and a vacuum truck. Alpha Sanitation was born.

The first events Alpha Sanitation is booked for ended up on the same weekend — East Park’s Fairway Fest and the Chiclets Cup road hockey tournament, both this past September. And as an added twist, Galloway is also performing at Fairway Fest.

“At eight o’clock, I was up on stage deejaying for about 2,500 people that day, living out my original dream, having a blast,” he says. “Came back at two in the morning and cleaned out all the same toilets that I could see from the stage. That’s a quick way to get humbled.”

Like any business, there’s been a learning curve, Galloway says, but at the end of the day it’s pretty simple: deliver the toilets, clean them out when you’re done. “There were times that [first] night when I was out at two in the morning, by myself, literally watching YouTube videos on how to start the toilet tank engine,” he recalls. “There was some learning-on-the-the-fly happening there.”

But a few months in, Galloway figures he has passed through the difficult part of that curve. Whether it’s large events, small parties, weddings or construction sites (one of the cash cows of the portable restroom business), Galloway sees plenty of potential for Alpha Sanitation, both as a complementary business to his Alpha DJ Company, and also as a transitionary enterprise.

“There’s an expiration date for deejays, right? So, my thought process the whole time has been don’t do yourself a disservice and not have any sort of game plan for when you get older,” he explains.

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Galloway is now looking at the next steps — hiring staff, building out his inventory of restrooms, scaling Alpha Sanitation from a one-man operation to something more. It’s unlikely he ever envisioned himself doing something like this at this point in his career, but he believes he has hit on something for the long-term.

“I really truly have fallen in love with entrepreneurship,” he says. “The work is the work. You put on the gloves and the mask and you do the job. Then you get the money, and that’s what it is. That’s life, man.” Kieran Delamont