We Rock dwellers share many things in common: Our love of open spaces, hiking trails, forests, farms and beaches. And more than half of us also share this: We need septic systems at our homes to take care of our … ahem …personal waste. Only urban Rock dwellers in Oak Harbor, Coupeville and Langley have city-provided sewer systems. The rest of us have one or more tanks in the backyard that need to be pumped and serviced every so often.

For Oak Harbor native Keith Jordan, that has presented a great business opportunity. He is hard at work to become, as he says, “#1 in the #2 business.” A little more than four years ago, he founded Dirty Deeds Septic to service all of Whidbey, and his business has grown rapidly. More about that later.

What’s amazing about this success story is what Jordan has been through to get to this point. He’s an Army veteran who served more than nine years. He worked as a trooper for the Washington State Patrol. He started a construction business that died in the economic crash of 2008. He learned how to find and remove undetonated explosives. He became a caretaker for a preserve on a private island in the San Juans. And, oh yes, he almost died from a dangerous bacteria infection, and the gigantic medical bills forced him to file for bankruptcy.

Just after his construction company failed, he became very sick with a version of the MRSA bacteria infection. He was treated at WhidbeyHealth, then airlifted to Harborview in Seattle where he spent more than a month. The total medical bills were over $1 million, and he had no insurance because his construction company had closed.

“I have been through a lot and lost everything,” Jordan said. “Very humbling.”

But it also has brought out his endless creative energy. Jordan, 54, seems always to be looking for new ways to grow and succeed.

Just before the pandemic, Jordan was working as a caretaker for the preserve of a wealthy Seattle family on Blakely Island in the San Juans. But he often returned to Oak Harbor to visit his parents and friends. “I started noticing all these ‘essential vehicles’ on Whidbey — like ambulances and septic pumper trucks.” He knew a little bit about septic work. His uncle in Anacortes had a septic business and he had friends on Whidbey that also did septic work.

So, in 2020, he bought his own pumper truck and parked it in a storage unit while he got a commercial driver’s license and figured out what to call his business and how to promote it.

“The name Dirty Deeds came to me in a dream,” he said. “I thought at first I surely couldn’t use it, that it was so good somebody else would have trademarked it. But I checked with a lawyer and found out it was available, so I trademarked it myself.”

Of course, some may recall that Dirty Deeds first became famous as the title of a 1981 album by hard rock bank AC-DC, and Jordan gives the band credit for that.

Once he had a truck, he had to start building his business, first by painting the Dirty Deeds name and phone number on his pumper truck.

“I never thought that, given everything I had done and trained for, I would be in the septic business,” he said. “So I decided to have some fun with it and make it humorous for my customers.”

So that’s how the “#1 in the #2 business” motto came to be, followed by “We take (poop) from everyone.”

On his very first pumping service call in 2020, his customer was an old man outside Coupeville who looked at his pumper truck and declared, “Son, that looks like a milk truck.” So, of course, Jordan made use of it and has now painted on the back of all his trucks, “We Haul Milk on Weekends.”

Jordan says humor is an important element of his Dirty Deeds marketing. “It breaks down the barrier in customer service and makes people feel comfortable about something that might otherwise make them a little uncomfortable to talk about,” he said.

When he launched the business, he was living in Anacortes in a fifth wheel, near where his truck was parked in a storage unit. What amazed him was how fast the business grew once he painted the Dirty Deeds name and phone number on his truck. The phone quickly began to ring. “The first month I did $20,000 in pumping business,” he said. “And the first year was almost $400,000.”

At first he only pumped septic tanks, but he quickly began doing repairs, such as replacing pumps, when customers asked him to. “I didn’t want to be the guy who showed up to pump the tank but then says you’ll have to call somebody else to get the system fixed, when I could easily do it while I was there.”

Today, he has eight employees and several pumper trucks. Most of those employees are also veterans, and he proudly promotes Dirty Deeds as a veteran-owned company. Company revenue now exceeds $400,000 a month, and in April it pumped 200,000 gallons from Whidbey septic systems. Dirty Deeds then takes the pumped waste and empties it into the Anacortes sewage treatment plant at an agreed-upon price per gallon.

“We did some research for a promotional mailer and discovered there were more than 5,000 septic systems just in the area north of Oak Harbor,” he said. “That’s why this is such a good business.”

Harry Anderson is a retired journalist who worked for the Los Angeles Times and now lives on Central Whidbey.