A former Greater Cincinnati investment adviser shifted gears nearly a decade ago and has built a business based on cleaning stadium and institutional kitchens’ cooking oil into a $10 million company.
Ken Melick, who lives in Springboro, bought his first Filta Environmental Kitchen Solutions franchise in Columbus in 2014. He was an investment pro at downtown Cincinnati-based Fort Washington Investment Advisors, the money management unit of Western & Southern Financial Group, for about five years, doing research on its small-cap growth fund. But he wanted to do something more entrepreneurial and wound up finding something dramatically different.
“I decided I wanted to explore owning my own business,” Melick told me. “I looked at everything that was for sale at the time and saw this in Columbus. I decided to go that route.”
One franchise became three a few years later when he bought the Cincinnati and Dayton franchises. The business succeeded and grew, and he eventually bought the franchises in Louisville, Lexington and Indianapolis. All are part of the franchise company, Centerville-based LXU Ltd., that Melick owns.
The business has grown organically as well as through acquisition to one that generates about $10 million in annual revenue. That has soared exponentially from the $250,000 in sales he generated that first year in Columbus. He had two employees then and now has about 50. LXU operates in the six markets where he owns Filta franchises.
Filta’s main service is to manage the deep fryers at large facilities and institutions. Melick’s business serves the Cincinnati Reds’ Great American Ball Park; Paycor Stadium, home of the Cincinnati Bengals; Heritage Bank Arena; and the minor-league baseball Dayton Dragons’ Day Air Ballpark, among others.
Universities and hospitals also make up a big chunk of its business. Miami University is his largest client. Ohio State, Churchill Downs and the Indiana Pacers home of Gainbridge Fieldhouse are others.
Filta cleans out the cooking oil from deep fryers, runs it through a micro-filtration system and reuses it. Once it can’t be used, Filta changes the oil, collects the old stuff and sells it to companies that use it to make biodiesel fuel. The company also deep-cleans fryers. It reduces cooking oil usage by about one-third, Melick said.
Stadiums and arenas are Filta’s bread and butter, Melick said. Most restaurants handle the process themselves and dump the old oil in a grease bin.
“But a stadium like Great American Ball Park probably has 40 or so deep fryers,” he said. “Delaware North (which handles concessions for the Reds and GABP) doesn’t want to have its employees take it from the View Level (upper deck) to the parking garage to put it in a dumpster. It’s not safe, and it takes a lot of time.”
During a 10-game homestand for the Reds, Filta is typically on site at some point each day, Melick said.
The company has grown largely on its own, Melick said, although the acquisitions helped, too.
Filta doesn’t have any true direct competitors, he said.
“Our competition is chefs and kitchen staffs doing it themselves,” he said. “So it’s kind of an educational process about the benefits of outsourcing that.”
A lot of its growth comes from word of mouth. Concessions and food service operators such as Aramark, which handles those roles at Cincinnati Bengals games, can refer Filta’s services from one of its accounts to numerous other places it serves.
LXU, Melick’s franchise company, probably won’t grow by acquiring franchises in other cities. It’s already at Filta’s maximum limit for generating a sizable amount of the company’s overall revenue.
But he sees opportunities to grow by adding products. Filta has rolled out a Filta Clean product. He’ll add that as a deep-cleaning service done maybe once a year for kitchen equipment at a stadium, arena, university or hospital.
He also plans to hire a vice president of sales who can oversee salespeople in each of his markets, which his company hasn’t had until now.
“We’ve never really had a sales force before,” he said. “Once I get that started it should help get the growth going.”
While the business isn’t something Melick dreamed of as he was getting his degree from Ohio State in finance and accounting, he finds it highly rewarding.
“I really enjoy seeing the business grow and seeing people advance,” he said. “They can build a career here, and that’s what I really enjoy about it.”
