Founder's Story - From Law School to Garbage Trucks: How Alfonso Guerreri Built a $Millions Waste Empire | Ep 213 with Alfonso Guerreri Founder of RICI
Episode Date: May 5, 2025Alfonso Guerreri, A Harvard-educated lawyer turned hands-on entrepreneur, founded RICI Contracting in 2022 and has since grown it into a full-service powerhouse. Today, RICI delivers construction, as...phalt paving, snow & property maintenance, waste management, and facility services across Ontario. Alfonso shares how he parlayed legal training into strategic vision, weathered early food-truck misfires, and now innovates a once-old-school industry with sustainability, operational excellence, and client-first focus.Key Discussion Points:Law Meets Hard Hats: How a top-tier legal education taught Alfonso discipline, risk assessment, and negotiation skills he now applies to multimillion-dollar contracting bids.Early Failures to Firm Foundations: The food-truck chapter that taught him to test market fit, manage debt serviceability, and pivot swiftly into construction.Building RICI’s Service Portfolio: The step-by-step playbook for adding roll-off trucks, portable toilets, paving rigs, and snow-plow fleets—each driven by recurring revenue needs.Ideally Niche Clients: Why focusing on property managers, REITs, and pension-fund portfolios ensures monthly billing reliability and repeat business.Innovation & Sustainability: How Alfonso is modernizing a legacy sector through advanced equipment, AI-powered fleet surveillance, and eco-minded operational upgrades.Scaling with Discipline: His criteria for debt-financed expansion, in-house versus subcontractor work, and turning low-risk jobs into entry points for higher-ticket contracts.Key Takeaways:Strategic Pivoting: Embrace early failures as fast-feedback loops that uncover scalable opportunities.Debt Serviceability Test: Only invest in capital assets when your recurring cash-flows can safely cover the payments.Client Lifetime Value: Lock in high-margin, recurring services for the same ideal customers rather than chasing one-off gigs.Operational Excellence: Leverage technology, standardize processes, and build sustainability into every service offering.Closing Thoughts: Alfonso Guerreri’s journey from articling desks to asphalt crews illustrates that true entrepreneurial grit lies in mastering finance-savvy expansion and relentless client focus. Tune in to discover how RICI Contracting is redefining Canadian facility services—one strategically financed roll-off bin at a time.Our Sponsors:* Check out Indeed: https://indeed.com/FOUNDERSSTORY* Check out Northwest Registered Agent and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: https://northwestregisteredagent.com* Check out Plus500: https://plus500.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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Welcome aboard the inaugural episode of the Widen Your World podcast,
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Bettering your business takes working with the best. Hey everyone, welcome back to Founder's Story. Today we have Alfonso
Guerrero, founder and president of RICI Group. And Alfonso, you've had an amazing
experience going from law school, which I think I wish I went to law school. I feel
like every business owner could probably do better as a business owner if we went to law
school. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that soon but scaling and growing your company now you know a
rapidly growing Canadian firm you have different industries and different
companies within. So let's just start off with how why did you choose this
specific industry or the the first industry you were in and why at the time period that you did.
Yeah, 100%. It's quite a wild ride. So I did law school in the UK. I studied at the University of
Harvard here. After I went to law school, I worked at a firm in Toronto. I worked on their
art team and going through the legal licensing process and I didn't love it. I kind of wanted
to do something that I could get my hands dirty and enjoy being on a team and working in an industry that I kind of loved. And I kind of
learned while working at the law firm that I didn't really love doing that. And I kind of wanted
to do something more hands-on. I didn't want to do something that was an office job or work in the
legal industry. I just didn't love it anymore. I fell out of love with it. So after working at the law firm, I decided to open, I went into the food business. So I opened a small food truck. And
after a little while, we figured out that that industry wasn't kind of the best for growth. And
there wasn't much opportunity to kind of scale that into a massive company, which always was our end
goal. And you know, we wanted to utilize that legal education. So I kind of sat back. We ended up closing up the company.
And I worked at my family's business.
I worked in construction.
I worked for a roofing company.
And during my time there, I was doing some part-time
construction work.
I launched RICI.
We were doing small general contracting projects
and interior, residential, exterior stuff, small projects.
I decided to go full time with RICI in November of 2020, 22, 23.
So while I was running RICI, we started servicing larger clients, working in general contracting, using sub trades.
As I kind of scaled to bigger projects and kind of more difficult projects that we didn't
want our subs to do, we started hiring our own team and we built our operation.
We built our back office, we set up an office and did all the things required to kind of
scale the growth into what it is today.
So we started with general contracting when we inevitably ended up doing exterior work.
We started to get into a lot of property maintenance, snow plowing, exterior landscaping, hardscape
being inner lock, asphalt, concrete, stuff like that on a very small scale.
We were running all rental equipment.
We didn't have it.
We had one pickup truck.
We had all, you know, a small crew of guys.
I was working in the field at the time.
As that scaled into bigger and bigger projects, we were spending more and more money on hauling
and moving material, moving equipment, renting equipment. It wasn't working. It wasn't possible
for us to really make money because we were spending thousands, tens of thousands of dollars
a week on waste hauling and equipment rentals. We were really fortunate to work with a lot of
really good haulers. They kind of helped us build up our business and worked with us, but inevitably
we got to a point where we needed our own truck multiple times a day.
So we were kind of back and forth with the idea, do we buy a dump truck?
Do we go buy another truck?
So we ended up buying a large roll-off truck, a hook lift truck, where we were able to buy
some bins and add another revenue stream to our business.
That was in 2024.
And we started servicing other clients. We were
doing roll-off bins, servicing our own sites. A lot of our sites, our demo sites, our construction
sites, a lot of garbage, a lot of material. So one thing that allowed us to operate more
profitably and be able to have the opportunity to have the funds readily available to scale
was a huge challenge to us. And to be
able to invest in ourselves while somewhat decreasing our cost, because it's still very
expensive to run equipment, we were able to run more efficiently and have our sites finishing
at quicker deadlines, not depending on other trades, depending on our kind of internal team.
And we've really, really made the push to bring everything in-house. We now specialize in servicing
property managers in the Greater Toronto Area and across Ontario. We work at shopping centers, we work for multi-family
residential buildings, industrial plazas, commercial plazas, offices, the whole yard.
And the main kind of proponents of our business are niched into servicing those property managers.
We offer four line items to our business. We have waste management and recycling, so that's
our roll-off truck, our front-end truck, which is the truck that hooks the bins up. We do rear load
work. We have a portable toilet division with a small vac tank. We also offer ash ball paving,
interior general construction still, and other services in the construction field that are
specialized niches towards our clients in addition to our property maintenance and snow care. So you mentioned how you had the first failure was the food truck and then that then led into
the other things. I've had like five or six failed businesses and ideas myself. As we know,
business is a higher risk. So knowing that you didn't really enjoy law and then you went to a business that then failed
and then you were then thinking about what do I do next?
When you looked at the risk of then working for somebody
versus then creating another company,
did you have any doubt that,
okay, maybe I should go back to maybe working in law
or getting a corporate job versus starting another company.
Yeah. The trickiest part is everybody around you tells you to do the same thing.
You have a law background.
You can go work in the corporate field.
Like why you kind of hustling it out through business.
And the hardest part about closing the food business was we weren't even doing bad.
It just there was no opportunity to scale.
So that's kind of where we decided like, let's just try again one more time.
Kind of get plagued as like not the failure, but you know, you have two goals and
like, you don't like both of them. Maybe, you know, you're the problem.
And it's tough to kind of, you know, your family and friends and people around you
tell you, just go back into law, go finish your licensing and go practice.
But it's double ended, right?
Well, it's impressive that you realize
that you're going to stop and change.
Many times what I see, people will continue in the business
and they just keep going because they don't want to give it up
and they don't want to start something new, which I think
could be a huge detriment.
What was that turning point that happened that you said, okay, we need
to shift out of this and shift into something else?
Yeah, because I always had an interest in construction, it got to a point in the food
business where we felt that, okay, we need to invest a million dollars, let's say to
kind of get this thing to the next level. But with the revenue we were getting, we would
have had to take on massive debt more than what we would have been comfortable taking on. And the turning point was we're unsure
if we could service this debt if we decided to do this scale. You know, it's very expensive,
right? So that's why we kind of inevitably decided to shift away from that business and
move to something that we felt more comfort in and a possibility to scale and grow with
kind of less daily and operation, small operation or challenges.
So wouldn't and that's I mean, debt could be like the greatest thing ever or it could be the worst thing ever.
Right. So when you when you look at the new company, because I know you it sounds like you have heavy inventory or large inventory
costs in terms of equipment.
inventory costs in terms of equipment. So how do you look at debt or purchasing of equipment or inventory now that your company has really scaled?
Yeah, and it's millions of dollars. It's so tricky kind of saying, I'm going to stay being this guy in a pickup truck servicing interlock and making a good living.
You know, your family's making money and it's it's hard to say, like, let's take that step and ultimately comes down to debt serviceability. When we feel comfortable carrying more debt and we feel like we have,
we're very fortunate to have recurring cashflow from our maintenance business to service that
debt. So we felt comfortable taking the risks on buying equipment and investing the capital
into ourselves. Right. And the only reason why we felt comfortable doing that in versus
in the food business, which, you know, we're long out of, um, it's, it's a hundred percent down to dead service
ability. And I don't even think risk to a point.
I think, uh, the ability to service that with what you currently have without depending
on that equipment, because yeah, I think it's, you know, very wise to think that you can
do very well and that you can get a lot of work.
But if you're not sure what you have, you don't have 10, you haven't
worn any tenders, you haven't worn any clients, you don't have the equipment yet.
You have to be comfortable servicing that debt with the revenue that you
had and that you know you're going to consistently have.
And that was our understanding of when we were ready to take the next step
and buy the next piece of equipment.
I like your, your strategy around adding in additional revenue streams and
creating, for example example like you said you
had to spend money on something you might as well bring that in-house and
create a new revenue stream from that. So how do you look at now in terms of when
when is it right to add in a new revenue stream? When is it right to add in a new
business versus when is it right to hire vendors? Yeah, it's totally case dependent, right?
Some of our stuff, still to this day, we use sub trades every day and it just doesn't make
sense for us because most of the times it comes down to what our clients need.
So because we only service property managers, we're not going to invest in things that they
don't need and that we don't think that we could upsell to the same client.
That's ultimately our end goal is getting the most revenue out of the same clientele
right without over leveraging your risk and not offering way too many things that
are way out of the sort of our service needs and never be at the end of our day.
We kind of offer two services.
We offer construction and we offer a waste management, um, to the same type of
clientele.
That is interesting that you've really honed in and you figured out who your,
who your ideal client is almost essentially who the avatar is or however you
want to say it. Um,
I would imagine a lot of people struggle with this and that's why they're,
they're trying to sell, you know, something to everyone, which we know is,
is either impossible or very costly.
How did you hone in and figure out that this is your most ideal client?
Yeah, a hundred percent. I learned very quickly from my father who ran a waste management business for 25 years
that got acquired by waste management many, many years ago. He picked a clientele and he
serviced them the best way possible. And he offered multiple services kind of solider,
what we do on a way bigger and different scale. But when we felt that we were getting paid every month,
and not that it's difficult to get paid from general contractors or from private owners,
or REITs and pension funds, they're not going to not pay you if you complete the services that you
give to them, which is the biggest risk in our industry is not getting paid by the client.
Because we carry so much of the front side load on the transaction between the two, right? They
give us the PO to do
the work. We buy all the equipment, we buy all the material, we do all the hauling and everything
kind of gets brought to the site, you know, before you even see money, all right? So you need to make
sure that that client is going to pay you. And for us, we felt that not that there's any issue
with contractors and we work with still with contractors, but they're not our core clientele.
We felt that working with REITs and Pensioners not only do they have access to the best buildings,
the most budgets, they're spending the money on these additional means that kind of single owners
don't really care to, not that they don't care, but if the funding is not needed to be spent,
private owners aren't going to spend it. So, you know, with capital budgets and maintenance
budgets from property managers, it's important to kind of focus in
on that niche because we know that they're gonna be spending
the money and they're investing in their buildings.
Whereas private owners and small managers and contractors
and being a sub, it's different, right?
You're not working for the wealthiest of the wealthy,
or you're working for private owners.
And their money means a lot more to them than,
not that it doesn't mean to the property,
but you know what I mean, on the grand scale of the transaction, right?
Yes, I totally there's this like meme or saying it's like, you know, if the client who spends
500, 5,000 or 50,000, I'll take the client who spends 50,000 and they will many times
complain less about something than a $500 client.
Their money means different when they spend money.
I'm curious about sales.
When it comes to sales, and you're obviously selling larger ticket services, what do you
find, whether it's you, your sales leadership, or your sales team, is there some process
or something that you found has really worked
in terms of selling these larger B2B deals?
It starts on servicing the client very well
on services that you make zero money on.
And not that we don't get revenue,
but very low revenue items.
There's a big process of being approved
with these asset management firms, I'll call them,
property managers, REITs, petroplans, whatever, just to be eligible to work for them. There's high
barriers to entry. You need a big insurance policy. You need, you know, back office. You
need to have the abilities to kind of work on this scale of working for these big companies.
So just to get that set up and just to kind of work with them doing anything is a fantastic
opportunity. It's how we start. Most of our clients started with snow and small interlock maintenance and landscaping
and clean outs of units and stuff that not nobody wants to do, but it's not the glamour stuff and
it's not great, but it allows us to service the client phenomenally, give them a phenomenal report,
you know, do all the things that we would be doing on these big large scale projects that we inevitably grew to. But it started with a small transaction. And that's, I'm
sure how most of the people in our industry grow rates. It's tricky to convince somebody
to give you a half a million dollar parking lot, a job, but there's not that much risk
for the property manager to pay you $700 to go clean out a unit. Like if you don't do
it right, they'll just call somebody else. But by doing that right, that goes into something else and goes into a back to base
demo that goes into building out a unit that goes into doing a patio slab. Like there's
all kinds of things that it grows through. Right. And then hopefully you get the opportunity
to one day bid on bigger stuff. But our sales process. Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry. Sorry. I think
we have a bit of a gap in time here.
No, no, that was great. I remember my first company was a very, very small commercial cleanup
company. Very, very small. And we got a phone number and we got a call from Kohl's department
stores to come and clean because it was the same phone number as the previous cleaning company. Total fluke.
And we had no idea what the heck to do.
So we just looked in the phone book at that time and called other cleaning people
and outsource made like no money on the deal.
And eventually we closed the business, but it was a very interesting learning
experience. So when you look back and you, you, you meet somebody who says,
uh, Alfonso, I'm also a law student. I'm a college student. And I'm realizing I don't think I even want to do what I'm going to school for. What kind of advice would you give to them if they say I want to be an entrepreneur as well?
well like I got a degree in something that I still use every day. You know we do our own analysis and we like to hopefully write our own deals one day. It's hard because you do something for so
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Makes you happy and that you think, obviously
it's bad to think make money, but I never
believe the end goal is to do the thing that's
going to make you the most successful in
whatever capacity that that is, whether it's
your personal success or wealth or it's tricky,
but it's inevitably a decision that has to be made by yourself and you can't let people sway you one way or another
Hey
If you can be happy and make a lot of money and be successful and be satisfied
That seems like a you know win-win right there. So as as you've grown and skilled
What do you find whether it's work or life? What makes you the most happy? As a diva, that's a loaded question.
I wasn't expecting that.
It's hard.
It's happy is kind of a tricky question, right?
Because I never believe we want to be happy
at the stage that we're at in our growth and our capacity,
but inevitably we're always aiming for higher goals.
And it's hard to be comfortable in the kind of shoes
that you're currently in.
And you always see yourself at a way bigger scale
servicing way bigger clients on a way bigger region of mass. But I'm very happy with what we're doing and we're very happy with the
stage that we're currently at and we hope to continue going in the same trajectory.
Maybe I should use the word content than happy. But yes, that's all right. So if you had a crystal
ball and you said in five years, this is where I want to be, where would you want to be in five
years? Yeah, a hundred percent.
We want to continue servicing our same for the clients, service them in the same
way that we are on a bigger scale.
We hope to never, we go this to a national kind of program to service our clients
who are national vendors across Canada.
And it never be, hopefully end up moving itself and into bigger and better
projects.
A lot of people are talking about the quote unquote boring business.
It seems like this is like what people want to get into.
They want to get into like home service or certain types of industries
that are not going to be disrupted by technology.
How do you see this playing out with the fact that obviously AI,
we already know is already disrupting or about to disrupt
you know many things but I don't know about how how how will this industry be disrupted
if it will at all.
Almost we're almost in the sad way to kind of say this the ones that are hoping to rush
that transition into bringing your technology and analyzing AI and using it to service our
clients better.
Our goal is to bring as much technology
and which is why we invest in the most modern
and advanced equipment.
You know, our pavers are built with kind of
the max capacity that they could have
to be eligible to service our clients
in the way that they are.
We maximize our reporting,
we have all AI cameras built into all of our trucks
to help us with surveillance and not only just safety,
but we have the ability, especially on our snow routes and our construction services route,
to actually go into our trucks. And we have an AI camera built in the truck that not only maps productivity and safety, but
we have a live feed to be able to see our frontline workers without having to kind of be there every second.
So even if we have four jobs, five jobs going across the city, across two different companies, we have the opportunity to see that live through this technology and through
AI. I don't think it's a thing that's going to hit our front. It could one day, I'm sure
it will. But I think the boring business was definitely the model. It's very different
than our first business, which was not a boring business. You know, everybody wants to be
in the food business. It's fun and exciting. And that's what we kind of boiled it down to was what are we going to do in a business
service space that's going to allow us to maximize revenue and have the opportunity
to grow. It's not from a fun business, unfortunately. It's dirty, it's rough, it's kind of gross
business, right? Garbage and poo is not fun to move around. Paving is not fun.
Like working, it's not, it's fun in its own way, but it's a very tough thing from people
at the outside to say, well, why would you want to do this? You work in a nice office
in the city, you drive a nice car. Why would you want to go backwards? And it's not backwards.
It's back to service and it's having the ability to scale a business that we know and that
we understand it in the best way possible.
Reminds me of that show, Dirty Jobsirty Jobs. I really liked watching that show. It was very interesting.
But Alfonso, it seems like you were ahead of the game. You foresaw this industry, this
business. I mean, everyone who I know that does food is pretty miserable. It's very small margins and they work 24 seven
and you know the next restaurant comes in and they're completely gone.
So it seems like you're a much more stable industry that you have a lot of
previous experience and knowledge. But if you want to get in touch with you,
they're super inspired and they want to know more information or maybe they want
to, you know, they, they need your services. How can they do so?
Absolutely. You can visit us on our website, ricicon.com, or you can add me on LinkedIn, shoot me a message, and we'd be happy to chat with anybody interested, especially even legal students that are looking for some guidance.
Amazing. There you go. You're going to help a lot of legal students get into a service industry outside of law. Very interesting. But Alfonso
Guerrero, this has been great. Thank you so much for joining us today on Founder's Story.
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