and have two weeks off. For a single young guy, it was pretty
all right.”
Around Christmas in 2000, Greenspan was on vacation in
Rapid City and met his now-wife, Heather. Once they began
dating, he knew he didn’t want to be away for months at a
time, so he took a sales and project management job in South
Carolina. Soon after, Midco was born, although not without
difficulty.
“In 2003, we moved back to Rapid City where my wife had
family and started the business more out of needing a job
than anything else,” said Greenspan. “The plan hadn’t been to
stay in Rapid City. We had a new baby by then and were living
with the grandparents, and had, essentially, nothing. The job
I thought I was going to have didn’t work out. So, I started
putting the company together.”
Working at night, on weekends and in any other spare
moment to build his business, Greenspan also worked four
days a week as a milk delivery man.
“I’d go to work at midnight, do my route until noon the
next day then I’d come home and work on Midco, trying to
get work.” Even though it was tough, Greenspan knew he was
in the right business. “I went with this business because I
enjoy the type of work that we do. It was the one business I
could get into that I knew something about. I’d been in the
industry for the previous 10 years, so it was natural for me to
go that way.”
Greenspan’s endless hours of hard work began to pay off
and he was finally able to bring someone on to help build
the business.
“I got to the point where I hired Roger King, who was with
me for nine years, as vice president of sales and marketing,”
said Greenspan. “He’d been in the industry almost as long
as I had been. He started doing sales for me. About three or
four months after he started doing that, I had enough work
banked up where I could quit the dairy.”
A team underwater
These days, Midco is the go-to commercial diving company
for almost everyone and almost anything.
“I always say, if it’s under water, we’ll take a look at it,” said
Greenspan. “We do a very broad spectrum of work.”
The team at Midco are certified in areas such as underwater
inspection, repair projects, marine construction and
more.
“In the last few weeks, we’ve recovered a car in a lake,” said
Greenspan. “We’ve done water tower work maintenance. We
were tracking a natural gas pipeline across the Missouri River
for a new bridge that’s going in.”
When he says they’ll look at anything, he means it.
“We dive in wastewater for sewage treatment plant work.
There’s a lot of extra equipment; the diver can’t see anything,
the smell can get pretty bad and, of course, there are sanitary
issues. We charge a bit more for those jobs because, well,
there’s definitely a ‘gross factor.’”
Of course, not every job that Midco takes includes a high
level of “grossness.”
“We did a job in Colorado where we dove through the ice.
There was concrete cast-in-place piling that was buckling
due to the movement of the ice in the pond. It was logistically
a tough project for us because it was the middle of winter. We
were diving in hot water suits, which is basically where you
wear a wetsuit and you pump hot water in – it’s like diving
in a jacuzzi. It’s the best way to work in cold water; you don’t
want to get out because you start getting cold again!”
FEATURE
CONTINUED ON PAGE 26
“We dive in wastewater for sewage
treatment plant work. There’s a
lot of extra equipment; the diver
can’t see anything, the smell can
get pretty bad and, of course,
there are sanitary issues. We
charge a bit more for those jobs
because, well, there’s definitely a
‘gross factor.’”
– Robert Greenspan, Midco Diving
& Marine Services Inc.
24 Q4 2017 www.pilingcanada.ca
/www.pilingcanada.ca
