Our History
The Beginning
From humble beginnings, founder and CEO Joshua Gámez had the vision to build an enterprise-level family-owned business in the professional landscape industry. Before he could ever afford to buy a single commercial lawn mower, he earned his first dollars cleaning windows in the river towns of Frenchtown and Milford New Jersey. The first customer of the young entrepreneur’s business was The Little Shop Near the Bridge, a local specialty gift shop that occupied an 1800s train station. The sale was a mere eleven dollars per cleaning for the entire first floor of the building. The year was 1992 and Joshua was 13 years old.
Five years later in 1996 Joshua invested in two commercial lawn mowers and began building his commercial landscaping business. The business would be incorporated in 1999 and later sold off in December of 2014 after reaching nearly ten million dollars in annual revenue.
The New Era
The time came for a new model and new investments. It was determined that there was a need for a multi-faceted facilities maintenance player. A company that looked and operated differently than any other company in the market. There were two key facets of the new business that would be at the core of the model. One, is a front-line first organization that put front-line workers in the first place and ensured they had fair pay, protections, and development opportunities. Second, a large enterprise-level business that self-performed all services, specifically industrial snow removal. Selling off the first company made room to build a new business and introduce a new model.
In 2015 East Coast Facilities, Inc. was born. The business was designed from the ground up to conquer markets by deploying the two key components, people first, and self-performance. The infrastructure for East Coast Facilities was built slowly and methodically between 2015 and 2016. In 2017 the company was ready for full launch and immediately opened locations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Florida.
Today ECF operates Service Centers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Illinois, and Florida, with several other markets set to launch. The company is one of the largest self-performing providers of industrial snow removal in America and is the largest minority-owned company in the space.