If the key to a successful start-up business is absolute belief in the soundness of your idea, then Steve Hilfiker has it made. Sitting in the small but well-organized construction trailer in his rural Naples backyard that serves as home office for his new business, Hilfiker has the assured air of a man with no doubt about the validity of his idea and the direction he is heading. But he did not get there overnight.

Last May, with a $50,000 line of credit from Huntington Bank, he established his business - actually two affiliated companies, Environmental Risk Management and First Environmental Mortgage.

For eight years prior to that, Hilfiker ran the environmental division of Coastal Engineering in Naples. In that job, he did environmental assessment and cleanup of at-risk properties (old gas stations and dry cleaners, for example), primarily for lenders concerned about financing the purchase of such a property.

Then Hilfiker had a brainstorm. Why not combine the two services, environmental assessment and financing, into one business, a sort of one-stop shop for at-risk properties?

The two biggest hurdles on these properties are resolving the environmental problem and getting financing, explains Hilfiker. In some cases, the cost of remediation (or cleanup) may exceed the cost of the property. The property then goes into foreclosure. Lots of lenders don't want to risk it.

Hilfiker proposed his idea to his employer, but it didn't fly. Though he maintains a good relationship with Coastal Engineering and specifically points to its president, Michael Steven, as his mentor, Hilfiker knew he had to move on. "It was too good of an idea, so I decided to do it on my own," he says with no hesitation. "My primary motivation was to take advantage of the niche I saw that combines mortgage, real estate, and environmental assessment all in one."

A Planned Venture

Though convinced of the value of his idea, Hilfiker did not rush into this entrepreneurial phase of his life. In his spare time, he set out to earn his real estate and mortgage broker licenses. That was 1997. He took another couple of years contemplating the move. "This was well planned out," he says.

His first-year strategy has been to get the cash flow going by concentrating on the environmental assessment and cleanup side of the business. "That can generate immediate business -- and checks," he says. Indeed, he had jobs right from the start and now has projects all over the state -- the Panhandle, Sarasota, West Palm Beach, Clewiston, Fort Myers and Naples.

Environmental Risk Management is approved by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which means it can work on sites in the state-mandated clean-up programs for petroleum and dry-cleaning solvents. Eligible properties are scored according to their hazard level, then the state covers the cost of cleanup on those sites, addressing those with the highest scores first. There are about 13,000 such properties in the state. Most have not received funds yet, notes Hilfiker. One-third of his business comes from properties in the state cleanup program. Another third comes from the state or other public entities, and one-third from private insurance companies, property owners and banks.

He is working on a former gas station site in Okeechobee, for example, with five inches of used oil floating on top of groundwater from an old tank that leaked. The bank next door, which is expanding its operation, is purchasing the site and plans to build on it. The bank hired Hilfiker's company to assess the site, which in this case meant taking samples of soil and groundwater, then sending them to an environmental laboratory for analysis. That determines what needs to be done, says Hilfiker. In this case, that includes the excavation of a 20- by 20-foot site to a depth of eight feet and cleanup of the oil.

Hilfiker also works with insurance companies to cover against cost overruns for a cleanup. "We write a remediation plan and submit it to the insurance company," he explains. If the insurer approves the plan, it then insures against the cost escalating above the estimated cost of the plan. Precise estimates are difficult because costs can vary based on geology, level of contamination, types of chemical constituents and groundwater flow. "Without insurance, consultants could never guarantee the cost, and no one would ever close on the properties," says Hilfiker. "This is attractive to investors. Just like some people buy an old house and fix it up to resell, some investors buy contaminated property, clean it up and resell. We help investors do that."

The next natural step in the life of Hilfiker's business will be to develop the mortgage and real estate side. Working through a realty company, Amerivest, Hilfiker is able to list environmentally at-risk properties. Through his own First Environmental Mortgage, he can coordinate financing on high-risk sites. As cash starts flowing from the environmental assessment side, he can better afford to work on mortgages, which depend on the deal closing for payment to be realized. So far, he has worked on only one mortgage project. He put a lot of time and effort into it, and the deal didn't close. "I can't take those risks up front, but eventually that's where the focus will be," he says.

This is where he sees the true bottom-line value of his business lying. Whereas an engineering firm is fee based, the real estate and mortgage business is a commission-based structure, which Hilfiker says he finds more appealing.

He is about to launch a marketing plan that includes direct mail and telephone calls to Realtors and attorneys to promote both sides of his business. "I have a lot of environmental competition, a lot of mortgage competition and a lot of real-estate competition. But I'm not aware of any other company that provides all the services together," he says.

In the next year, Hilfiker knows the business will grow, but by how much he is not sure. He now has one full-time employee, an environmental specialist, in addition to himself, plus part-time staff as needed in Fort Lauderdale, Lakeland, Gainesville and Tallahassee. His wife does the bookkeeping. "I haven't decided whether to expand the staff," he says. "I go back and forth over developing this into a huge corporation as compared with staying small, lean and mean."

Ultimately, he says, "the decision will be based on the success of the marketing program and what the demand is." Whatever the decision, you can be sure it will be well thought out.

Susan Holly is a freelance writer and editor based on Sanibel.