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A Case CX220E excavator works to remove slabs from the flood ravaged Lynn Hall Memorial Park visitors center and beach facilities on Ft. Myers Beach.
Duane and Jennifer Lopez moved to Ft. Myers, Fla., from Chicago in 2003, when Jennifer had an opportunity to transfer within her company. Duane left his small remodeling business where he was finishing basements and doing roofing work in the Chicago area.
After arrival in south Florida, Duane picked up right where he left off in Illinois and started a general contracting company with a partner. He later left the company to move on to bigger things, establishing Extreme Painting & Contracting in 2016, which performed general contracting work such as painting, stucco, drywall and metal framing.
The work of this company spawned another company in 2018 called Extreme Disposal, which consisted of one roll-off truck and 50 dumpsters. Growth continued with the company expanding to include three Florida locations: Ft. Myers, Panama City and Tampa.
After more than a year to get permitting, Lopez opened a recycling transfer station in 2021 for construction debris. One week after the business finally got permitted, one of the "bigs" came in and bought it. With that additional capital, Lopez was able to go from one truck to 20 trucks and approximately 2,000 dumpsters.
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"While we were running Extreme Disposal, we started doing demolition and land clearing," he said. "After we sold Extreme Disposal, we continued with a few pieces of equipment and a couple trucks and in 2021 begun operating under the name Extreme Demolition & Land Clearing."
Born from a dream and raised by industry demand, Extreme Demolition & Land Clearing has quickly become a force to be reckoned with in southwest Florida. Lopez said, "I'd say we're probably the largest demolition contractor in southwest Florida."
Extreme operates under a portfolio of four unique companies: Extreme Florida Roofing; Extreme Painting & Contracting — a full-service general contractor; Extreme Demolition & Land Clearing; and Extreme Florida Metals — a 12,000-sq.-ft. metal shop for machining roofing products, including gutters, downspouts, drip edge, soffit, fascia gutters and more.
The big investment for the company was recently opening a recycling yard providing it the capability of recycling its own wood waste, horticulture debris and green waste for processing into a reusable product. Lopez said it also allows other companies to dump clean concrete, clay roofing tiles and other recyclables for processing.
Extreme sells the crushed and sized aggregate directly from the yard and ships the processed wood products to mulch bagging and coloring facilities for their resale.
The 15-acre processing yard is in Cape Coral, Fla., and saves Extreme a lot of money on its own recycling needs: "We charge other vendors to dump and then make money on the finished product," Lopez said.
"Much of the land clearing and demolition products received in the yard come from our own projects and job sites throughout southwest Florida. Now we make money on the project itself and the wood waste and concrete processing proceeds."
Brand Loyalty
Extreme started out with the purchase of two Case machines: a pair of Case CX 250 excavators; the rolling stock at the processing yard is now exclusively Case excavator and wheel loader products.
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"Regular staffing on the recycling yard is six to eight operators on Case machines working five days a week. As we finish up other offsite jobs, we'll haul the Case machines to the processing yard and utilize those operators with their machine to help catch up or get ahead on our needs here on the recycling yard."
Non-rolling stock products on the processing yard include products from Diamond Z, Morbark and Powerscreen. For the excavators, manual sheers and concrete densifiers have been added to assist in separating concrete and metal/rebar.
When Hurricane Ian hit in September of 2022 as a Category 5 Hurricane in Ft. Myers, Fla., Extreme Demolition & Land Clearing began buying more-and-more Case machines to keep up with the intense work required for cleanup and debris processing.
To simply say Extreme is "hooked on Case machines" is a bit of an understatement. In a mere two-year span of time, the company has purchased 17 new and four used Case machines with a vast array of attachments of buckets, grapples, thumbs, shears and densifiers, with most of the specialty attachments coming from Florida-based Pemberton Attachments.
In addition to full-sized excavators and wheel loaders, the overall fleet now includes a Case TV450B compact track loader and Case's largest built compact track loader, the TV620 with a land clearing mulching head. Extreme even purchased the first Case CX220E ever sold in the state of Florida.
The overall machine fleet for Extreme Demolition totals 30 machines, including some forestry machines like skidders and harvesters and a couple other excavators with hammers. The company owns and operates a fleet of approximately 30 trucks — mostly big tractor-trailers with 75-yard dump trailers.
The Extreme group of companies did not obtain the level of success it is experiencing by simply "going with the flow."
"Our fleet was aging, we were having issues with them, and we weren't getting quite the service timeliness that we needed. So, we tried Case.
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"The service is great. Whenever we needed something fixed, [CASE Power & Equipment of Florida] was there within a couple of hours. We were back and forth with Case for several months on what they were able to do for us and what we could get for our other machines without it hurting us too badly. They were able to make it work and after three months we struck a deal and here we are with all Case machines.
"These guys have been really good. Best service I've ever seen. They really stepped up to the plate and made it happen and we consider them a partner in our operation.
"Our sales rep, Todd Kundinger, has been great. He's ‘Johnny on the spot' when needed and will answer his phone at midnight if we have a need."
In addition to reliability, Lopez said his Case machines are user friendly and the operators like them.
"In our business, we beat the Hell out of machines. Our first Case purchases from a year and a half ago are still running strong. What we do is far more damaging to a machine than the average contractor digging in the dirt. And these machines have held up great. They're what I call EXTREME." CEG
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