Jorge Argota Testimonial

Dylan Gerken, Owner | Greasecycle

Used Cooking Oil Recycling & Grease Trap Services — NC, SC, VA

I own Greasecycle. We’ve been doing used cooking oil recycling and grease trap services across North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia for over 15 years. Family owned, trucks on the road every morning, the kind of business where you know every driver by name and you answer the phone yourself when a restaurant has an emergency at 2 AM. I know this industry and I know what it takes to grow in it, which is why when I decided to launch a new brand in Florida I needed someone who could build it from nothing and actually understand what we do.

That person was Jorge Argota, and the brand he built for me is Stirling Food Systems.

Why I Created Stirling

Greasecycle has a strong footprint on the East Coast but Florida is a different animal. The market is massive, the regulatory environment is its own world, and the competition down there doesn’t look like what we deal with in the Carolinas and Virginia. I didn’t want to just slap the Greasecycle name on a Florida operation and hope it worked. I wanted a brand that was built specifically for Florida, that spoke to Florida restaurant owners, that understood Florida’s FOG ordinances and compliance requirements and climate challenges. I needed someone who could create that brand from the ground up; the name, the positioning, the website, the content strategy, all of it.

I’d looked at what other companies in the Florida market were doing online and most of it was terrible. Stock photos, generic service descriptions, no real content, no understanding of what actually makes a restaurant owner pick up the phone. And then I came across Jorge’s work and it was clearly operating on a different level than anything else in the space.

What Jorge Brought to the Table

Jorge spent ten years doing marketing and paralegal work for Percy Martinez, a medical malpractice attorney in Miami. He took that practice from a solo attorney with a $500 marketing budget to one of the highest ranking medical malpractice firms in Florida; four cities, outranking Morgan & Morgan in Local Service Ads, 483% traffic growth, 287 leads in five weeks. He had four years of marketing experience before he even started that project. So when I say he built Stirling from scratch I mean he came in with fourteen years of combined experience knowing exactly how to build a brand that dominates search results in Florida specifically.

But what made him the right person for this wasn’t just the marketing resume. It was the paralegal background. In our industry, FOG compliance is everything. Every county in Florida has its own ordinances. Miami-Dade requires gravity traps cleaned every 60 days and they can never exceed 25% grease capacity. You need a current Grease Discharge Operating Permit from DERM or you can’t operate. Restaurants are required to keep signed service manifests on site for a full year. Fines can hit $2,000 per day per FOG violation and repeat offenses jump to $5,000 with potential license revocation.

Jorge understood all of this immediately because he spent a decade working inside a legal practice dealing with compliance documentation, regulatory frameworks, and what happens when people don’t have their paperwork in order. Most marketing agencies in the grease industry have never read a FOG ordinance in their life. Jorge read them the way a paralegal reads case law; thoroughly, looking for the angles, understanding what it means for the client on the ground.

Building Stirling from Zero

When I say Jorge built Stirling Food Systems I mean he built it. The brand identity, the website architecture, the content strategy targeting specific Florida markets, the service pages, the location pages, everything. He didn’t hand me a template with our logo pasted on top. He researched every major Florida metro, analyzed the competition in each one, identified the content gaps that nobody else was filling, and built a website and content system designed to own those gaps.

The used cooking oil and grease trap industry has a massive content problem. Every company’s website says the same thing; “we recycle your oil, we clean your traps, call us.” Jorge built Stirling’s content around the actual problems restaurant owners are searching for. What happens when you fail a DERM inspection. How to stay compliant with your county’s FOG ordinance. What the manifest requirements are and why you need them. How grease trap sizing works based on kitchen volume. What the environmental impact is of proper oil recycling versus illegal dumping. Content that answers real questions instead of just listing services.

And the environmental piece is where it really comes together. At Greasecycle, every gallon we collect gets recycled into biodiesel. That’s not a tagline; that’s what we actually do. Stirling is built around that same model in Florida and Jorge built the content strategy to connect the regulatory compliance story to the environmental impact story in a way that’s compelling to restaurant owners without being preachy. Restaurant owners don’t want a lecture about sustainability but they do want to know their waste is being handled properly and that they’re not going to get fined. Jorge threads that needle better than anyone I’ve worked with.

The FOG Marketing Advantage

Here’s what I’ve learned from watching Jorge build Stirling; FOG ordinances are the biggest untapped marketing opportunity in the grease management industry. When a restaurant owner gets a notice from the county, or hears from another owner who just got hit with a fine, or has an inspector show up and ask for manifests they can’t find, the first thing they do is search. And right now, in most Florida markets, nobody has good content answering those searches. The company websites all say the same generic things and the actual regulatory information is buried in county PDFs that no restaurant owner is going to read.

Jorge saw that gap and built Stirling’s entire content architecture around it. County specific FOG compliance pages, grease trap maintenance schedules tied to local ordinance requirements, content explaining the DERM inspection process, pages about the fines and consequences of non-compliance. It’s the same strategy he used at Percy Martinez; find the searches nobody else is targeting, build the best content around those searches, and own the results before the competition figures out what happened.

And because Jorge understands the legal side from his paralegal work, the compliance content isn’t surface-level fluff. It references actual Florida statutes, specific county codes, real fine structures, actual permit requirements. That kind of authority is what Google rewards and it’s what restaurant owners trust when they’re looking for answers.

What This Means for the Industry

I’ve been in the grease management business for 15 years and the marketing in our industry has been stuck in the dark ages for most of that time. Everyone’s competing on price or truck count or service area and nobody’s competing on content, on authority, on actually being the resource that restaurant owners turn to when they have questions about compliance. Jorge is changing that with Stirling and I think it’s going to change the way companies in this space think about marketing.

He’s expanding his operation to take on more clients now and that’s the right move because there are a lot of grease management companies across the country that need what he’s offering. The combination of legal compliance knowledge, local SEO expertise, content strategy that actually drives calls, and a track record that includes both a decade of legal marketing and now the grease industry; I haven’t found that combination anywhere else and I’ve looked.

When I handed Jorge the task of building Stirling Food Systems, I was betting on someone I believed could take a brand that didn’t exist yet and make it competitive in one of the toughest service markets in Florida. He’s delivered on that bet and we’re still in the early stages. If you’re in this industry and you’re serious about growth, talk to Jorge. And if you’re not in this industry, talk to him anyway, because what he does with local SEO and compliance-driven content works for any service business where regulation determines customer behavior. The guy just understands how to connect what people search for with what businesses actually do, and that sounds simple but almost nobody gets it right.

Dylan Gerken

Owner, Greasecycle

Used Cooking Oil Recycling & Grease Trap Services — NC, SC, VA