Cleaning up on hazardous-duty pay.

• Position: Four Seasons Industrial Services get Environmental Protection Agency clean up contract for North Carolina

When Greensboro-based Four Seasons Industrial Services announced it had been awarded a $25 million Environmental Protection Agency contract in August, it might have looked like a windfall. But securing the five-year contract was by no means a breeze.

"Two years ago, we learned that the EPA was going to offer the contract for an eight-state region in the Southeast," Operations Manager Jim Noles says. "We dedicated one full-time employee to gathering a base of information."

The EPA gave companies 60 days to prepare proposals. "We worked almost around the clock," Noles says.

Four Seasons, which declines to disclose its revenues, has offices in Charlotte, Nashville and Charleston, W.Va. Noles says the company spent $25,000 pursuing the contract, not counting the hundreds of hours that members of the 175-employee company devoted to the project.

"They gave us three case scenarios of environmental disasters, and we had to describe literally minute by...