May/June 1997
Triple M Metal Inc. is more than just a scrap processor. Through a handful of acquisitions, the recycler has also become a steel service center, equipment maintenance and sales shop, and environmental service company.
By Kristina Rundquist
Kristina Rundquist is an associate editor of Scrap.
When people think of one-stop shopping, they probably conjure up something in the way of Wal-Mart or perhaps their local shopping mall. But how about a scrap recycling one-stop shop?
Well, that’s exactly what Triple M Metal Inc. has striven to become.
In its 27-year history, this Brampton, Ontario-based processor and exporter of ferrous and nonferrous scrap has not only expanded its recycling operations, but also integrated into related businesses through acquisitions. And along the way, the firm has grown to become one of the largest—and most diverse—processors in Canada, according to its principals.
Not bad for a company that started out operating from the back of a pickup truck.
Pursuing the North American Dream
Although Triple M now has 160 employees and hopes to soon process more than 1 million tons of combined materials a year, the company traces its roots to one man making the rounds in a lone pickup truck.
That man was Michael Giampaolo, Triple M’s president.
In a story that might be described in terms of the North American Dream, Giampaolo emigrated from his native Italy in 1965 and settled in Canada. A welder by trade, he first worked as a maintenance man at a Canadian scrap operation. “I’ve loved the scrap business since I was a kid,” he says, recalling how he “used to go out and pick up old pots and pans.”
Giampaolo struck out on his own in 1970, founding an operation under the name Arco in Toronto. By 1980, this one-man business had grown to roughly 15 employees and put down roots in a 10,000-square-foot shop on a 5-acre site. Giampaolo also changed the company’s name that year to Triple M Metal (1980) Inc., with the three Ms standing for minerals, metals, and machinery—an indication that the firm’s scope would encompass more than just scrap.
By 1988, Giampaolo’s business was doing well enough to add the 53-acre site that continues to serve as Triple M’s headquarters. The following year, Larry Attar, one of Giampaolo’s business associates, joined the company and now serves as a partner and vice president. Giampaolo’s brother Antonio and his wife Rosa have been with the company since the beginning and remain an integral part of the organization.
Growing in Leaps and Bounds
Over the years, Triple M tripled in size but didn’t stop there. Today, the firm that once had 15 employees now has more than 10 times that number, its processing volume has grown 10 times as well, and it has expanded from one site to eight.
One member of the Triple M business family is Racco Iron & Metal Ltd. (Goodwood, Ontario). Located on 3 acres north of Toronto, the Racco division specializes in reclaiming irony aluminum and copper. In addition, its feeder yard dismantles and processes transformers and electric motors and produces aluminum ingots and sows.
Mostel Metals Co. of Canada Ltd., just east of Toronto in Scarborough, has a similarly sized lot that serves as a feeder yard for the processing of both ferrous and nonferrous metals.
Triple M Kitchener Ltd. (Kitchener, Ontario), which services southwestern Ontario, occupies 11 acres and generates high-density industrial bales of ferrous and nonferrous scrap, using a baler with a capacity of 12,000 tons a month. And because of its rail siding, the plant can service steel mills outside the usual trucking radius.
Barrie Metals Ltd. (Barrie, Ontario), meanwhile, acts as the gateway for scrap processing in the northern part of the province. The operation’s three divisions include Cable Recycling, a copper chopping and lead stripping facility; a ferrous and nonferrous sector complete with a warehouse for new and reusable steel; and two feeder yards with baling and shearing capabilities.
Rounding out Triple M’s family of scrap operations is Attar Metals Inc. (Mississauga, Ontario), the company formed by Attar when he joined Triple M and took over ownership of the old Triple M site just west of Toronto. This facility, currently run by Attar’s brother and company vice president Alan Attar, has an 1,100-ton guillotine shear and primarily serves community and independent small scrap collectors. “A truck may bring in eight different kinds of metals,” Attar says. “They come here because we’ll accumulate a greater volume of one metal. The accumulation has got to start somewhere. If we lose the opportunity for the metal to go beyond the loop, where’s it going to go?”
Although individual loads might be small, Attar Metals is constantly busy—so much so that the site is open on Saturdays. What can’t be processed directly at the Attar Metals site is trucked to Triple M’s main facility, though the firm prefers to stick to the one-bounce approach to processing for cost reasons: “From whomever generates the scrap to our ground and then off to a client,” Attar explains.
While Triple M is primarily a scrap processor, it is also much more. In the past year, for instance, the company branched out into new territory by acquiring Automatic Steel (Brampton, Ontario) and City Waste Systems Inc. (Kitchener, Ontario).
Automatic Steel handles new and reusable steel and coils, processes cut-to-size steel, and serves as a broker. “Initially, it feeds our customers if they have special requests,” says Attar, “but it’s also a company in itself and services the steel industry on the open market.”
With City Waste Systems, Triple M can now provide customers a complete range of environmental services, beginning with an audit review of the firm’s site and operations and concluding with a set of recommendations on how to achieve environmental compliance. City Waste can also help with environmental site assessments, the decommissioning of a site, as well as waste disposal audits and reviews.
In an effort to branch out further, Triple M also acquired W.M. Stocks Used Equipment Ltd. in 1989 and relocated the business to its headquarters site, where it now serves primarily as the repair shop for the company’s machinery. “Nothing goes out of here,” says Giampaolo. “We do everything ourselves.”
Price and quality concerns created the need for such on-site repairs, Attar says, explaining, “If we have problems with a piece of equipment, we want to know what those problems are. Is it wear and tear? Is it an operator who’s not functioning properly? We need to know where the problems lie so we don’t repeat them.”
Set on the back portion of the Triple M lot, W.M. Stocks also fills other roles, such as supplying construction firms with new and reusable machinery parts, as well as dismantling and repairing a variety of construction equipment. Plus, the facility buys, sells, and rents construction equipment.
These recent acquisitions have helped make Triple M a one-stop shop of sorts for its customers. “When we go to any company, we can be an all-service provider to them, not only in scrap recycling but in environmental studies, equipment, maintenance, and steel,” Attar notes.
Keys to Success
So how did Triple M manage to grow from a humble pickup truck to a diverse eight-operation company?
Aside from hard work, Giampaolo attributes much of the firm’s growth to its fair treatment of customers and its attention to their needs, summing up his three rules of successful customer relations as “service, service, service.” It’s this focus on service that has enabled the company to forge long-term relationships with many of its suppliers and consumers. “We don’t lose customers here,” Giampaolo says, pointing out proudly, “We still have the first industrial account we ever got in the business.”
Not that building its customer base has been easy over the years. “It was hard breaking into some of the larger consumers at first,” Attar recalls. “But we took every opportunity and never stopped until we became a supplier to all the mills we wanted to supply.” Currently, the firm sells to steel mills and foundries as well as all major nonferrous consuming sectors—including aluminum, copper, and stainless—throughout the Toronto metropolitan area and southern Ontario as well as internationally.
Triple M has also grown thanks to considerable investments of both time and capital, Giampaolo says, noting, “All the money we made in the business was reinvested, and we still do that today. Plus, we keep our debt low.”
Adding to the company’s financial stability, Attar notes that it shies away from large positions based on speculation. “What makes this business interesting and dynamic more than anything else," he explains, " is that we’re dealing with a commodity that can be traded internationally and that prices fluctuate continually.”
A Strong Employee Foundation
Another feature that defines Triple M—and certainly another component of its continuing success—is the involved management approach of its principals. They use the term “hands-on” frequently, and you can bet they’re referring to more than the employees who work with scrap directly. “We’re all hands-on and have to be doing business all the time,” Attar says, noting, “No one is saying, ‘I’m in charge of just management.’”
In addition to being hands-on, Triple M’s principals are also committed, which means they rarely leave the office when the 5 o’clock whistle sounds. “Business opportunities don’t just exist between 9 and 5, and we’re dedicated enough to realize that,” Attar says. “You’ve got to have dedication to what you do. It takes a lot of work. But when I look back at what we’ve achieved in the last 10 years, I can say we’ve done it successfully, profitably, and with good people working with us to achieve that goal.”
Good people. That’s the key, assert Giampaolo and Attar. In the scrap business, success requires more than simply buying low and selling high. It requires a strong foundation built on quality employees. And Triple M believes it has such a foundation, in part because its employees have brought a broad range of knowledge to their jobs. “Our employees have worked in virtually every aspect of the business,” Attar says.
Offering one example, he points to the firm’s employees who have extensive foundry experience, noting that they “can be a big help to consumers if they happen to be having problems with their foundry. They bring a real professionalism when it comes to consumers having problems with metals.”
Building on their employees’ combined years of experience, Triple M holds regular recycling seminars to discuss industry news and encourages employees to voice their opinions. “We explain what we’re doing on a constant basis,” says Attar. “Say, for example, that we want to increase our volume because the market is rising. We need everyone’s help and input to do that. Employees will take an active role and are constantly looking for different ways to improve and streamline the system.”
This sense of teamwork stems from a belief that everyone is equally important in what they do, Attar observes. And in this spirit of all for one and one for all, employees can participate in a company profit-sharing plan after they have worked for Triple M for one year. “We try to explain to everyone that it is up to them to help the bottom line and that, by helping, they can participate,” says Attar. Of all the company’s benefits, in fact, Giampaolo is most proud of the profit-sharing plan. And clearly this pride is infectious, not to mention profitable. In some years, employees have made as much money from profit sharing as their regular salary, Giampaolo notes.
But benefits alone can’t make a happy work force, and especially not a productive one. Safety is always critical in the scrap business, so Triple M hosts regular safety seminars. “We have meetings every month,” Giampaolo says. “It’s just a reminder to everyone that safety is a priority.” And he adds, once again proudly, “Our safety record is excellent.”
Triple M also tries to help its customers prevent industrial accidents. The company, in fact, goes so far as to assume a portion of the expense of installing concrete pads and interceptors on its customers’ properties.
A Wide-Open Door
To keep Triple M’s employee relations running smoothly, Giampaolo and Attar also maintain an open-door policy. “All of us are available all the time for all employees,” explains Attar. “We call it employee investment. We’re not unapproachable. And if there’s a specific problem, we’ll get involved.”
That degree of openness extends outside the company as well. For instance, every year Triple M allows school groups to tour its main facility and gives the students a mini-recycling lesson. Other community projects include donating matching funds for charities and giving a lecture on Canadian free enterprise to a group of management students from Eastern Europe.
And this spirit of giving doesn’t stop at the door—it even extends to Triple M’s competitors. “Traditionally in this business people keep very close to themselves. We’re totally different,” declares Giampaolo. “We’re wide open, and we tell our competition how to do things better. Some might wonder, ‘Why would he tell me that?’ But we don’t have anything to hide. We’re what you see and it seems to me when you open up to your competitors, they can open back to you. That way there’s more sharing of knowledge, and especially, cost.”
Offering an example, Giampaolo notes that transportation is a major cost for the scrap industry, “and if we find a way to minimize our cost by sharing, then I don’t have a problem with that.”
Putting Quality on the Line
Aside from its employees, another top priority for Triple M is quality. In addition to an on-site testing lab, the company checks the quality of material at every step of the process, beginning with its drivers conducting visual inspections of material when they pick up loads. When these loads are delivered to Triple M, employees examine the material as it’s being dumped, as well as when it’s prepared for processing. “We try to ensure purity from the very beginning and carry it through the system,” Attar remarks.
Triple M has so much confidence in the quality of its scrap, in fact, that last year it put its convictions—and at least a portion of its bottom line—on the line.
It was late on a Friday afternoon. Attar received a telephone call from one of the firm’s steel mill consumers, who stated that it would never buy from Triple M again. In fact, the mill said it was sending back Triple M’s trucks still loaded and demanded that the company send empty trucks to pick up any of its material still on hand.
Attar was shocked and told the mill rep that he thought the firm was overreacting. He let Triple M’s trucks go and also allowed the mill’s trucks to be loaded. “Then I waited until 5 o’clock and talked with Antonio Giampaolo who agreed with my position and said I should call them back and tell them that they weren’t cutting us off, but rather we were cutting them off,” Attar recounts.
As it turned out, the mill called soon thereafter saying it had made a drastic mistake. The material in question wasn’t Triple M’s scrap at all. “And on Monday, we received a letter apologizing for the whole thing,” Attar says, adding, “We thought that was very thoughtful.”
With that kind of confidence in its products, not to mention its broad range of services and focus on customer needs, Triple M seems to have all the right elements for further growth. “Every day we look at new opportunities,” Giampaolo says. “Some we go on, some we don’t, so it’s hard to say where we’ll be in the future. One thing I can say is we will be somewhere. And in the meantime, you just have to get up, go to work, and have fun with it.” •
Triple M Metal Inc. is more than just a scrap processor. Through a handful of acquisitions, the recycler has also become a steel service center, equipment maintenance and sales shop, and environmental service company.