March/April 2011
In its 15-year history, All Scrap Metals has made its recycling “soap opera” work, thanks to its strong family foundation, customer service focus, employee dedication, and resourcefulness.
By Kent Kiser
Every business has a unique story, says Veronica Costanza, and the story of her family’s recycling business, All Scrap Metals, could be a soap opera—As the Magnet Swings, she jokes. This second-generation scrap metal company in the New Orleans suburb of Kenner, La., has seen its share of drama: the loss of the family patriarch, hurricanes, market tribulations, and several other “defining moments,” as Veronica calls them. Despite the many twists and turns in this real-life saga, it’s a classic scrap metal entrepreneurial tale.
The Story So Far
The All Scrap Metals story begins with New Orleans native Vincent Costanza. In spring 1962, he was one of 115 students in the first graduating class at Louisiana State University in New Orleans, earning a degree in chemistry with a minor in math. He began his career as a chemist testing oils for International Lubricant Corp., a subsidiary of the Shell oil company in Metairie, La., a community between Kenner and New Orleans. That’s where the 23-year-old Vincent met 19-year-old Veronica Weeser, another New Orleans native who worked as secretary/assistant to the chief chemist. They married Dec. 26, 1962—two weeks after their first date.
By September 1965, the Costanzas had two children and a new, unfurnished home in Kenner. Then Hurricane Betsy struck. The Category-4 storm tore the roof off their house, displacing the Costanza family to a temporary storm shelter in New Orleans. Hurricane Betsy became the first major defining moment in their lives, Veronica says. For one, the storm led to the first of many evacuations for the Costanzas over the years. Because the hard-working Vincent never took family vacations, those evacuation trips became the family’s holidays. The family members jokingly call themselves “professional evacuators.”
Hurricane Betsy had another profound effect on the Costanzas’ lives: Seeing the vast need—and opportunity—for house repairs and remodeling after the storm, Vincent decided to put his degree on the shelf and start a construction business. Though he had no formal business experience, he dove into this new enterprise and, over the years, he expanded into other ventures, including pile-driving, clearing land and selling the timber for firewood, debris hauling, demolition, real estate brokerage, metal warehouse construction, concrete recycling, and dealing in used equipment. “He tried to make a nickel any way he could,” says Dominick, Vincent and Veronica’s youngest son. Veronica, meanwhile, took care of the growing Costanza family, which included—in age order—Vincent III, Veronica, Christopher, and Dominick.
Vincent’s philosophy was to reinvest as much of the company’s profits as possible back into the business so he could buy more equipment and land, primarily in Kenner. “He believed that buying land was a good investment, a forced savings account, and a foundation for establishing a lasting family business,” Veronica says. All that reinvestment meant frugal times for the Costanzas, though. For years the Costanza home also served as the company’s office and workshop, with the family doing welding, tire repairs, and mechanical repairs on trucks and equipment in the carport. Vincent even made the furniture for the home. “Sacrifice got us where we are,” Dominick says.
Vincent expected his children to assist him in the family enterprises from an early age, and all four grew up learning how to operate heavy equipment, drive 18-wheelers, and work together. As teenagers, they worked after school and during summers; Vincent even allowed them to bid at equipment auctions. “Dad made sure we acquired the necessary skills—including how to make and manage money—to join the company full time after graduation and created jobs for all of us,” Dominick says. “He wanted to keep the family together for life.” With all of the kids engaged in the family business, Veronica decided in 1981 to embark on her own career at Pollution Control and Waste Disposal, a Kenner-based engineering firm that specializes in petrochemical waste injection wells. She quickly rose to the position of office manager.
The Costanza family faced another defining moment in 1991, when the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, which is in Kenner, decided to expand and used eminent domain to purchase the family’s many properties in the area. Vincent used the settlement money to buy the first 3.5 acres of the company’s current 10-acre tract in Kenner. Soon after the move, in 1994, Vincent changed the company from Costanza & Sons, a sole proprietorship, to Veronica Industries, a limited-liability partnership that included Veronica and the four children, and he added one more service to its portfolio: scrap metal recycling. Being in construction and demolition, the family already had experience and regular dealings with scrap metal yards. The company began to purchase aluminum cans locally and solicit metal in the area. The new initiative proved successful, and with construction bidding becoming too competitive, Vincent decided in 1996 to devote Veronica Industries exclusively to scrap metal recycling. “It seemed like a good idea,” Veronica says, “because the company had the land in a prime location, some equipment, and scrap metal industry exposure.”
Though the market downturn in 1998 made the company’s early going a challenge, Vincent never doubted his decision to enter the scrap business, and the family was excited about its future in the recycling niche. Then the family and the company experienced their most critical defining moment: In January 1999, Vincent died suddenly from a blood clot that traveled to his lungs. He was 59.
This could have spelled the end of Veronica Industries. “I lost my husband of 36 years, our four children lost their father, all of us lost a partner, and our young company lost its leader and visionary,” Veronica says. But Vincent’s death “gave us an incentive to carry the business on” and work to fulfill his vision, says Vincent III. And so they did. “We met this huge challenge as a family and as business partners,” Veronica says. “Today we can say proudly that All Scrap Metals represents the fulfillment of our goal to achieve Vincent’s vision—a successful family-owned metal recycling company.”
The four Costanza siblings continued to work together and run the company until 2003, when Veronica joined them and assumed the duties of general manager, even as she continued her job part time with the injection-well firm. She also persuaded her twin brother, Art Weeser, to join the family business and use his business background to help it succeed. Daughter Veronica, then the company’s sales director and office manager, left the family business to open her own real estate brokerage firm. In 2004, Veronica changed the company name to All Scrap Metals to better reflect its scrap metal-focused operations.
Then came August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina slammed the New Orleans area. Though All Scrap Metals avoided a direct hit, the massive storm destroyed the facility’s fences and half a wall on one of its buildings and inflicted other minor damage around the yard. Further, the company had no water service for several days and no power for three weeks. Fortuitously, the Costanzas had installed a new nonferrous baler prior to Katrina. “That machine allowed us to keep up with the volumes of scrap metal that rolled in during the post-storm and post-levee-breach cleanup and, overall, helped us grow the company,” Veronica says.
After Katrina, the company rode the wave of economic good fortune from 2006 to late 2008, expanding its yard to 10 acres (8.5 acres of which it uses now) and adding both equipment and employees. Then the company watched the bottom fall out of the scrap metal market again in late 2008. All Scrap Metals survived the recession without laying off any employees—it even gave everyone a holiday bonus—thanks to its fiscally conservative tradition, its refusal to hold on to scrap metal inventory, and its management policy to “take care of the company first so the company can take care of us and our employees,” Veronica says.
A Formidable Team
If you visit All Scrap Metals today, it is abundantly clear that the company Vincent Costanza founded to support his family remains a family affair. The office walls showcase many family photos, including portraits of the late founder and snapshots of him at various family events throughout the years. Veronica and her three sons continue to manage the company day to day, and all the Costanzas—including daughter Veronica, who now operates a networking and communications company with her husband—are partners in the company. Their partnership works “because each of the partners possesses different talents and skills that combine to provide the necessary elements for successful business management,” Veronica says. Vincent III, for example, is the family’s “mechanical genius,” while Chris excels in sales, Dominick’s strengths lie in operations and people management, and Veronica is a talented business manager. Together, the Costanzas’ complementary abilities make them a formidable team.
Though they have different strengths, the Costanzas share one distinctive characteristic: They are all resourceful, can-do individuals. The Costanza brothers, for instance, all have their commercial driver’s licenses and know how to operate every piece of equipment in the yard. The company built all of its own structures, and it repairs—and sometimes builds—its own equipment. In addition, the Costanzas are slowly but surely hard-surfacing their facility using excess concrete from local cement companies.
For all of their creativity and familial unity, the Costanzas are the first to admit they don’t always see eye to eye. In a family business, Veronica points out, “you have the same challenges as any business partnership, only magnified due to the family aspect.” As Vincent adds, “It can be a challenge making sure the family members get together and move in one direction.” They make the situation work by compromising, sharing a common corporate vision, and communicating, which Veronica calls “the most important factor.” They meet every day at 10 a.m. to share information, discuss developments in their respective areas, plan, and generally stay connected.
Parlaying Strengths Into Success
All Scrap Metals’ strong foundation and resourceful ways are big reasons for its success, but they aren’t the only reasons, the Costanzas note. When asked what their company does best, the unanimous answer is “service.” With several competitors in its backyard, All Scrap Metals realized it had to offer excellent service if it hoped to succeed. The company draws 90 percent of its scrap metal volume from industrial accounts, which it serves with five trucks and 180 containers. The firm will pick up any container within 24 hours of a call. “We move containers based on our customers’ schedules—whenever they need it,” Chris says. “Thanks to our own fleet of trucks, we have full dispatch control, so we can serve our customers promptly according to their scheduling needs.”
Excellent service doesn’t just happen, of course, and the Costanzas are quick to credit their 40 employees—both on the road and in the yard—for their hard work. Veronica calls them the company’s “most important asset.” Many employees have worked there from the beginning. Veronica attributes the company’s low turnover rate to several factors, including its ability to “put the right people in place and let them do their jobs.” All Scrap Metals rewards its employees for their efforts with a quarterly production bonus, which “gives employees an incentive to work smarter because they have a stake in the outcome,” Dominick says. The company also offers a 401(k) retirement plan, group medical insurance, and good equipment—the necessary tools for employees to do their jobs well.
The Costanzas say their No. 1 priority is their employees’ on-the-job safety, which explains why the company was an early signer—in February 2006—of ISRI’s safety pledge and why it holds weekly safety meetings, in both English and Spanish, for its yard workers and drivers. The company’s focus on safety complements and supports its other priorities, which include taking care of the environment and delivering high-quality services and scrap products, Veronica notes.
The family-minded Costanzas also feel it’s important to stay connected with their employees, and they do so, in part, by lending a hand in any aspect of the operation. It’s not uncommon to see the three brothers out in the yard, working side by side with their employees. In the office, they maintain an open-door policy for their crew. “We’re always readily available to our employees,” Veronica says.
Hopes, Dreams, and Aspirations
Though All Scrap Metals already has grown beyond the Costanzas’ expectations, they have no intention of stopping now. The company currently uses only about 30 percent to 50 percent of its processing capacity, Vincent says, so there’s plenty of room for growth in volume. “We’re in a position to process much more than we’re processing,” he says. Next, he envisions the company expanding on its current property, spreading its 8.5-acre operations over more of the 10-acre plot. Within the plant, the Costanzas have a variety of plans, including covering all of its nonferrous operations and broadening its scope to process other materials, such as electronics and plastics. In short, All Scrap Metals continues to evolve, expanding on its founder’s original vision while staying true to his dream of a sustainable family business.
Already, a third generation of Costanzas has shown an interest in joining the business. Chris’ eldest son, also named Chris, is a junior at the University of New Orleans, but he works at the yard on weekends and holidays. And Dominick’s 12-year-old daughter, Rosetta, spends many hours at the yard after school, absorbing the scrap metal culture—when she’s not doing homework or training her horse for barrel racing.
Though the Costanzas are bullish on their company’s future, they worry about the impact of increasing government regulation. “The bureaucracy of business regulations has grown to where it’s overwhelming,” Veronica says. Given that small businesses—like All Scrap Metals—create the most jobs in the United States, she says, the government is hindering job creation, threatening the viability of many companies, and stifling economic recovery by regulating businesses too much and taxing them excessively.
She credits ReMA with helping her company and others face these challenges as an advocate for the recycling industry. “ISRI is as great a tool as any piece of equipment,” she says. All Scrap Metals has been an ReMA member from its earliest days, and Veronica has been a Gulf Coast Chapter officer since 2006, currently filling the post of second vice president.
In a quiet moment at the end of another busy day, Veronica sits down, granddaughter Rosetta on her lap, and can’t help but smile about what her family has created. “I’m proud to be a for-profit family business that helps preserve the environment for future generations,” she says. And what about the sacrifices and hardships they’ve experienced in their recycling soap opera thus far? “It was absolutely worth it,” she says. “It has been an amazing journey, and I’m looking forward to what lies ahead.”
Kent Kiser is publisher and editor-in-chief of Scrap.
In its 15-year history, All Scrap Metals has made its recycling “soap opera” work, thanks to its strong family foundation, customer service focus, employee dedication, and resourcefulness.