March/April 1999
It may seem ironic to build a business by tearing things down, but that’s what D.H. Griffin Wrecking Co. Inc. has done in its 40-year history in the demolition and scrap processing niches.
By Robert L. Reid
Robert L. Reid is managing editor of Scrap.
When D.H. Griffin Wrecking Co. Inc. (Greensboro, N.C.) blows up an old building, the explosive charges level the structure in about 10 seconds. The crowd, watching the spectacle from a safe distance, gives a great cheer and then goes home. Local TV stations broadcast dramatic film of the implosion, then move on to other news.
But for a full-service demolition and scrap processing firm like D.H. Griffin, the big bang is only the middle of the story, not the end. For it, there are often months of preparation before each detonation and several weeks or months of scrap processing work afterward.
And D.H. Griffin’s goal is to provide even more start-to-finish services on demolition projects—from environmental and hazardous material cleanup before demolition to constructing the new facilities that replace the old ones.
Demolition and Much More
D.H. Griffin—which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year—has grown from a small, local operation that dismantled mostly one- and two-story structures with sledgehammers and crowbars to one of the largest demolition contractors in the country, with more than 200 pieces of equipment, more than 500 employees, several subsidiaries, and a track record that includes demolition projects in France and South Korea, says David H. Griffin Jr., vice president and son of the company’s founder and president, David H. Griffin Sr.
In addition to its scrap recycling operation—which represents about 10 percent of its annual revenue, David Jr. notes—the D.H. Griffin family of companies includes Demolition and Asbestos Removal Inc., an environmental services firm; D.H. Griffin Construction Co. (Raleigh, N.C.), a general building contractor; D.H. Griffin of Texas (Houston), which focuses on heavy industrial demolition projects; Griffin Industrial Services (Jessup, Ga.), a specialty industrial leak repair service; and a car parts operation in Greensboro.
From 1988 to 1998, D.H. Griffin also ran its own implosion division named Demolition Dynamics, but last year sold that business to the existing management team.
And for about a year and a half, the company was involved in a joint venture with United Metal Recyclers (Kernersville, N.C.) that ran a shredding operation in Smithfield, N.C. But that venture ended in February 1998 after Recycling Industries Inc. (Englewood, Colo.) bought first United Metal and then D.H. Griffin’s share of the business.
Although short-lived, D.H. Griffin’s experience with shredding was positive, David Jr. says, and the company might consider reentering that market sometime in the future.
Going Where the Work Is
Demolition and scrap recycling have always gone hand-in-hand for D.H. Griffin, even before the company was a company. In 1959, David Sr., a former tobacco farm sharecropper then working the night shift at a Greensboro tobacco factory, took over a church demolition project from his brother-in-law, primarily to obtain building materials to construct his first home. This part-time demolition job, however, turned into David Sr.’s full-time career when the tobacco factory laid him off. Luckily, a city employee noticed the church project and invited him to bid on other local jobs created by a road-widening project.
“He bid on the next job, got it, and kept on from there,” says David Jr. “Getting laid off was probably the best thing that ever happened to him.”
At first, the newly formed company consisted of David Sr., his wife Marylene, and a handful of family members and local laborers hired from time to time. The demolition projects were small—mostly houses—and the work was done by hand with simple tools. A pickup truck was the biggest piece of equipment. But David Sr. was learning the business, getting D.H. Griffin on the bid lists for other city and county jobs, neighboring communities, and the North Carolina Department of Transportation.
Early in the 1960s, the company bought its first piece of heavy equipment—a bulldozer—and by the middle of the decade had grown large enough to start tearing down multistory buildings.
But as D.H. Griffin grew and the size of its demolition projects increased, so did its need to expand beyond the Greensboro area. “To be a big contractor in the demolition business, you’ve got to go where the work is,” David Jr. explains. By the early 1970s, D.H. Griffin was demolishing buildings as far away as Texas, and today regularly wins jobs in a dozen states, primarily in the Southeast. The company has even worked on projects in Montana and Utah, as well as a couple of international projects.
On any given day, D.H. Griffin employees are working on five to 10 large projects (in excess of $1 million), plus another 25 or so smaller jobs. The company’s projects are roughly 60 percent industrial (such as old refineries and shuttered plants) and 40 percent commercial (such as high-rise buildings and shopping centers). Its business has been growing about 20 percent a year, David Jr. adds, a rate that he believes can be sustained for years to come.
Scrap Makes the Difference
David Griffin Sr.’s first experience with scrap came in his childhood on the North Carolina tobacco farm his family sharecropped. During the off-seasons, they’d clean up around the farm, hauling scrap metal to a local scrap recycler.
Today, David Sr. and his company are still doing the same thing, only on a much grander scale. Large demolition projects generate tremendous amounts of scrap. At each of the five to 10 big jobs that D.H. Griffin handles simultaneously, it can process and/or ship 12,000 tons of ferrous scrap and 2 million pounds of nonferrous in a six-month period, David Jr. notes. By working in and understanding the scrap business, D.H. Griffin can often obtain the best prices for material it recovers. That, in turn, helps the company make more competitive bids. “With larger projects, the fact that we can get a good price for the scrap sometimes does make the difference in whether we get the job or not,” David Jr. says.
At each demolition site, the project manager is basically in charge of deciding how best to handle the scrap generated. When time permits, for instance, D.H. Griffin will send mobile equipment, including shears and a baler, to the demolition project to process the scrap on-site before shipping it directly to a consumer. Some equipment has traveled from site to site without returning to the Greensboro headquarters for years at a time. Other pieces alternate between use on demolition sites and use in the company’s 15-acre scrap plant, opened in 1974 at its 37-acre Greensboro headquarters.
On several occasions, scrap material such as concrete was reused right on the demolition site. When D.H. Griffin tore down Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta, the company also had the contract to build the new parking lot for the site. Some 100,000 tons of concrete from the old stadium was crushed on-site and used as base material, saving D.H. Griffin the expense of buying an equivalent amount of new stone at $8 a ton, David Jr. says. (For more on the firm’s demolition projects, see “What Goes Up Must Come Down” below.)
Likewise, when D.H. Griffin dismantled an old foundry for Tuscaloosa Steel Corp., some 4,000 tons of steel were sold directly back to the mill, where it was turned into new steel products, all within 72 hours of being torn out and without ever leaving the immediate vicinity.
Other times, if the demolition project is on a particularly fast track, D.H. Griffin will partner with a local scrap processor near the demolition site to haul away and process material. “We’ve got a very good relationship with about 10 to 15 scrap companies in the South that we do business with every month,” David Jr. notes.
When necessary, D.H. Griffin even brings material back to its Greensboro scrap plant for storage or processing.
All told, the company’s total scrap volume reaches as much as 200,000 tons a year, roughly 85 percent ferrous. Most of this scrap comes from the demolition sites, David Jr. explains, but about 30 percent is collected from some 200 industrial accounts the firm services in the Greensboro area, as well as over-the-scale peddler traffic.
The firm’s over-the-scale business has grown so much in recent years that it now operates two scales just for its peddler suppliers, notes Ray Coleman, manager of the nonferrous division. Those are in addition to its separate scales for UBCs and truck deliveries. With 10 to 15 trucks often showing up at the same time, the company is considering installing a second truck scale so it would have one for suppliers’ trucks and one for D.H. Griffin vehicles. A rail scale is also a possibility, David Jr. says, noting that the company’s rail spur can accommodate 20 railcars at a time.
Most of the firm’s ferrous scrap, in fact, is shipped by rail to minimills in the Carolinas, the Birmingham market, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and sometimes Chicago. Nonferrous, in contrast, is usually transported by truck within a three-to-four-state range.
Expecting Loyalty, Providing Flexibility
D.H. Griffin has about 100 employees at its Greensboro headquarters, with perhaps 20 of them dedicated to the scrap operation. That number varies depending on how many demolition projects the firm is working on. That’s because D.H. Griffin takes its own employees to each project rather than hiring local workers for the job, then laying them off at the end. So when the company’s employees return from a demolition project, they start working in the scrap operation, explains Robert Fields, plant manager.
“Loyal, dependable people” are one of the company’s greatest strengths, David Jr. says. And the fact that D.H. Griffin offers both demolition and scrap processing work helps keep good crews together full-time, year-round, even when one side of the business slows down.
While D.H. Griffin demands job flexibility from its employees, it also gives them flexibility and tries to accommodate their needs. For instance, the company tries to consider the needs of employees who cannot travel too far from home.
“It all comes back to people,” David Jr. asserts. “If they’re happy, we’re happy. If they’re not happy, eventually it will affect the operation.”
Paying a “very competitive” wage plus a production bonus is one way to keep employees happy, he says. There’s also a profit-sharing plan and the potential for other bonuses, all of which can add up to a “substantial” percentage of the employee’s salary. But all bonuses are also linked to safety performance. “Just because a project makes money isn’t enough,” David Jr. notes. “It has to be safe and make money.”
The company is a stickler for safety, with its Greensboro scrap plant serving as the initial training ground for most new employees. That’s because it’s much better to have an employee make a mistake cutting a piece of scrap, where the material can simply be recut, than to let that person make a mistake while cutting a vital part of a building under demolition, where every cut weakens the overall structure, David Jr. explains.
Moreover, all of D.H. Griffin’s torchcutters must wear respirators, even when the material poses no respiratory hazard. “It’s easier to train people that whenever they’re burning something, they have to wear a respirator,” David Jr. says. That way, when an employee cuts material that could pose a hazard, they’ll be wearing the necessary protective gear.
All supervisors and many employees are also trained in Red Cross first-aid and CPR techniques, he adds. And given the likelihood that demolition projects could involve some hazardous material—from asbestos to PCBs—many employees take a 40-hour hazardous material recognition course.
In addition, some employees are cross-trained to work both the environmental cleanup and demolition sides of a project. That way, when D.H. Griffin handles both aspects of a job, some of the same employees stay on the project throughout both phases. That saves time and money for the client and lends continuity between the different stages of the job since a totally new demolition team doesn’t have to learn about the site from scratch, David Jr. notes. It’s also preferable to deal with environmental issues using your own employees rather than an outside firm, he adds, because your own employees will understand the project from start to finish.
Wanting to Do It All
Active in the industry and its community, D.H. Griffin is a member of ReMA and a charter member of the National Association of Demolition Contractors, whose logo adorns the firm’s vehicles right beside the Griffin name. In the Greensboro area, the company sponsors eight youth baseball and softball teams, a youth soccer team, and an adult golf tournament that last year raised about $10,000 for local charities. And one of D.H. Griffin’s recent implosion jobs will be featured in a children’s video on demolition and recycling to be released this Fall.
Apparently, though, the company isn’t big on blowing its own horn: It’s not planning much of a celebration to mark its 40th anniversary this year. Perhaps some commemorative stickers, that’s all, says David Sr. In retrospect, he probably didn’t expect his firm to evolve into its present size or its present form, combining demolition, scrap processing, and other related services. When D.H. Griffin opened its scrap facility in the mid-1970s, commodity prices were strong, David Sr. says. But when prices took their first tumble, he had second thoughts about the scrap side and recalls concluding, “I think I’ll stick with wrecking.”
But the company stuck with wrecking and scrap, and it plans to keep expanding in both. To that end, it recently purchased a 28-acre site across from its headquarters “for future expansion,” David Jr. says. And within the next five years, the company could easily open two more scrap operations, he notes. These likely would be located in other states, near major demolition markets, and could involve either acquisitions of existing facilities or greenfield plants.
Even with such expansion, though, D.H. Griffin would continue to partner with scrap processors near its demolition sites. “We’d never be able to handle it all,” David Jr. notes.
The company also runs a construction and demolition landfill in Greensboro that accepts material from other contractors. The 40-acre landfill, opened in 1981, is “getting close to capacity,” David Jr. says, and so the company plans to open another two or three similar landfills in the next five years.
And while wrecking remains the largest part of the firm’s business, its new construction division is growing fast, David Jr. says, noting that it has opened a second office, this one in Orlando.
While each D.H. Griffin division works solo on various projects, at least half of its projects involve combining environmental work with demolition or demolition with new construction, David Jr. notes. And someday he expects the company to routinely offer the ultimate in start-to-finish services.
“I’m looking forward to doing deals down the road,” he explains, “in which we have a 10-story building to tear down to put up a new 20-story structure. We’ll clean out the environmental problems, tear the old building down, ship the recovered steel to a mill, and then buy back new steel from the same mill to put up the new building. And throughout each phase of the project, the client will be dealing with the same people—us.” •
It may seem ironic to build a business by tearing things down, but that’s what D.H. Griffin Wrecking Co. Inc. has done in its 40-year history in the demolition and scrap processing niches.