CR Meyer and Sons Co.—Reputation Building

This general contractor has found a niche in providing construction services for the scrap recycling industry, relying on generations of experience serving heavy industry.

BY JEFF BORSECNIK

Jeff Borsecnik is assistant editor of Scrap Processing and Recycling.

Why would a scrap recycling facility call on a national contracting firm like C.R. Meyer and Sons Co. to help with its heavy equipment needs? After all, as Todd N. Grunewald, C.R. Meyer's (Oshkosh, Wis.) lanky leading scrap-project manager, is quick to point out, "our scrap customers know how to weld up their shaker pans, they can put in their liners, they can change their hammers, and they do do those things." But when it comes to "anything that has to do with tight specifications or some type of a skilled talent," he adds, "that's when they call us."

C.R. Meyer's first call from a scrap recycling company came in the early 1970s, when Sadoff Iron & Metal Co. (Fond du Lac, Wis.) set out to install central Wisconsin's first automobile shredder and was looking for assistance with ironing out the bugs. C.R. Meyer offered just that assistance, and, since then, has built a loyal base of scrap clients, who take on the firm for jobs ranging from changing a shredder rotor to rejuvenating a tired and stressed-out shear to building foundations for and installing complete processing systems and related structures.

Backing up these skills is C.R. Meyer's ability to respond almost instantly to serve its clients, and to do so just about anywhere, says Phillip J. Martini, vice president of the firm. "At the drop of a hat we'll put our people in an airplane or a truck and go fix a guy's machine." Grunewald chimes in with an example of a service call from a client in Erie, Pa., whose shredder was vibrating so badly it couldn't be run: "[Martini] called me and said, `Hey, they're down, can you respond?' By 11 a.m. the next day, within 24 hours of the call, we were on-site. By 3 that afternoon we had analyzed the problem and it turned out to be—as we had suggested to them—that the rotor was not balanced. We told them how to correct it, and they kept a crew on that night. The next morning we came in to help them start it up and that solved their problem. And they've been running well ever since."

Importing Expertise

Taking its services on the road doesn't come cheaply. C.R. Meyer relies on a bank of experienced workers to successfully compete for scrap-related jobs around the country against local contractors that can operate more inexpensively. C.R. Meyer's crews have seen an awful lot of the things that trouble scrap processing equipment, Grunewald explains, so even when they come across an unfamiliar problem, "they can analyze it and form a plan of attack." Martini also points to C.R. Meyer's people advantage: "They've been there and know what that hinge on your shear is going to be like and they've tried to get one out before. They know what that rotor is going to be like, they've taken one out before. They know where you're stuck and where they're going. That's the difference."

 This experience enables C.R. Meyer crews to react to unexpected problems as well, says Grunewald, describing a job on which the crew arrived to install an Osborne Engineering air-separation system only to discover that they had a left-hand system to deal with, when they'd expected a right-hand orientation. "We engineered it right in the field to fit," changing the foundations, moving components, refiguring angles. "This is something your local contractors are not likely to be able to do," he says. "They don't have the ability to really respond; they're going to sit back and call in Osborne. In this case, the owner was on a tight schedule, he wanted this done in 10 days so he could be back up again. He couldn't afford the two days that it would take for somebody to come and figure it out."

An equipment supplier with 15 years of experience working alongside C.R. Meyer backs up this assertion: Says Bud Murray, product manager for Universal Engineering Corp. (Cedar Rapids, Iowa), "These people know what they are doing and they get it done twice as fast" as less-specialized contractors would.

"The end result is the equipment is up and running a lot sooner so it's making money for the client," concludes Sara Scharpf, C.R. Meyer's marketing coordinator. And to C.R. Meyer, this means more business, based "not on the dollar but on the fact that we can get you down and back up again in the shortest period of time," says Grunewald.

Building Up

Of course, scrap-facility work is only a part of the total C.R. Meyer picture. The company's headquarters—a converted airplane-manufacturing facility conveniently located on the periphery of a small airport—attests to this, with walls covered with dozens of photographs of projects the firm has undertaken since its founding in 1888 by C.R. Meyer, a German immigrant. There are pictures of hydroelectric dams under construction, a simple wood-beam-and-pulley crane extending from the side of a truck equipped with sandbags as counterweights, bridges, factories, schools, churches, hospitals, and—the firm's bread-and-butter business—paper mills.

In all, the company "self-performed" about $112 million in construction work on contracts it managed worth $264 million last year, making it the 104th largest general contractor the United States, according to Engineering News Record. That's a dramatic rise from just a decade ago, when it performed about $14.5 million worth of construction services and managed approximately $84 million in contracts. Perhaps it's the culmination of more than a century of following the values C.R. Meyer—the man—is said to have built his business on: hard work and straight talk. For whether or not you believe it when C.R. Meyer—the company—says it retains those traits in its fourth generation (the founder's great-grandson, Fred M. Pinkerton, now heads the firm), it's hard to ignore the many overlapping comments from its employees and clients that confirm the claim. When Grunewald describes how C.R. Meyer's scrap industry clients might characterize the company, for example, he offers, "They're very good, they're very quick, and they're very expensive."

Bruce Lans, manager of William Lans Sons Co. Inc. (South Beloit, Ill.), which has hired C.R. Meyer for jobs such as installing a shredder and downstream equipment and realigning of the squeeze box on a shear, offers a similar example: The contractor is "real expensive," he says, "but when you look at value, it's worth the money without a doubt. It's not the right company for every job, but if it is, it's an extremely good business investment." C.R. Meyer was right for the job that had to be done at Mervis and Sons (Kokomo, Ind.) when it needed a contractor to put in a new shredder (including foundations) and raise and rewire the infeed conveyor, says Operations Manager Phillip Mervis. "If you want it done right and want it done fast, you have to use people who know what they're doing," he says, explaining how C.R. Meyer's emphasis on hard work pays off. "If your downtime costs are cheap, use a cheaper contractor, but I was pleased to be up in seven weeks ... I thought it was a miracle."

Beyond 'Good Enough'

Why bevel the concrete edges and clip the protruding tips of steel ties that held forms when foundations were poured for a shredder and its downstream stacking conveyors? "Looks better," says Grunewald. "A professional touch."

It's high standards like that—which you might not expect from a heavy industry like the construction business—that C.R. Meyer expects not only its employees and subcontractors to buy into, but also its clients. "There are certain standards we keep and if the philosophy of the company we're working for doesn't match ours, we'll walk, says Grunewald. He describes a million-dollar job moving a plant that fell through because of a philosophical difference between C.R. Meyer and the prospective client: "They did not want to put the time and effort into setting up the equipment the way our standards for setting up equipment are, and we basically walked away from it. We would not drop our standards to get the job."

The firm generally avoids public-sector work for just that reason, says Martini, explaining that such jobs typically don't have the client's best interest in mind, which is C.R. Meyer's priority. "It's that simple. Our people are service-oriented, we're not used to having to make money by screwing somebody. It's not worth it." Beyond the unappealing corner-cutting budgets of public-sector projects, the company has its employees' welfare in mind by staying away, says Grunewald: "The layer after layer of bureaucracy frustrates almost everyone who works here. And [Martini] has a saying—he uses it especially on bad days—`Are we having fun today?' because if we're not having fun today, we might now want to be in the business tomorrow. So when management sees a situation where we are not having fun, they say, `Hey, it's not worth it.'"

The Right People

Finding employees who will live by these quality standards and uphold the C.R. Meyer tradition of hard work and straight talk means looking beyond the surface when weighing candidates for jobs. "It's quality vs. education," explains Martini. "A Harvard M.B.A. doesn't mean anything to us. The person means something to us." He brings up the example of when Grunewald was hired: "It wasn't an issue of whether he'd ever worked in the scrap industry before. We saw in him a good athlete that would learn the industry and service the industry—that's more important."

To retain the quality employees it has invested in, the company tries to treat them with loyalty and fairness. "Normally when somebody comes to work at C.R. Meyer, they retire at C.R. Meyer," boasts Martini. The company encourages—and expects—workers with questions or problems to communicate freely with their supervisors, and the firm's managers stick to an open-door policy. "That door is very rarely closed," says Martini, pointing at his office entrance. "As a matter of fact, when I closed it this morning, the door handle fell off!"

"Don't say that—we're a construction company!" Grunewald interjects with a laugh.

In addition to an office staff of about 70, most of whom are project managers, architects, and engineers, the firm steadily employs a pool of at least 200 skilled union laborers. These "freelance" employees are free to work for other companies, but prefer to stick with C.R. Meyer, according to the firm, because the contractor ensures them regular employment and treats them well. Key laborers, for example, are treated as management by compensating them beyond union scale and in other ways. By working with freelance laborers, when the firm is very busy, it is able to temporarily expand its workforce through referrals from unions or its own lists of workers it has employed previously, giving the company flexibility. "We like to be able to act like a blowfish—expand to handle large jobs and at same time be able to suck in to remain economical," Martini explains. On its scrap-related jobs, the contractor sticks with a group of about 50 workers experienced with scrap-processing equipment, enabling it to field up to three full scrap-job crews at once.

Lans, whose firm has employed a number of C.R. Meyer crews under different supervisors, says the C.R. Meyer people have been extremely consistent. "They're all individuals, not clones, but you always get the same quality of customer service and expert knowledge. And the work ethic is there: they pound every day to get the job completed." He adds, "In construction and the scrap industry, things don't always work well. These guys thrive on the problems, they eat them up."

Part of the Team

Every C.R. Meyer project begins with a "supermeeting," in which all the players involved in the job—the contractor, the owner, the equipment manufacturer, and any subcontractors—get together to set goals for the project, divvy up responsibilities, and learn each others' strengths and limitations. And this emphasis on teamwork extends throughout the job, says Martini: "At C.R. Meyer, we don't need to be the boss. We bring a certain area of expertise to a project. The owner brings a certain area of expertise. The equipment manufacturer brings a certain expertise. Our job is to meld that."

The teamwork emphasis also extends beyond the project at hand as C.R. Meyer tries to establish long-term relationships with its clients, expecting return engagements at the same facility, its sister operations, even at the original client's customers or suppliers. This kind of relationship-building demands once again the straight talk/hard work philosophy C.R. Meyer clients and employees always seem to return to. The company is clear about what it is capable of contributing to a project, as well as what it expects in return for its efforts, according to the firm's managers. Mervis agrees: "They're always honest. If they say there going to do it, they will. And," he adds, "they know what they're doing on a shredder."

Another client, describing a job C.R. Meyer performed on a lump-sum basis, notes that the work ended up involving hidden delays and expenses, which the contractor absorbed without complaint. "When they give an estimate—even if they've erred—they live by that estimate, and that's how business should be done."

Because it expects to work for each client again, C.R. Meyer will go a long way to cement relationships, says Martini, describing one extreme example: "Two years ago we had a client that was just starting an expansion program, and its maintenance superintendent died of a heart attack. The general manager called and said, `I've got a problem, can you help me out for a little bit?' I said `sure,' and sent Todd Grunewald on loan for a couple of weeks. Eight months later, he was still there." Why help this client out? "We're going to continue doing work for that client," says Martini, explaining that such service is key to C.R. Meyer's future: "One of the individuals that used to work there has left and now we're doing work for him. That's really how we build our business."