Frankly Speaking

Frank Cozzi started walking the path of association service in the 1970s. Now, some 30 years later, his journey will culminate this April in his election as ISRI’s next chair. 

By Kent Kiser

It was 1998, and Frank Cozzi was vying against Joel Denbo in the race for ReMA national secretary/treasurer. Both men were worthy candidates: Cozzi, then president of Cozzi Iron & Metal Inc. (Chicago), and Denbo, then vice president of Denbo Iron & Metal Co. Inc. (Decatur, Ala.), were ReMA veterans, each with more than 20 years of association service. Both were well-liked by the voting board members. Both held great promise as national ReMA leaders. The election promised to be a close contest.
   Though Cozzi was honored to be nominated by his peers, he was also apprehensive going through the election process, he recalls. “I never saw myself as someone who would be successful at campaigning for an election. I’m not the kind of guy who feels comfortable talking about himself,” he says.
   The votes were counted—and Denbo won.
   Cozzi calls the loss “very disappointing,” a “humbling experience” that gave him a “real dose of humility.” He assumed that was his one shot at a national ReMA officer post. “I certainly never expected to be asked to run again,” he says.
   But Cozzi was nominated to run again, in 2000—and this time he won. That election as secretary/treasurer set him on a path through the ReMA national officer positions, progressing through vice chair and chair-elect, and culminating this April in his election as ISRI’s national chair.
   Cozzi might have reached the top of ReMA leadership the hard way, but he definitely earned it—a fitting analogy for his overall life and times in the scrap industry.

A Scrap Executive’s Tale
Frank Cozzi was born into a middle-class Chicago family in 1949, the third of six children. In his youth, he spent summers on his grandfather’s farm in northern Minnesota and played all kinds of sports (except hockey—“I never could stand on skates,” he admits). He has vivid memories of his family’s scrap business, Frank Cozzi & Sons, which his grandfather and father, both named Frank, founded in 1945. “They basically peddled the alleys of Chicago and the near-western suburbs,” he says.
   By the time Cozzi was 12, he was working summers in the family scrapyard. “I started work pretty young,” he notes. “I was expected to work like every other hired hand.” His duties included sorting metal, loading and unloading trucks, and tasks like “carrying bundles of newspapers out of people’s basements,” he says. “It was pretty dirty work.”
   In high school, Cozzi started working full time on the midnight shift at a gas station. “My drive, from the time I was 15 or 16 years old, was to make money,” he says. After working at the gas station for another year, he returned to the family scrap business, officially beginning his career in the industry.
   At the time, Frank Cozzi & Sons was shifting its focus to industrial scrap, and it became Cozzi’s responsibility to secure accounts. Most mornings, his brother Albert would drop him off in an industrial district with a bunch of company brochures. He would then go door to door trying to buy scrap. “It was tough,” Cozzi recalls, “but we picked up some significant accounts that way.” Once the company had secured enough accounts, it bought the trucks and containers it needed to manage the material from the customers.
   For the next three years, Cozzi spent much of his time driving a truck—a task he didn’t like. Subsequently, he left the driving to others so he could manage the firm’s growing fleet and yard operations. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he assumed greater management duties and helped the firm grow, first by acquiring the accounts and equipment of other Chicago-area scrap dealers, then by purchasing physical operations and forming joint ventures. By 1990, the company—which had been renamed Cozzi Iron & Metal Inc.—was one of the largest scrap recycling firms in the Midwest.
   The company continued to grow in the 1990s, ultimately going public in 1997 through a merger with Metal Management Inc. Cozzi left Metal Management in 2004 and founded Cozzi Enterprises Inc. (Burr Ridge, Ill.), a scrap paper venture, marking a new chapter in his otherwise metals-focused scrap career.
   To this day, Cozzi considers his 38-year run with Cozzi Iron & Metal his greatest professional achievement, which is understandable. After all, he helped grow the family firm from 12 employees and less than $1 million in annual sales into a company with 600 employees and more than $250 million in sales, then he merged it into a public company with 1,200 employees and more than $750 million in sales.

Getting Involved
Frank Cozzi didn’t plan to get involved in association work. The truth is, his father volunteered him to do it.
   It was the mid-1970s, and Frank Cozzi & Sons was having trouble purchasing insurance. Bernie Landau, a Chicago scrap broker and poker buddy of Cozzi’s father, suggested over a game one night that the Cozzis should join the Institute of Scrap Iron and Steel, the trade association for ferrous scrap recyclers. Landau, a devoted ISIS member, explained that by joining the association, the Cozzis could learn more about insurance issues and perhaps take advantage of the ISIS insurance program.
   “My dad made the decision to join ISIS,” Cozzi recalls, “and he assigned the responsibility of participating in the association to me.” Thus began Cozzi’s decades-long association service.
   He started out attending ISIS insurance committee meetings. The first few years, he sat on the sidelines, observing, learning, “basically watching other people do all the hard work,” he says. “After a while, I started feeling like a freeloader, so I got involved.”
   At that point, Cozzi says, he “jumped in with both feet.” He assumed his first association leadership position, chairing the ISIS transportation committee. Later, he also chaired the ReMA transportation committee. These leadership positions brought new challenges to the generally reserved Midwesterner.
   He still laughs, for instance, when he recalls the first time he addressed the ReMA board. As transportation committee chair, he was asked to propose a motion regarding Ex Parte 319, a federal rule concerning railroad rates.  As he walked to the podium, he remembered the advice of his public-speaking teacher, who frequently admonished, “Always know the subject you’re talking about!” Cozzi knew nothing about Ex Parte 319. He was simply the presenter, woefully unprepared for the cross-examination the board members gave him.
   At the time, the experience was mortifying, he recalls. 
   Today Cozzi can tell the tale with his customary good humor, calling it a “good lesson” that proved the wisdom of his public-speaking teacher.
   Overall, though, Cozzi’s association involvement grew smoothly and steadily throughout the 1990s. He climbed through the leadership chairs of ISRI’s Chicago Chapter, ultimately serving as its president. He was tapped to chair ISRI’s finance committee and to sit on several strategic planning groups. These positions also gave Cozzi an ongoing seat on the ReMA board of directors. Through all of this, he built a reputation as one of ISRI’s most promising, most dedicated volunteer leaders.
   By 1998, Cozzi had devoted more than 20 years to association work, yet he had “never thought about running for national office,” he says. The ReMA nominating committee certainly thought about it, though. That’s how he ended up competing against Joel Denbo for the secretary/treasurer post.
   After that initial defeat and his subsequent victory in the 2000 national officer election, Cozzi’s path has steadily led him to where he is today—on the verge of becoming ISRI’s next elected chair. 
Priorities Old and New Today, when Cozzi reflects on his association career, he notes a pattern. “Initially,” he observes, “my involvement was for selfish reasons. I wanted to make my company and myself stronger. Then, after a while, my involvement became more about making the association stronger.”
   That mission will remain his focus in his two-year term as ReMA chair. Fortunately, he’s assuming the post during a healthy period for both the scrap industry and ISRI. Thanks to the discipline of ISRI’s leaders, the association has rebounded from the depressed years of the early 2000s to the point where it’s once again building its financial reserves and launching new programs.
  The ReMA staff is also the strongest it’s been in years, Cozzi says. “Though we’ve had some very talented staff members over the years,” he says, “we’ve never had such a well-rounded and total package as we’ve got today.”
   What’s more, ReMA has become a much more powerful force on Capitol Hill, which is evident in its 2004 defeat of proposed export controls on copper scrap and the recent establishment of recycling caucuses in the U.S. House and Senate, Cozzi notes. The same progress is visible in ISRI’s growing international recognition. Many times in recent years, Cozzi and other ReMA leaders have spoken at global conferences and discussed trade issues with officials of foreign governments. And last year ReMA took members on the association’s first international trade/study mission, to China.
   Taken together, these and other factors point to one conclusion: ReMA is on a roll, and Cozzi has every intention of keeping the momentum going during his administration.
   Regarding his priorities as chair, Cozzi compares himself to the bearer of the Olympic torch—one who carries on the work of the previous bearers while making an individual contribution to the overall effort. He doesn’t seek to make his mark on ISRI. He simply wants to continue his decades-long goal of “making ReMA stronger.”
   In practice, that means continuing to focus on issues such as increasing railcar availability, promoting the Design for Recycling® concept, advocating for mercury-free vehicles, and—most of all—improving safety to combat the industry’s recent rash of fatalities.
   “Safety will be the number-one agenda item for every ReMA meeting,” Cozzi says, asserting that “safety in our plants is everybody’s responsibility—from the CEO to the newest employee.” ISRI’s dedication to safety is clear, he maintains, in its many free and paid services and resources, including ReMA Safety Consulting Services, new training videos, the weekly For Your Safety e-mail newsletter, an OSHA 10-hour training workshop, the ReMA National Safety Committee, and others.
   Another Cozzi priority is using the new recycling caucuses in the U.S. House and Senate as “powerful tools” to protect and promote the interests of the scrap recycling industry. He also intends to heavily promote RIOS, ISRI’s new Recycling Industry Operating Standard. “I’ve been a longtime supporter of a standards program for our industry,” he says, noting that such a program will benefit member companies of all sizes. In addition, Cozzi says he sees an ongoing need to improve ISRI’s communications efforts, with a focus on finding innovative ways of getting the right information to the right people in each member company.
   In the membership area, Cozzi hopes to keep increasing ISRI’s member ranks—which have been growing for three consecutive years—and to boost attendance at the association’s governance meetings. That’s important, he explains, because those meetings create a pool of dedicated members the association can tap as volunteer leaders. One way he hopes to attract more interest in these meetings is by holding them in different cities around the country. Also, as an experiment, the governance meeting typically held in conjunction with the ReMA annual convention will be held separately, perhaps beginning next year. The goal is to minimize the number of days members must spend away from their businesses to attend the combined governance meeting and ReMA convention.

Moving Forward
Aside from some public-speaking jitters, Cozzi has no reservations about becoming ReMA chair. “I’m looking forward to it,” he says, noting that his decades as a scrap executive and association leader have more than prepared him for this latest challenge.
   It’s readily apparent that Cozzi has no worries about his leadership abilities. When asked about his strengths as a leader, he rattles off a handful of points. There’s his industry and association experience, his adaptability (“You need to be able to change direction on a dime”), his capacity for listening and learning, his inclusiveness (“I’m confident I can bring stakeholders together to achieve the desired results on our important issues”), his ability to deliver results, and his strategic-thinking skills. Cozzi also points to his communication skills, specifically his talent for keeping people connected and moving forward on issues.
   That, in the bigger picture, is Cozzi’s goal as ReMA chair—to keep ReMA moving forward as an association. “I just want to leave ReMA a little better off than when I started,” he says. 

The Cozzi Chronicles
Born: Sept. 25, 1949 (you aren’t going to tell anyone, are you?).
Education: Completed Harvard Business School’s three-year owner/president management program.
Family: Married Josephine Grillo in 1968, and we have had 38 years of wedded bliss. Two sons: Frank, 32, and Anthony, 30.
Association/Industry Highlights: Chair of both the ISIS and ReMA transportation committees. ReMA Chicago Chapter president, vice chair of the chapter presidents council, chair of the finance committee, member of strategic planning committees, and the various national ReMA officer positions (secretary/treasurer, vice chair, and chair-elect).
Community Involvement: Member of the board of managers for the Valentine Boys & Girls Club of Chicago.
Favorite Movies: The Godfather (I and II), Ocean’s 11, and 12 Angry Men. 
Favorite Drinks: Diet Pepsi, Don Julio Silver tequila, and Ketel One vodka.
Favorite Foods: Do I look like a fussy eater? A good steak or Chicago-style pizza.
Favorite Places in the World: My farm in northern Minnesota, Tuscany, and the Great Barrier Reef.
Favorite TV Shows: CSI, NCIS, and the NFL.
Favorite Cities: Chicago; Sydney, Australia; and Florence, Italy.
Favorite Music: Rockabilly blues and classic rock.
Last Books Read: Benjamin Franklin, by Walter Isaacson; George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, by Willard Sterne Randall; and Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore. My all-time favorite book is Undaunted Courage, by Stephen Ambrose. 
My greatest personal achievements include … helping to build a small family scrap business into one of the largest and most respected regional scrap companies in the country and being accepted in and completing Harvard Business School’s owner/president management program at age 40.
In my free time, I like to … read, travel, partake in casino gaming, and wander the woods and fields on my Minnesota farm.
I’d like to improve my … golf game. Golf is like the scrap business in a lot of ways. It has a tendency to get under your skin, and it takes time to be good at it. I never did take much time to be any good at golf, but it seems in every round, you hit one or two good shots that keep you coming back for more.
If I didn’t work in the scrap industry, I’d probably be … a farmer or a cattle rancher.
If I ran the world, I would … implement term limits for all politicians, especially senators from Massachusetts.

Kent Kiser is publisher and editor-in-chief of Scrap.