January/February 1997
Eight decades in the making, this family business attributes its success to commitments to family, the community, and the scrap recycling industry. And with its younger generation pledged to carry on this tradition, this midsized operation promises to retain its big reputation.
By Eileen Zagone
Eileen Zagone is an associate editor of Scrap.
It’s hard to imagine several members of any family getting along well enough to work together day after day, especially in the pressure-cooker world of a scrap processing operation.
But for the Gordon family, working together is, well, a family tradition, and a day spent at its Statesville, N.C., scrap recycling facility, L. Gordon Iron & Metal Co., is a model of cooperation, unity, and family pride—all of which have been keys to the firm’s 80 years of success in the scrap industry.
Naturally, a company can’t succeed on family harmony alone, and L. Gordon can point to a long history of customer and community service, as well as a commitment to continuous improvement, as additional factors that have helped it flourish and establish itself as a noteworthy player in the Southeast scrap market.
And in the future, as in the past, the company plans to continue exploring new processing options, while at the same time remaining committed to its founder’s service-focused business philosophy that has served it so well thus far.
A Statesville Scrap Story
Though family-operated companies are hardly an anomaly in the scrap recycling industry, it’s a safe bet that few scrap firms have as many family members actively involved in day-to-day operations as L. Gordon.
Following in the footsteps of their father and grandfather, three of the five sons that comprise the third generation of Gordon scrap recyclers—Melvin, Saul, and Kalman—found their calling in the family’s scrap operations, while Alfred, and, prior to his death, Ellis, pursued careers in another one of the family’s related businesses.
Taking the tradition still further is the fourth generation, represented by Ellis’s son Barry, Alfred’s son Richard, and Saul’s son Craig. And with Kalman’s daughter Wendy planning to join the staff soon, the number of Gordons in the business will come to the lucky number seven.
The Gordon scrap saga began in 1900 when Harry Gordon, Saul et al’s grandfather, found that times were too difficult for a peddler living in New York’s Lower East Side. Seeking greener and scrappier pastures, he loaded his wife and year-old son Louis into a one-horse wagon and headed south. As the story goes, Harry and his young family had no destination in mind. The only certainty was that he planned to remain in the only business he knew: scrap collecting.
The trio ended up in High Point, N.C., for no other reason than that Harry was a religious man and there was a synagogue in the town, recounts Saul, president. An added attraction of the area was that it was—and continues to be—a well-known furniture center. While Harry expected to collect the breadth of scrap materials, rags represented a significant portion of the scrap trade in those days, and the proximity of furniture companies—and their appetite for wiping rags—would, he hoped, offer a captive market for his services.
H. Gordon & Son became official when Louis left school in the sixth grade to join the business full time. Thus was the beginning of the Gordon scrap legacy in North Carolina.
At the ripe old age of 17, yet with years of experience in the scrap business under his belt, Louis decided to strike out on his own and headed west about 65 miles from High Point to Statesville. He leased a piece of storefront property in the middle of town and, in 1917, established L. Gordon Iron & Metal Co.
As with his father, the phrase “location, location, location” was not lost on Louis. He chose to set up shop in Statesville because it was home to a foundry that consumed scrap iron. He mainly supplied the foundry with worn-out plow points, which he gathered from the numerous farms in the area. “Back in those days,” says Saul, “you had to go out and get the scrap yourself. Few customers were going to bring it to you.”
L. Gordon continued to grow throughout the years, as did the number of Gordons working in the business. After helping out part time at the operation throughout their youth, three of Louis’s five sons decided to make the scrap business their profession, with Melvin, the oldest, coming onboard and temporarily directing the firm through the challenges of World War II after Louis suffered a heart attack in 1941.
“Our father was a good teacher, but tough,” remembers Saul, who also counts Melvin among his scrap mentors. When Louis died in 1964, “he left us with the means to continue the business, and he taught us the importance of integrity, honesty, compassion, and, of course, how to buy and sell scrap.”
Clearly, Louis’s instructions left a lasting impression because L. Gordon has continued to grow and thrive throughout the ensuing decades.
A (Wooden) Leg to Stand On
Scrap is what brought the Gordons to Statesville and it has, ironically, also led the family to diversify into non-scrap—but still related—niches over the years. In perhaps one of the most unusual pairings of business interests, L. Gordon’s sister company is a large furniture store, Gordon Furniture, located in downtown Statesville in the storefront site that was the scrap firm’s original headquarters. In Statesville, it seems, the Gordon family is known just as much for its furniture savvy as for its scrap recycling acumen.
As Saul explains the story, Louis was visiting a furniture plant one day when the manager suggested that Louis could take advantage of his storefront location by buying some furniture and trying to resell it. The arrangement worked out surprisingly well, with a typical transaction playing out like this: A farmer would come into Statesville and buy a piece of furniture from the store. Louis would deliver the piece in his horse-drawn wagon, then load the empty cart with the farmer’s scrap, effectively killing two birds with one stone and saving on hauling costs. “We had a two-way hauling system for years,” recalls Melvin, chairman. “If we were hauling scrap out, we would bring furniture in, and vice versa.”
While this system is not the norm anymore, the family’s scrap recycling and furniture businesses still have a close, symbiotic relationship, each offering advantages to the other. In just one example, L. Gordon employees can purchase furniture at a substantial discount.
Today, the furniture store, managed by Alfred, also serves as a central meeting place for the Gordon family. Each day after work, for instance, the four brothers gather at a round table in the store’s offices to spend an hour talking about what went on that day and what they plan to do the next day. According to Saul, there are few unilateral decisions in the company, so this daily powwow gives the busy brothers an opportunity to hash things out.
Committed to Improvement
The L. Gordon of today is a far cry from the operation Louis left behind in 1964. For starters, the company operates a broader array of machinery, giving it a substantial degree of processing versatility and flexibility. Louis would undoubtedly be impressed. “In 1957,” Saul recalls, “we put in a new automobile baler, and we thought this was absolute utopia. Our dad said, ‘You’ll never need another piece of equipment!’”
Of course, the firm has added many pieces of equipment since then. In fact, notes Barry, manager of ferrous operations, one of the company’s strengths has been its willingness to invest in capital improvements, including new machinery. The automobile baler, for example, gave way in 1976 to the firm’s first shredder, which was itself replaced in June 1995 by a new Texas Shredder system. As if simply purchasing this new system wasn’t enough of an investment, the company is planning to convert the diesel engines to natural gas within the next year, a move designed to boost the shredder’s horsepower and increase its throughput 5 to 10 percent. It’s exactly these types of investments that enable the company to continuously upgrade its abilities and, hence, its service to its suppliers and consumers.
Another distinguishing characteristic of L. Gordon’s operations is its aluminum melting operation, which the Gordons say is a perfect example of the specialized service their firm offers. Overseen by Richard, manager of nonferrous and alloy operations, this operation produces between 20,000 and 25,000 pounds a day of aluminum sows from two natural gas-powered furnaces.
One of the advantages of this niche, explains Richard, is that by “eliminating the middleman, we can give a good price for aluminum” and produce a high-quality product with a specific chemical report to each consumer, primarily die casters along the East Coast. Commenting on the operation’s quality control practices, Richard notes that employees first visually sort “what should be eliminated from a melt to meet customer expectations.” During the melting stage, a button sample is taken of each heat and sent to a lab for chemical analysis. This analysis enables the firm to market the sows “honestly and accordingly” to its consumers, Richard states.
The Gordon Treatment
Turning to less operations-focused issues, Kalman, vice president, sums up L. Gordon’s business philosophy as an open door, noting that “any customer can walk in here anytime and sit down and talk with any of us.”
Indeed, the divisions between the various offices at L. Gordon are largely made up of windows, not walls, so customers can readily see any member of the management team. At any given time, extra chairs may be occupied by a Gordon or two taking the time to catch up with a longtime customer, seeming oblivious to the whirlwind of office activity that swirls around them.
As Saul asserts, Louis taught his sons the critical lesson that “you always have to satisfy the customer,” adding that “everyone who leaves here knows they’re getting paid a fair market price for every pound they brought in.” Not only that, he adds, but all workers are trained to figure out the most efficient and quickest way to handle each incoming load so customers can get back on the road as soon as possible. The result of this customer-friendly approach has been a vast amount of repeat business, with the firm’s supplier list tallying in the thousands at last check and some customers traveling out of their way to receive the “Gordon treatment.”
Of course, many of L. Gordon’s customers are local, and part of the Gordon family tradition has been to extend its service approach outside the plant and into the community.
“The community is good to us, so we want to give something back,” Richard explains, describing the many local charities that benefit from the family’s generous gifts of money and time. “I want to make Statesville a nice place to live,” says Saul of his involvement in everything from a community center for elderly day care to a tree preservation group to the board of a local financial institution.
The family’s community and business efforts have not gone unnoticed. Just last year, L. Gordon was recognized as Industry of the Year by the Statesville Chamber of Commerce.
But the commitment doesn’t stop at the local level for the Gordon family. It is also involved in the close-knit scrap recycling community. Both Louis and Melvin, for example, were involved in ISIS, one of ISRI’s predecessor organizations, notes Kalman, who—along with Saul—has been a president of ISRI’s Southern Chapter. For the past 20 years, Saul has also led the ISIS, and more recently ISRI, shredder maintenance seminars along with Ted Lipman of Denbo Scrap Materials Inc. (Pulaski, Tenn.).
In addition, when ReMA called on its members in recent years to lobby their congressional representatives to cosponsor Superfund reform legislation, Kalman, as president of the Southern Chapter, took the bull by the horns and, along with the chapter’s other members, was instrumental in making North Carolina one of the first states to secure the support of all of its legislators.
This kind of commitment and service-minded participation is certainly demanding, but it also has its rewards. “There’s a lot of good that comes from being active in the trade association,” says Kalman, asserting that his family’s association involvement is not only good for business, but also gives them invaluable guidance on regulatory and safety issues.
The Gordon family also extends its service attitude to its 65 employees. Every member of the Gordon family is quick to note that, no matter how important the family’s experience in and knowledge of the industry is to the success of the firm, the real key to the company’s success is its employees, whom Barry describes as “our best asset.”
And they are treated as such. Among other benefits, L. Gordon’s employees enjoy a generous profit sharing program, which the firm started in 1965 and which each year amounts to about 15 percent of all employees’ salaries. Also, the firm rewards safe working habits with a monthly monetary prize available to all employees who have completed their duties injury-free. “The most well-managed, successful scrap companies have good safety programs, and good safety programs make supervisors better at their jobs,” says Craig, vice president, who is modifying the firm’s safety program to make it even more rewarding for employees.
Beyond financial rewards and benefits, L. Gordon is conscientious about keeping the communication lines open with its employees—“Our doors are always open to them too,” notes Craig—and approaching them with respect. As Richard remarks, “All of our supervisors are working supervisors, and I’ll never ask them to do something that I wouldn’t do.” Adding to this comment, Saul observes, “I learned a long time ago that employees will have a lot more respect for you if you’re out there working right alongside them.”
Perhaps these personal touches explain why L. Gordon has low turnover and high morale within its employee ranks, notes Saul.
Smarter Every Day
With seven family members working together—each of them an individual with definite ideas—it’s no surprise that each has a vision for the company’s future. Yet they have a commonality, perhaps best expressed by Richard, who notes, “We want to follow in our uncles’ and fathers’ footsteps as far as keeping the same reputation in the community and scrap processing industry. We’re proud of what they’ve built here and want to keep the tradition going with the same integrity they’ve established.”
One tradition that all Gordons want to continue is the use of the latest equipment to enable the firm to process material faster and more efficiently. “We’ve seen how using the latest technology helps us provide the best service possible,” explains Barry, claiming that L. Gordon was one of the first processors to use hydraulic cranes, which allowed the firm to handle more scrap. “Faster unloading and loading is a key to efficiency, and we’re always looking at replacing older equipment with newer, more efficient equipment as it becomes available,” Barry says. The new shredder installation is a prime example of the company’s equipment commitment.
Part of L. Gordon’s long-term future plans may also involve constructing a greenfield extension of its operations on part of an 80-acre farm that the family owns about four miles from the Statesville facility.
The firm is also considering installing a second scale at its existing facility to handle the ever-growing traffic at the plant, which averages about 250 customers a day.
On the management and administrative side, Craig envisions L. Gordon eventually having a paperless office with a computer on every desk, noting that plans are under way to make this a reality in the next year or two.
In the environmental arena, he continues, the company is “practicing more best management practices to keep up with environmental regulations,” pointing out that it continues to hard-surface another portion of its operation each summer when the plant shuts down for the Fourth of July holiday.
“But more than anything,” says Craig, “we’re continuing to follow the three Ts of talent, teamwork, and technology. We can always improve on every one of them every day, and every day we’re getting a little smarter.” •
Eight decades in the making, this family business attributes its success to commitments to family, the community, and the scrap recycling industry. And with its younger generation pledged to carry on this tradition, this midsized operation promises to retain its big reputation.