March/April 1996
A good working truck is the backbone of nearly every scrap operation, and Trucks & Parts of Tampa is ready to meet that need with a variety of used roll-offs designed for recyclers.
By Paul Belden
Paul Belden is associate editor of Scrap.
Sometimes, just so you don’t forget that running a business takes guts, God sends a customer to remind you.
That customer came to Trucks & Parts of Tampa in August 1994, just as the company was starting out on a new venture—into the truck-rental market. Before then, the company had been focusing exclusively on buying, rebuilding, and selling used trucks for the recycling and waste industries. But now, it had acquired a fleet of brand-new roll-off trucks and was ready to put this sizable investment to work in the uncharted territory of rentals.
And in walked the first rental customer: a man in need of a roll-off truck to fill a temporary contract hauling ash from a local incinerator. He put his money down and drove off in a new Mack RD with a Rudco hoist. Richard Kemner, top salesman for Trucks & Parts, describes what happened next: “The guy drives it off the lot, and a couple of days later he calls up and says he needs another truck. ‘Well, what about the one you’ve got?’ ‘You can come and get that one. Oh, and you better bring a tow truck.’”
Apparently, the man had raised the hoist to drop the container while it was partly filled, and the damp ash, instead of flowing to the container’s rear, had stuck right in place. As the container’s front end rose, the truck’s center of gravity rose with it.
The result: BOOM! The truck slammed over onto its side. The sexy new cab paint job—red and blue stripes on a white background—ate the ground.
Hearing the news later, Lex Goldenberg, president of the company, could only mutter to himself, “Oh, Lord, what have we got ourselves into?”
But, in the end, he went ahead and sent the man another truck. The man had been a good customer in the past, after all, and probably would be one again.
Rows of Trucks Gleaming in the Sun
Trucks & Parts has taken care of a lot of customers in its 46 years of existence. Indeed, the firm’s principals believe it is precisely the company’s emphasis on learning and fulfilling the needs of customers that has been the chief factor in its steady growth since being founded in 1950 by a 26-year-old automobile enthusiast named Marvin Goldenberg.
Back then, the company was nothing like its current incarnation. It started out as a tiny auto salvage yard in a small town in Ohio, with total inventory of three cars and a trailer housing the business office. For years, Marvin and his wife, Betty, ran it as a team, with only one extra man on the payroll. Marvin moved the company to Florida in 1979, and shortly thereafter his son Bruce joined him. From that time on, the company blossomed into one of the largest buyers and sellers of used roll-off and waste-hauling trucks in the nation. Now co-owned by Lex and Bruce Goldenberg, the founder’s sons, the company has more than 160 employees and annual sales exceeding
$24 million.
It’s an impressively efficient operation. The yard is big—so big that employees use golf carts to navigate the channels and straits running between the stacks of truck parts rising up in all directions. At its north end, in full view of the passing highway, clean bright trucks are parked in proud rows, gleaming like flags in the Florida sunshine.
For anyone who likes trucks, it’s a handsome sight. To fully appreciate it, though, you need to imagine what these vehicles looked like when the company acquired them, and that takes a visit down to the other end of the yard where trucks have just come in through the back gate.
Here—way back out of sight of the highway—20 or so trucks in various stages of disrepair sit lined up neatly on a gravel bed, patiently awaiting scrutiny by a Trucks & Parts inspector. Far from gleaming in the sun, these trucks seem to wilt in it. Most are dirty, some are filthy, and a few aren’t much more than rusted-out hulks. A couple have broken axles and skewed tires, giving them the look of a stumbling drunk.
Some of the trucks lined up here are beyond repair; these will be stripped of usable parts and cut up for scrap metal. The others, though, will be rebuilt into good used trucks that have years of working life left in them.
Flexibility and Creativity
One of those chiefly responsible for this transformation is Paul Sexton, a rough-hewn man with a slow drawl who oversees the company’s 30 welders, fabricators, and hydraulics specialists. A truck in one of Sexton’s work bays resembles nothing so much as the carcass of a prehistoric mammoth brought down by hunters. It lies there, a passive hulk, as men crawl over, in, and under it, tearing off chunks and ripping out its insides. Sexton’s men aren’t killing anything, though. They’re bringing a truck back to life.
These work bays are the heart of the business, where the air is filled with the ting of metal on metal, the slap of tires on hard-packed asphalt, and the whir of air wrenches. In one bay, a man hoses down the greasy winch of a roll-off hoist. In another, a welder crouches in the dark interior of a rear-loading garbage truck, refabricating a metal slot. Everywhere you look, someone is rebuilding a transmission or cleaning a tool or installing a cab interior or pulling parts from a shelf or sweeping a floor. The place is a hive. Everyone’s busy.
In front of the welders’ bays stands the business’s main building, which houses the executive and sales offices, the customer service areas, and the accounting operations. Here also is the parts warehouse, a vast chamber that contains a truly awesome throng of parts. Floor-to-ceiling shelves overflow with transmissions, axles, rear ends, cylinders, power steering boxes—everything that could possibly be yanked off a truck. Drive shafts hang in clusters like bats along the walls. Battalions of rebuilt engines stand in mounted formations. Big bruisers of transfer cases sit in orderly rows like football players lining up for the team photograph.
Having such a wide variety of truck parts on hand gives the company the flexibility to customize each job’s specifications to the customer’s preference and needs. Sexton explains that customers can choose from three different basic levels of service: At the low end is an “as is” truck, which comes in operational condition, with new paint, but with no firm time-specific guarantee. Next up the scale is a “gold” truck, which comes with a 45-day guarantee. At the high end, finally, is the “diamond” truck, which comes with a 90-day guarantee and is, for all intents and purposes, an entirely rebuilt truck.
“Whatever our customers want, we can do,” says Sexton. “If they just want a working truck and they don’t want to spend a lot of money, we can do that. If they want a truck that’s totally restored, with a new drivetrain, suspension, transmission—whatever it takes—we can do that too, and we can give it to them for about half the cost of a brand new truck.”
Flexibility and creativity are not just slogans at Trucks & Parts, they’re the philosophy by which the place operates. Sexton takes great pride in his people, and he notes with satisfaction that none of them is much interested in waiting around for someone else to come up with a better idea. They’ve got the skills and the tools to build their own better ideas, and they do.
As evidence, Sexton points out a long, narrow, open-topped bin made of welded metal and standing about chest-high in the fabricators’ work bay. The structure functions as a drain pan for hydraulic cylinders just pulled from trucks and was built by a few of the welders who decided they needed it. “We’ll eventually build a whole series of these along the line here, and then we’ll connect them all with a catwalk,” he says. “Our guys are always building things—racks, jack stands, almost anything they need, they go ahead and make for themselves.”
Lex Goldenberg, too, has high praise for the workers who transform the company’s products, as well as the rest of the firm’s employees. In fact, the quality of the people at Trucks & Parts is, in his opinion, one of the keys to the company’s success over the years. The philosophy has always been to hire people with basic skills, teach them what they need to know, provide them with good benefits, and give them space to rise to the level of their ability. Both Sexton and Kemner, for example, started out with the company working in entry-level jobs—Sexton as a welder and Kemner as a tire mechanic.
Another major key to success is a focus on customers that rises almost to the level of obsession and isn’t limited to questions of service. The company’s business plan is built around knowing everything possible about actual and potential customers—who they are, where they are, how big they are, what they want, why they want it, what they buy, what they don’t buy.
In providing answers to these questions, Kemner is aided by a computer program that was designed in-house by one of the company’s sales representatives who happened to have experience writing computer code on a Unix platform. Kemner can push a few buttons and call up a wealth of information about anyone who has ever dealt with the company in any way. The program details every contact a customer has had with Trucks & Parts, describing questions asked, answers given, letters sent, letters received, contracts signed, payments made, and more. The software is continually being revised, with new options added and old ones tinkered with, in keeping with Kemner’s philosophy (one that his sales crew knows well): “There’s always room for improvement.”
A Saturated Market in The Recycling Industry
Being specialists in a specialized market has also paid off for Trucks & Parts. And with new competition in the roll-off business—spurred by the combination of high demand and limited supply that last year led many truck manufacturers to start producing roll-offs—the company is betting its experience will continue to pay off.
In fact, Kemner not only accepts the challenge of this increased competition, he welcomes it, especially since few of the new entrants in the roll-off market are familiar with the vagaries of the scrap recycling industry. “The domestic market for roll-offs is nearly saturated right now,” he says, “And [some large truck manufacturers] don’t understand the demand curve.” Historically, demand for roll-off trucks has been unstable, reflecting the volatility of commodity markets and the uneven business cycle of the scrap recycling industry, he points out.
With the domestic market saturated right now, the Goldenbergs are paying close attention to the recent trend in the scrap recycling industry toward consolidation. “A lot of scrap and waste-hauling companies have been bought out in recent years,” Lex Goldenberg says. “And a lot of those bought companies are our customers. We’re studying this trend and trying to find ways to position our company to stay abreast of it.”
One of those ways is the rental business, which Lex Goldenberg sees as an opportunity to expand the number of truck-purchasing companies with which Trucks & Parts has a business relationship. He explains it this way: Because Trucks & Parts sells only used trucks, it has in the past been unable to reach buyers who prefer new trucks. The hope is that the rental business will provide an entry into that segment of the market.
The idea first came up at a time when the demand for roll-off trucks was far exceeding supply, says Kemner. “For a while there, you just couldn’t get a roll-off. There wasn’t enough supply to meet demand. You’d put your order in and wait, like, six months for delivery. In the meantime, guys had jobs to do, they needed trucks, and they couldn’t get them. So they’d come in and see a roll-off sitting in line and say, ‘Well, what about that one?’ ‘You can’t have that one. It’s sold.’ ‘Jeez, just let me borrow it for a couple of days then.’”
Another new and growing focus for the company is international sales, which Kemner sees as a double positive: Not only do exports have the potential of drawing down the domestic supply of trucks and therefore increasing the short-term business climate, they also could permanently expand the universe of customers, providing a significant long-term boost.
International sales does have its drawbacks, however. In the past, the company has signed contracts to provide foreign governments with waste-hauling fleets only to see the deals crumble for unforeseeable political reasons. Contracts of this sort are susceptible to being used as internecine weapons in local feuds, Kemner says. From now on, when dealing with foreign governments, his motto will be, “Cash up front.”
Even with a few icebergs like these on the radar screen, the Goldenbergs are excited about the prospect of sailing their company into the new waters lying just over the horizon. Although they know that these waters are uncharted, they also know that running a business takes guts.
With that first rental customer to remind them, this is something they aren’t likely to forget. •
A good working truck is the backbone of nearly every scrap operation, and Trucks & Parts of Tampa is ready to meet that need with a variety of used roll-offs designed for recyclers.