May/June 1997
In his 40 years in the aluminum smelting business, Marvin Fink has helped make Allied Metal Co. a $100-million-a-year firm with four plants in two states. Here, he takes a look back at his career.
By Si Wakesberg
Si Wakesberg is New York bureau chief for Scrap.
It’s March 27, 1997, and Marvin Fink is celebrating his 69th birthday in the lunch room at Allied Metal Co. (Chicago), the secondary aluminum alloy company he leads as president.
As he enjoys a cake presented by his employees, Marvin looks back on his 40-year love affair with the scrap recycling business. And as he talks, his career sounds like a classic Horatio Alger tale, in which a person with a good heart and an entrepreneurial spirit rises from humble origins to prosperity.
Born into a poor Chicago family, Marvin was on his own at 16, working and attending night school. At various times, he lived in a cold-water flat and even the YMCA. Although he worked briefly as an accountant, he had no interest in spending his life at a desk, poring over columns of numbers. “I always wanted to work with people,” he says.
The Korean War interrupted Marvin’s career plans—the Army assigned him to a stateside anti-aircraft unit—but afterward a combination of luck and opportunity steered him toward a “people” business in which he would thrive for his entire working life.
It’s quite fitting that Marvin describes his career in the scrap industry in terms of love, for love was what first brought him into the business. A blind date introduced him to Bobbie Dubofsky, his future wife and the daughter of Chicago aluminum scrap executive Irving Dubofsky. “I married into the scrap business,” Marvin explains, recalling that many of the 500 guests at his 1957 wedding to Bobbie were from the scrap business, “which testifies to the family nature of our industry.”
The industry is a family to which Marvin Fink has been a devoted and prominent member for four decades.
Finding a Mentor
Everyone has a mentor of sorts. For Marvin, it was his father-in-law Irving Dubofsky.
Dubofsky, who began as a collector of rags and scrap iron, established Allied Metal Co. in 1952 and hired Marvin as his right-hand man in 1957. “He was a role model,” Marvin says in fond recollection. “Probably the most influential person in my life. ‘It’s a fast America. Don’t get too cocky and don’t get panicky,’ he used to say. In other words, stay in-between. As a result of his teachings, I’ve had a conservative business philosophy all my life.”
To illustrate Dubofsky’s innate sense of the scrap business, Marvin tells this anecdote: One day, early in his career at Allied Metal, Marvin had the chance to make a deal involving some silicon that would bring in a quick profit of $30,000—much more than his annual salary at the time. Elated, he sought out Dubofsky to tell him the good news. But in the middle of his story, his father-in-law suddenly interrupted to ask Marvin about a regular supplier of batteries. Somewhat chagrined, Marvin asked, “Why are you talking about batteries when I’m telling you about the silicon deal?” Dubofsky answered, “That man delivers batteries every single week. The silicon is a once-in-a-lifetime deal.”
From stories like that, Marvin says he “learned to be patient, to watch what I was doing, to take care of my customers.” In those early days, he recalls, “there was a kind of direct relationship between the buyer and seller. My father-in-law’s business philosophy was ‘satisfy the customer,’ and we lived by that rule.”
First Days and Sixth Senses
Marvin recalls his early days at Allied Metal with a kind of amused tolerance. That was when he tried to learn all aspects of the business, from working on the receiving dock to selling aluminum ingot. “I didn’t exactly know what I was selling,” he now admits, “but I think even then I was a pretty good salesman.”
But apparently knowledge alone wasn’t enough, at least not for someone working for Irving Dubofsky. “One day,” Marvin recalls, “a man came in with some babbitt he wanted to sell. I took a pencil and a pad and started to figure out the percentage of antimony, etcetera, to see what price I could pay, when my father-in-law grabbed the paper out of my hand. ‘If you have to figure, you’ll never buy anything,’ he told me. And he was right. You have to know. You have to know instinctively. You have to have a kind of sixth sense in this business.”
That sixth sense has served Allied Metal well. Although the company’s growth “just coasted along” during the early 1970s, Marvin concedes, it didn’t miss its opportunities in the 1980s. Most notably, in the mid-1980s, the firm tripled its capacity overnight by purchasing the bankrupt Harco Aluminum smelter at auction.
Today, Allied Metal has three plants in Chicago and one in Chattanooga, Tenn., that produce approximately 120 million pounds of aluminum alloy and 84 million pounds of zinc annually. Over the past four decades, the company has grown from 12 to 135 employees and from a $4-million to $100-million business, Marvin says. Moreover, he adds, Allied Metal is the only aluminum alloy smelter left in Chicago, a city that once supported about a dozen such firms.
Along the way, the company developed the industry’s first “mobile” furnace—used to deliver molten metal to consumers—and pioneered the use of ceramic filters to assure metal purity, Marvin boasts. The firm has also received its share of awards from major suppliers and consumers. And in its ongoing quest for improvement, Allied Metal recently began the process of achieving registration under the international ISO 9002 quality assurance system standard.
While Marvin is justifiably proud of the company’s progress, he’s quick to note that “it’s not a one-man show. Everyone here is a decision-maker. That’s what gives the company the energy it has.”
And indeed, watching the “boss” move through office, warehouse, and plant, he exhibits authority that’s not dictatorial, but friendly and informal. And employees respond in turn with respectful informality.
Some of their respect can certainly be attributed to Marvin’s philosophy of sharing the rewards of Allied Metal’s success with them. As he explains, “Company growth is good not only for the owners but for the employees who realize they have an opportunity to grow with the firm.”
His Kind of Town
Aside from the scrap industry, Marvin has also had a long-standing love affair with Chicago. It is, in short, his city. He has lived there all his life, currently in the suburb of Lincolnwood. And though he has a place in Lake Geneva, Wis., and travels throughout the world—including Israel, England, and Italy—he always returns to his Chicago roots. His connection to the city is strong. He still has friends there from his schooldays, he says, and his wife has friends that go back as far as kindergarten. He has also been long active in the community’s civic and religious affairs, serving on the boards of the Jewish National Fund and the Manufacturers Bank, as well as the Cook County Hate Crimes Commission and a 20-year stint on the Lincolnwood Zoning Board.
And, as if that weren’t enough, he has extended his involvement beyond his beloved Chicago to be an active participant in the former NARI and ISIS, and the current ReMA and North American Die Casting Association. In addition, Marvin has been called on to be an expert speaker at industry meetings and roundtables, most recently at ISRI’s aluminum roundtable in Chicago in September 1996.
Chicago is also where Marvin’s family lives. He and Bobbie have three children—David, Beth, and Joel—and four grandchildren. His sons and son-in-law Michael Gilford all work in the business and attend industry chapter meetings and conventions. Moreover, everyone in Allied Metal’s third generation of family enterprise is a college graduate, which is a notable change from the early days of the scrap business. Forty years ago, Marvin muses, scrap recyclers didn’t have college degrees, though he quickly adds that “those early scrapmen were street smart, and they were the ones who built this industry.”
Play Ball!
To those who know him, Marvin is more than just an aluminum alloy executive—he’s an avid sports fan and part-owner of the Chicago White Sox and the Chicago Bulls. The walls of his office are lined with photos of the teams’ players, and he wears the 1996 NBA Championship ring—a tribute to the most recent of the Bulls’ four winning seasons. But while the NBA may be the hottest commodity in the world of sports, Marvin concedes that his heart still belongs to baseball. “All American kids grow up on baseball,” he explains. “I did. Basketball came later.”
That certainly holds true for his involvement in team ownership. Marvin has been part of the syndicate that owns the White Sox since 1981. He didn’t invest in the Bulls until 1985.
Though he feared he would be out of place among the tycoons who normally run sports franchises, Marvin was pleasantly surprised. “What impressed me,” he says, “was the simplicity and friendliness of these people. It was refreshing.”
And true to his nature as a “people” person, Marvin concedes that he’s a soft touch when it comes to the perks his team ownership brings. “Yes, people ask me for tickets to the games,” he says. “But it doesn’t annoy me. I understand them and, if I can, I try to accommodate them.” He even accommodated a friend who recently asked if he could borrow the Bulls championship ring. “I said, ‘Sure,’” Marvin recalls. “I knew the feeling of wanting to show something like that, and it made me feel good that I could loan it to him.”
A Changing World, An Exciting Future
As he looks back on his 40 years in the aluminum alloy industry, Marvin recounts the dramatic changes he has witnessed both in his market segment and the scrap industry as a whole.
It was a different world when he joined his father-in-law’s firm back in 1957. For one, he notes, there were few aluminum brokers in the business, and most trading was accomplished without a contract or signed documents. The LME had not yet established its predominant influence—an influence that Marvin sees as too pervasive and unhealthy—nor had the government issued its myriad regulations that today have such a tremendous impact on the scrap business.
And, of course, it was exclusively a family industry back then, defined by a sense of identity and loyalty, unlimited opportunity, and a feeling of giving something to the next generation.
But that’s starting to change, too. “There’s a trend toward consolidation that was unknown 40 years ago,” Marvin says with regret, estimating that family ownership has fallen industrywide from 100 percent to about 75 percent today, with a corresponding increase in corporate control of scrap firms. “The industry has lost some of its early individuality and personality,” he laments. “It’s becoming more regimented and compartmentalized.” Moreover, he adds, in a corporation “you’re continually valued not on your operation but on your stock value.”
Despite this diminishing family focus, Marvin wouldn’t have wanted to work in any other industry. “If I had to do it over again,” he says, “I’d still choose the scrap business because it’s a people business.”
Some aspects of the business remain unchanged, of course, such as that scrap is an essential commodity, that “we must learn the best way to market our products, that there has to be a profit in our business, and that we should follow a conservative policy,” Marvin asserts.
Looking ahead, he notes optimistically that “aluminum has had tremendous growth and the potential for future growth remains exciting. The amount of material coming into the marketplace is astonishing.” And he points with pride to the way the industry now refers to Allied Metal’s chief product as “aluminum alloys,” rather than by the older and less prestigious term “secondary ingot.”
His credo for the future? It’s advice he acquired from his scrap industry mentor. “I learned early on from my father-in-law,” Marvin says, “that you have to be straight in your dealings, never turn your back on your employees, and always, always satisfy your customers.” •
In his 40 years in the aluminum smelting business, Marvin Fink has helped make Allied Metal Co. a $100-million-a-year firm with four plants in two states. Here, he takes a look back at his career.