Colmar--A Long Shadow

Ron Lewis and Brian Lewis

TIDES OF CHANGE

If Scrappy was still around today, it’s hard to say whether he would recognize the company that Scrappy Thomas Inc. has grown into.

"Peddlers are less than one-fifth of our business," Brian says. "Most of our customers are industrial accounts. It’s a complete change from when my grandfather established the business."

Brian continues, "We’ve seen major expansion in the last three years." The company has added 10 employees in the last year alone, nearly doubling its staff to 25. Despite the company’s staffing additions, Brian says, "We are still understaffed and undermachined."

In addition, Brian and Ron are looking at acquiring a second facility, because the company’s current location does not include rail siding, though it has access to rail siding about two miles down the road from its yard.

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is Scrappy Thomas’ dedication to customer service. "We are a hands-on, family-operated business," Brian says. "My dad and I like to take care of things ourselves as often as possible. We provide personal service and will go out of our way to make sure our customer is taken care of." He adds, "My dad and I have a relationship with each customer."

Ron, Brian and the staff at Scrappy Thomas also treat each person they encounter with the same level of respect, because, as Brian says of the company’s customers, "The guy driving the forklift today will be the guy making the decisions tomorrow."

This personalized approach to customer service may account for the growth the company has enjoyed recently, but the booming secondary metals market surely hasn’t hurt.

A QUESTION OF TIMING

Scrappy Thomas, like many scrap recyclers, experienced tough times throughout much of the 1990s and early 2000, as secondary metal markets struggled in the doldrums. "Early 2000—and most of the 1990s—was really kind of slow, dead," Brian says. "It just didn’t seem like we were moving forward through much in the ’90s," he says of the company’s lack of growth during that decade.

Fortunately, Scrappy Thomas was able to purchase a Colmar stationary shear in 2002, helping it to take full advantage of the upswing the market would embark on shortly afterward.

"We got into the equipment market just in time," Brian says. "We got equipment reasonably priced, which really allowed us to buy additional equipment on top of that as scrap prices increased."

In addition to the stationary shear from Colmar, the company also operates three mobile shears, five scrap handlers, two front-end loaders, five roll-off containers and two tractor trailers, most of which have been acquired in the last four years.

However, Brian says his timing hasn’t always been so good.

In the early 1990s, Scrappy Thomas tried to get into the recycling of trash generated by the company’s industrial customers, an idea that didn’t meet with success. The company was doing some hauling for its industrial customers at the time and realized that they were disposing of material that could be valuable. However, Brian says this attempt took place before Florida began mandating countywide recycling goals of 30 percent for all solid waste and 50 percent for steel, aluminum, newspaper, plastic and glass. (The law was amended in 2002 to a "significant portion" of newspaper, aluminum cans, steel cans, glass, plastic bottles, cardboard, office paper and yard trash.")

"We just couldn’t get any cooperation from any one government entity," he says. That lack of cooperation, coupled with the market uncertainty at the time, meant Brian’s idea never took flight. "The markets were hard and soft at the same time. The bottom could fall out, and here you had all this money invested in equipment," he says of his decision not to pursue the idea at the time.

Despite more robust markets, Brian says he’s not interested in revisiting his earlier idea presently. "I have more work than I can handle now and still maintain some sort of grip on the situation."

Instead, Brian is focused on doing the work he enjoys, which he calls the "hunt for treasure." He describes his forté as stainless and nickel alloys and goes to auctions, which he especially likes, in his pursuit of material.

When it comes to these materials, "Knowledge is your best weapon," Brian says, and an understanding of how the material was originally used can give him an advantage. "Everyone knows copper and brass, but very few people know stainless and nickel-based alloys. There is a vast array of nickel-, molybdenum- and cobalt-based alloys," he adds.

While Brian certainly seems at home in the scrap industry, he wasn’t always certain that he wanted to be part of the family business.

MAKING HIMSELF AT HOME