NEW BERLIN — Preferred Mutual Insurance Co. recently named Jeffrey Lopata its senior vice president (SVP) and chief information officer (CIO). He joined Preferred Mutual
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Oneida Indian Nation today initiated the first of “substantial dedicated payments” to Madison and Oneida counties, marking the
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The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) has named David Margalit as the authority’s chief operating officer. NYSERDA announced the appointment
SYRACUSE — Destiny USA announced it is adding a branch to its marketing department focused on tourism. Rose Hapanowich, who has been serving as marketing
One man’s junk is another man’s treasure. — Proverb OWEGO — On Jan. 22, Adam Weitsman, CEO and owner of Upstate Shredding, LLC. and sister company Ben Weitsman & Son, Inc., announced the acquisition of Jack’s Recycling located in Mt. Morris, Penn. Jack’s, an auto and scrap business recycling ferrous and non-ferrous materials, is located
One man’s junk is another man’s treasure. — Proverb
OWEGO — On Jan. 22, Adam Weitsman, CEO and owner of Upstate Shredding, LLC. and sister company Ben Weitsman & Son, Inc., announced the acquisition of Jack’s Recycling located in Mt. Morris, Penn. Jack’s, an auto and scrap business recycling ferrous and non-ferrous materials, is located 65 miles south of Pittsburgh. Weitsman bought the scrap yard from Rick Smith in an all-cash transaction. The acquisition at Mt. Morris marks Upstate’s 17th location. The deal should close in 30 days.
Even though the enterprise is known as Upstate Shredding and Ben Weitsman, each location is structured with an operating company and a real-estate company.
Weitsman has ratcheted up the pace of his acquisition activity just in the last 13 months. In December 2012, the company bought the Ferromet site in New Castle, Penn., followed by the announcement in the same month with the signing of a long-term lease for 18 acres in the port of Albany. (The 20-year lease is valued at $6.8 million.)
In July 2013, Weitsman scooped up Valley Recycling in Allegany County, in August he bought Reamer Recycling, Inc. in Ithaca. In January 2014, he closed on the Hornell Waste Material Co. in Hornell and announced the Mt. Morris deal and the acquisition of Capitol Scrap in Albany, which closed in February. Upstate Shredding is also currently negotiating a deal in Wilkes-Barre, Penn.
The rapid pace of acquiring scrap and recycling yards is being driven by Weitsman’s decision to invest in new shredders. “The Albany deal is something I have dreamed about for 14 years,” says Weitsman. “Until now, the company was forced to use competitors such as Schnitzer [Steel Industries, Inc.], which controlled access to loading our materials on ships. Albany is so important to our strategy that we didn’t buy a company to start. We opened the yard in August of last year, and I was shocked with the reception. Customers lined up an hour before we even opened. I anticipated 100 to 125 customers a day, not the 350 to 400. Within four months, Albany became our number one yard based on the customer count.”
The success of the Albany yard spurred Weitsman to modify his plans. “I had planned on ordering a shredder for New Castle, but the Albany demand convinced me to order a shredder for the Capital Region first,” continues Weitsman. “Upstate ordered the shredder in November 2013, and we expect to go into production by April of this year. The shredder, the infrastructure, and the downstream investment are a $25 million commitment.”
To assist with that initiative, the company needed more land. Upstate Shredding/Ben Weitsman announced on Feb. 21 that the Albany Port District Commission voted 5-0 in favor of Ben Weitsman of Albany LLC to lease additional land in the Port of Albany. The new 12-acre site, located at 700 Smith Boulevard, is on the same road as the current 18-acre Ben Weitsman retail scrap yard and port facility.
Upstate Shredding commissioned the Wendt Corporation of Buffalo to build the 2,500-horsepower shredder and downstream sorting to recover wire, plastics, non-ferrous metals, and other materials. Weitsman financed the deal, in part, with a $12 million loan from a banking syndicate headed by the Syracuse office of First Niagara.
Concern for bringing the Albany shredder on line has not slowed Weitsman’s appetite for other investments. “Now that Albany is coming on line, we went ahead and ordered another 2,500-horsepower shredder for New Castle, which should be operational in the fourth quarter of this year. These shredders and the 10,000 horsepower mega-shredder in Owego have a huge appetite for scrap. Our feeder scrap yards are economical if they are located within 200 miles of a shredder. In Albany, I need at least four feeder yards to keep the shredder busy. In Pennsylvania, the plan is to expand west from Scranton to Pittsburgh.”
At the same time, the CEO of Upstate Shredding is in negotiations with Kinder Morgan, the third-largest energy company in North America, which holds the master lease at the Port of Newark. “I think it may take up to two years to ink this deal,” opines Weitsman. “Newark is important, because we can load our ships in Albany and top them off in Newark before they proceed down the East Coast or overseas.” Currently, 95 percent of Upstate Shredding’s sales are domestic, based on the premium prices paid for scrap materials.
Weitsman’s approach to growing Upstate Shredding has been defined by business consultants as a lily-pad strategy. An entrepreneur decides that a market is large enough and the timing is right to grow rapidly. Scrap recycling is a $100 billion business in America, and the prices for scrap are at an all-time high. In addition, except for a few very large publicly held companies, scrap recycling is a still largely a mom-and-pop business with a generation of owners looking for an exit option. The solution for the entrepreneur is to broaden the product footprint. That means jumping to the lily pad near you, rather than trying to jump across the pond, while leveraging your existing customers and creating more items to sell from the scrap processing.
Weitsman is also in an excellent position to finance his growth, because he is funding most of his acquisitions and improvements from cash flow. Not only is he not burdening the company with outsized indebtedness, be he is also not distracted by spending a lot time chasing after investors. Finally, Weitsman has been assembling a professional team in anticipation of scaling up the enterprise, including Stephen Green as the president; Joel Root as a vice president and senior buyer; Dan Innarella as CFO; Bill Dizer as a vice president for the Main Street operation in Owego; Kim Weitsman to handle accounts receivable and rail shipments; Natassia Bowman as the export manager; and Stephen Donnelly as the director of marketing and public relations.
Perhaps most unusual is Weitsman’s ability to manage both the cash and human capital of Upstate Shredding without bringing in an outside CEO.
The pace of Upstate’s growth is impressive. When Weitsman joined his father in the late 1990s, Ben Weitsman & Son generated $3 million in annual sales. “In 2013, the company generated $750 million,” asserts Weitsman. “This year, I expect we’ll reach the $1-billion level. When I joined my father, we had 30 employees in two locations. Now we have 400 in 17 locations, and most of that growth came within the last five years. In fact, we have doubled our sales and geography just in the past three years. We currently process 100 million tons of ferrous metals and 200 million pounds of non-ferrous material.” Weitsman bought the company from his father in 2005. His grandfather started the business in 1938. Today, Upstate Shredding is the largest, privately held, scrap-metal processor on the East Coast.
As Upstate accelerates its growth, the competition seems to be struggling. Upstate’s competitors include two publicly traded companies — Sims Metal Management, Ltd. (OTC: SMSMY) and Metalico, Inc. (NYSE: MEA). Sims reported a net loss of $426.6 million in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2013, following a $638.1 million net loss the previous year, according to Yahoo Finance data. Meanwhile, Metalico’s stock is trading at below $2 a share (as of Feb. 11), down about 50 percent from two years ago and off more than 70 percent from its early 2011 level above $6 a share.
Privately held European Metal Recycling Ltd. (EMR) is another competitor. The UK–based company says on its website that it employs 3,500 people at 150 locations around the world. That includes two facilities near Albany and one in Poughkeepsie.
Keys to success
Weitsman’s explanation for his success is straightforward: “I have kept my debt low, we’re a non-union company, and we’re agile, adapting quickly to changes in the marketplace.” He then adds in a blog: I like to win … We have taken a company in a town of 4,000 [people and] gone head to head with the biggest companies in the world and kicked them in the head really, really hard (Weitsman, in another blog, refers to a different part of the competition’s anatomy.) … I really get off competing against these guys who underestimated us … They can’t beat my team’s passion to win.”
Weitsman, 45, has grown his business over the last 15 years without asking for any government assistance. His prospects for continued rapid growth are excellent, considering on the day I interviewed him he had on file 131 solicitations from scrap-yard owners eager to sell their businesses. He is also buoyed by the prospect that the economic climate overall should improve in 2014, increasing the demand for recycled scrap.
Adam Weitsman has certainly proved the proverb that one man’s junk is another man’s treasure. In the process, he is shredding the competition.
SENECA FALLS — ITT Goulds Pumps, Inc., a unit of ITT Corp. (NYSE: ITT), is in the midst of an expansion project that will add 75,000 square feet of manufacturing space and at least 50 jobs to its plant in Seneca Falls. The business manufactures pumps for the oil and gas, mining, chemical, energy, pulp
SENECA FALLS — ITT Goulds Pumps, Inc., a unit of ITT Corp. (NYSE: ITT), is in the midst of an expansion project that will add 75,000 square feet of manufacturing space and at least 50 jobs to its plant in Seneca Falls.
The business manufactures pumps for the oil and gas, mining, chemical, energy, pulp and paper, and other industries, and will increase both its capabilities and capacity with the expansion, company officials say.
ITT Goulds Pumps first announced the $27 million project in November 2012 and began with an expansion of its research and development facility that wrapped up at the end of 2013. That project added new space to house more engineers at ITT Goulds Pumps, which currently employs about 860 people.
The company is now well into the construction of the manufacturing facility, with an expected completion date of late June. The company campus in Seneca Falls has 900,000 square feet of space “under roof,” at 240 Fall St., says Michael Dellefave, general manager at ITT Goulds Pumps, but needs more manufacturing space. The facility also includes a foundry, machine shop, and quality control space, he notes, but the manufacturing end of things is running out of space.
ITT Goulds Pumps hired VIP Structures of Syracuse to design and build the facility.
“We’re making very good progress,” Dellefave says. The primary steel is up and the roof is on, he says. Cranes are inside ready to set equipment and work is under way on building the interior offices. A portion of the new space will house a test floor for pumps with a capacity of up to 8,000 horsepower.
“Our goal is to be production ready by the end of June” Dellefave says.
ITT Goulds Pumps received an incentive package from Empire State Development totaling more than $5 million for the project, including $1.5 million in Excelsior Jobs Program benefits and a $100,000 training grant. The company is using cash flow and operating revenue to fund the project, Dellefave says.
ITT Goulds Pumps purchased and refurbished a used energy substation from BAE Systems that was damaged in 2011 flooding in Johnson City and also invested in demand-management software that will help the company monitor and manage its energy usage, Dellefave notes.
Once complete, the new space will position ITT for growth in the pump market, says Anthony D’Angelo, senior manager of communications. Currently, the majority of pumps produced by ITT Goulds Pumps (www.gouldspumps.com) are standard, almost “off the shelf” varieties, he says, but the new facility will provide the space and equipment to produce highly customized pumps that are in demand in the oil gas, and mining industries.
“This gives us capability to enter into segments of the market we can’t play in today,” Dellefave adds. By expanding further into that customized market, he says the company hopes to grow revenue as well as employment. “From a revenue standpoint, our plan ideally would double the size of our business over the next three to five years,” he says. That plan includes production at a $34 million facility that opened in South Korea in 2013. That facility will serve the Eastern Hemisphere while Seneca Falls will serve the Western Hemisphere.
In terms of jobs, ITT Goulds Pumps will add at least 50 new employees and at least half of those positions will be technical ones while half will be production and other non-technical positions.
“We’ve already begun some of the hiring,” says Ronald Golumbeck, vice president of human resources at ITT. The company is working with workforce boards and one-stop career centers across an eight-county region to find people to fill the positions, he says. The company will phase in all the jobs over the next year.
Headquartered in White Plains, ITT Corp. (www.itt.com) has about 8,500 employees worldwide and generated revenue of $2.5 billion in 2013. ITT acquired Goulds Pumps in 1997.
YORKVILLE — Meyda Lighting, which says it’s the nation’s leading manufacturer of decorative and custom lighting, is celebrating its 40th anniversary in business. “We didn’t start out as a business,” says Robert Cohen, company president. “My mother [Ida] was tired of looking at the ‘vintage’ cars in our backyard, which my father [Meyer] said he
YORKVILLE — Meyda Lighting, which says it’s the nation’s leading manufacturer of decorative and custom lighting, is celebrating its 40th anniversary in business.
“We didn’t start out as a business,” says Robert Cohen, company president. “My mother [Ida] was tired of looking at the ‘vintage’ cars in our backyard, which my father [Meyer] said he would restore one day. She asked him to … [install] a stained-glass window [to block the view] … Meyer was retired and a master tinkerer, so he and my mother took a course in making stained-glass windows.” This was the beginning of Meyda Tiffany.
The year was 1974. “The window project was clearly a hobby with my parents,” remembers Cohen. “Following that, they made some stained-glass sun catchers, terrariums, lamps, and planters in the basement for area craft shows. Business was very slow; the door usually opened only when the wind blew. It wasn’t until 1980 when a local Methodist Church ordered four stained-glass windows that I started to think of this as a business.”
Meyda (a contraction of his parents’ names) today is anything but a hobby. “We have 65 employees here in Yorkville,” notes Cohen. Meyda Lighting is a d/b/a of 55 Oriskany, Inc., the operating company. “The family owns the company, as well as 170,000 square feet of manufacturing, distribution, and retail space incorporated as CMB Oriskany. The plant sits on 8.5 acres with an adjacent acre and building currently leased out.”
Meyda also has a 1,600-square-foot retail store in Old Forge. Meyda sources its Tiffany lamps from a contract manufacturer in China that employs 100 people devoted exclusively to Meyda products.
“I joined my parents in 1975 when I was a teenager, helping out at craft shows,” muses Cohen. “The business began to grow in the early 1980s, entirely by word-of-mouth. We also were fortunate to ride a national wave of renewed interest in Tiffany designs. While much of our growth was organic, we also acquired some of our suppliers and competitors. We bought the Quality Bent Glass Co., which created original lighting fixtures, including the famous Coca-Cola chandeliers supplied to Louis Comfort Tiffany’s studio in New York City.
He continues, “In the mid-1990s, Meyda bought Mecco Art, a metal-art studio which featured natural and wildlife themes. In 2009, we bought the assets of 2nd Ave. Lighting in Mesa, Ariz. to expand our metal-lighting sales both on the residential and commercial sides of the business.”
Today, Meyda works with steel, iron, aluminum, bronze, brass, copper, textiles, acrylics, wood, and glass to create lighting products with crafting techniques including forging, welding, forming, plasma and laser cutting, soldering, vacuum-forming, and engraving.
Meyda’s corporate strategy is simple. “We’re here to say yes and make it happen,” stresses Cohen. “Designers and customers are always sending us sketches and asking whether we can reproduce the designs. We hand the requests to our engineers. Sometimes the requests aren’t even sketches; they are just verbal thoughts about what a product should look like. We never delete from inventory any of the products we make; we just add more. Every evening, we bring the new products to our photo studio and then add them to our digital catalog.”
From supplying a few items at craft shows, Meyda has morphed into a complex business. “We’re in a number of different businesses,” asserts Cohen. “We are importers, retailers, and manufacturers. Meyda deals with a lot of market segments including Internet dealers, brick-and-mortar dealers, designers, customers who buy directly at Meyda’s retail outlets, and buyers in industries like hospitality. Starting in the 1990s, we installed a complex data-processing system to track our inventory of products, materials, and work-in-process. We have spent more than $1 million [over the years] developing the system.”
Meyda’s growth is also based on new-product development. “A few years ago, we created a lighting innovation by integrating lighting fixtures and fan mechanisms. The new collection takes a custom lighting fixture and inserts a fan mechanism inside the fixture. We call the line ‘Chandel-Airs’ and offer them in almost any size or color combination.”
Cohen and his wife Ellie, who is the company’s director of visual merchandising, are now joined in the business by their three sons Chester, Maxwell, and Benjamin. Chet, 28, focuses on production; Max, 27, is in sales, and Ben, 23, has just joined the company. Their grandmother, Ida, is still active at age 94 and runs the Nutty Putty Miniature Golf business in Old Forge.
The second generation has taken Meyda Lighting from a hobby to a recognized leader in the industry. “Meyda requires focus. I was unsuccessful in branching out into areas like home accessories and furniture,” Cohen says. “I am totally focused on lighting. I’m also a free-market guy who likes to do battle every day. The markets (home and hospitality) have picked up since the recession ended, and we’re seeing growth again … I’m always looking for talent to take us to the next level.”
Meyda Lighting is America’s decorative lamplighter. Historically, lamplighters were employees of a town who lit the street lamps at sundown and extinguished them at sunrise. They brought light to the community. They are also symbolic figures in literature who were the bearers of light. The Cohen family brings light and creative decoration not only to America’s homes but also to its streets through street lighting sold by 2nd Ave. Lighting. The third generation is poised to continue the legacy.
Contact Poltenson at npoltenson@cnybj.com
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