by DONNA CURRIE
Mike McDavid cheerfully said he doesn’t have an official title at the Becker Iron & Metal Co., but he works as a broker. “We’re a small family company,” he said. “I’m just an old friend.” Morris and Ginny Becker are the founders of the Alabama business.
“Morris worked for a scrap yard for a few years before I got into the business,” McDavid said. “At some point, he opened a small scrap yard here in town, and he worked out of that yard.” The bulk of the business was brokerage, “but he had the yard for 25 years or more.”
That original scrap yard closed “about six or seven years ago,” McDavid said, and the business continued as a brokerage-only enterprise. Today, Morris is “technically retired” while Ginny still handles bookkeeping for the company.
McDavid traveled along some of the same paths as the Beckers after a short stint in the restaurant business, followed by a job at a foundry supply company. Neither of those were what McDavid was looking for.
At that time, McDavid’s father was working for a steel warehouse, and he heard that a local nonferrous scrap recycler was looking for an account executive. Even better, they were willing to train. “What is scrap?” McDavid asked his father, when he heard about the job. He went through several interviews and landed the job.
His first view of the scrap yard was one of wonder and amazement. “When I first stepped onto the yard there – the capacity – I had never seen that kind of big industry.” Everything from cranes to wire choppers was a new experience. “I was wide-eyed,” McDavid said.
While the experience was great, it was also exhausting as McDavid priced nonferrous on the scale, walked loads coming in by rail from all over the country, and bought scrap over the phone. “I literally ran from the office to the yard,” he said. While he might have been in the best physical condition in his life, when he got an offer to venture into brokerage, he welcomed the change.
He learned about the ferrous end of things at his new job and did a lot of traveling, up to two weeks out of each month, usually driving. It was less physically demanding, but when he got an offer from a small nonferrous brokerage company that didn’t require as much travel, he settled in for the next 16 years. Later he moved to a ferrous brokerage firm where he ended up doing some business with Morris Becker’s company, and actually doing some brokerage work for Becker as part of the job. It made sense for him to join Becker permanently, in December of 2006. “Two key components made it an attractive move: the ease of doing business with the Beckers and their ethical business practices, particularly with on-time payments to customers,” said McDavid. His assistant will soon retire and his wife will take her place.
Becker family members Jon and Ryan, along with a nephew, Mark Childress, also work at the company. Jon and Mark trade scrap while Ryan is involved in bookkeeping. The company is doing well,” he said. “Jon, Mark and Ryan are very capable guys.”
The majority of ferrous material is sold locally. “We have three strong mills,” McDavid said, but some shipments travel just a little further.
While business is good, margins are tighter because of competition, and freight costs have gone up. “Trucking and rail logistics are probably the biggest challenges of the day,” McDavid said.
In just one example, a load that would have cost $1,375 to move last year is now quoted at $1,900. “That’s a nightmare we’re all dealing with.” Even when people are willing to pay the price, getting trucks can be a problem since a number of trucking companies have gone out of business and existing companies are having a hard time hiring qualified drivers.
Rail isn’t much better. “Customers that ship by car say they can never get all the cars they need,” McDavid said. It’s a problem getting material from point A to point B at a reasonable rate, no matter how that material is moved.
Because of his long tenure in the industry, McDavid said that he’s still dealing with people he first met in the 1970s, and he enjoys the personal contact. While some of the younger people like to text message and McDavid has become used to it, he still prefers to pick up the phone and talk to people when he can. “The personal contact is the real joy.”
When that call results in a deal where the customer is happy, and everyone else involved is happy, that’s the deal that McDavid loves to make.
Published in the May 2018 Edition