The right attitude

“I want to be the biggest and the best,” Willie Geiser, president and CEO of Allshred Services, Maumee, Ohio, says. “I want to win.”

Geiser’s Allshred Services celebrated its 25th business anniversary in 2014. He acquired the company, which was founded in 1989 by Michael Lucht, in 1994. In the time since, Allshred Services has grown from its single Maumee location to two additional locations in Ohio as well as one in Indianapolis.

“When I went into business, staying small and local was never an option,” Geiser says.

His drive undoubtedly has played a part in Allshred Services’ expansion. He also credits his stubbornness.

“The first few years were pretty rough,” he says of his young company. “When you’re driving the truck, loading and unloading it, running the processing equipment, making sales calls, paying the bills and doing the 1,001 other things it takes to run a company, it makes for some long days. And you don’t always get to take a paycheck because the employees need paid first. What got me through all those days was telling myself, ‘Failure is not an option.’”
 

Gaining Scale

Allshred’s founder, Lucht, dedicated most of his time to growing his original business, Progressive Sweeping, and found it difficult to grow Allshred as a result. In late 1993, he reached out to Geiser, who in 1992 had founded Recycling Services Inc., a provider of office paper and polystyrene lunch tray recycling programs that expanded into document destruction in 1993 at a client’s request. Lucht offered to sell Allshred Services to Geiser, and the deal was finalized three months later in 1994.

Geiser rented 5,000 square feet of additional space to make room for the Allshred acquisition, which brought an additional truck, two more employees and two shredders to Recycling Services, which at the time had one truck and three employees, including Geiser.

In 1997 Geiser discontinued his company’s recycling services as well as the Recycling Services name to focus on secure document destruction. While Recycling Services Inc. remains the corporate entity, Allshred Services is the company’s operating name.

The company serves a 300-mile radius that includes the states of Ohio, Michigan and Indiana as well as parts of Illinois, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

Allshred Services has grown organically and through acquisition. In 2008, the company added its Akron, Ohio, location to better serve clients in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. In 2011, Allshred Services acquired seven-year-old Mid Ohio Shredding, Westerville, Ohio, increasing its market share in the Columbus, Ohio, area. In early 2014, Allshred completed its most recent acquisition. The purchase of Indianapolis-based Hoosier Shred, which had been in business for seven years, extended Allshred’s reach into southern Indiana.

Regarding acquisitions, Geiser says, “If you do the proper due diligence, you avoid a lot of unpleasant surprises. The positives are that you increase your economies of scale so it increases profitability.”

He adds, “We’ve also acquired some great staff, which is a real positive.”
 

Sticking to its niche

While Allshred has expanded into hard drive and product destruction and electronics recycling, Geiser says he has no interest in adding records management or imaging services to his company’s capabilities. “I read something a long time ago that has stuck with me,” he says. “It said, ‘Figure out what you do really well, and then do it.’ It’s a pretty simple motto, but it’s worked well for us.”

He adds, “We got into the other types of destruction because they made sense—they were natural extensions of what our customers wanted and needed.”

Geiser admits that product and hard drive destruction and electronics recycling represent a small part of Allshred’s business, though they are growing.

“We’re doing so well with our core business that we probably don’t spend as much time and money on growing these areas as we could or should,” Geiser adds.

While Allshred Services’ 2,500 clients represent a wide range of industries, the bulk of the company’s revenue comes from clients in the financial services sector. Geiser says, “We’ll certainly shred anything for anybody willing to pay us, but we’ve been very successful with the financial services industry, specifically banks. Over time, we’ve figured out what banks need and want—and they do have some unique needs—and we’ve done a pretty good job of providing that. Almost 55 percent of our service revenue is from banks.”

Doing it right

While Allshred offers on- and off-site destruction service, 93 percent of the company’s revenue stems from plant-based destruction, Geiser says. “We’re also about 89 percent recurring revenue versus 11 percent purge revenue and 80 percent service revenue versus 20 percent paper recycling revenue,” he adds.

“I really like our recurring versus purge and service versus paper recycling percentages,” Geiser continues. “They show that we’re doing business the right way. We insist on making a profit on the service we provide. Any revenue from the sale of paper is a bonus. That helped us tremendously when the paper markets went down the toilet in 2011.”

He says Allshred works “really hard” for recurring business. “That’s what we emphasize to our sales staff. It’s also the kind of business we go after in our marketing programs. For example, as part of our account management program, we periodically call all of our old purge and on-call customers and try to get them onto some sort of schedule, even if it’s just a quarterly schedule.”

Geiser adds, “It’s low-hanging fruit, but it’s a fairly easy sell.”

In an effort to avoid the commoditization of shredding service pricing, he says Allshred Services tries to customize services for its clients. “We always try to do something unique—something that our competitors don’t or won’t do—for our customers so they truly have a customized service. That allows us to charge a little higher price or, at least, to keep them happier longer,” Geiser says.

Geiser’s need to be the best in the shredding business translates to focusing on security and employee training, he says. “To us, that means having the most secure shredding systems in place, not necessarily the equipment, but the best people trained properly. It also means providing the best customer service.”

He offers an example of the company’s dedication to customer service: “About eight years ago, I had gone to my hometown, which was about three hours from Maumee, for Thanksgiving. On Saturday late afternoon, I was driving back to Maumee. I passed one of our trucks going the opposite direction, away from Maumee. I found out on Monday morning that one of our drivers had been catching up on the Thanksgiving reroutes and had been working an area about three hours from Maumee. When he got back to the plant, one of the customers on the route had called and complained that the driver missed one box from the purge he had performed. The customer wanted him to come back and pick it up. So, he went back.

“I certainly wasn’t happy about it,” Geiser continues, “and we worked very, very hard to make sure it never happened again, but that was the mindset we like our employees to have. Believe me, customers remember that.”
 

Planning for the future

While Allshred Services continues to grow, Geiser says the maturation of the information destruction industry is a concern.

In 2004, he says Allshred’s revenue grew 25 percent compared with 2003, while in 2014 the company saw 18 percent growth relative to 2013. “We’re seeing decent growth, but it’s slowing down, and it’s certainly harder to come by,” Geiser adds.

“All of the big customers are already vended … As shredding companies fight over the same customers, we’ll see more and more price erosion.”

However, Geiser says he is not losing sleep worrying about the future. “When you’ve been around as long as we have, there isn’t much we haven’t seen,” he says. “You learn to deal with whatever happens.”

Allshred’s staff is a source of pride for Geiser. (See the sidebar, “A Deep Bench,” below.) “I consider myself semiretired now; I really don’t do much on a day-to-day basis,” he says. “That’s because I can trust everybody else to handle whatever happens. We have some very talented and experienced people at Allshred.

“I believe strongly in hiring good people—people who have passion—and then getting that passion focused in the right direction,” he continues. “People who care can accomplish great things when properly trained and motivated.”

Geiser says it was difficult to learn to get out of the way of his employees. “I suppose my true accomplishment was learning to let them do their jobs,” he says. “You need to hire good people, but then you need to learn to back off, stop micromanaging and let them do their jobs. It’s easier said than done.”

These people will help Geiser steer Allshred Services into the future, which likely will see the company continue to grow through acquisition.

“We are actively seeking acquisitions to help grow our company,” he says. “We’re looking first within our footprint and then expanding from there where it makes sense. We have our eyes on another half-dozen acquisitions.”

 

The author is editor of SDB and can be contacted at dtoto@gie.net.