Thriving Titan

With 11 total employees, one might rightly describe Titan Mobile Shredding, Pipersville, Pa., as a small company. While small, this mobile secure destruction company owned by Don Adriaansen and Bob Leventhal has been repeatedly recognized among eastern Pennsylvania’s fastest-growing companies.

The Wharton Small Business Development Center, the Entrepreneurs’ Forum of Greater Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Business Journal recognized Titan in the Philadelphia 100 for two consecutive years. Titan ranked as the 87th fastest-growing privately held company in Greater Philadelphia in 2011 before jumping to the 54th spot in 2012.

Titan also was among the companies recognized by Lehigh Valley Business, placing 14th in the Greater Lehigh Valley’s Fastest Growing Companies for 2013. This year marks the second year Titan was honored with the award, which is presented by ParenteBeard and sponsored by the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Group. In 2012, Titan ranked 16th.

Adriaansen says in addition to becoming the first National Association for Information Destruction (NAID) certified company in southeastern Pennsylvania, receiving recognition for Titan’s growth is among the business accomplishments he is most proud of, noting that the awards have resulted in a high degree of exposure in the marketplace.

Titan’s growth comes despite the recent recession, which coincided with the company’s move into a new building and investment in baling equipment.

Bad Timing
Leventhal and Adriaansen formed Titan Mobile Shredding in 2005. While well-acquainted with entrepreneurship, the two men were new to the document destruction industry. Adriaansen previously owned a manufacturers’ representative agency in the building products industry, and Leventhal provided accounting services to a number of small businesses, including Adriaansen’s.

“We were not going to ‘reinvent the wheel,’” Adriaansen says, “so we met with the experts in the industry before we got started. Many we talked to mentioned that my sales and marketing experience and Bob’s accounting and operations experience were a great fit for the document destruction industry.”

The business partners formed Titan in the summer of 2005 after purchasing a shred truck from Shred-Tech, Cambridge, Ontario. They added their second Shred-Tech truck just over a year later, Adriaansen says.

Prior to 2008, Leventhal and Adriaansen were operating their business out of their homes and renting parking spaces for their shred trucks. “We moved into a building and started baling in the fall of 2008, just before the recession hit,” Adriaansen says.

He and Leventhal made the move to add baling because Titan had been growing at a good pace up until then and they felt they were not getting a fair price for their paper from the recycler they had been working with. They also felt they were adding an additional layer of security by baling in house, Adriaansen says. The business partners purchased a Balemaster horizontal baler with a conveyor from BE Equipment, Quakertown, Pa.

In what could be described as bad timing, Adriaansen says Titan moved into its new 4,000-square-foot building in August of 2008 and began producing bales of shredded paper in September. By October, however, the price for recovered paper “went into the floor,” he says, declining 65 percent in value.

The business partners responded to this seismic shift in the market by making arrangements to delay their first baling equipment payments and by letting one employee go. The employees who remained with the company found their workweeks trimmed to less than 40 hours at times, Adriaansen says. Titan also took other belt-tightening measures. However, the business partners continued to invest time and money promoting Titan, he adds.

“2009 was very tough, but we continued to grow at a significantly reduced pace,” he says.

Titan saw its purge business decline considerably in the fall of 2008, Adriaansen says. “By November 2009, the purges were back, and routine service continued to grow.” In fact, he says purge activity after the recession lasted through most of 2010.

One of the lessons that stuck with the business partners as a result of the recession is shifting their focus to things they have power over within their business. “We work on what we can control: our attitude, productivity and the way we take care of customers,” he says.

Firmer Ground
With the recent recession behind them, the business partners continue to watch where they spend money, Adriaansen says. “We haven’t gone wild since the economy came back.”

Today, Titan Mobile Shredding operates four shred trucks, all of which are supplied by Shred-Tech. Ninety-nine percent of the company’s document destruction jobs are done on site using these trucks, Adriaansen says. “We have always promoted the added security of on-site information destruction,” he adds.

However, Titan also has a 25-horsepower shredder from Allegheny Shredders, Delmont, Pa., which it uses to shred media and documents that are dropped off at its facility, and an AMS-150 hard drive shredder from Alpena, Mich.-based Ameri-Shred.

Titan shreds and bales more than 2,500 tons of paper per year. Its service area includes all of southeastern Pennsylvania—north to the Lehigh Valley, west to Harrisburg and south to the Delaware border—and the western part of New Jersey, Adriaansen says.

In addition to document destruction, Titan provides on- and off-site hard drive and electronic media destruction. “Certainly hard drive destruction is growing as more organizations recognize the need (or requirement) for destruction,” Adriaansen says. “Because they don’t take up much room, many organizations keep them for years before they have them destroyed—mainly because they did not know how to get it accomplished.”

Titan also plans to expand its product destruction services, Adriaansen says. “We do a very small amount of product shredding, usually for our existing customers; but, we see this as an opportunity for our plant-based services,” he says. Titan is currently exploring product destruction opportunities involving uniforms and shoes.

“We also help with recycling computers, policy design and implementation and employee training,” Adriaansen says. “We have positioned ourselves as the information destruction experts, and we do all we can to maintain that position. My CSDS (Certified Secure Destruction Specialist) certification and continuing education help with that.”

Titan uses its shred trucks to transport small quantities of electronic devices from its clients’ locations to its plant. The company accumulates these devices securely at its facility until it is ready to transport them to a local electronics recycler for processing. This recycler also processes Titan’s shredded hard drives, recovering and sorting the metals they contain.

While the company’s hard drive destruction volume in 2013 remains consistent with last year’s, he says its paper destruction volumes are up. He credits this growth in document destruction to increasing knowledge of the need for proper information destruction.

“Even though people are using less paper in offices, more people are using the service because of regulations or because it saves them money,” Adriaansen says.

Focused Approach
While Leventhal and Adriaansen have explored additional services such as imaging and records management, they have decided to remain focused on destruction. “It’s an issue of knowing and understanding the business and having capital to put toward it,” Adriaansen says.

“Our expertise is in shredding. To give customers the same level of expertise we have in shredding, we’d have to add equipment and add people, and we weren’t ready to do that yet. We didn’t want to have to lower the bar to go into another service.”

Therefore, Titan has partnered with a local firm to provide imaging services. “We work together and trade customers back and forth,” he adds.

Adriaansen says Titan remains open to adding related services, either directly or through partnerships, and will consider geographically appropriate acquisitions, as it did in 2010. (See sidebar, “Growth through Acquisition,” above.) “We will add employees and equipment when the volume requires it.”

Regardless of the breadth of services Titan offers, the company will retain its focus on customer service, Adriaansen says. “We are in a service business. Our philosophy is pretty simple: We consult with our customers before the service, show up on time, do a good job, clean up when finished, say thank you and charge a fair price. This is what I think most people want when they hire a service, but they don’t get it very often. They get it 100 percent of the time from Titan Mobile Shredding.”

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